Chapter 581: Cultivation is Creation - Chapter 576: The Trial of Pressure
The black pillars on either side of the entrance were enormous and as I crossed between them.
I immediately felt something go wrong with the air around me, like the whole world had decided to suddenly become heavier and more difficult, and my knees bent under the weight of it before I had even realised what was happening to my body. I was forced forward at the waist with my hands coming down onto my thighs to stop myself from just collapsing onto the ground, the pressure wasn’t coming from above or below or any single direction, but was instead pressing against me from every angle at the exact same time.
It pushed down on my shoulders and squeezed against my chest and built up inside my ears until they popped with a sharp, painful sound that echoed strangely in the large, dark chamber ahead of me. My vision started to go dark at the edges, and I tried to take a breath, but the air was resistant, it pushed back against my lungs and made the simple act of inhaling feel like something that required serious effort and concentration.
“Azure,” I thought, keeping my thoughts as calm as I could manage while my body was being crushed from all sides, “isn’t this the most predictable possible beginning to a trial. Every single xianxia trial I have ever heard about starts with exactly this test, raw physical endurance against pressure.”
“The pattern is consistent across cultivation worlds, Master, but I believe the reason the test has persisted for so long is because it is effective at eliminating weaker cultivators. The majority of cultivators who attempt this trial fail at this stage specifically.”
“That is very reassuring,” I muttered, though what came out of my mouth was barely a wheeze and not a real sentence at all.
I began straightening my spine slowly, one vertebrae at a time, pushing back against the force that was actively trying to keep me bent over and weak. Eventually I was standing upright again though it had taken real effort to get there, my body was already complaining about what I had just asked it to do.
The chamber around me was called the Drowned Vestibule.
It stretched out ahead into shadows and darkness that the silver light from the floating corpses suspended in their crystal prisons did almost nothing to illuminate properly. The bodies drifted slowly, rotated in place, and the faint glow they produced just made the surrounding darkness feel deeper and more complete by contrast.
There was no reason to stand still any longer, so I took a step forward.
The pressure increased the moment my foot left the ground, my foot came down harder than I had intended onto the stone floor, and I felt the impact travel up through my leg. When I looked down, there were hairline cracks spreading outward from the point where my foot had landed.
I took another step and then another after that, each one harder to complete than the one before it, the air becoming heavier and more resistant with every meter I covered. By the time I had gone roughly twenty feet, I was bent forward again with my arms hanging loose at my sides and my head bowed down under the invisible accumulating weight.
The walls of the chamber had begun showing damage from the pressure as well, thin cracks spreading across the black stone surface in patterns like frozen lightning branching outward, and small fragments of rock were falling from the ceiling above me, dropping slowly at first before suddenly accelerating in the last moment before they struck the floor and shattered into small pieces.
The suspended corpses around me had begun to rotate, orienting their bodies toward me as I moved through the chamber, their faces which were visible through the crystal that encased them had expressions on them that ranged from something resembling peaceful acceptance all the way to expressions of absolute terror.
Several of them had their mouths open in screams that would never produce any sound because they had been dead for a very long time.
One of the corpses was a woman wearing robes that had once been white before whatever had happened to her had turned them gray, and her eyes were open and they tracked my movement as I struggled past her.
I tried not to look directly at her eyes, but I failed at that, and when I did look, they were glassy and vacant, but somehow still carrying enough residual awareness to follow my progress through the chamber.
“Dream cultivators were not built for this test,” I thought as I forced my legs to keep moving despite every muscle in my body communicating its displeasure with me, “dream qi is about imagination, flexibility, and consciousness work, not raw physical endurance.”
“The first trial of the Sunken Dream Palace is designed to eliminate cultivators like this, Master. Most Oneiric Sovereigns would have lost consciousness before reaching the point where you are currently standing.”
“Good thing I’m not most Oneiric Sovereigns then.”
I stopped moving and straightened my back as much as the pressure allowed me to.
The floating corpses around me had begun drifting closer while I was distracted by the effort of walking, forming a loose circle around my position, and I could feel the frequency that their crystal prisons were producing vibrating against my teeth.
There was no more point in pretending I was a standard dream cultivator who had only access to the tools that cultivators of that type would normally possess.
I reached inward past the silver dream qi flowing through Hou Hongyun’s cultivation channels, past the connection to my main body’s stored qi reserves and continued reaching until I found the red sun energy waiting for me with its characteristic hunger.
The moment I made contact with it the energy responded with enthusiasm.
Red light came out from my skin and surrounded my body as an aura that pressed back against the pressure that had been pressing down on me. The pressure didn’t go away, but now it was encountering something that refused to be compressed or diminished.
The red sun energy was aggressive and domineering by nature, it pushed outward against the invisible weight with force equivalent to what was being exerted against it.
I was able to stand fully upright, the physical strain on my body reduced to something I could actually manage, and around me, the red aura pulsed with visible distortions in the air where it intersected with the pressure field.
