Chapter 52 - Dream Trial
After being called one by one, the first group inner members went to the building assigned for the dream trial. From their expressions, one could see traces of nervousness, and they were clenching their fists and their teeth to prepare themselves mentally.
The dream trial, although less important than the combat trial regarding the total score, was considered, however, the most feared of the two. The reason was obvious.
In the combat trial, they simply had to fight as they always did. In the dream trial, on the other hand, it was impossible to know in advance what would you see. And it was very challenging to get out of the illusion even when knowing that it wasn’t real. Furthermore, the potion the participants had to take had the task of lowering their mental resistance so that, even though they were mentally ready, the illusion would appear more real.
In order to escape, therefore, one had to face the illusions from the sentimental point of view. It was because those illusions were nothing more than depictions of the inner demons present in a martial artist. By accepting their flaws and nightmares of the past, they would obtain victory.
However, it was also possible to forcefully get out of the illusion by generating enough spirit power to break it. And this was also the method most used by all sect’s martial. After all, it was easier struggling and spending one's spirit power than accepting one's inner demons.
While the first group went inside to face the trial, Hei pulled the sleeve of Lian's robe to attract her attention. When the girl turned to look at him questioningly, Hei smiled and pulled out something he had hidden in his clothes.
It was a necklace made of spider silk and had as a pendant depicting a red flower with five petals.
"It was done a little roughly and therefore didn’t come well; anyway, it is a rafflesia flower. Do you remember when I buried that woman and planted rafflesia seeds? Inside the pendant, you can find the seeds of that flower as well as a piece of Ye and Xing's molts. They wanted to give it to you before, but I thought it would be better to give it to you before the trial.” Hei said as he looked at Lian in the eyes.
Indeed, taking advantage of the fact that Lian was busy in her training, Hei and her two little sisters had practiced together to make that necklace to surprise her.
"I don't know what torments you, but I want you to understand that your past isn’t your future. In the same way that that dead woman was reborn in a beautiful rafflesia flower, you too were reborn in Lian. So, whatever happens inside, don't lose hope for the future and remember that now you have a family."
Saying this, Hei gently placed his hand on Lian's head as she watched him without a word. After some time, she reached out her hand to take the necklace and put it around her neck. In her eyes, two drops of tears slowly descended on her face.
Without saying anything else, Hei remained in that position, not caring about the looks that were being addressed to them by the surrounding people who giggled among themselves.
"Hey, if you want to flirt, you can go somewhere else, you know? My word, trying to impress a girl in the middle of an important trial like this."
"Ahahaha, why don’t let them do it, no? Come on, why don't you kiss her? "
Hei continued to pretend nothing happened, as if he and Lian were in a space separate from the others. Since they weren’t getting any reaction from the two, soon, the crowd that had gathered around them dispersed, losing their interest.
Hei and Lian remained in that position until their turn came. As they had been called together during the appeal, they had also ended up in the same group for the dream trial.
Hei took Lian by the hand and led her to the one-story structure along with the other younger generation inner members of their group. Inside there were bedrolls as described by the man who had explained the trials. Beside each bedroll, there was a glass bottle containing a kind of violet liquid.
Inside there were women of the inner sect who were monitoring the situation and had the task to verify that everyone drank the potion as well as mark the time taken and awaken those who couldn’t get rid of the illusion.
Hei, always holding Lian by the hand, accompanied her to the bedrolls at the back of the room. They lay down next to each other. Then, after receiving the signal, the trial participants drank the strange concoction, and soon, an intense drowsiness suddenly fell on them, making them fall asleep in a few moments.
When Hei opened his eyes, he was no longer in the one-story building where the dream trial was held but was in a grassy space. Around him, there was nothing but desolation as darkness was covering everything. Trying to figure out where he was, he looked around, forcing his eyes to the maximum, but he couldn’t see anything.
At that point, he decided to move a little from his position to better understand where he was when he was suddenly grabbed by the hand. The moment he turned around to see who had managed to get close to him so stealthily without noticing, he noticed a beautiful raven-haired woman.
It was she who grabbed him. Her light brown eyes were shining in that darkness as her body was barely covered by a thin layer of robe showing its sensuality in the allure of the darkness. Her hand felt delicate and soft to the touch.
"Who are you?" Hei asked, confused by the woman who had just appeared before him.
She didn't answer and instead smiled. Then she started driving Hei away from the darkness he was aiming for. In a short time, they arrived in a place illuminated by the warm rays of the sun. There was a huge table filled with delicacies of all kinds. Around the table, there were a group of other girls of the same beauty as the one who had led him there, and, as soon as they saw Hei, they approached him with blazing smiles. They were all gorgeous.
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With sinuous gestures, they began to fill various dishes with the food on the table as they made Hei sit down together with them and poured him a drink. It was a reassuring and attractive scene in that world surrounded by darkness. No one would undoubtedly blame Hei if he stopped there to eat and drink delicacies of all kinds surrounded by beautiful women who showed kindness and availability towards him.
However, Hei didn't drink or eat anything. He simply stood up after being seated and turned back to the darkness. Although the sight of all those women and dishes attracted him, there was something else that bothered him about being there. And in the end, he understood what it was.
"The sun and the day isn’t the place where I belong, but it is the night with the moon and the light of the stars. The darkness is the one that cradles and envelops me during my journey. My family, my treasure."
Having said this, he went into the darkness without looking further towards him, although the women were repeatedly calling his name. When he walked for quite a while, he found himself in a river with a low river bed.
There, dragged by the current, there was the body of a young girl. She had the hair of a familiar blue color. As he approached and lifted her, he realized that it was Lian. By now, the girl was no longer breathing and was utterly cyanotic, a sign that the blood inside her body had now fallen to a mortally low level. Her skin was as cold as the cold of the night and wrinkled due to prolonged contact with water.
