16 - "Is there no end???"

As Su Tao calmed down, he was still extremely angry, but he did not have to rely on the powers of his left eye to stay calm in the face of that anger. This meant that if he was to watch his mother's death again, he would not even react in anger even though he would feel all the same amount of anger.

In other words, he was not unable to feel anger, but rather, he was unable to react to it in the way a normal person would, and he would instead be able to use his anger to help himself in a rational way instead, pushing his body to do exactly what he wanted it to do and nothing else.

He hated that whole process, and he was glad that he could not remember the whole thing. He couldn't remember it, but he knew what had happened and how the trial worked. As such, he knew that he had experienced the same thing many many times in a row, but he would never imagine just how many times he had gone through it.

But even so, he thought that he was through with the trial, but unlike last time, nothing happened. The endless grassland did not vanish, and he did not go into the dimension of his eyes.

Suddenly, the drunken feeling reappeared, and the world around him changed once again. The grassland shriveled and died, leaving nothing living in its wake. The bright day turned to a pitch black night without a single star in the sky. All that was left of the sky was the moon, which had turned blood red.

As Su Tao looked around, a feeling of deep uneasiness burrowed its way into his heart, like a tick burrowing into your skin. On top of that, the power of Su Tao's eyes vanished, leaving him unable to see ten feet in front of him in the dim blood red moonlight.

It was dead silent, with not a single sound, not even the sound of wind. The only sound that Su Tao could hear was that of his own heartbeat. A feeling of fear crept its way into his heart as he looked at his surroundings, feeling anxiety build up.

He tried to walk, but found that he could not walk properly due to the drunkenness. He stumbled and fell over. His hands went under him but did not catch him. Instead, his arms buckled and bent, giving way for his whole body to fall onto the ground.

There did not appear to be much on the ground, only shriveled and dead grass. But the moment Su Tao touched the ground, he felt something weird on his hand. It felt like something was moving, scurrying around his hand. He looked closer while trying to prop himself up, only to find that there were little grey beetles on his hand.

The beetles had a gray shell, but their eyes were blood red, and they even lightly glowed in the darkness. Su Tao was scared due to the extreme amplification brought by the drunkenness and he tried to get his hand away, but it only ended up flailing.

Not only did he not manage to get the beetles off his hands, he also fell back over in the process and suddenly felt the beetles crawling on his face. Suddenly, he screamed in terror, but no sound came out. He knew that he was screaming, but he could not hear it. Instead, he could once again only hear his heartbeat, and now, he could hear the scuttling of the beetles.

He urgently scrambled, trying to get away from the beetles, but all he could do due to the drunkenness was flail on the ground wildly, screaming at the top of his lungs. After a few second, he felt himself getting lightheaded from how long he had been screaming in mortal terror, but no matter how much he yelled and thrashed, the only sound that he could hear was his own accelerated heartbeat and the scuttling of the beetles.

Then, he finally passed out due to the immense fear he was feeling as well as a lack of air in his lungs from screaming.

He woke up a few minutes later, but when he did, he was just as scared as before. In fact, even more so now, because the beetles had managed to crawl into his mouth. At this point, they were across his entire body and even in his mouth.

He once again screamed in mortal terror, which got the beetles out of his mouth, and he started flailing on the ground again.

Then, he once again passed out.

This process continued for about three hours straight before Su Tao managed to finally quiet his scream a little bit and stop thrashing as much. But there was still a lot of progress to be made.

A day later, Su Tao was still extremely scared, but only so much so that he was whimpering and breathing extremely heavily and rapidly. He had stopped passing out from the fear and lack of air from screaming, but this did not mean that he was capable of standing up yet.

He had tried several times to get up, but he was still not capable of doing so. He managed to push himself into a sitting position, but the moment he tried to stand up, he would fall over face first into the ground covered in those beetles.

After another twelve hours, he was only panting lightly and was capable of standing up, but he would still fall whenever he tried to walk or run, and being that his mind had been overrun by intense fear, he would of course try to run before trying to walk. Since he was no longer passing out for long periods of time, he was capable of adapting faster and therefore he was able to make much progress in a short amount of time.

After three days being in this field under the blood red moon, he was able to run a couple steps before falling down again.

