However, once the battle had continued to a certain point...
Li Qi gradually gained the upper hand, because the other side had many concerns—for example... she had to protect that fourth-rank cultivator below.
She naturally had one more target than Li Qi did, and it was an exposed target.
Thus, Li Qi had more means of targeting her.
This was the importance of intelligence. If you knew your opponent's objective and knew where they could not yield, then you had more opportunities to interfere with them, even force them into a head-on decisive battle, rather than whacking here and hammering there amid the whirlpools of spacetime.
However, likewise...
Misleading the opponent was also extremely important. So long as you made others believe you cared deeply about something, causing them to spend enormous effort interfering with that matter, then reversing things in the end could also secure a tremendous advantage.
Therefore, the essence of a third-rank war was an intelligence war. Before an absolute gap in strength had opened between the two sides, all other spells, divine abilities, and even interference itself were not nearly as important.
Li Qi had seized upon her need to protect mortals, repeatedly striking at the mortals and forcing her to rescue them, thereby constantly draining her computational power.
Moreover, the cost for her to rewind events was certainly greater than Li Qi's, because altering the spacetime Li Qi occupied was extremely difficult. Li Qi was highly stable.
Even if one possessed boundless divine abilities, computational power was ultimately limited—at the very least, limited within any given unit of time.
If computational power were truly infinite, then it would be like playing Chinese chess. Without restrictions on moves, there would be a state of "inevitable draw." That was because the upper limit of computational power required