The suspended corpses all jerked backward in their crystal prisons, repelled by the red energy’s presence, several of them collided with each other, their prisons rang against one another producing a sound like enormous bells. The sound echoed through the chamber multiplying off the walls and ceiling until it became a layered discordant sound that filled the entire space.
The pressure increased again in response, but I was ready for it now, the red aura simply flared brighter and matched the increase, my feet stayed planted on the cracked stone beneath me.
I started walking again, and now each step was easy rather than desperate, each breath required normal effort rather than maximum concentration.
The red energy had created a moving space around my body where the atmosphere was breathable and the pressure was neutralized.
The corpses kept rotating to track my position, but they maintained distance from me now, the red aura’s presence disturbing them in a way that went beyond simple physical repulsion, and several of the crystal prisons nearest to me were developing visible cracks in their surfaces.
I had covered roughly fifty feet when the nature of the pressure changed.
The physical weight pressing down on me actually lessened slightly and something else moved in to take up the space that had occupied, a sound that was barely audible at the beginning, like wind moving through trees that were very far away or water running over stones at a significant distance.
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I kept walking and maintained the red aura but redirected part of my attention toward the new development while the sound grew louder around me. I finally realised what it was, it was voices.
“Turn back,” one voice whispered from somewhere just behind my left shoulder, “turn back before you end up among us.”
“He cannot hear you,” another voice responded from my right side, “they never hear us, not until after it is already too late for them.”
“Too late, too late, it is always too late,” a third voice said in the voice of a child.
I looked around, but there was nothing visible except the dark chamber and the floating corpses drifting in their prisons, the voices weren’t coming from the bodies at all, but from everywhere and from nowhere simultaneously.
“Mental endurance,” I muttered to myself, remembering what Song Wei had told me before I entered, “the physical pressure was just the first portion of the test.”
“He knows,” multiple voices said, overlapping with each other, “he knows what is happening, but he continues anyway, that is a foolish decision.”
“Did you believe you were different from the rest of us?” A woman’s voice said, sharp and carrying real bitterness in it, “every single one of us believed we were different. You can see where that belief led us.”
I kept walking, and the voices grew louder as I moved forward, more of them joining in and the volume and frequency increasing with every step I took.
“Your companions are already dead,” something whispered so close to my ear that I felt what seemed like breath against my skin despite there being nothing physically present beside me, “Lu Chenyang is gone, Tian was destroyed by his own forgotten identity, you are the only one left and you do not know it yet.”
That was interesting actually. Whatever was generating these voices had access to my experiences in this world.
“You will be alone forever here,” the child’s voice sang, “there is no one who will come for you, no one who will find you, just us and the dark and the time passing.”
The corpses in their prisons had begun moving more actively now, shifting position within their suspensions, opening and closing their mouths in a rhythm that matched the words being spoken, even though no sound was actually coming from their dead throats.
“Can you hear your own voice among ours yet?” A man’s voice asked, “you will soon. Then you will do what we do, warn the ones who come after you, but they will not listen to you any more than you are listening to us.”
I kept my pace steady and I didn’t react to any of it, the voices were clearly designed to erode mental resistance through repetition and through targeting things that would produce emotional responses. This was a standard approach for high-level trials. The problem was that they were being extremely irritating.
“Your parents would be ashamed of what you have made yourself into,” one voice tried, aiming for something that would produce maximum emotional damage, “your grandmother left because she recognized you were not worth staying for, every person who has ever been close to you has privately wished things had gone differently.”
“Your cultivation is already beginning to consume you,” another voice promised, “it started before you even noticed it happening. The roots are spreading through your soul right now, drinking everything that makes you a person and not just a vessel.”
I stopped walking, not because the voices had produced any genuine effect on me, but because I had a solution available and there was no reason to keep enduring the noise when I could do something about it.
“He has stopped,” the voices noticed immediately, “he is surrendering. That is the intelligent decision, better to stop now before the next part begins.”
I stopped paying attention to what they were saying and reached for the blue sun energy.
Where the red energy was aggressive and hot, the blue sun energy came from my palm as pale cold light when I raised my hand, and it manifested without the urgency or hunger that the red energy always carried.
The whispers noticed what I had done and went silent, the sudden silence after the constant noise was more unsettling than the noise itself had been, and then they began screaming.
“No, what is that? What are you doing with that? You need to stop doing that right now—”
The blue sun energy moved outward from my hand flowing across the invisible medium the voices traveled through, and instead of simply blocking them or silencing them it did something more complete than either of those things, it responded to them, it engaged with what they were.
Blue sun energy at its most refined was consciousness manipulation, the ability to program, alter and reshape thought itself. And unlike red energy, which operated through force, blue sun energy worked with precision on the specific thing it was targeting.
