Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

The token activated.

The dimensional pull extended outward from it in the specific way it had extended outward at the Nine Yin Demon Guild’s hideout, the directional thread reaching toward the target with precision.

It then reached Cang Yutian. And the watcher moved.

He moved against the pull, the way a person leans against wind, the body registering resistance and applying counter-force in response. But the pull was continuing. Not stopped by the counter-force. It kept pulling.

Lin Yi watched the thread hold.

Cang Yutian’s dragon eyes sharpened, and Lin Yi felt something surface in his chest that was not a skill and not a technique. A familiar quality. The specific lightness of watching a calculation resolve correctly when the outcome had not been certain.

He smiled.

Cang Yutian looked at the smile.

The watcher’s expression, which had maintained the flat authority of celestial appointment through the entire engagement, produced something different.

Not anger.

Something more precise than anger. The specific irritation of a being of considerable power and considerable dignity encountering a smug expression on the face of someone who, until approximately thirty seconds ago, had been on the losing end of a pursuit.

"You find this amusing," Cang Yutian said. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

Lin Yi did not answer. The smile was answer enough.

The ten Buddha wheels began to spin.

Not at their previous cycling pace. Faster. Significantly faster, the golden light they produced blurring from the distinct pulse of individual wheels to a continuous ring as the rotation rate increased. The acceleration was not gradual. The wheels spun up to their elevated rate in under a second, and at that rate the light they produced changed quality, moving from the deep golden to something brighter and more concentrated.

Lin Yi’s eyes caught the wheels. The bright concentrated light of the accelerated Buddha wheels, at the rotational rate they had reached, did something to the processing of his perception that was not blocked by Unbroken Will’s mental interference immunity because it was not a mental interference technique. It was a sensory input operating through the visual channel, which was a physical process rather than a mental intrusion.

Then, the pull reversed.

Where the token’s dimensional mechanic had been drawing Cang Yutian inward, the reversal produced an outward force, the dimensional pull now operating in the opposite direction from the original activation intent.

It also pushed Lin Yi. The Void Walk phasing that had been softening his approach was still active, and the push operated through the same dimensional layer as the pull had, bypassing the phasing’s physical protection because it was not a physical attack.

He was moving backward before he processed that the reversal had occurred.

Cang Yutian moved within the reversal’s window.

The sword strike that followed the push was the most precisely timed attack of the entire engagement. It arrived at the moment Lin Yi’s backward momentum had been established and before any of his active skills could generate a response, the temporal gap between the reversal and the counter small enough that Void Walk’s protection was the only available defense and Void Walk’s protection against energy attacks, the eighty percent reduction, was not sufficient against a full Deity-class output strike at close range without any other mitigation active.

The cut opened across Lin Yi’s chest.

Below the previous chest cut. A new line, deeper than it should have been given the regeneration work Eternal Spirit Core had been doing since the engagement began, because the regeneration had not had sufficient time to close the original cuts meaningfully and a new cut on partially healed tissue from a Deity-class blade did not require as much force to reach depth.

He went backward. Not a step. Multiple steps, the force behind the strike carrying through even at eighty percent mitigation, his right leg managing the first contact with the island surface and partially absorbing the backward momentum while the injured left leg provided nothing useful.

He then stopped.

Cang Yutian did not press the advance immediately. He observed. The dragon eyes moving across Lin Yi’s current state with the assessment that had characterized every pause in the engagement, the watcher reading the situation the way something that had done this for a very long time read situations.

"You smiled," Cang Yutian said quietly. "It’s not the smile itself that bothers me. It’s what I saw behind it—what I guessed you were thinking." He stopped for a moment, letting the words hang. "You thought the token had somehow found a way to get around my power. But that’s not the case." His gaze shifted to the token Lin Yi held. "The Buddha wheels are designed exactly for this. They’ve been running ever since this whole engagement started." He shook his head slightly. "Whatever that device is supposed to do, it’s not doing it to me."

Lin Yi looked at the token. Then at Cang Yutian.

He activated every remaining offensive skill in a sequence that took three seconds to deploy and covered the engagement space in outputs from every available direction.

Stellar Burst, the spherical release centered on his position covering the full radius. Heaven’s Judgment, the celestial energy column descending from above. Star Collapse, the singularity compression and release targeted at Cang Yutian’s position. Dragon’s Roar, the force cone directed forward. Absolute Slash, the defense-ignoring single strike deployed directly. Heaven’s Echo repeating the last skill’s output at fifty percent one second after the original.

Six simultaneous outputs from six directions.

Cang Yutian moved through them.

He wasn’t stopped or diverted by any skill activation. Instead, he moved straight through every attack, relying on the Buddha Step to carry him at just the right moment—slipping between each technique’s arrival and its effective range. It was like weaving through a storm, finding the narrow gaps that opened up briefly before the attacks could land. The watcher’s careful observation played a key role here; he had seen Lin Yi use each technique at least once before, and that was enough to anticipate where each would strike. Thanks to this, he could map out their spatial reach in his mind.

When all six attacks came down, they struck nothing but empty air.

Cang Yutian then appeared inside Lin Yi’s guard.

Swoosh!