Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

The base approach was a stone path.

Wide enough for four people walking abreast, the surface worn smooth by the passage of cultivators across three hundred years of attempts, the stone carrying the specific quality of something that had absorbed the spiritual energy of everyone who had ever walked it. He could feel that accumulation beneath his feet with each step, not as pressure but as history, the layered residue of ambition and preparation and hope and all the things people carried to this place.

The mountain was fully visible from the base approach in a way it had not been from inside the forest. Nine tiers ascending through layers of stone and light, each tier larger than the last from the base, the proportions inverted from standard mountain logic, the peak wider than the base’s middle sections in the way that things are wider when they are not following physical law but a different organizing principle entirely.

The First Gate was at the approach’s end, visible from three hundred meters. A structure built from stone that carried the same pulse he had felt in the deep zone’s bark and ground, the mountain’s rhythm present in the gate’s material at full intensity rather than as background ambient.

He walked the base approach at the pace that the approach seemed to suggest, not rushing, not slow, the pace of someone moving toward something with full awareness of what it was.

Lei Bao was silent.

The cultivation compression had 68 hours remaining. He had two levels to close. The deep zone’s inner section and the Mountain Vanguard had produced 248. The base approach had its own monster population, the transition entities that existed between the deep zone’s testing function and the First Gate’s level assessment, and Predatory Instinct was already reading the first of them ahead.

[Threshold Sentinel | Level 249 — Gate Guardian]

HP: 1,480,000 / 1,480,000

Physical Attack: 10,400–11,800 | Physical Defense: 9,200–10,400

Magic Resistance: 8,040–9,120

A guardian stationed on the base approach to confirm combat readiness at the threshold tier. Operates through sustained pressure rather than single decisive exchanges. Tests endurance and output consistency across an extended engagement. Weak point: the gate sigil inscribed on the left shoulder plate, which carries the mountain’s authority mark. Strikes against the sigil carry bonus output from the mountain’s endorsement.

Level 249. One level above his current 248. The Threshold Sentinel’s HP total was the largest he had encountered in the deep zone, the extended engagement design reflected in the mass that the sustained pressure approach required.

He engaged without preamble.

The Threshold Sentinel moved with the measured pace of something that understood its function. Not the territorial aggression of a predator or the immediate maximum output of something trying to end an engagement quickly. A sustained application of force across the engagement space, the kind of pressure that tested whether a cultivator’s output remained consistent or degraded over time.

Lin Yi activated Flow State.

The passive skill reduced energy costs continuously during sustained combat, the cost floor dropping the longer engagement continued until active skills were operating at near-zero energy expenditure. Against a fight designed for sustained pressure, Flow State was structurally correct. The longer the engagement, the less it cost him to maintain output while the Sentinel’s own energy reserve operated on fixed consumption.

He drove the Thunder Surge Blade at the gate sigil on the left shoulder plate with the first exchange, the mountain’s endorsement bonus carrying through the contact the way the system prompt had described, the output against the sigil location running above the standard calculation.

The Sentinel absorbed it and applied the sustained pressure, a continuous wave of force across the engagement space that required active management rather than single defensive activations. He moved through it with Phantom Void Step and Heaven Step in alternation, the Void Step Compression Stone’s extended chain window keeping the movement fluid, Lei Bao’s lightning Sword Qi adding to every physical strike.

The engagement ran for longer than any single fight since the Void Eroding Soul King.

Not because the Sentinel was beyond him. Because its design was duration and he was respecting the design rather than forcing it into a different shape. He struck the sigil consistently. The mountain’s endorsement bonus accumulated across each contact. The Flow State cost reduction built toward its floor. The Thousandfold Pressure stacking multiplier compounded with each consecutive strike.

The Sentinel’s HP dropped in steady increments.

At the halfway point the sustained pressure intensified, the Sentinel’s second phase producing doubled output across the engagement space. He activated Dragon Sovereign. Into the sixty-second window he pushed the output rate higher, the combined multiplier running above the Sentinel’s intensified pressure by a sufficient margin to maintain the downward HP trend.

