Chương 18: First Dive

When the first man had fallen to the floor and then ran away, nobody had reacted. When the second one had let go of the artefact and started screaming, people started asking questions about what he had experienced. Whatever lightness of mood had built up during the first few minutes of the test had all but disappeared leaving behind a frenzy of people worried about their chances of becoming disciples and asking themselves if it was even worth it.

While everyone was focused on the man who'd failed the exam, another one joined him shortly after with the same scream and a pallid face. Xiao meanwhile had finished eating his bread and felt rejuvenated.

Rather than immediately stepping up, however, he looked at the top of the wooden structure from where the cultivators were looking down on them He didn't know if he did so because he thought he could glean something from their reactions or because the queasiness and his stomach made him want to look away from the people who were behaving as if they just lived through their worst nightmare. Now that the sun had changed its position slightly, he was actually able to make out more about the cultivators.

The first thing he noted was that they were all men and the second was that one of them obviously did not belong. The one in the middle, the one who had announced the beginning of the exam was bald, androgynous and was wearing orange robes. Two others, one middle-aged and one elderly shared his style of dress and baldness. It was the fourth with a full head of dark brown or black hair that stood out.

He was looking down the most intently of the four with a weird smirk on his pale face, on which the dark malicious bags under his eyes stood out all the more. Instead of orange robes, he was wearing a slightly different cut of beige. The other three were standing a bit separate from him as if not wanting to associate themselves. A familiar anger started bubbling up inside Xiao. The cultivator looked like he was enjoying himself. Getting off on their suffering. He clenched his fists and closed his eyes.

There was nothing he could do at the moment. But in the future, when he was a powerful cultivator himself it would be these people who treated mortals simply as toys to be played with and discarded when they broke, that he would banish from the cultivation world. Xiao's eyes opened and glazed over with a burning determination as they refocused their attention on the exam that was going on.

All but one of the examinees had dropped out, two of them lying on the floor and occasionally screaming in a catatonic state while the third was mumbling something about big fat demons and crazy people. Most noticeably, no one was going up to take the space of the four who had failed. Xiao looked carefully at the floating purple artefacts and moved a bit closer to the babbling man with whom the others were trying to interrogate.

It was after a few more minutes of rough dirty hands pushing their victim around and demanding answers that finally revealed some basic facts about what had happened. A dark mansion, something they'd never seen before, housing what was presumably some sort of great evil that they had to investigate. Only that, when they entered the house, everything had started turning for the worst.

Nobody had gotten much further than that, simply saying how they'd been killed by a big screaming man with no forehead and sores all over his body. They couldn't handle their death, which felt real, and gave up. Xiao leaned back and watched the situation with narrowed eyes, wondering if there was something he was missing. The longer that the four Rooms remained untouched, the more he started to suspect that there was a bigger game at play here.

After all, who said that the instructors had to tell them everything about the exam? No one had said that, and feeding into his belief that cultivators didn't even see mortals as human only fed his suspicion. It was after another few minutes and some brainstorming, that he came to a possible conclusion as to the hidden parts of the exam.

The revelation came to him as those who had failed regained their bearing and having given all of the information that they could be forced to give, left the clearing to wallow in their shame. There was only one man still standing and holding a hand to the floating artefact. However, going from the shaking of his arms and the absolute whiteness of his face he might not last long either. Although, considering that no one truly knew how long the exam was supposed to take this didn't necessarily mean much.

But, Xiao couldn't help but think of what would happen if the last man standing also failed and if no one was brave enough to step forward. Wouldn't that mean that the cultivators would simply be standing there above them looking at nothing? Wouldn't that mean that the exam would simply end, no one left being brave enough to become a disciple? His eyes widened with realisation.

"Everyone listen up!" he shouted, gathering the attention of the other examinees. Everyone from those dressed and rags to those dressed in riches cast suspicious glances his way.

"There's another hidden aspect to this exam," Xiao began.

"The behaviour of those that failed is supposed to scare us off from attempting it. But, do you truly think that if no one is currently getting tested, the cultivators won't simply end the exam claiming that there's no one with enough courage to be worth testing anyway?" he propositioned.

"You go and touch the fucking thing then!" one woman dressed in an elaborate golden toga yelled at him with fear in her eyes.

"You're just trying to trick us into touching those Rooms so that you can then do better with the information gleaned from our mistakes!" she accused. Xiao reeled back as if struck and realised something else. The fact that there was an information advantage to those who came later and the requirement that someone had to be trying at any given point of time meant that… he glanced to the side as he heard a groan. The last man who'd been standing and clutching the artefact…

his eyes rolled to the back of his head and he was falling over backwards, the arm holding on to the cube was in the process of slipping, with just one finger remaining. Before Xiao could think, he'd already jumped forward and touched the cursed cube. The world around him disappeared. -/-"That kid has some courage," Jin commented.

