Lin Yi ran.
Not the word he would have chosen for what Boundless Step produced, but the functional description was accurate.
Lin Yi was moving away from a fixed point toward no particular destination, each activation of the layered movent technique carrying him further from Cang Yutian’s last position, the chain window extending the consecutive steps until the energy cost beca relevant and the window expired, at which point he activated again before the gap between activations beca a stillness the watcher could exploit.
The mid atmospheric layer of the Allheaven Expanse was familiar terrain at this point, the island formations and astral river paths catalogued through weeks of operation. He moved through it at the speed Boundless Step produced, the floating islands resolving from shapes into detail and then passing into the wake of the transition before either phase could beco significant.
He did not look back.
He already knew what was behind him. The watcher had announced the decision with the specific feel of sothing that did not make announcents it did not intend to execute.
The wounds were a continuous and accurate inventory.
Chest. Shoulder. Three cuts across the torso. The passive skills running below capacity, the Celestial Armor layer depleted from the sustained engagent’s cost, the regeneration cycle running as fast as Eternal Spirit Core and combat intensity could push it, which was fast but not fast enough to close the gap between damage received and recovery capacity while simultaneous movent was drawing on the sa energy reserve.
He activated Boundless Step again.
The chain carried him through six consecutive transitions before the window expired. He activated again imdiately.
And he thought.
"I can’t outrun him," he said aloud. "Buddha Step isn’t movent in any conventional sense. It doesn’t traverse space along a path I can track or within a range I can outpace. It manifests at the point of observation. And he has already observed this entire layer." A brief pause, his gaze sharpening. "Which ans, functionally, he can appear anywhere he chooses."
Another activation. Another chain.
"Which ans running in this space indefinitely is not a viable approach. He will appear in front of . He did it once. He will do it again and again until I can no longer use the movent techniques fast enough to generate another gap before the next appearance."
He thought about the ti.
The Sub-Class Awakening event. Three months. More than one month remaining. The event frawork kept every participant inside the expanse until the duration elapsed. There was no ergency extraction in this event, the event rules had been explicit on that, unlike the dungeon expeditions at the academy where the extraction beacon was mandatory equipnt. The Allheaven Expanse had no extraction beacon equivalent.
Which ant he could not leave.
He had known this before the engagent with the watcher began. He had factored it into the decision to approach the thunder dragon, the calculation that the event provided a boundary that would contain any consequence that arose from the approach.
What he had not factored was a level 240 Deity class entity with Buddha Step and the declared intention to kill him.
"I cannot outrun him," he said again. "I cannot exit the expanse. And at the current gap between our levels, I cannot et him in direct engagent. Every exchange costs more than it costs him, and that disparity isn’t sothing skill diversity can compensate for."
He activated Boundless Step once more.
"What I can do is redefine the term of this encounter. End the pursuit... and turn it into sothing else."
Sothing else.
He thought about the storage space token.
He had been carrying it since before the academy. A dinsional container that accepted items and preserved them. He had expanded its application over the course of the event, discovering that the dinsional pull could be directed outward as a containnt chanism, the eleven hunters of the Nine Yin Demon Guild the largest test of that application. The token’s dinsional space was not a finite room. It was an endless dinsion, the spatial architecture of the container not bounded in the way that physical spaces were bounded.
He had not thought about what that environnt was like for a person inside it.
A hunter, stored in the token’s dinsional space, would be in an environnt with no exit, no spatial boundary, no reference points, and no chanism for self-extraction. The token’s dinsional pull was controlled by the person holding the token, which was Lin Yi. Soone inside the token without a way to generate the reverse pull from the inside was contained indefinitely.
Indefinitely ant until the holder released them.
He thought about the watcher’s classification. Level 240. Deity class. The ten Buddha wheels. The celestial appointnt that gave him authority in the Allheaven Expanse with respect to the Thunder Dragon God’s protection.
Could the dinsional pull reach a Deity class entity?
The eleven hunters it had contained were A-Rank in the level 100 to 110 range. The token’s containnt force was calibrated by his own Spirit output, which at Spirit 5,127 was substantially above the level that the nine yin demon guild hunters had been able to resist. Cang Yutian was at level 240 in a Deity class rank.
His Spirit attribute is definitely far above mine, probably 6000 , but with Dragon Sovereign and my other attribute multipliers, I should be able to bridge the gap and use the dinsional pull on him, trapping him in the storage space token, Lin Yi thought.
But the honest answer was that he didn’t know.
Maybe Cang Yutian’s Spirit attribute reached as high as 8000. It wasn’t an unreasonable estimate, given everything he had already observed.
But the token’s pull didn’t operate like a conventional skill. It functioned through dinsional chanics, not through raw energy output or direct attribute comparison. That placed it in an entirely different category. The real question wasn’t whether Cang Yutian was stronger than him, because that much was already obvious. The question was whether the dinsional pull interacted with a Deity-class entity based on Spirit values... or whether it was governed by the hierarchy of the frawork itself.
That distinction mattered.
And right now, he didn’t have a definitive answer.
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