He struck it.
But the skin did not cut.
He hit it again. And again. Three strikes in rapid succession, each one carrying Strength 5,751 through a mythical-grade weapon at 4,905 attack power, strikes that had cleaved through level 170 Cluster Guardians with their layered celestial stone construction in single exchanges.
The skin showed three marks. Not cuts. Marks. The way a very hard surface shows contact evidence without yielding to it.
"That is," he said, and paused. "Remarkable."
The worm’s body shifted toward his position, the dissolution field’s range extending to cover his location as the creature reoriented. He stepped back with Phantom Void Step, the spatial transition carrying him clear of the field’s direct contact range.
"The dissolution field processes energy," he continued, still working through it aloud. "The physical skin itself is not the dissolution chanism. The skin is just." He looked at the surface where his strikes had marked but not penetrated. "Dense. Beyond what standard physical output can breach with conventional blade technique."
The worm released an attack.
It opened a section of its leading edge ring and expelled a concentrated burst of processed void energy outward, the compressed form of everything the dissolution chanisms had consud since it erged. The burst was not a beam. It was an expanding front, the void energy pressing outward in a hemisphere centered on the expulsion point.
Lin Yi activated Mirror Stance.
The void energy front reached him and the refraction field deflected it. Not perfectly. The Mirror Stance’s reflection accuracy, which his Spirit values made high but not absolute, handled the majority of the burst and redirected approximately seventy percent of it back at the worm’s leading edge. The remaining thirty percent reached him and registered against Celestial Armor and Iron Body Fortification.
The combined passive absorption handled it. But the thirty percent that landed was not nothing. At level 195 output with unknown attack values, thirty percent of a compressed void energy burst was a genuine force that the passives absorbed at a cost.
He noted the cost and filed it.
The redirected seventy percent hit the worm’s leading edge. The dissolution field absorbed it, the creature processing its own expelled energy through the sa chanism with no apparent recognition that the energy was returning rather than arriving from an external source.
"It can absorb its own output," Lin Yi said. "Which ans reflected attacks are irrelevant."
The Greater Qilin moved.
It did not use Heaven Step. It moved in physical contact range of the worm’s exterior and struck with the full output of what it was at its current tier, the raw capability that had eliminated three A-Rank hunters in under two seconds. The strike connected with the worm’s skin.
The skin held.
But the mark it left was deeper than the marks Lin Yi’s blade had left.
He looked at that. "Your output is higher in pure physical terms," he said. "Just by what the conversion made you."
The qilin looked at him. Not with the expression of sothing that understood the words. With the expression of sothing that understood the situation.
"Together," Lin Yi said.
He activated Absolute Domain. All three combined effects deploying simultaneously at maximum values, the domain expanding to its maximum radius, the amplification at triple values across the area. Then he activated Dragon Sovereign, the sixty-second multiplier on all damage dealt and reduction of incoming damage. Then Attribute Surge, temporarily multiplying all four primary attributes by the scaling factor, the exponential multiplier at his base attribute values producing a temporary enhancent that pushed his already exceptional numbers into a different tier.
Within the domain, with Dragon Sovereign and Attribute Surge simultaneously active, he drove the Celestial Lord Blade against the worm’s skin at the specific point where the Greater Qilin’s strike had produced the deepest mark.
He drove it at the sa point seven tis in five seconds, each strike following the previous before the dissolution field could fully process the contact residue from the last.
On the seventh strike, the skin yielded.
Not completely. Not a clean penetration. But a fracture, a disruption in the structural integrity of the skin layer at that specific point, the accumulated contact creating a compromise that the seventh strike was able to exploit.
He drove the blade into the fracture.
The dissolution field inside the worm’s body was different from the external layer. Denser, more active, the primary processing chanism rather than the protective exterior.
The blade’s celestial energy contacted it and was partially consud, but the Void Severance component he layered on top of the basic strike operated through spatial penetration rather than energy output, the spatial component cutting through the dissolution field’s consumption chanism at a level the field was not calibrated to process.
"ERRRRRRRRRRRRR!"
The worm reacted.
For the first ti in the engagent, it produced a sound that neared a scream. And it’s body movent changed, the massive form shifting in a way that was reactive rather than predatory, the specific motion of sothing that had registered genuine internal damage.
He kept the blade in the fracture and pushed.
The Greater Qilin struck the exterior at three additional points simultaneously, the physical output creating stress fractures that extended from the primary breach point outward, the combined effect of internal penetration and external structural compromise producing a damage pattern that the skin’s extraordinary density could not distribute fully.
The engagent continued.
He lost track of individual exchanges. The Dragon Sovereign window expired and he reactivated when the cooldown cleared. Attribute Surge reactivated on its cooldown cycle. The worm’s HP, still unlisted by the system, was clearly depleting because its behavior kept changing, the reactive responses becoming more frequent and less controlled as the damage accumulated.
He used Final Cut once.
The five-second charge ti was the longest five seconds he had spent in a combat engagent, maintaining position while the technique assembled every available form of offensive output into a single delivery. Physical, energy, spatial, celestial, all of it compressed through the Celestial Lord Blade at the point of penetration, released simultaneously into the worm’s internal structure.
The worm went still.
Not gradually. All at once, the massive form losing its operational coherence in a way that was different from a monster dissolving at HP depletion. It was slower. The void energy that had constituted its dissolution chanisms dispersed into the ambient expanse environnt in a gradual release that took several seconds, the creature’s fundantal energy structure unwinding at the pace its processing chanism could manage rather than instantly.
Then it was gone.
The system panel updated.
[Void Eroding Soul King Defeated]
[EXP Gained: 2,840,000 — Apex Bonus Applied ×10]
[Reward Amplification Triggered — ×1000]
[New EXP Gained: 28,400,000,000]
[Level Up! — Level 200 → Level 201]
[Level Up! — Level 201 → Level 202]
[Level Up! — Level 202 → Level 203]
[Level Up! — Level 203 → Level 204]
[Level Up! — Level 204 → Level 205]
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