"And some serious balls on him. Jumping in like that without that much of an information advantage after seeing what happened to everyone else." He glanced to the side toward the monks.

"I think he realised something that we didn't yet. Perhaps we were foolish and underestimated how terrible the Illusion Room would be for those without our life experience," Sect Leader Shen began.

"Consider this, would we truly stand here watching if no one was attempting to defeat the scenario because they are too scared to even try?"

"Preposterous. Mortals wasting our time? We could simply end the exam right here and leave. Obviously no one valuable left in this batch," Elder Kwang grumbled.

"Yet that was exactly what was about to happen," Elder Zhang interjected.

"If the boy hadn't thrown himself forward to prevent that from happening."

"So not only smart, but also brave," Jin commented. He scratched at his chin, he was getting some serious protagonist energy vibes here. Perhaps he should put in a bit of effort to be nice to whoever ended up being selected. Considering the difficulty of what he'd created for simple mortals who'd never heard of an Illusion Room, well, whoever won would have to be quite talented, no? Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Unbeknownst to him the simple creation of this Room and by default this exam had already made him an enemy of said protagonist. That just went to show how good deeds never went unpunished. -/- A bout of disorientation hit Xiao as he opened his eyes only to find himself sprawled on all fours on a gravel road. Trying to not puke he noted that the feeling of discomfort was leaving him as fast as it had come over him in the first place.

Rattling himself up to his feet he looked around to find that he was on a hill, well, he was on a road leading up to the top of a mountain on which he could already make out a weird tiled roof made in a style that he hadn't seen before. One of his hands suddenly went out of control and went up to his face, holding up a roll of parchment in front of him which he could read despite the bad light conditions.

It was weird because the sun had already set and usually he wouldn't have been able to make out the small lines. He read through what was being shown to him, not as disturbed by the casual control of his body that this Illusion Room displayed as he probably should be. The scroll only confirmed the information that he already knew from the interrogation of the other examinees. He was to finish walking this path and to find the cause of the disappearances around the region.

People, mostly the insane and the homeless, had been vanishing from their homes and from the streets and finally, someone had taken enough notice to send out an investigation. He was just about to set one foot in front of the other to begin his hike up the hill when a sound distracted him. A rustling from the grass to his right which was tall enough to reach his chest.

He jumped back and put his hands up in a fighting pose only to lower them again when he beheld the scrawny ragged man who stumbled out of the bushes.

"They're doing horrible things, I can't stay, leave me alone!" the man shouted at Xiao with wild eyes as he ran past him. Too surprised to hold out an arm and stop the man by grabbing onto his clothing, Xiao simply stood there as the calls of, "Don't talk to me, don't talk to me, don't talk to me," faded into the distance. While all of this had been slightly disconcerting, he didn't think that this was necessarily the part that had made people give up yet. He narrowed his eyes.

Which meant that the true horror was still to come. He steeled himself and started walking up the road, trying to mentally prepare himself for whatever challenges would come his way. Already his journey to the Mad Monks Sect had been incredibly arduous, he was sure that he could handle this challenge as well. His opinion didn't change much as he finished traversing the path towards the building on the hill.

Neither did it change much when he chose to commit to a more stealthy approach and went through the dark forest surrounding his target to get closer. However, when he was hiding out at the line which demarcated the forest from the lawn before the building, he was starting to see signs of how exactly this was not going to be a pleasant experience. He grit his teeth as he saw through one of the brightly lit windows how a bunch of human shadows ganged up on one another to tear them to pieces.

He knew everything that was to come up until this point, but it was very much different when one saw it by oneself. He hadn't travelled a lot by night since that was when the unpleasant things came out, so already that made him a bit discomforted. The casually shown murder did not make him feel any better. Nevertheless, Xiao slowly but surely walked around the property, avoiding the main gate as best he could. There was supposed to be a way to enter the building more stealthily somewhere around here.

He eventually found a hole in a wall on the second floor. It seemed that it was being renovated and that if one knew the basics of climbing one could grapple up. Patting his hands together he grabbed at the exposed red brick of the mansion and started pulling himself up, finding easy footholds as he did so, as if they had been placed there specifically for him. The implication was naturally that this path had been provided by whoever had made this illusion, specifically to enter the house.

Xiao couldn't quite shake the feeling that he was just a puppet dancing to the tune of another. The room that he entered had been broken apart as if by a raging beast. It seemed like the chairs and tables had been thrown violently at the walls. Rolls of parchment were scattered on the floor and there were bloody fingernail markings, or rather claw markings on the half-wooden half-brick walls. Reluctantly, Xiao, knowing that he had to investigate this facility, walked slowly and carefully out of the room.