This process of adaptation continued until a week had passed, after which Su Tao was no longer screaming or panting, and he instead only had his heart pumping in fear. He was able to run without any issues now, but wherever he stepped, the bugs were still there. The beetles always crawled onto his shoes and up his legs with every step he took, and he violently swiped at his legs with his hands to get them off, but failed and ended up knocking himself over every time he tried.

He was now using his fear to push his body past its limits to do what he wanted it to do regardless of the physical condition of his body, which was currently overrun by the drunkenness. Normally he would barely be able to move, but now, he was able to use his fear to push it to do what he wanted it to do.

After a week and a half, he was able to slow his run to a fast and anxious walk, realizing that the beetles were not going anywhere, but he could not control his swatting as his arms flailed wildly to get the creepy gray beetles off of his body.

After two weeks, Su Tao was able to slow his fast speed to just a slow walk, and he was able to resist swatting the beetles off his body. At this point, he was able to accept that the bugs were not going anywhere and that even if he got them off of him, more would just come back onto him a second later.

It was at this point that he started to look around. He was still affected by the drunkenness, and his eyes were not helping him see like they normally did, but he would not be able to recognize this due to the drunkenness affecting his memory of anything other than what was happening now.

He was able to remember appearing in this dead grassland and everything that happened after it unlike last time, however, meaning that he was capable of learning faster since he could figure out that this was a trial unlike last time.

After the third week, Su Tao was completely able to stop his walking and swatting, and he looked around curiously. It was at this time that he finally gained some ability to think back again. It was only at this point that he realized he had been running around randomly not getting anywhere this entire time, so he decided to walk forward instead of doing that.

His heart was still full of fear, but he was able to control it enough to use it to his advantage, pushing his body through the effects of the drunkenness to walk without many issues. The same thing was happening to his fear as what happened to his anger; he was learning to control it and not act on impulse, instead using his emotions to his own advantage.

After walking forward for a couple minutes, Su Tao finally discovered something. His eyes had gone back to normal eyes, not allowing him to see ten feet in front of his face, but that was only due to the lack of light with the only source being the blood red moon in the sky. At the edge of the horizon, Su Tao saw a tiny speck of red light.

He started to run towards the tiny red light, and as he got closer, he managed to see that it was only about three hundred feet away. It was at this time that he finally saw that the light was actually not one, but two lights that had merged together. Then, the lights blinked.

Suddenly, Su Tao got an uncomfortable feeling. The lights in front of him started moving a little bit. Fear once again took over his heart as he saw the pair of blood red lights move towards him. He finally realized that this was not a light, but rather, it was a pair of eyes.

He panicked as he stumbled backward, falling to the ground. As the eyes got closer to him, he was gradually able to make out the shape of them, and by the time they were a hundred feet away from him, he was able to clearly see that the eyes were in the shape of the eyes of a predator.

Before he could even see what the eyes belonged to, he started to panic in a fit of fear, with him desperately scrambling backwards on the cold dead ground, his eyes trained on the source of his fear.

By the time the eyes were fifty feet away from him, he had already once again started to scream in terror, and his body had ceased to listen to him, once again flailing on the ground. Then, when the eyes were finally close enough to him, he could see what the animal was.

It was a wolf with pitch black fur and rips across the fur, revealing bloody gashes underneath. It's eyes were glowing a deep blood red and were trained on Su Tao, who was now flailing on the ground screaming in terror. It was growling menacingly as its teeth bared viciously.

The pitch black fur could not hide the muscular body of the wolf underneath. The bloody gashes across its body showed that it was vicious and had been in many fights. It was slowly circling around Su Tao, who was still screaming in a fit of terror on the ground.

At this point, Su Tao had his whole body pumped with adrenaline, not allowing him to pass out. He could only continue to lay there flailing and screaming. But just as before, no matter how much he screamed, he could only hear his surroundings and his heartbeat.

As such, all he could hear was his terrified heart and the menacing growling and snarling of the pitch black wolf with blood red glowing eyes. Then, the wolf leaped at him. Without any chance to fight back, Su Tao's throat was grabbed by the bared teeth of the wolf, and his body was violently thrashed around.

Su Tao felt his throat be torn open and his neck broken, and he felt his life fade away, and his consciousness fell into black. Then, a couple seconds later, he woke back up in the first place he had been, standing the middle of the dead field with the beetles crawling over him. He did not cry out in terror like last time, though, because he had already learned to control the fear that the beetles gave him.

