Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

There was nothing.

Not darkness in the way darkness exists in a room without light, where the absence of photons is still a space with dimension and boundaries and walls you can reach.

This was different.

This was the dimensional interior of the storage token, and the storage token had not been designed by anyone who anticipated a person being inside it as a conscious observer rather than as stored contents.

Lin Yi floated.

Not floated in the physical sense, no gravity operating on him in the conventional direction, no surface below or above or in any determined orientation. He existed in the dimensional space, the accumulated depth of an endless dimension that had received thousands of items and multiple human beings and the amplified drops of every hunt since the Jianghe wilderness, and none of that gave it walls or floors or any reference point that a floating consciousness could use to orient itself.

He was suspended in pitch black.

He could not see his hands. Not because he didn’t have hands, he could feel them, the cuts, the compromised leg, the accumulated damage from the engagement with Cang Yutian all present and accurate.

He simply could not see anything, because there was nothing to see. The dimensional interior produced no ambient light. It produced no sound. It produced no sensation of temperature or air movement or the thousand small environmental inputs that consciousness uses to confirm its location in the world.

He was alive and he was inside the token and he was nowhere.

"Alright," he said.

His voice existed. That was something. It produced itself normally, traveled normally, and then was absorbed by the nothing around him with no echo and no reflection, the sound simply ending at the boundary of the distance his voice could carry rather than bouncing back from a surface.

"The token is falling," he said. Speaking helped. It forced his thoughts into order. "Outside, it’s already off the island, caught in the expanse currents."

He thought about the current patterns he had learned over weeks of traversal. The mid-atmospheric layer’s currents moved in a general lateral direction, carrying things at the drift speed of the island formations themselves. An object that fell from an island in that layer would be picked up by the current and carried, not falling in the gravitational sense but drifting, the mechanics of the Allheaven Expanse making altitude more a function of atmospheric energy concentration than of any external gravitational force.

"Cang Yutian used Buddha Step," he said. "The moment I was inside and the token fell, he used it. He has to have used it. Buddha Step requires observation of the destination but the destination was the token’s exterior surface, which he had observed throughout the engagement." He paused. "He already has the token."

This was almost certainly true. The watcher’s perception speed and execution speed made any window between the token hitting the island surface, rolling off the edge, and Cang Yutian retrieving it from the drift current extremely small. A few seconds at most. Probably less.

"He has the token," Lin Yi said. "Which means he is currently looking at the restriction."

He had inscribed the restriction during the first week in the Allheaven Expanse, a precautionary modification to the token’s access mechanism after he had worked out the containment application and realized that a token capable of holding celestial jades and amplified drops worth what his collection was worth had to have access protection.

The restriction was not a combat-grade defensive formation. It was a deterrent against casual access, the kind of thing that stopped an ordinary hunter from opening a found token and claiming its contents. It would not stop a serious attempt from a hunter with meaningful formation knowledge. It would certainly not stop a level 240 Deity class entity with celestial appointment.

But it would take time.

"He will break the restriction," Lin Yi said. "The question is how long the restriction holds him. A high level hunter with solid formation knowledge breaks it in approximately six hours." He thought about the Buddha wheels and what their operational sophistication implied about Cang Yutian’s knowledge of formation-class techniques. "An hour. Maybe two. Probably closer to one."

He did the arithmetic.

One hour. More than a month of event time remaining. Cang Yutian would break the restriction in approximately one hour, extract Lin Yi from the token’s dimensional interior, and the situation that had produced this decision would be exactly as it had been, except that Lin Yi would have one hour less in the expanse and his wounds would have one hour of Eternal Spirit Core’s regeneration applied to them.

"One hour of regeneration," he said. "Against the total damage picture."

The chest cuts. The shoulder cut. The three torso cuts. The new chest cut from the reversed push engagement. The leg.

Eternal Spirit Core’s passive regeneration at combat intensity had been supplemented by Second Wind once and by Celestial Absorption’s continuous intake in the high-dao environment. In one hour, with no combat drawing on the energy reserve and Celestial Absorption running in the token’s dimensional space, which did contain the jade deposits and amplified drops that the high-dao environment’s energy had been embedded in during collection, the regeneration could make meaningful progress.

Meaningful. Not complete. Not enough to return to the level of readiness the engagement had begun with.

"It isn’t a solution," he said. "It is a delay."

He floated in the nothing and processed this honestly. "One hour bought by a restriction that was not designed to prevent a Deity class entity from accessing it. And at the end of that hour, Cang Yutian will be holding the token and he would have released me."

He tried to think past the one hour.

"What changes between now and the end of the restriction?" He spoke slowly, giving each possibility enough space to be genuinely evaluated rather than dismissed in the first processing pass. "My wounds improve partially. My energy reserves recover. The watcher has spent one hour breaking the restriction that was designed for much simpler threats, which means he has not been doing anything else in that hour."

Nothing else useful.

"What would change my capability relative to his?" He spoke the question and let it sit. "Level. The gap between 230 and 240 is what made the engagement unwinnable. If that gap were smaller, the margin in the exchanges would be different." He thought about this. "To reach level 240 I would need to consume the experience that the 230 to 240 range requires. At the 230-level cost curve, the threshold per level is already above fourteen billion. At 235 it would be approaching thirty billion. At 240 it would be higher than anything the mid-tier cluster clearing could produce in any reasonable time frame even at 10,000x amplification."

He tried to find a path.