Lin Yi looked at the thunder dragon for another mont. The lightning arcs playing between its scales continued their continuous discharge, the creature’s traversal pace unchanged by the conversation happening in the space adjacent to its path. He looked at the distance between his current position and the thunder dragon’s nearest point.
Then he activated Boundless Step.
The skill assembled all movent techniques into a single layered execution. Phantom Void Step’s spatial distortion. Heaven Step’s Spirit-converted montum. Chain Void Step’s consecutive activation. The combined output carried him not toward the thunder dragon but behind Cang Yutian in an instant, the spatial transition producing its signature non-vibration arrival at the destination point.
He materialized directly behind the watcher.
Cang Yutian’s armor moved.
Not in reaction to seeing it happen. In reaction to sensing it happen, the perception of a level 240 Deity class providing enough advance notice that the response was simultaneous rather than sequential. The sword ca out of its sheath in a motion that produced no sound during the draw, the blade itself clearing its housing at a speed that made the draw and the first strike a single continuous motion.
Lin Yi raised the Celestial Lord Blade.
The blades t.
CLANG.
The force behind Cang Yutian’s strike was different from anything Lin Yi had encountered in the Allheaven Expanse.
Not different in kind. Different in scale.
The Thunder Dragon Watcher’s level 240 Deity class output, expressed through a single sword strike, produced a force impact that traveled through the Celestial Lord Blade into Lin Yi’s arms and through his arms into his torso with enough residual force to move him backward across the atmospheric space three ters before he arrested the montum.
His arms registered the feedback. Iron Body Fortification was absorbing the physical component. Celestial Armor was handling the energy layer. Both passives were doing what they were designed to do, and both passives were operating at a cost that was perceptible rather than trivial.
He pressed forward.
Cang Yutian did not move backward from the return pressure. He simply was where he was, the ten Buddha wheels cycling slowly behind him, the dragon eyes tracking Lin Yi’s movent without urgency.
The second exchange.
Lin Yi activated Dragon Sovereign, the sixty-second multiplier on all damage dealt and reduction on all incoming. Into the Dragon Sovereign window he drove a Resonant Strike through the Celestial Lord Blade, targeting the gap between Cang Yutian’s armor plates at the shoulder joint, the secondary burst tid to detonate from within the joint rather than from the surface.
The armor at the shoulder joint absorbed both the initial strike and the secondary burst without producing a visible response.
Cang Yutian’s counter was imdiate and its direction was not where Lin Yi had anticipated it from. The strike ca from below, the blade angling upward through the closing distance that the Resonant Strike approach had created, the trajectory chosen to pass between the defensive positioning that Dragon Sovereign’s damage reduction created and the positioning that the Resonant Strike attack had required.
Lin Yi read it with Predatory Instinct. He adjusted. The adjustnt was not sufficient to fully clear the blade’s path.
The Celestial Lord Blade deflected the majority of the force. The remainder, the portion that the deflection did not redirect, was still carrying Deity-class output behind it.
The blade caught him across the chest.
The cut was deep. Not lethal. Not imdiately structural in the way that a cut becos lethal when it reaches sothing that cannot continue functioning. But deep, the kind of cut that registers imdiately and completely, that the body communicates with a clarity that leaves no room for misinterpretation about what has just occurred.
Lin Yi felt it.
He stepped back with Phantom Void Step, putting distance between himself and Cang Yutian’s follow-up positioning. The space between them opened. He held the Celestial Lord Blade in his right hand and pressed his left to the cut across his chest.
The Eternal Spirit Core’s healing component activated in response to the injury detection, the passive recovery function doing what it could against a cut of this depth. Second Wind was available. He did not activate it yet.
He looked at Cang Yutian across the atmospheric space between them.
The watcher was in the sa position he had been in after the last exchange. The ten Buddha wheels behind him continued their slow cycle. The dragon eyes looked at Lin Yi with the specific quality of soone who has demonstrated a point and is waiting to see whether the demonstration was sufficient.
"You are strong," Cang Yutian said. "Considerably stronger than anyone I have t from Blue Star since this event beca available to them."
Sothing that might have been curiosity flickered briefly across his expression. "Impressive. I can sense the celestial energy in your weapon, and not only that, you are at level 230. For that, I comnd you. You have earned a fraction of my respect."
He saw through my level imdiately, without opening my player panel. That’s a different kind of different, Lin Yi thought.
And "a fraction" of his respect? A faint, humorless thought surfaced. Am I ant to be honored by that... or is it his way of asuring the gap between us?
A quiet pause.
Is that his way of saying I’ve reached the threshold where I’m worth acknowledging... and just barely worth treating as a challenge.
Lin Yi said nothing. He was reading the cut’s depth against his current regeneration rate and calculating the exchange window.
"It is not enough," Cang Yutian said. "Not for this. Not today."
The blood from the cut crossed Lin Yi’s hand where it pressed against his chest. The Allheaven Expanse continued around them, the astral rivers flowing, the thunder dragon moving through its traversal path in the upper atmospheric layer, the vast and indifferent machinery of the expanse operating without acknowledgnt of the exchange that had just occurred in its upper reaches.
Lin Yi looked at the cut.
Then he looked at Cang Yutian.
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