Zhao Fan stepped forward with silent footstep.
The glowing characters etched beneath his feet dimd slightly with every step, as if touched by a breath of frost.
Behind him, the others followed including all the others who were revived, each step hesitant, eyes flickering warily between trees and shadows.
"What is this trial?"
"I don’t know but we can keep all the treasure from now on and use points to buy extra lives,"
"Ooh... You see the tree over there, it has a weird spiritual fruit,"
However, unlike Young Master Zhao’s reduction, the danger did not lie in the trees, nor in the strange sky above, nor even in the ancient stone path that carried them forward.
It ca from within.
Yi Xin Xue felt it first, a gentle pressure stirred at the edge of her consciousness, soft and almost pleasant, almost like the scent of distant flowers carried on a breeze.
Then ca the images: warm, golden, and painfully beautiful.
The crooked trees around her blurred and shimred, shifting into the marble towers of her holand.
She stood not on the sixth floor of a so trial, but among the sunlit spires of mory.
Her pulse quickened. Her fingers tingled...
The pride of her achievents, the sweet echo of admiration, the sense of destiny fulfilled... it wrapped around her like silk.
And then ca the voices.
"You don’t need them," the voices of faceless characters whispered, their tone coaxing and calm.
"You’ve always been the strongest. Why waste ti in another’s shadow? Why follow, when you were born to lead?"
She wasn’t alone, trapped inside the illusion.
Jia i’s eyes had glazed, a soft tremble in her shoulders.
She saw her family before the massacre.
A life before cultivation had hardened her spirit.
Others were also trapped inside the illusion.
...
Lu Tian’s expression was darker, his jaw clenched, fists tight.
He was trapped in visions of authority and reverence, his own twisted dream of power and control.
Only Zhao Fan seed unmoved, he walked forward, calm and alert, the whispers falling flat against the wall of his focus.
He could hear the voices but he wasn’t trapped in an illusion.
Yi Xin Xue looked at him after freeing herself from the illusion but she felt the pull again, the voices inside her mind growing louder and sharper.
"He’s holding you back. Always ahead, always in control. You don’t need him. You can go farther without him."
Mm~
She bit her lips until they bled and the voices were gone.
"Young Master this place is filled with illusion..." She said while looking left and right to see that everyone was trapped inside the illusion.
"The river flows downwards, the mind moves upwards, a monk shall seek balance. There is nothing we can do regarding that matter, they will only hold us back..."
Woosh!
With a flick of his hand, the Qi surged forward taking the shape of a hand and pulling the spiritual fruits.
"This place has no exit, this Zhao believes, we need to exchange the points to leave this place... We should collect the bare minimum and leave this place early on, this place has no aningful treasure, the true treasure lies above," Young Master gave his wisdom as the faster they move, the more ti to collect actual treasures.
"The Maid feels enlightened."
After that, they began to collect the spiritual fruits and began to exchange them for points.
"Strange... Within 3 minutes the fruits regrow, it seems like this place plans to give small rewards and make them invested for the long run." Yi Xin Xue looked at her token and it was already 3000 points.
She had already collected 300 spiritual fruits, glowing, fragrant orbs nestled beneath silver-leafed trees, their auras gentle but dense with pure spiritual Qi.
Zhao Fan had gathered more, 400 in total, his magical hands were swift and precise, each fruit plucked with ease.
Once the area seed picked clean, they wasted no ti. One by one, they pressed their jade tokens to the fruits, watching as each vanished in a shimr of light.
The tokens pulsed in response, numbers etched along their surface shifting rapidly.
Yi Xin Xue’s token glowed a soft blue: 3,000 points.
Zhao Fan’s shone brighter with 4,000 points.
However, it wasn’t enough... With two of them, they managed to gather over 1,500 spiritual fruits.
A mont later, the collective tokens began to hum with synchronized vibration, and then, the white rabbit appeared out of thin air like a breeze.
With the faintest shimr in the air, the white rabbit stepped into view from nothingness, its pristine fur as clean as ever, but this ti, a crooked grin stretched across its face—sharp, knowing, edged with sothing too clever to be harmless.
"Well done, little wanderers," it said, voice silky, playful, and far too composed. "You may now proceed to the next trial... for a price."
The air tensed.
"You’ve t the contribution quota, which is 15,000 points," it continued, lifting a paw tipped with claws far too long for a rabbit.
"However, for groups larger than three, progress demands... a balance,"
Its ears twitched and its smile grew wider, and more sinister.
"One of you must die. Voluntarily or otherwise."
A glowing line of text seared into the air beside it:
[Conditions to Proceed]
— Points: 15,000 ( Fulfilled )
— One Life Lost: ( Unfulfilled )
Silence fell over both of them for a second, but the very next mont, without a flicker of hesitation, Zhao Fan moved.
His Qi exploded outward in a wave of cold, precise pressure. A violet arc split the air. Before anyone could
Comprehending what happened, one of the female disciples was struck dead, her body falling to the ground with a small hole between her eyebrows.
Her token dropped from her hand with a dull clink. It blinked once. Then shattered.
The rabbit clapped— delicately, amused seeing a true Daoist after a long cycle of life.
"Ahhh... how delightfully decisive. No struggle. No votes. No second chances. I am liking you, if you die in this place don’t worry this Seat shall refine your soul and turn it into a pill,"
The glowing text pulsed once more:
→ Trial Access Granted.
Yi Xin Xue didn’t flinch, not outwardly. But her fingers curled slightly tighter around her token.
She did not pity the girl. Weakness in this place was a kind of betrayal. Still, watching Zhao Fan act with such unflinching brutality left a chill trailing down her spine, the the wetness between her thighs grew bigger.
Zhao Fan simply stepped forward, passing through the air where the rabbit had stood, now parting like a veil.
Woosh~
The reality began to change.
"Did Holy Envoy just kill her? She lost all three of her lives."
"Shush... Didn’t you just hear, we are all going to die, as long as there are more than 3 mbers, you need to have at least one person from your group to die, in order to continue..."
"How brutal... This place isn’t for weaklings..."
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