Confusion first, then the specific escalating register of something large and demonic discovering it cannot move — rage building below the confusion, red eyes shifting from her to whatever was behind it, the thirty-ton body twisting against a grip that offered no purchase because it had no physical surface to push against.
Lin Yuxi looked past it.
There was a man standing at her back.
She hadn't heard him arrive.
She hadn't felt him arrive — no spiritual pressure displacement, no sound of landing, no disturbance in the slope's ambient energy that her fractured cultivation could detect — he was simply 'there', his back to her, both hands clasped behind his robe in the specific way of someone who had arrived at a conclusion rather than a location.
The robe was dark.
Not sect-marked, not clan-colored — dark fabric, good quality, the specific unhurried cut of clothing that belonged to someone who did not need insignia to establish what they were.