But just like with the situation with his anger, he had been reset back to his original place with no memories of the previous events. As such, he picked a random direction and walked in it. Eventually, he came upon another wolf, and the same situation repeated itself. Once again his throat was torn out and his neck was broken. He had once again died from the wolf, although it was not the same wolf as before.

After repeating the same thing for about ten times, he was able to control his thrashing in the face of the wolf and was able to not scream as much, allowing him a second longer of life, which also allowed him to adjust faster.

After the twentieth time, he was able to keep his screaming down to a whimper and was capable of walking back a few steps before stumbling, and he was able to continue to crawl back even in the face of the wolf, which was major progress.

After the hundredth time, he was able to stay silent and walk backwards without falling.

After the hundred fiftieth time, he was able to stop himself from backing up at all, knowing that he could not outrun the wolf, but when the wolf jumped at him, he was still incapable of fighting back, and he froze in fear. He could only watch as the wolf killed him.

But after the two hundredth time, he was finally able to overcome his fear and swing his fist at the wolf. When his fist collided with the wolf, not much happened to the wolf aside from its head being knocked a little to the side, but this was only because it was only a punch thrown out of fear and it did not use proper form.

After the three hundredth time, he was able to finally punch with proper form, which knocked the wolf to the side. Then, he used instinct to continue to attack the wolf.

In the end, he still died to the wolf, but he was now able to at least fight back for a few moments. These few moments of fighting his fear and using also allowed him to learn faster.

Because of this, on the three hundred seventy fifth time, he was finally able to wound the wolf and scare it away, albeit with himself severely injured as well. Then, he continued on his journey and saw another pair of eyes, but when he tried to turn away from it to not attack it, he was stopped in his place by some unknown power, the same power which stopped him from running away from those villages in the first test, but he did not know that right now.

As such, he had no choice but to confront the second wolf, which, of course, killed him.

This same process continued for a long time until, on the five hundredth time, he was actually able to kill the first wolf with only a couple bite marks. Then, when he met the second wolf and the ones after, he continued to kill them until his accumulated injuries were enough to cause him to lose the fight.

By the six hundredth time, he was able to completely control his fear in the face of the wolves and act completely rationally, using his skill to kill the wolves instead of instinct. As such, they were no longer able to hurt him, and therefore, he was able to continue killing them as long as he could continue to walk.

As such, he decided to walk in one direction and kill any wolves he met along the way.

After walking for a total of an hour, Su Tao finally found something other than a wolf. But he was once again overcome by fear the moment he saw what it was. It was a giant poisonous lizard, and it was many times more dangerous than the wolf he saw.

After time passed slowly, the levels of fear he experienced kept ranking up again and again, until it reached seemingly impossible levels of fear, just in the way his anger did previously. And by the time he got to the for a lack of better words final challenge, he had already gone through dying a couple hundred thousand times.

Once again, he was bound by seemingly the universe itself and forced to watch as the greatest fear he was capable of feeling was jammed straight into his heart. It was millions of blood red eyes peering into his soul, looking at all his secrets and bringing out his worst fears, forcing him to experience them thousands of times every second with seemingly no end.

He was forced to live through this moment for hundreds of millions of times, until he was able to ignore his fear and act based on logic alone, using his fear to make his body do what he wanted it to. It was exactly the same thing as what happened for the anger, but a little bit different.

Then, the boundless grassland once again appeared before him and then changed again and again and again, each time targeting a new emotion.

Each time he completed an emotion, he could remember his last experience of it. At this point, he had gone through so many emotions that he would never have even thought of them all in the first place, let alone train himself to resist them.

At this point, he screamed out in exasperation, "Is there no end?"

He had already gone through the trial of exasperation, but that did not mean that he did not get exasperated, it was simply that he did not try to act on logic at this moment and instead acted with exasperation because there was no benefit to not feeling his feelings and keeping them under the control of logic.

But right after he said that, the endless grassland changed, but this time, it did not change into a challenge, but rather, it changed and collapsed, revealing the dimension of his eyes. He had long ago gotten back the power of his eyes, it was just that his body was sometimes changed in some way to fit the challenge, and it was specifically the challenge of fear and a few others that did not allow him to use the power of his eyes.

At this moment, the green flame marble and the purple liquid marble were both much bigger than before. At this time, they were both about two inches in width instead of one inch.

