Chapter 176,Trade (1)
The Seven Star Immortal Conversion Halo materialized in Lin Yi’s grip, the seven-spectrum pulse cycling through its surface.
The ambient light of the Allheaven Expanse caught the halo’s surface and reflected it with more depth than the physical surface should account for.
Long Tianyu’s golden eyes locked onto it immediately.
The Dragon Knight’s expression did not collapse into obvious reaction. He was years into a career that had produced enough unusual encounters that visible shock was something he had learned to contain. But the specific quality of the stillness that settled over him in the two seconds after the halo appeared communicated more than any expression would have.
"Is that what I think it is?" he said.
"It depends on what you think it is," Lin Yi said.
"An immortal treasure," Long Tianyu said. "Capable of converting a hunter into an immortal guardian." He looked at Lin Yi’s face. "The Seven Star Immortal Conversion Halo."
"Yes," Lin Yi said.
Long Tianyu looked at the halo for a long moment. Then he looked at Lin Yi with an expression that had developed something new in it, something between professional assessment and the specific warmth that a person of experience directs at someone younger when they encounter a capability they respect and find surprising in someone at that developmental stage.
"Junior," he said. "You truly want to show off your inventory to me? You are really quite bold."
"I was answering your question," Lin Yi said.
"My question was about your level," Long Tianyu said.
"And the answer involves this," Lin Yi said.
Long Tianyu looked at the halo again. His golden eyes moved across it with the attention of someone who had encountered artifact in years of hunting and was reading this one with the full knowledge base that experience provided. The pulse cycle. The slot mechanism visible in the halo’s surface.
Six slots, Long Tianyu thought. The halo has a maximum of seven. If one has been used, six remain.
He thought about what six immortal guardians would mean for the Heavenfall Guild’s operational capability. Not during the event. After it. In the dungeons and rifts and dimensional expeditions that made up the Heavenfall Guild’s primary activity. Six converted entities operating as permanent bound guardians, their accumulated level experience compressed into extraordinary vitality and redirected to continuous combat output on behalf of whoever held the halo.
A guardian, Long thought, converted and bound, would be an entity that most dungeon environments could not contain. The vitality mass from that level of accumulated experience would sustain it through encounters that would end any conventional team. It doesn’t tire. It doesn’t retreat. It doesn’t make tactical errors from fear or pain or the hundred other interruptions that real combat produces in real hunters. It simply engages until the target is gone or the vitality runs out.
Six of those.
The Heavenfall Guild would not need to negotiate difficulty tiers or coordinate extraction plans or maintain the elaborate safety networks that high-level dungeon operations required. Six immortal guardians operating at the converted level of experienced hunters would be a force that the hunter world did not currently have a framework for.
The jade collection in my team’s storage token represented weeks of organized effort from seventeen guild members operating in coordinated sweeps. I had intended that collection for my own Sub-Class Awakening, the single-master principle that governed how the guild’s collective work was allocated. The jades were mine. They were valuable.
Against what the halo would provide to the guild’s long-term operational capability, the comparison did not favor the jades.
Long Tianyu made his decision.
"Junior," he said. "Name your price for the halo."
Lin Yi looked at him with the faint expression of someone who had been waiting for this question to arrive and had already decided what to do with it. "All your celestial jades," he said.
Long Tianyu laughed. It was the genuine laugh, the one from the first encounter in the Jianghe wilderness.
"You really are bold! Not even a moment of consideration, you just said all of them." He shook his head. "What about half my celestial jades and my Heavenly Dragon Armor?"
Lin Yi looked at the armor.
The Heavenly Dragon Armor was Legendary grade, the golden dragon-scale construction carrying the characteristic Legendary-tier protection and defense. It was visually imposing and had clearly been constructed with real craft. But Lin Yi ran a brief comparison against his own defensive profile. Iron Body Fortification. Celestial Armor. Eternal Guard. Unbreakable. The passive defensive stack he had accumulated through the skill core absorptions produced defensive coverage that the Legendary-grade armor’s stats did not add to in any meaningful way.
"Your armor is crap," Lin Yi said.
Long Tianyu blinked.
Not because the statement was rude. Because it was delivered with the same flat accuracy that Lin Yi delivered most statements, and the specificity of it suggested he had actually run the comparison rather than dismissing the offer for negotiating reasons.
"It is a Legendary-grade defensive artifact," Long Tianyu said.
"My passive defensive stack surpasses it," Lin Yi said truthfully. "The armor adds nothing to my current protection profile."
Long Tianyu looked at him. A different kind of stillness settled over the Dragon Knight. Not the stillness of artifact recognition. The stillness of someone doing a rapid reassessment and arriving at a position that was several steps ahead of where they had been.
Passive defensive capabilities that exceed Legendary-grade armor. Long thought.
Isn’t he below level 120? That was my assumption when this conversation began.
He looked at Lin Yi directly. And underneath the direct look, the thought that arrived quietly and without announcement. He has the halo. He has the Abyssal weapon. He has defensive passives that exceed my Legendary armor. He is standing here alone, in the upper mid-atmospheric zone.
If I took the halo by force.
He looked at the halo. Then at Lin Yi. Then at the Abyssal Celestial Lord Blade at Lin Yi’s waist. Then at the absence of anything in Lin Yi’s expression.
This junior is clearly above what I estimated. By how much is the question I cannot answer without more data. Long paused internally. Taking the halo by force from someone who’s currently holding an Abyssal weapon is a different calculation from taking it from a junior academy student.
He let the thought go.
He reached into his storage token and began materializing jades.