Chapter 258 - The Shadow of Death Lingering in His Mind
Chapter 258: The Shadow of Death Lingering in His Mind
Edited by Lord Immortal
The statue was shattered as a snake-head man with four arms suddenly came alive.
Lin Xun’s pupils of eyes constricted as he became vigilant.
Buzz~
With a strange buzz, suddenly, a simple saber appeared in Lin Xun’s hands.
At this moment, the creature had flown to the platform and locked on Lin Xun with a pair of scarlet eyes.
His four stout rocky arms also grabbed a long saber. It was 3.3 meters long with a peculiar shape and frightening red light. He stood there at will but gave out a terrible bloodthirsty momentum.
“The first battle, against the strongmen of snake spirits.”
The ice-cold voice suddenly sounded in the space.
Bang!
Before the voice finished speaking, the snake spirit burst out a loud roar, and the blood saber in his palm dashed out.
Suddenly, the weather changed. An indescribable feeling of terror hung over Lin Xun, making him almost see the falling comets that had the power to destroy the whole world.
The scene was horrible but familiar.
Wasn’t it Reaching for the Stars?
Just as this idea had flashed in Lin’s mind, he felt a sharp pain all over his body. His soul felt like being torn, and his body felt like being split into pieces. Lin Xun was unable to respond to all this. His eyes darkened as he instantly lost consciousness.
Time flew unconsciously. When Lin Xun woke up, he found himself still standing on the platform, surrounded by the strange statues as if nothing had happened.
But when Lin Xun’s eyes fell on the statue of the snake-head and four-arm creature, his face turned pale in an instant.
In his mind, the battle scenes emerged clearly like a tide. It was just like a nightmare, branded on his heart.
That cut!
It was horrifying.
The more he thought about it, the colder Lin Xun felt. When the saber fell, for the first time in his life, he had felt that death was so near. That feeling was so strong and awful that it would be hard to describe without personal experience.
That was RFS! Even worse, that snake spirit adopted RFS twice as powerful as Lin Xun had.
Lin Xun was shocked in his heart. He lost his first fight in an instant, and what defeated him was his most familiar skill.
This overwhelmed Lin Xun, especially at the moment he was “killed”. The sense of horror and sudden despair made Lin Xun realize, for the first time, what a real moment of death was.
It was horrible.
If it really happened in reality, how could he possibly revive?
Resurrection?!
Wait a minute!
Abruptly, Lin Xun recognized a problem. According to the rules, after every battle, he would have a quarter of an hour’s rest time.
In other words, the second fight would begin soon.
He must find out as soon as possible what this challenge tested. If all the statues on the stage were as strong as the snake spirits, he could hardly win them.
Lin Xun took a deep breath, tried hard to calm himself down, and began to think quickly. There were a hundred battle opportunities in the Secret Realm of Hundred Battles, so the test should be related to the fights-. Along with the cultivation, combat skills and battle experience might also be the key to the assessment.
Then, what was the test really for?
According to the fighting power displayed by the strong snake spirit, even if he had the strength to fight back, he could not keep up with it. So the test wouldn’t be for combat skills as the strength gap was too high. This was the first battle, and there were still ninety-nine battles remaining. No matter how high his fighting prowess was, it was nothing in front of such absolute strength.
In that case, the test should be for his saberplay.
That was it!
Reaching for the Stars!
Straight away, Lin Xun remembered that the snake spirit had started with his most familiar RFS. It was obviously abnormal.
Time passed quickly as Lin Xun thought through the details. Not long after, accompanied by a buzz, another sculpture suddenly fragmented, and a strange creature came to life.
This was a man of tall height. He was strong and slender with clear, handsome, and white facial features. His eyes were mysterious blue, and his body was filled with a wisp of black fog-like flame.
“The second battle: against the strong demons.”
When he heard the sound, Lin Xun had the saber in his hand again. This time, he was ready to fight with all his strength. His spirits were boiling like molten lava.
Kill!
With a warcry, the strong demon strode to Lin Xun. His extended white palm turned into a saber as he gently slashed in the void.
His movements were neat, precise, and extremely simple but had a strong sense of mesmerization on others.
In that instant, Lin Xun did not have the time to resist. He only saw the illusion of countless stars falling from the eternal night sky like a rain of Milky Way light.
