One Strike!
Resonant Strike through the Celestial Lord Blade at Strength 5,751, the secondary burst detonating from within the target rather than from the surface. Sun Tian had a defensive formation active at close range that he had deployed between the construct summoning and the formation technique.
The Resonant Strike’s secondary burst bypassed the defensive formation’s surface layer and detonated from within it.
Sun Tian staggered backward across the island surface.
He was not finished.
Sun Tian recovered with the speed of soone whose level made recovery fast even from serious impacts, already repositioning, already deploying the next layer of his capability. The engagent continued for another four exchanges, each one demonstrating the gap between level 166 with thirty-eight years of operational depth and level 200 with a mythical-grade weapon and sixty-seven acquired skills at that attribute scale.
The fourth exchange ended it.
Sun Tian was on the island surface, one knee down, the other leg braced, maintaining upright posture through the specific discipline of soone who does not concede a posture even when the combat has reached its conclusion.
"You fought well," Lin Yi said.
Sun Tian looked up at him. "You’re way above level 170," he said. Not a question. An assessnt from the engagent.
"Yes," Lin Yi said.
"As a first year student." Sun Tian exhaled slowly. The connection was strange indeed. Even at a war academy or even higher, the strongest students range up to level 80, that’s after many years of grinding through experiences.
"I have been hunting for thirty-eight years and I am level 166." He was quiet for a mont. "The world is stranger than I give it credit for."
Lin Yi picked up the jade collection token from where Sun Tian had set it on the island surface and added it to his inventory.
"I don’t deserve this," Sun Tian said. His voice was even. "Whatever category you’re using for the conversion, I haven’t angered you. I haven’t attacked you unprovoked. My guild was collecting jades through legitimate ans in a competitive event." He t Lin Yi’s gaze directly. "You ca here specifically to take what we collected and to convert . That’s predatory, and you know it."
Lin Yi looked at him. "You’re right," he said.
Sun Tian blinked. The acknowledgnt was not what he had anticipated. "Then why?" he said.
"Because the conversion requires a target with sufficient accumulated level experience to produce a guardian worth having," Lin Yi said. "And because the event operates on rules that include direct combat between hunters and jade transfer from defeated parties." He paused. "You are the highest level hunter I have located in this instance who is not otherwise claid."
Sun Tian looked at him for a long mont. "Being a mindless entity with high vitality that pursues combat indefinitely," he said. "Is not preferable to death. If those are the options, I choose death."
"The conversion doesn’t offer a preference," Lin Yi said. A dead person doesn’t have any vitality left, so they can’t be converted into an immortal guardian. The logic was simple.
Sun Tian’s expression shifted. The calm that had characterized the post-combat exchange reorganized itself into sothing more urgent. The controlled urgency of soone who has identified a window and is calculating whether it is viable.
He moved.
Not toward Lin Yi. Laterally, toward the island edge, toward the gap between this island and the next formation in the chain, toward the open expanse beyond the hideout’s periter. The movent skill he activated was not the one Lin Yi had observed during the combat, it was a secondary technique, sothing held in reserve specifically for this kind of situation, a retreat-optimized activation that covered distance faster than anything he had deployed in the engagent.
The Greater Qilin could have intercepted him. Lin Yi did not instruct it to.
Sun Tian cleared the island edge and activated a sustained flight technique, the kind that carried a hunter over significant distance rather than covering a single step or transition. He was moving fast, the urgency behind the activation pushing the technique toward its output ceiling.
He had covered approximately forty ters when the ground changed.
Then, the surface shifted.
Not trembling. Not eroding. Shifting, with the specific motion of sothing large moving beneath a surface that was not as solid as it appeared.
Sun Tian registered it through his spiritual sense half a second before it happened.
The Void Eroding Soul King erged.
It did not announce itself. It did not build to a visible surface disruption gradually. It simply opened, the surface parting in a radius of twenty ters as the creature’s leading edge pushed through into open space. A Dune (Dune the movie) worm, enormous beyond what the word enormous adequately communicated, erged from the dium it had been moving through.
Sun Tian had approximately zero point four seconds between full visual acquisition and the worm’s leading edge reaching his position.
He activated every defensive formation in his available inventory simultaneously. The burst of deployed defensive energy was genuine and significant, the full output of a level 166 S-Rank with thirty-eight years of survival instinct behind the activation.
The Void Eroding Soul King did not appear to notice.
The sound it produced as it closed was deep enough to register more as pressure than audio, a vibration that moved through the island structure and the air simultaneously.
Then, Sun Tian disappeared. Not moved, but eaten by the enormous Worm.
The worm’s leading edge continued its upward trajectory for a mont after, the montum of ergence carrying it into the open space above the island before it began its return arc downward. The sandy substrate that had concealed it during its approach settled back into its compressed form as the main body followed the leading edge through its arc.
Then it was gone.
The island was quiet again. The ambient sounds of the Allheaven Expanse filled the space that the worm’s ergence sound had occupied. The hideout’s central island sat in the ordinary drift of the expanse as though nothing had happened in it recently.
Lin Yi stood at the edge of the island where Sun Tian had departed and looked at the space where the worm had been.
He was quiet for a mont.
That worm.... Did it just eat Sun Tian?
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