Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

Lin Yi looked at the nearest rift. The gold border was clear, the depth-visible interior showing the white space of the processing environment rather than a destination landscape.

He looked behind him.

The third Thunder Dragon God projection had stopped.

It was hovering in the mid-atmospheric layer approximately three hundred meters back, the lightning arcs between its scales still active, its directional orientation still toward him. But it was not advancing. The event’s conclusion had produced a response in the projection’s operating framework, Cang Yutian’s command architecture presumably carrying some instruction about what the event’s end represented relative to the projection’s directive.

Or the projection’s own existence was tied to the expanse’s operational framework and the framework’s shutdown was interrupting its ability to maintain the pursuit.

Either way, it had stopped.

He looked at it for two seconds. Then he looked at the rift.

Ten minutes. The rift was forty meters away.

He activated Heaven Step and crossed the forty meters in the time the technique required, which was negligible. He reached the rift’s gold border. The same membrane quality from the entry, the same sense of something that was not transition but passage through something that had texture.

He stepped through.

---

The Allheaven Expanse ceased to be the relevant context.

What replaced it was a white room.

Not the pitch black of the storage token’s dimensional interior. White, the specific white of a space that had been designed rather than constructed, the surfaces producing a diffuse ambient light that came from no identifiable source and cast no shadows. The room was approximately ten meters in diameter, circular, with a ceiling that was high enough to be imprecise about how high it was.

He was alone in it.

The system notification was still present in his panel but not demanding immediate attention. He noted it, filed it, and looked at the room.

There was a door.

Set into the circular wall at the point directly ahead from where he had entered, the door was not decorated or marked. A door-shaped opening with a door filling it, the handle the only detail that distinguished it from the wall surface.

He looked at it.

He was level 230. His jade count was in the Spatial Storage Token, the accumulated Cluster Guardian drops and the Nine Yin Demon Guild’s transferred collection and the Heavenfall Guild’s share and the ambient collection from the weeks of clearing. He had not been able to assess the global ranking from inside the expanse. He did not know where his jade count stood relative to the other sixty million participants.

He looked at the door.

He did not know what was on the other side. The event notification had said the rift would lead to the jade assessment and the Sub-Class Awakening result determination. This white room was a threshold space, the zone between the expanse’s interior and whatever the assessment environment was.

The door was the next step.

He crossed the white room and put his hand on the handle.

He opened it.

The space beyond was smaller than the white room. Not enclosed exactly, the surfaces had a quality that made their nature ambiguous, but the scale was intimate rather than vast. The ambient light was the same diffuse sourceless white as the outer room.

And on the floor at the center of the space, cross-legged, eyes closed, with the posture of someone who had been sitting there for a very long time or possibly had always been sitting there, was a young girl.

Lin Yi looked at her.

Long black hair falling straight down her back, unbound. A white robe that was pristine in a way that did not match places where things were usually pristine. A face that looked no older than ten, the small features composed into the specific stillness of deep concentration or deep rest or something that was both simultaneously.

And the aura.

He felt it the moment the door opened. Not pressed against him, not overwhelming in the way that Cang Yutian’s spiritual pressure had been overwhelming. Simply present. Calm. Ancient. Boundless. The specific quality of something that existed at a level the mortal classification framework had no tier for, not because it was a threat but because it was simply what it was.

He had felt this aura before.

Twice.

The first time was in the Celestial Emperor’s Abode, the dungeon event in the wilderness outside Jianghe, the place he had entered alone before the regional examination and from which the Celestial Lord Blade had come. The aura had been ambient there, embedded in the structure of the environment rather than emanating from a specific source.

The second time was on the thirty-third floor of the Dragon God Tower, in the Allheaven Expanse, in the room that had been quiet and still and wrong in the way that rooms are wrong when there is no monster and no pressure and only a throne and a girl sitting on it with her legs swinging.

He looked at her.

The same girl. He was certain of it. Not because the physical description was distinctive enough to be conclusive, young, black hair, white robe, small, could describe many people. Because the aura was specific in a way that no physical description could be. The Celestial aura that the girl on Floor 33 had carried was not a common quality. It was the quality he had been carrying a fragment of in his inventory since the Celestial Emperor’s Abode, the Celestial Emperor Note that she had identified as something left deliberately by someone who did not leave things by accident.

It’s her again, he thought.

He stood in the doorway and looked at her.

She had said, on Floor 33, we’ll meet again. Very soon.

Three months of the Allheaven Expanse had followed. The slave mark, Cang Yutian, Long Tianyu, the watcher, the volcanic basin, level 230 and the jade count and the Sub-Class Awakening event that had brought sixty million hunters into dimensional instances worldwide.

And at the end of all of it, the processing space between the expanse and the assessment, a door in a white room, and her on the other side.

He stepped through the door.