Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

The cultivation compression was real.

He felt it as a physical quality in his framework, the way a sharpened blade feels different in the hand from an unsharpened one, not louder or heavier but more precise, the system’s processing of each kill running at the enhanced rate the fifth entity’s reward had granted him. He did not have to open his panel to confirm it. The first monster he encountered after the compression activated produced a notification that was visibly different from the baseline.

He had moved through the deep zone’s inner section for an hour after the fifth encounter before the sixth entity found him.

The inner section had a different character from the outer and middle sections of the deep zone. The architectural spacing of the trees was gone. What replaced it was not the natural ecology of the outer forest but something that felt closer to the mountain itself, the terrain becoming rockier, the canopy thinning, the pulse in the bark that had been present since he crossed the boundary now present in the stone beneath his feet as well, the mountain’s rhythm integrated into the ground.

The sixth entity appeared from the rock.

Not through the rock. From it, the way something emerges when the material it was embedded in becomes insufficient to contain it, the entity peeling away from the stone surface with the specific quality of something that had been waiting inside the mountain itself rather than in the environment the mountain had created.

True Sight provided a clear read this time. The fifth entity had apparently recalibrated something in the skill’s assessment function, because what True Sight returned was not partial or paused. Clean, complete, and unambiguous.

[Deep Zone Entity — Mountain Vanguard]

Level: 248 | Classification: Mountain-Native Guardian

HP: 1,240,000 / 1,240,000

Physical Attack: 9,840–11,200 | Physical Defense: 8,640–9,800

Magic Resistance: 7,240–8,120

An entity that exists at the threshold between the deep zone’s testing function and the Ninefold Heaven Gate Mountain’s assessment framework. Unlike previous deep zone entities, the Mountain Vanguard operates through standard combat mechanics rather than conceptual engagement. It is the guardian of the passage between the inner section and the mountain’s base approach. Defeating it confirms readiness for the First Gate’s level assessment. Weak point: the luminous core at the center of the chest, accessible from direct approach only.

A level 248 entity with a million and a quarter HP and attack power in the five digit range.

Standard combat mechanics, True Sight said. Not conceptual engagement. The mountain had finished testing him through the first five encounters and had moved to the final confirmation, a direct combat assessment at a level that matched what the First Gate would be dealing with.

He looked at it without activating anything yet.

Level 248 meant two levels above his current 246. The attack power range of 9,840 to 11,200 was significantly above what he had encountered in the middle zone’s strongest rare elites. The HP total was the highest he had seen since the Void Eroding Soul King.

Lei Bao emerged from the blade without being asked, hovering at his shoulder, his crackling back to full intensity after the subdued quality of the deep zone’s conceptual encounters.

"Now this," Lei Bao said, his voice carrying the specific delight of something finally encountering a problem in its native language, "is something I can help with properly."

"I know," Lin Yi said. He adjusted his grip on the Thunder Surge Blade. "Stay active."

"Always," Lei Bao confirmed.

He engaged.

Boundless Step carried him across the space between the tree line and the Mountain Vanguard in a single layered transition, all three movement techniques combined, the Void Step Compression Stone’s sixty percent range enhancement making the crossing distance negligible. He arrived inside the Vanguard’s engagement range before the entity had fully oriented to his starting position.

He drove the Thunder Surge Blade at the luminous core’s coordinates.

The Vanguard was fast.

It moved with the specific response speed of something that had been built to match what was coming rather than what had come before, the entity’s defensive repositioning arriving before his strike reached the core’s depth, the chest plate coming up to intercept rather than the core being left open.

The blade hit the plate.

The Vanguard’s physical defense at 8,640 was real. The Thunder Surge Blade at 7,600 listed attack power hit it and produced a response that was absorbed rather than penetrated, the plate deflecting the strike upward and using the deflection’s momentum to generate a counter, a sweeping horizontal cut at Lin Yi’s torso that carried the full attack range’s lower bracket, 9,840.

He activated Unbreakable. The twenty percent single-hit cap reduced the incoming damage to a value his enhanced HP pool absorbed without critical impact.

He stepped back and reassessed.

The core was accessible only from a direct frontal approach and the Vanguard was using its defensive positioning to make the frontal approach consistently arrive at the plate instead. Flanking and aerial approaches did not reach the core because the direct approach specification was structural, not a positional weakness. He needed to force the chest plate open from the frontal position rather than circumventing it.

