She moved laterally, circling the perimeter at a distance of approximately fifteen meters—reading it, looking for the mechanism. Her cultivation output was very slightly elevated as her formation sense ran active, and the qi-thread sensor he had set at the outer edge registered the reading without triggering because she was staying outside its boundary.
She found the qi-thread at approximately the six-minute mark.
He watched the micro-stillness of her—the specific immobility of a cultivator who has identified a trigger mechanism and is now reading it from outside its effective range. She circled it slowly. Looked at it from three angles. Read the threading pattern with the formation literacy of someone who was very good at this.
'She's mapping my sensor line,' he thought. 'Now she's looking for the gap.'
He had left one gap.
She found it in four minutes.