At seventy percent depletion the Sentinel’s third phase began, the pressure shifting from area coverage to targeted output, the entity focusing its full capacity directly at Lin Yi rather than across the space. He activated Attribute Surge on top of Dragon Sovereign, the two temporary multipliers stacking their effects, and drove Final Cut at the sigil with the full assembled maximum output the technique produced.

The sigil fractured under the mountain’s own endorsed force turned back against its guardian.

The Sentinel’s HP collapsed from thirty percent to zero in the Final Cut’s aftermath, the structural compromise at the sigil point propagating through the entity’s framework and ending the engagement cleanly.

[Threshold Sentinel Defeated]

[Classification: Gate Guardian | Level 249]

[EXP Gained: +1,680,000]

[Cultivation Compression Active — ×1.5]

[Modified EXP Gained: +2,520,000]

[Amplification: ×10,000]

[New EXP Gained: +25,200,000,000]

[Level Up! — Level 248 → Level 249]

One level.

He stood on the base approach stone and looked at the First Gate ahead. The distance between his current position and the gate was approximately two hundred meters. Predatory Instinct was reading one more entity between him and the gate structure, positioned at one hundred meters, the midpoint of the remaining approach.

He began walking.

The second Threshold Sentinel was identical in classification to the first, level 249, the same gate guardian function, the same sustained pressure design. He did not stop to read the full system prompt. He engaged from the same foundation the first engagement had established, Flow State already approaching the cost floor from the previous fight’s duration, Thousandfold Pressure available to build again.

The second engagement was shorter than the first.

Not because the entity was weaker. Because he was more precise. The first engagement had been a calibration, the first time encountering the sustained pressure design and learning the correct response to it. The second engagement was execution, the calibration applied, every exchange targeting the sigil with the efficiency that came from having already solved the approach once.

The sigil fractured faster.

The entity dissolved.

[Threshold Sentinel Defeated]

[Classification: Gate Guardian | Level 249]

[EXP Gained: +1,680,000]

[Cultivation Compression Active — ×1.5]

[Modified EXP Gained: +2,520,000]

[Amplification: ×10,000]

[New EXP Gained: +25,200,000,000]

The notification appeared without a level-up attached.

He opened his panel.

Level 249. EXP: 38,400,000,000 / 42,800,000,000.

He was 4,400,000,000 short of level 250. The two Threshold Sentinels had consumed the 248 to 249 gap and moved significantly into the 249 to 250 accumulation but had not completed it. He looked at the EXP bar and then at the First Gate one hundred meters ahead.

Predatory Instinct read no more entities on the base approach between his current position and the gate.

He looked at the surroundings. The stone path. The mountain’s pulse in the ground beneath him. The old growth forest behind him, the deep zone’s boundary visible at the forest’s edge. The nine-tiered structure of the Ninefold Heaven Gate Mountain above.

The gap was 4.4 billion EXP. At standard cultivation without compression, that was a significant number. With the compression’s 1.5 multiplier active and the 10,000x amplification, a single level 245 equivalent entity produced roughly 15 to 18 billion modified EXP. One fight was sufficient.

He turned to the forest’s edge and moved back into the deep zone’s outer boundary, not the inner section but the outer zone where the mid-level entities populated the familiar island-style cluster terrain. He found the first reading within sixty seconds of crossing the boundary.

One fight.

The entity dissolved.

He opened his panel without looking at the notification first.

The EXP bar was full.

Then the notification arrived.

[Level Up!]

[Level 249 → Level 250]

He stood at the deep zone’s outer boundary and looked at the number.

The threshold that the hunter classification system acknowledged as its documented ceiling. The level that no registered hunter from Blue Star had ever reached in the Bureau’s complete historical record. The number that Cang Yutian had been fixed at for years before Lin Yi had spent a month generating experience for him under the slave mark. The number that meant the Ninefold Heaven Gate Mountain’s First Gate was no longer a theoretical destination but an immediate one.

He stood with it for a moment.

Not performing anything. Not processing it for the gallery of anyone watching. Just standing with the specific quality of a thing that had been the horizon for a very long time arriving underfoot.

Level 250.