Hei was stunned by seeing her. The Lian in front of him looked real and, at the same time, not. He couldn't understand the reason for that feeling and tried to clear his doubts by smelling her. But the smell he perceived was the same as what he remembered.
Not exactly knowing what to do, he continued to move, taking the girl's body with him. A little further on, however, he encountered a vision that disturbed him even more than the sight of Lian's body.
On the trunk of a tree, the body of a snake and a spider had been embedded with spikes. The snake had black scales with golden patterns, while the spider had a purple color with silver patterns. In a moment, Hei recognized who they were - they were none other than his two little sisters, Xing and Ye. Only they had that kind of particular pattern.
Next to them was the carcass of a one-meter large spider. It was being torn to pieces by some men with axes in their hands. The spider was none other than his mother. Still alive, she was making excruciating noises while being subjected to that torture.
Seeing all this, Hei was immediately seized by an intense and murderous rage. Gently placing Lian's body on the ground, he later ran to the men who were attacking his mother while activating his spirit power.
In a moment, the distance with them was filled, and Hei slung himself on one of the men. Hei bit the man around the neck while his fingers stuck in the eyes of his enemy. Soon a metallic taste exploded in his mouth, staining his lips and his teeth of red, but he didn't stop.
Like a predator biting his prey at the jugular and not letting it go for any reason, Hei did the same while stretching his fingers in the exploded eye cavities of the man.
Then he stood up, and with the blood that was dripping from his mouth and fingers, he turned to the other men who had stopped hitting his mother. So he rushed over them with a wild charge.
Every time he hit them, blood and meat would be splashed in the air. Soon the land and the nearby river were dyed red too, and various parts of the body such as eyes, ears, noses, hair, and pieces of flesh and muscles began to flow along the river.
With every stroke, Hei wasn’t just aiming to kill the enemy. But he intended to destroy everything, coming to rip his enemies’ bodies with his own teeth, and even when they died, he wouldn’t stop hitting them until they were reduced to a pulp.
Although the scene itself was intense and brutal, that hell only lasted a brief moment. In a short time, Hei had destroyed his enemies, and only the remnants of what could barely be defined as corpses remained.
As he was panting, he tried to stabilize his breath as his lucidity gradually returned after that rush of destructive fury. But this hell wasn’t yet finished, and he could soon hear a familiar voice.
"You said you would protect us, and yet you let them kill us and desecrate our bodies like this."
From the tree, Ye's body was starting to melt as pieces of her flesh fell to the ground with a thud. That shapeless mass that had the appearance of his sister began to crawl towards him. Shortly after that, Xing also began to undergo the same process as she railed against Hei words of resentment.
"We were your little sisters, why didn't you protect us? Why didn't you protect Lian and Mom as well? "
Suddenly Hei heard a noise behind him. Turning around, he could see Lian's corpse crawling on the ground with her eyes wide open and full of resentment.
"You said it would be all right. That I would have a new family. Why did you delude me like that? Why didn't you let me die before having to experience all this again? "
And when it didn't look like it could get any worse, the voice that he didn’t want to hear in that situation spoke.
"You failed to protect your sisters. You are just a useless, weak person. It was a mistake to save you and raise you. I should have let you die when you were still a newborn, drowned in the puddle of blood inside the belly of that filthy human. It's all your fault, why don't you just die?"
His mother's voice was the same as the one he remembered, but she had a rage and hatred never heard before. That completely upset Hei, who saw her as his point of reference, until suddenly...
Hei approached Lian slowly and caressed her face before using Spider Lance to penetrate her head and killing her instantly. That left astonished ‘Bao Bei’ who looked incredulously as Hei repeated the same action against his two little sisters.
"What the hell are you doing ?! We are your family, why are you hurting them?!"
Hei turned to look at his ‘mother’ body and said with a smile,
"No, you aren’t my family. Or to be more precise, you aren’t my ‘real family’. It is just an illusion. It all seems so real, and in fact, you have reproduced the same smell and touch of my family. But you were wrong about one thing - regardless of what might happen, my mother, my little sisters, and even Lian, none of them would ever blame me. That would happen even if it was really my fault. Indeed, knowing them, they would probably tell me not to worry and to go on, that it's not my fault. "
Hei continued to walk towards ‘Bao Bei,’ and assuming the posture for Spider Lance, he positioned himself before her eyes.
"Even if it pains me to do this to my fake family bodies, in the end, you are nothing but an illusion. However, even if an illusion, it is also true that this scenario isn’t something unlikely in the future. It is why I am training to become stronger, to prevent this. But in case I fail and survive while my family is dead, then I would kill all those responsible for it, whether it was a single person, a whole sect, an empire, or even the whole world. But after obtaining my revenge, if I am still alive, I will personally take my life as an expiation for failing to protect my family."
That being said, Hei broke the head of his fake mother as her blood dripped onto his arm.
"I'm coming, my family."
So he committed suicide by using the spider lance to pierce his own heart and died. However, he didn’t really die because soon after, he opened his eyes and found himself again in the building of the dream trial.
Turning his head, he could see Lian twist her face in pain. He wanted to help her, but he was stopped by one of the women of the inner sect who sent him away with a strange expression on her face.
As soon as he came out, murmurs all around started to break out.
"Hey, how long has it been? H, how did he get out so quickly?"
"I think it barely passed, five minutes!?"
"How is it possible? The average time is 12-13 minutes, while the record for the dream trial is 8 minutes and 30. Even personal disciples failed to go below that limit."
But to Hei, all that didn't matter. He simply stood in front of the door, waiting for Lian to come out because he knew she would make it.