Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

He tried to find a path.

"Inside this token, hunting is impossible. There aren’t any monsters lurking within its dimensional space. Sure, the jade deposits are present, and the enhanced drops are available as well. The nine yin demon guild’s gathered resources are also stored here. But none of those things yield experience points. Experience only comes from fighting, from combat. And to fight, you need an opponent."

He stopped for a moment. "But I don’t have one. There’s nothing here. I’m just drifting in complete darkness, carrying my wounds and my skills. The level counter stays frozen because there’s no target for me to use these abilities on."

He thought about the skill cores he had absorbed. The sixty-seven skills. Each one available and functional. He ran through them in his mental inventory that the integration had made complete and immediate.

None of them solved the fundamental problem. A skill was a capability directed at something. There was nothing to direct them at.

"I could reach level 240 if I had a target population equivalent to what the volcanic basin provided," he said. "Thirty thousand level 145 elites at 10,000x amplification would produce enough experience to move through several levels in minutes. But there are no monsters in here. There is nothing in here except nothingness."

He tried from another angle.

"What else changes the level gap?" He thought. "The halo. Converting someone whose level experience produces a guardian capable of engaging Cang Yutian. But the only guardian slot that would be relevant is one filled by someone at level 220 or above, and the only person at that level I have encountered in this expanse is Long Tianyu at level 189, which is below 220, and even level 189 converted into a guardian’s vitality mass would not match a Deity class entity at 240."

He kept going.

"The jade count. The sub-class awakening. If I can complete the awakening within this hour, a sub-class might grant capabilities that fundamentally shift the tone of the engagement."

He turned his focus inward, toward the storage space itself. The cluster guardian drops. The Nine Yin Demon Guild’s accumulated reserves. The steady influx from every island he had cleared. All of it was here, all of it counted.

"Is the total sufficient?" he muttered. "The event rules state that the hunter who gathers the most jades and absorbs their insight most completely reaches the threshold of awakening."

A brief pause followed, more analytical than uncertain. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

"I don’t know where my count stands globally," he said. "And from inside this space, I have no access to the ranking to confirm it."

No access to the global ranking. No external information of any kind. The dimensional interior of the token was not connected to the event’s information ranking.

Every path he examined closed within a few steps.

He floated in the nothing.

The wounds were present and the regeneration was working and the darkness was complete and the time was passing.

"I made a mistake," he said. The words came out plainly, without hesitation or any need to soften them. Just a clear, unembellished statement of fact. "I approached the Thunder Dragon without adequate preparation. I engaged a Deity-class entity at level 230, despite the level gap making the outcome predictable."

A brief pause, his thoughts aligning with the weight of it.

"I lost the Greater Qilin," he added. Then, more quietly, "And I entered this token without a viable plan for what comes next."

He had not made decisions like this before. He had made aggressive decisions, forward decisions, decisions that other people found reckless. But he had always had a calculation behind them, a reason that the logic supported even when the risk was real. The decision to enter the token had been the decision of someone who was bleeding in multiple places and had run out of options, not the decision of someone who had identified a path to survival.

"The watcher is going to break the restriction," he said. "He is going to find me. And when he does, I will be in the same situation I was in before I entered, except that the wounds will be partially healed and I will have confirmed that there is no option inside this space that changes the outcome."

He stayed with that for a moment.

The darkness was complete.

The nothing was complete.

"My death is inevitable," he said. He said it the way he said most things, not performing the enormity of it but not diminishing it either. Just the statement, accurate and placed where it needed to be placed to be worked with honestly. "Unless something changes that I cannot currently identify."

He floated.

The regeneration worked.

And time passed.

And the watcher, somewhere outside in the Allheaven Expanse, was breaking through a restriction that had been designed for something far below his level, moving steadily and patiently toward the moment when the token’s interior would be accessible and the dimensional space would open and the person inside it would be in exactly the situation they had been in when they entered.

Lin Yi closed his eyes, which made no difference in the pitch black but was the action his body chose regardless.

He thought about Wang Hao. The morning knocks. The tea. The enthusiasm that was never performative. He thought about Shen Rou. The glasses. The coffee ratio she had been adjusting without being asked. The formation theory materials she had prepared the first day. He thought about the academy, the tournament, the regional examination, the Dragon God Tower. He thought about Jianghe, and the system panel appearing for the first time, and the room full of people who found an E-Rank Laborer class laughable.

He thought about the Greater Qilin. The fight in that had introduced them. The choice the qilin had made afterward to remain.

He opened his eyes.

The nothing was still there.

"I need a different option," he said. "And I don’t have one."