The figure did not flee, and it did not attack.
It rose from its crouch slowly, deliberately, the same unhurried quality Kǎn had carried in the proving ground, and Lin Yi understood that whatever this thing was, it did not regard sudden movement as a useful tool the way most hostile entities did.
Up close, it resolved into something the Observer's reading still struggled to fully categorize. Roughly humanoid, though the proportions were subtly wrong in a way that took a moment to identify — the limbs slightly too long, the joints positioned at angles that suggested a different structural logic than human anatomy used. Its surface carried the Middle Domain's self-luminous quality, but muted, as though it deliberately dimmed itself rather than emitting at the ambient rate everything else in the realm produced.
In its hand, held with the same careful attention it had been giving the ground a moment before, was an object.
Lin Yi recognized it immediately.