He also felt his vision increase by a lot, but he still could not see even the slightest bit of this dimension other than the two marbles in front of him. Then, his consciousness was sucked out of the dimension of his eyes and back to the real world.

He did not know it, but this time, he had been in the endless grasslands for almost a million years total with the most time being taken up by the challenge of anger and the rest of the time spread over the rest of the hundreds of challenges.

He awoke with a start, and his eyes snapped open violently. Then, he let out a couple bone-rattling coughs, spitting up a little bit of blood, and looked at his body. Wrapped around his chest was a load of gauze, which were not soaked with blood at all.

Instead, they were seeming to be wrapped around his chest, which had broken ribs. He could feel that his entire left side of his ribcage had been shattered, and it was only about a tenth of the way through being healed.

He then wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and looked at his shoulder, which he remembered had been pierced along with his back by a whole container full of arrows. He was glad to find that they had all been mostly healed and only the deep cuts were left with a slight scab on the surface of his skin, which would heal fairly quickly.

He then heard a door open, followed by it closing and footsteps. He looked towards the source of the footsteps to find Su Xue looking straight at him.

"How long has it been?" He asked, straight to the point. But to his surprise, she did not respond right away. Instead, she just stood there looking at his face. She seemed to be entranced, but this only lasted for less than half a second before she came to her senses and responded.

"It's been nearly a month since you were attacked. I gave you healing pills, otherwise it would have taken a much longer time." She spoke slightly weirdly, although Su Tao could not tell why.

Hearing this, Su Tao was surprised. He specifically remembered that the last time he went through a trial of his eyes, he had been in there for three years and yet at most a few seconds had passed in real life.

This meant that this time, he must have been in there for at least a few hundred thousand years to a million years to make the time almost a month in total. This surprised him because the total time of the memories he had from the challenges was about a month's time of memories, one from each challenge's final stage.

But he pushed this thought aside and tried to sit up, but when he did so, he spat out another small mouthful of blood. But he just wiped it and continued to sit up until he was happy with the position he was in.

At this point, Su Xue was rushing over to him, concerned that he was hurting himself just to sit up. "You have to be more careful! You don't want to get any more hurt than you already are!!" she yelled with concern. After all, she had spent a month taking care of him so that he did not die, and if he hurt himself further, it would have just wasted all her efforts and all her time.

But then, before she was even able to reach him, she quickly spun around once again because she felt the feeling of being watched again, but she still saw nothing, just like every time she felt that feeling since she brought Su Tao here.

She then turned back towards Su Tao, but was surprised to find that his head had fallen over and he was once again unconscious. She felt that something was different about him now compared to a minute ago, and when she looked closer, she saw that the scabs from the arrow cuts on his shoulders and back were already gone.

There were quite a few of them previously, but now there were none and instead the open wounds were exposed, but they weren't bleeding at all. She also did not notice it, but there were now considerably more purple flower tattoos than before, and all the tattoos seemed to shift so slowly that it would be completely imperceptible even if one watched it for hours.

She figured that she should leave him alone, and she just gave him another healing pill before going into her room. She wanted to ask him more questions, but that would have to wait for now until he was in a more stable state.

But the moment she entered into her room, Su Tao's aura began to grow stronger. He was unconscious, but little drops of golden Qi began to float into his body at a very fast pace and merge into his flesh and blood. With every passing second, his aura grew stronger and stronger. It seemed that he was actually breaking through to the three star bronze rank.

After only a few minutes, his body had already gotten significantly stronger, and it showed no signs of stopping anytime soon. Very soon, his body had reached the peak of the second bronze star in strength. Any more, and he would break through to the three star bronze rank.

Then, the Qi suddenly picked up in speed and entered into his body all at once. Suddenly, Su Tao's strength increased by a large margin, shattering the barrier to the third bronze star and having him officially step into the third bronze star.

But he was not awake to know it because of his injuries, which had also been partially healed by his breaking through. Before, his ribs had been one tenth of the way healed, but now they were one fifth of the way healed, twice as much as before. On top of that, his face became more handsome and mature, making him look older than he was.

Only after all of this did the Qi finally stop flowing into Su Tao's body, leaving him permanently at the third bronze star rank.

He slept there, completely unaware of what had happened, and unaware of what was happening to his body. The tattoos all over his body were moving, despite being so slow that it would be impossible to see, they were still moving nonetheless, as if they were alive.

Perhaps even Su Tao's eyes themselves would not be able to see the change.