The terror of death and the extreme despair surged into Lin Xun’s heart once again, making him feel cold all over. His mind suffered an unprecedented impact.
Immediately, the endless pain followed. Everything went black as Lin Xun died again.
When he woke up, Lin Xun’s face became extremely gloomy.
Although he had resurrected, and his body and soul were intact as before, there were still fear, despair, and helplessness arising from his death.
While distracted, he recalled the scene of being killed by the snake spirit and the demon strongman. It was almost like a shadow in his mind that could not be dispelled.
Lin Xun knew that if he couldn’t get rid of the shadow of death, it would become rooted in his mind. The more it accumulated, the more danger he would be in. Eventually, he would be unable to progress and go mad if things became serious.
Through these two deadly failures, Lin Xun already understood why the rules showed that he could pass the test even if he failed all hundred battles, as long as he could persevere to the end.
The reason was that if he failed repeatedly, the impact of death would accumulate. It would make him give up ahead of time because he would not be able to bear it at all. Thus he would be eliminated from the whole test.
So, if he continued to fight like this, it was almost impossible for him to persevere till the end.
He could easily imagine if his fighting spirit was destroyed, and he went mad, what would he depend on to fight?
If he didn’t want to go mad because of these losses, he could only take the initiative to admit defeat.
This was the hardest thing of the third pass of Green-cloud Path. The first two passes were too easy to compare with.
“How come it is so cruel and perverted? What kind of bastard made this barrier? It is totally insane.”
As Lin Xun comprehended everything, his face became more and more gloomy. Even though he had made full preparations before, in the Secret Realm of Hundred Battles, he found that all those measures were in vain.
Lin Xun suspected that since the third pass of Green-cloud Path was already so difficult, would the next several passes be even harder to challenge?
Humming~
A wave sounded, reminding Lin Xun that the third battle was about to begin.
This time’s opponent was a black-scaled giant with a snake around his neck and a tortoise under his feet. It was a strongman of the Unicon Clan.
When the strongman moved, Lin Xun had learned the lessons from the first two times, so he displayed his strongest RFS without hesitation.
However, after only one blow, Lin Xun was killed on the spot once again. There was no way for him to struggle at all, and he was defeated by the same RFS.
“Shit, it’s impossible to get through this challenge at all.”
When Lin Xun resurrected, he couldn’t help cursing; he was outraged. He had thought that he could complete the third pass of Green-cloud Path with the help of mastery of RFS of Human-gang Realm.
Who would have thought that the reality would be so cruel?
The most unbearable thing for Lin Xun was that every failure he experienced was like being killed in reality. The fear of death accumulated in his heart and the shadow of death pestered his state of mind like a ghost. This steadily eroded and impacted his calmness and consciousness.
This was the evil in his heart.
If he could get rid of it, even if he failed all the battles, he could pass the test as he would have stuck to the end. But how would it be so easy to get rid of the evil spirit in his heart?
There were too many practitioners who became depressed once they encountered big setbacks on their path of practice. When they thoroughly lost their state of mind and became stagnant in their practice, they would become disabled or even die.
Why?
It was all because they couldn’t defeat the evil spirits in their hearts.
Today, Lin Xun was facing the same danger. And the most terrible thing was that he was suffering setbacks of experiencing death directly.
Although he could be resurrected, the impact of death was real.
It could be imagined how horrible it would be for Lin Xun to face the evil spirits accumulated by such death.
Nevertheless, Lin Xun was never one to give up easily. After realizing the seriousness of the problem, he forcefully abandoned all the miscellaneous thoughts in his mind and began to think about solutions.
Instead of waiting to fail, he would instead try his best to fight.
He preferred to accept the cruel rules and change the situation rather than to resent all this.
The genuinely disheartening thing for a practitioner was to be defeated by setbacks and failures without going all out. How could such a person possibly become a real powerful man if he voluntarily admitted defeat?
The opponents continued to kill him with RFS and left the terror of death in his heart.
Lin Xun stood alone on the platform with deep dark eyes. He was motionless like a statue, but in his mind, he was thinking hard about an answer.
Evil spirits appeared from death, and death was caused by RFS. If he wanted to defeat and dispel his terror, he should also start with RFS.
Lin Xun had grasped the key to the problem, but how to use that key to open the lock?