Chapter 1802: Last Trial - 3
Chapter 1802: Last Trial - 3
The platform rose again.
A new stretch of steps appeared ahead.
Unlike the lower layers, these steps were narrow and stretched across a vast open void. Each step floated separately, with gaps between them large enough to swallow an ordinary cultivator. White-gold mist moved between the gaps, and inside the mist, vague figures could be seen drifting silently.
They did not look like guardians at first. They looked like memories, shadows, or souls that had never fully formed.
Then the system prompt appeared.
[Second Stage: Genesis Will Corridor.]
[Objective: Cross The Corridor Without Losing Your Will.]
[Warning: The Corridor Will Manifest Regrets, Fears, Desires, And Attachments.]
[Warning: Participants May Assist One Another, But Cannot Bear Another Participant’s Trial Completely.]
[Warning: Individual Willpower Assessment Has Begun.]
The moment the prompt faded, the white-gold mist surged upward.
The world around them changed.
Max took the first step into the corridor, and the scenery before him blurred slightly. For a moment, the cubic platform, Revona, Tamara, Varkhon, and Ervin all faded from his senses. He still knew they were there, but the trial had placed a thin layer between each participant, separating their inner experiences while keeping their bodies on the same path.
Then Max heard a voice.
It was faint at first.
Then it became clearer.
"Why did you survive?"
Max’s footsteps paused for half a breath.
The mist before him formed a scene.
He saw a broken space, a fleeing child, golden light being torn out of a body, bloodline extraction chains, and a woman’s desperate scream that seemed to echo from a past he had not fully remembered with his own eyes.
The trial showed him fragments of the night his family had been destroyed. He saw his mother being restrained. He saw his father bleeding. He saw the forbidden formation extracting the Heavenly Luminance Divine Bloodline from his young body. He saw a shadow carrying someone away through a collapsing spatial crack. He saw second faction elves standing above everything like judges.
The mist whispered again.
"You survived while others suffered."
Max’s eyes became cold.
The pressure on his will deepened.
The scene tried to drag him into guilt, anger, confusion, and helplessness. It tried to make him ask why he had been spared, why his parents had remained imprisoned, why his sister had disappeared, why Caroline and the remnants of the third faction had suffered for so many years while he climbed step by step without knowing the truth.
It was not an illusion meant to trick his eyes. It was a manifestation aimed at the cracks in his heart.
Max stepped forward.
"I survived," he said calmly, "so I can settle the debt."
The mist trembled.
The voices grew louder.
"Can you save them? Can you break the Celestial Thorn Abyss? Can you take back what was stolen? Can you face the Divine Son who carries your bloodline?"
Max’s expression did not change.
Golden-black dragon scales faintly appeared beneath his skin, not because he needed their defense, but because his bloodline itself was reacting to the provocation. The little cursed eye on his shoulder blinked slowly, as if watching the memories with eerie interest.
The Emotion Severing Path stirred faintly in Max’s heart, but he did not fully release it. He did not want to sever this emotion. He wanted to remember this hatred.
He wanted to use it.
"I do not need the trial to remind me," Max said softly. "I already know who I have to kill."
With that, he took another step.
The memory before him split apart.
The mist retreated.
Max continued forward.
On another part of the corridor, Varkhon’s body trembled as the mist around him formed mountains of demon corpses and a throne made of broken horns. His expression twisted, but not from fear. It was from rage.
A giant demonic shadow stood before him, looking down with contempt, and the voice from the mist said something only he could hear. Varkhon roared, and his fist smashed forward, breaking the shadow apart with raw will as much as raw strength.
"I do not kneel to dead demons," Varkhon snarled.
Farther away, Tamara walked through a battlefield of endless corpses.
Banners burned around her. Soldiers called her name. Some begged her to save them. Others accused her of leading them to death. The War God Palace had shaped her into a war lord, but war lords carried the weight of those who followed them.
Tamara’s grip tightened around her spear, and for a moment, her steps became slower. Then her war intent rose, not wild and violent, but firm like a commander refusing to collapse before the cries of the battlefield.
"A commander remembers the dead," Tamara said, her voice heavy but steady. "She does not die with them."
Her spear struck the ground.
The battlefield mist parted.
Revona’s trial was quieter.
She stood before a mirror of endless void.
Inside that mirror were countless eyes, each one identical to her Void Origin Eyes, watching her from every direction. The mist whispered that everything she erased would one day erase her in return.
It showed her a future where her eyes consumed her emotions, her connections, and even her own existence, leaving behind only a pair of void eyes floating in nothingness. Revona looked at the mirror in silence for a long time.
Then her Void Origin Eyes glowed softly.
The mirror began to vanish.
"I decide what disappears," she said calmly. "Not the void."
The mirror was erased.
Ervin’s mist was the strangest.
No one could see clearly what he faced.
Even Max, whose Dimensional Sovereign Body could vaguely sense the others through the trial’s separation, found Ervin’s side unusually difficult to read. The mist around him did not show a battlefield, family, sect, demon throne, or void mirror.
It showed darkness. Endless darkness. A deep abyss without sound, light, or direction. Ervin stood in front of it with his black spear in hand, and for the first time, his calm smile disappeared.
A faint voice came from the abyss.
"Come back."
Ervin’s eyes remained still.
The abyss deepened.
"Come back to where you belong."
His hand tightened around his spear.
For a few breaths, Ervin did not move. Then he slowly raised his spear and pointed it toward the darkness.
"I have not reached the bottom yet. I have not fulfilled my goal" he said softly. "How can I come back?"
The spear pierced forward.
A thin black-silver line cut through the abyss.
The darkness did not disappear completely, but a path opened through it, and Ervin walked forward without looking back.