Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

The morning came quietly.

Lin Yi sat at the edge of his bed in the accommodation block assigned to Jianghe’s team, the early light coming through the narrow window at an angle that made the room feel smaller than it was. His left side still ached from the previous day, a persistent reminder that the thirty-ninth floor had meant it when it hit him.

He checked his system panel without getting up.

Total Score: 400 points.

First place. He already knew that. He closed the panel and reached for the water on the table beside him.

A knock came at the door.

He opened it. Wang Hao stood in the hallway looking considerably more rested than he had any right to be after yesterday, holding two cups of something warm and wearing the expression of someone who had prepared what he was going to say and was going to say it whether the other person was fully awake or not.

"Brother Lin," he said, handing over one of the cups. "Can I come in?"

"You’re already halfway in," Lin Yi said, stepping back.

Wang Hao entered, sat down on the chair by the window, and wrapped both hands around his cup. He looked out at the early morning view of Celestial City for a moment. The scale of it was still disorienting after a lifetime in Jianghe. The buildings were taller. The streets were wider. Even the sky looked different, as though a larger city somehow warranted more of it.

"I talked to Qinghan last night," Wang Hao said.

Lin Yi sat back down on the bed. "And?"

"We’re not going back in today." He said it straightforwardly, without apology. "Three hundred and ninety points each. That already puts us above everyone except you.

Going back in risks that. If something goes wrong on a higher floor, if we get injured seriously enough, the score doesn’t help us if we can’t sit the Regional Academy intake assessment afterward."

"I know," Lin Yi said.

Wang Hao nodded. "I figured you’d understand." He sipped from his cup. "You’re going in alone though, aren’t you."

It wasn’t a question. Lin Yi didn’t treat it like one. "Yes."

Wang Hao was quiet for a moment. Outside, the city was beginning to wake, distant sounds of movement rising from the streets below. "How far are you planning to go?"

"As far as I can."

Wang Hao turned to look at him directly. "The record is four hundred and thirty. Someone from Heavenly Phoenix set it six years ago."

He paused.

"They were Level 45 and had an S-Rank class." Another pause. "You know that, right?"

"Yes."

Wang Hao stared at him. Then he exhaled slowly and leaned back in the chair. "Right."

He rubbed the back of his neck. "Of course you know that." He looked out the window again. "I’m not going to tell you to be careful because you’ll do what you’re going to do regardless of what I say." He stood up. "Just come back."

Lin Yi looked at him. "I will."

Wang Hao nodded once. He picked up his cup and moved toward the door. Then he stopped. "Brother Lin." He didn’t turn around. "Yesterday, when Qinghan and I exited." A brief pause. "We were both at our limit. If we had stayed another ten minutes that floor would have broken us."

He was quiet for a second.

"You stayed. And you cleared it." He shook his head slightly. "I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand what you are." He opened the door. "Go Top the record."

He left.

Lin Yi finished his water, stood up, and began preparing.

....

The Dragon God Tower’s entrance plaza was quieter on the second day.

Many teams had already decided not to return, their scores secured and their bodies still recovering. The crowd that had filled the space yesterday was reduced to perhaps a third of its size, students standing in smaller groups, the atmosphere more subdued than the charged anticipation of the day before.

Lin Yi walked through the plaza alone and registered for individual entry.

The examiner at the desk looked at his registration card, then at the score displayed on the board behind him. Four hundred points. He looked back at Lin Yi. Then back at the board. Then he processed the entry without comment, which was probably the professional thing to do.

Lin Yi walked through the tower entrance. The familiar pressure of the interior settled around him. He found the floor progression point and selected his continuation floor.

Floor 40.

The transition happened.

The fortieth floor boss was different from anything below it in one specific way that became apparent the moment Lin Yi saw it. Every previous boss had been powerful. Some had been fast. Some had been technically complex. But all of them had operated within a framework he could read and respond to.

This one didn’t give him a framework.

It was a shifting mass of condensed shadow energy that had no fixed form, contracting and expanding continuously, generating limbs where it needed them and dissolving them when they served their purpose. The system prompt identified it as a Shadow Colossus, Threat Level 40, with a passive ability that caused it to absorb and redistribute kinetic impact rather than receiving damage directly. Physical strikes fed it. Magic attacks dispersed it temporarily but didn’t damage the core. The weakness listed was the core itself, a dense point of concentrated energy at the center of the mass, but the mass restructured its shape constantly to keep the core moving.

It required a different approach.

Lin Yi spent the first several minutes not attacking. He moved, he observed, he tracked the pattern of the core’s movement through the shifting body, and he identified the cycle. The core didn’t move randomly. It followed a rotation pattern, moving between six positions in a sequence that repeated every forty seconds. The mass’s restructuring was reactive, designed to keep the core away from wherever the last attack had come from. Which meant if he attacked one position and immediately moved to the position the core would rotate to next, the mass’s defensive restructuring would move the core toward him rather than away.

He tested it once. Then confirmed it. Then ended the fight in three strikes, each one arriving at exactly the position the core rotated to before the mass could compensate.

The floor cleared.

....

In the monitoring hall, the reaction was immediate.

"He figured out the rotation pattern."

"In four minutes."

"Four minutes. The average time to clear floor forty across the entire examination history of this tower is thirty-seven minutes." A pause. "The record is eleven minutes, set by a Level 48 S-Rank twelve years ago."

"We don’t actually know his level."

"Because the exam has a policy of not identifying candidates levels."

"We know Han Yue is at thirty-four and he exited on floor thirty-three. Level is not the only variable here."

Principal Zhou was watching the screen. He hadn’t sat down since the second day began. Beside him, the principal from Red Lotus City who had made the bet was also watching, his expression carrying the particular quality of someone who had been wrong about something significant and was still in the process of accepting it.

"He’s going to break the record," someone said.

No one argued.

...

Floors forty-one through forty-four passed.

Each one was harder than the last. Each boss carried a Threat Level that exceeded Lin Yi’s registered level, the gap widening with each floor. The pressure from the tower’s internal suppression field accumulated as he climbed, stacking with the individual floor environments in ways that made each step cost more than the one before it.

He didn’t rush. He read each fight carefully, identified the approach, and executed it with the minimum force necessary. Conserving reserves. Managing the accumulated cost. The left side of his body from yesterday’s chain impact had settled from acute pain to a background awareness that he factored into his movement calculations and adjusted for.

Floor 44 cleared.

Floor 45 appeared.