The voices tried to pull back and away from the spreading pale light but there was nowhere for them to go because they existed in the gaps in reality, in the spaces between spaces where thoughts could take form without needing physical substance, and that was exactly the domain that blue sun energy operated within most effectively.
“Please, we will stop, we are sorry, we will not say anything else, please just stop—” multiple voices overlapped into something that was barely comprehensible.
I had not specifically directed the blue energy to attack them. I had simply allowed it to exist in the same space as them and let it to do what it naturally did.
The screaming intensified, the anguish in those voices were difficult to listen to. The blue sun energy was showing them what they actually were and stripping away whatever protections or comfortable assumptions had allowed them to function before.
“WE ARE NOT REAL,” one voice screamed with sudden terrible clarity, “WE WERE NEVER REAL, WE ARE JUST FRAGMENTS, ECHOES, WE ARE PATTERNS THAT THINK THEY ARE SOMETHING MORE—”
That realization spread through all the remaining voices in sequence, one after another understanding what the blue energy was showing them.
The floating corpses around me began shaking inside their prisons, several of the crystal encasements cracked completely, and the bodies inside fell to the stone floor below with heavy wet sounds.
The bodies didn’t move after landing because they had been dead for a very long time, but the crystal had been fractured by the spiritual disturbance the blue energy was creating in the space around me.
“Please, we understand now, we will be silent. Please make it stop, we understand.”
I considered leaving the blue energy active and allowing it to continue until the voices had dissolved entirely but that felt more cruel than what the situation required. More importantly, I didn’t want to risk contaminating this realm’s spiritual foundation with blue sun energy. I had already seen what a small amount of blue energy had done to the spiritual foundation of the Realm of the Chosen, and the Sunken Dream Palace was already corrupted by other things, adding blue sun contamination on top of that was not a risk I was willing to accept.
I raised my hand and the blue energy flowed back toward me, returning to my inner world where the Genesis Seed’s purification would keep it contained. The moment the blue energy withdrew the voices went silent, now too frightened to make any further sound.
I kept walking, the various pressures around me continued to exist in their physical and mental and spiritual forms, but none of them were penetrating the protections I had established, and the corpses around me were keeping respectful distance from the red aura that still surrounded my body.
After another hundred feet, the pressure changed again.
This time, what pressed against me was neither physical weight nor the voices but something that pushed against existence itself, against the fact of my being present in this space at all, it felt like being observed by something that was ancient and unimaginable.
I had encountered something similar during my confrontation with Xu Ruomei inside her domain gallery, her Civilization Realm cultivation had produced a weight that exceeded ordinary spiritual pressure, but this was less personal and more like standing next to an ocean and being made aware of the total volume of water present.
The floating corpses around me began glowing from within, silver light pulsing through their preserved bodies in a regular rhythm, and the light spread between the bodies through visible connecting threads until the entire chamber had the corpses’ collective light running through it like a web.
The spiritual pressure increased and my red aura flickered as it struggled to maintain itself against this new type of assault.
I understood that this wasn’t something that could be answered with brute force, this was the weight of thousands of cultivators who had died in this place and whose final moments of despair and failure had been preserved and concentrated into something that questioned whether you had earned your presence here.
“I just want this trial to end,” I sighed.
I released the red sun energy to let the crimson aura fade away, the physical pressure immediately began reasserting itself, but I wasn’t going to need the red energy anymore for what came next.
I channeled qi instead.
It formed around my cultivation base as a second layer, and qi operated through authority rather than force, it commanded where red energy demanded and ordered where red energy pushed.
The spiritual pressure still existed and pressed against me from all directions, but it stopped being something that could reach me, the qi created a barrier the trial simply couldn’t pass through.
I smiled slightly, that had worked very well.
The light in the corpses began fading gradually, the connections between them disappearing one at a time, and the spiritual pressure lessened as well because it had recognized that continuing to push against something that couldn’t be moved was a waste of time and effort.
Ahead of me the darkness was thinning and I could see a massive stone archway fifty feet ahead of my current position, through the archway there was different light, warmer in quality, suggesting the next trial was going to present a very different environment than this chamber full of dead cultivators in crystal prisons.
When I was close enough to the archway, I could see writing carved into the stone, script in a language I didn’t recognize personally but dream qi translated it automatically:
Those Who Endure The Weight Of Failure May Proceed
I walked through without slowing down, and the instant I crossed the threshold, the entire weight and atmosphere of the Drowned Vestibule stopped existing, replaced by something that was almost comfortable after what I had just been walking through.
The archway sealed itself behind me and cut off any view of the chamber I had just left.
From somewhere on the other side of the sealed stone, very quiet and almost impossible to hear, came a single voice:
“Thank you for making it stop.”
I didn’t look back. The stone was already sealed anyway, and whatever was waiting in the space ahead of me was going to have its own tests designed specifically to stop the cultivators who had been strong enough to pass the first one.