He activated Null Field. The Vanguard’s ability to reposition its defensive plate depended on a continuous read of incoming attack angles. Null Field’s skill suppression cut the entity’s active defensive repositioning function for ten seconds.

He activated Absolute Domain simultaneously, the triple amplification covering the engagement space. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Into the Null Field window, with the defensive repositioning suppressed and the domain amplification active, he committed Dragon Sovereign and drove a direct frontal Convergence Blade at full three-second accumulation.

The chest plate, unable to reposition under Null Field’s suppression, stayed in its current angle.

The Convergence Blade’s accumulated output hit it at full domain amplification.

The plate cracked.

Not shattered. Cracked, a structural compromise in the plate’s surface that the accumulation’s force had produced by exceeding the plate’s threshold in a single application. The crack opened the core’s access angle by approximately thirty percent.

He activated Absolute Slash.

Defense-ignoring. Full Strength-scaled output without reduction. Aimed at the crack, the thirty percent access angle insufficient for a full core strike but sufficient for a blade technique that did not require surface contact to deliver its force.

The Absolute Slash passed through the crack and reached the core.

The core’s luminous quality intensified for a single second and then fractured, the inner structure breaking from the Absolute Slash’s defense-ignoring force, the fracture propagating outward through the Vanguard’s framework from the core point.

The entity did not dissolve immediately. It was a level 248 Mountain-Native Guardian with a million and a quarter HP and the fracture had damaged the core but not destroyed it. The Vanguard’s attacks continued, intensifying as the damaged core’s output became erratic, the entity’s combat pattern shifting from the measured defensive positioning of the opening exchange to something more urgent.

He held his ground.

Thousandfold Pressure was active, the stacking offensive multiplier building with each consecutive exchange against the same target, the compounding damage output growing with every strike. He drove the Thunder Surge Blade into the core fracture with each exchange, Lei Bao’s lightning Sword Qi running alongside every physical strike, the lightning component bypassing the Vanguard’s physical defense calculation entirely and reaching the fractured core directly.

The damage accumulated.

The Vanguard’s HP dropped in large increments rather than the small reductions the opening exchanges had produced, the core fracture turning what had been a heavily defended entity into something that was structurally compromised at its center.

On the eleventh consecutive strike, the core fractured completely.

The Mountain Vanguard dissolved.

[Mountain Vanguard Defeated]

[Classification: Mountain-Native Guardian | Level 248]

[EXP Gained: +1,480,000]

[Cultivation Compression Active — ×1.5]

[Modified EXP Gained: +2,220,000]

[Amplification: ×10,000]

[New EXP Gained: +22,200,000,000]

[Level Up! — Level 246 → Level 247]

[Level Up! — Level 247 → Level 248]

Two levels.

The cultivation compression’s effect on the Mountain Vanguard’s base EXP had produced a modified value that consumed two level thresholds at once, the 1.5 rate increase combined with the 10,000x amplification generating a number that the 247 and 248 thresholds could not contain.

He stood at the edge of where the Mountain Vanguard had been and looked at the stone beneath his feet, the mountain’s pulse running through it unchanged, the inner section’s terrain continuing toward the base approach ahead.

Level 248.

Two levels from the threshold.

The cultivation compression had 71 hours remaining. The path ahead was the base approach to the Ninefold Heaven Gate Mountain’s First Gate, which the Mountain Vanguard’s system description had identified as the passage the inner section confirmed readiness for.

Lei Bao’s crackling had returned to its full buoyant register, the subdued quality of the conceptual encounters completely gone now that the engagement had been physical and the lightning Sword Qi had been genuinely useful.

"Two levels," he said.

"Two levels," Lin Yi confirmed. He looked up through the thinning canopy at the mountain’s profile against Tianyuan Star’s sky, the nine-tiered structure visible from the base approach’s angle in a way it had not been visible from inside the forest. "The base approach next."

"And then the First Gate," Lei Bao said.

"And then the First Gate," Lin Yi said.

He started walking toward the base approach, the mountain’s pulse beneath his feet steady and real and entirely certain of what it was, and he thought about what Zhao Yuexin had said when he first arrived: that no one had passed the First Gate. Not one cultivator in three hundred years of the two families’ stewardship.

He also thought about what the mountain had told him through the fifth entity’s resolution notification, the line that had no precedent in any system output he had encountered before.

The path is honest. Continue.

He continued.