Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

The dimensional interior ended.

The pitch black simply ceased to be the relevant surrounding and was replaced by the upper atmospheric layer of the Allheaven Expanse, the ambient light, the astral rivers, the floating island formations, all of it arriving at once.

Lin Yi landed.

His feet found an island surface and his body organized itself around the contact point in the same instant, the combat readiness that had been building during the token’s interior time expressing itself immediately as a physical stance. Feet separated to shoulder width. Left knee slightly bent to distribute weight away from the compromised thigh. Celestial Lord Blade in his right hand, drawn during the transition, present and active before the landing was complete.

He looked forward.

Cang Yutian stood four meters away, the token in his left hand, the sword in his right. The ten Buddha wheels cycled at their standard rate behind him, the golden light returned to its normal pulse after the accelerated spin that had countered the dimensional pull. His dragon eyes looked at Lin Yi with the same flat authority they had carried since the beginning, unchanged by the incident.

The wounds were better. Not resolved. Just better.

The chest cuts, the torso cuts, the shoulder cut, the leg, Eternal Spirit Core had worked through the hour with nothing drawing on the energy reserve and Celestial Absorption had been running on the jade deposits stored in the dimensional interior, which in a high-dao saturation environment produced recovery that was accelerated beyond the baseline passive rate. Meaningful improvement. Not full restoration. The leg could take weight in a way it could not when he entered the token. The chest cuts had closed sufficiently to remove the active blood loss from the equation.

He was not healthy. He was healthier than he had been.

Cang Yutian looked at the stance. At the blade. At the expression Lin Yi was maintaining, which was the expression he carried into things he had decided to do regardless of what the outcome looked like.

"You came out with the intent to fight me again," Cang Yutian said. It was not an observation delivered with contempt or with surprise, but one delivered with the accuracy of someone noting what they see.

"You wasted an hour," Lin Yi said. "The restriction held longer than you expected."

"Seventy-four minutes," Cang Yutian said. "Slightly above an average estimate for the tool’s quality. The restriction was more carefully done than most hunters bother to achieve." A pause. "You are better at that than you are at retreating."

"Why waste time," Cang Yutian continued. The sword in his hand was already in guard position, not because he needed the guard but because the guard was the efficient stance when the conclusion of the conversation was going to be combat

"You’ve recovered to some extent. You’ve spent seventy-four minutes reflecting on everything. No matter what thoughts crossed your mind while you were in the dark, you emerged from it holding that posture and wearing that look on your face. I understand what all of that signifies." He fixed his gaze on Lin Yi without hesitation. "Why drag this out any longer? The outcome is already decided."

Lin Yi moved.

"The outcome is already decided," he said, and the words came out in the space between the activation of Boundless Step and the arrival at the first contact point, "but I will not go down without a fight!"

The movement skill carried him across the four meters in the fraction of a second it required, and the Celestial Lord Blade was already activated to the Absolute Slash’s defense-ignoring strike before the spatial transition completed, the technique’s deployment taking advantage of the movement’s momentum to add physical force to the energy output.

The watcher met it.

CLANG!

Lin Yi was already moving into the next activation, the Chain Void Step component of the Boundless Step window still available, carrying him from the first contact point to a flanking position before Cang Yutian’s counter could fully orient to the first strike’s location.

He then deployed Void Severance from the flank position, the spatial energy blade targeted at the shoulder joint gap that Predatory Instinct was continuously identifying as the most accessible vulnerability in the watcher’s armor.

The armor rotated to present a different surface.

He had seen this counter before. He adjusted the Void Severance angle mid-deployment, the spatial energy component flexible in its delivery path in a way that a physical blade was not.

The adjusted strike reached the gap.

Something registered.

Not a significant damage. But something. The armor did not absorb the Void Severance completely because the gap it reached was a genuine gap and the spatial energy penetration already bypassed the surface layer. How much it reached the interior was not confirmed by any visible response, but the contact was real nonetheless.

He filed it.

Cang Yutian’s counter arrived.

He activated Void Walk, the five-second phasing reducing the physical component to nothing and the energy component to twenty percent. The twenty percent at Deity-class output hit Celestial Armor and Eternal Guard in sequence. Both absorbed. At cost.

He came out of Void Walk with Attribute Surge and Dragon Sovereign simultaneously activated, the combined multiplier windows running in parallel, and drove the sequence of high-output techniques he had deployed before. Heaven’s Judgment. Star Collapse. Convergence Blade at full three-second accumulation. Final Cut at the five-second charge.

Cang Yutian moved through the first three the same way he had moved through them before, the Buddha Step threading between the spatial footprints with the observation-based precision that made the technique functionally immune to being countered by techniques he had already seen.

Final Cut he did not fully thread.

Lin Yi had modified the delivery axis during the five-second charge, not by changing the technique itself but by changing his own spatial position during the charge using Sovereign Step’s movement component, shifting his body’s orientation relative to Cang Yutian’s last observed position so that the release axis pointed somewhere the watcher had not seen the previous Final Cut point from.

The output reached the watcher.

Cang Yutian moved most of himself out of the impact zone. Most.

A portion of the Final Cut’s assembled maximum output connected with the watcher’s left side. Not a clean hit. A partial contact, the edge of the output rather than the center. But it connected.

Cang Yutian looked at his left side.

Then he looked at Lin Yi.

"You adjusted the delivery axis," he said.

"Yes," Lin Yi said. He was already reading the next approach, the engagement’s momentum requiring continuous forward commitment.

Cang Yutian looked over, his voice steady but carrying a hint of surprise. "That’s the first time in this whole engagement that you’ve managed a move that didn’t get countered right away," he said.

"But it wasn’t sufficient," Cang Yutian continued.

And then the watcher moved.

What followed was not the measured engagement of the first phase, where Cang Yutian had operated at the pace that demonstrated the gap without hurrying the conclusion.

Rather, this was the elevated version, the watcher applying the full operational tempo of a level 240 Deity class entity against an opponent who had just confirmed they were capable of changing their delivery axis, which changed the threat assessment and changed the response level accordingly.

Lin Yi used everything he had left.