The door released him back into the sparse stretch of the Middle Domain he had left, the proving ground's contained shimmer closing behind him without ceremony, and he stood for a moment in the quiet between formations and let the engagement with Kǎn settle into something he could carry forward rather than something he was still standing inside.
"You're quiet," Lei Bao said.
"I'm thinking," Lin Yi said.
"About the gap."
"Yes."
He had known, abstractly, that the Middle Domain contained cultivators operating at depths he could not yet match. Shen Mao had told him as much in their first conversation, and the seven columns had confirmed it in stone — or in whatever the Middle Domain used in place of stone. But knowing a thing abstractly and feeling the specific texture of a Final Cut landing against someone who simply absorbed it and called the strain it produced a useful data point were different categories of knowledge.
He had needed the second kind.