The corridors that he exited into with their odd architecture were mercifully empty, although the rather horrendous amounts of blood pooling on the floor and splattered on the walls meant one couldn't truly appreciate the difference. He began exploring slowly but surely until he reached the first intersection from where he took a left. Seeing past the open door of a room on his way he saw more scrolls.

Deciding that it was better to know more than less he entered the room, only for the magical torch that had been illuminating it to flicker out. The light and the building were provided by a series of what looked to be small blue flames trapped in some sort of glass shell hovering in the air in the middle of the room. This one didn't work and knowing that he couldn't read in the dark he was just about to turn around when control of his hand was once again granted to some other entity.

He held up a red lens to his face, over his eye to be more specific and suddenly he could see. Although his sight was weird as if everything was cast through a murky glass of water. Nevertheless, he picked up the nearest scroll. Apparently, the lens that he was currently using also allowed him to see enough to read. He started browsing through what must have been diagnostic reports talking about bronchial infections and migraines. There was also something more.

Subject exhibits extraordinary amounts of distress when faced with liquids as if afraid that everything they are to consume is poisoned. Weirdly, while this might indicate that the subject had been poisoned before upon further analysis it was discovered that the subject had drowned his sister at birth to preserve food for his family knowing that his parents didn't have the strength to do so. The liquid in this case seems to evoke a profound sense of guilt and disquiet and is thus avoided.

The likelihood of summoning compatibility is low due to a frail body, is likely to die. There were dozens of such scrolls. Subject exhibits a near-religious following of military doctrine, and if commands are phrased as if coming from a superior officer of the same military structure they are followed quite regularly. The subject also believes to be clairvoyant in some sense, although all of the testing done due to this has indicated no such ability or even potential to develop it.

The subject did remove the skin of their forehead to, as they said, allow their third eye to see better. Compatibility is likely high as insanity is not self-inflicted through traumatic actions but seems to come from somewhere deeper. If nothing else the short break had provided him with more context, he now knew why it had been the insane being targeted for the disappearances in the region. Apparently, it hadn't been only because they would be less missed.

It had been because their insanity in some way made them compatible for some sort of summoning, which was worrying. This was starting to look more and more like the work of a demonic sect, or at least what he'd heard of them… Evil cultivators trying to attain immortality and power in ways that broke the laws of the heavens. Blood sacrifices, demon summoning and killing other lawful cultivators for their possessions and bodies.

Unfortunately, he didn't have a choice and had to continue, he exited the room with the scrolls and continued onwards thankfully meeting no one. He found a canteen, with food spilt on the floor and more blood, a corpse in the corner. It had been wearing a black robe which was now completely soaked through. Someone had gone to the effort of removing the head. He didn't see it anywhere so he didn't know what they'd done with it.

"Shit," he muttered and continued exploring, eventually finding that he appeared to be alone in this particular wing of the building and that it was blocked off from the rest by a collapsed ceiling. Looking up he managed to spot a hole into which a human could probably crawl if they contorted themselves properly. It must have been some sort of air circulation system, he guessed.

Taking a running start and jumping up he barely managed to clasp his fingers around the edge and pull himself up only to find that he had severely overestimated the size of the shaft. Putting his arms by his side, he slowly moved forward in the darkness by wiggling his body like a worm, the space enclosing. He started hearing more noises the further he went. It was the sound of dying animals, or in this case, dying humans, which rung against the metal construct he was currently working his way through.

He took the first exit he could find, having started to feel sublimely claustrophobic. Using the lens he found that he was in what appeared to be a library with more scrolls and books this time, however, there was also more blood and it was there that he heard a gurgle and a gasp. Making his way past several corpses wearing black robes, lying on the floor in different states of mutilation he found to his surprise someone that was still alive.

Xiao locked eyes with the man who was hung from the ceiling by what seemed to be a rope at first glance but which upon a second revealed itself to be an intestinal tract removed from the man's very own stomach. He did his best to not puke as the man's weirdly coloured eyes informed him more than any words could how much he wished to be released from his suffering. The survivor brought up a shaky arm to his neck and shoved a finger between the rope-like intestine and their neck.

"The variants, they've escaped. Summoning was a success, report back, run," the man said before his eyes closed and he sacked together to hang limply from the rafters. Dead. Xiao left the library trying to parse the word variant and what it might mean. A variant of what they'd summoned? He put down the lens which he noted seemed to have a little bar in the bottom right corner indicating how much energy it had left.

He didn't know how he knew that but he assumed that this was connected to what he'd heard about cultivation artefacts sometimes needing to be powered by spirit stones. He exited the library into a large square-like corridor with large windows surrounding a gigantic room, however before he could try to look he suddenly had to duck down as he saw from his peripheral vision a man dressed in beige blood-splattered robes walking through the corridor and entering a room on the other side, closing the door behind him.

Putting a hand up to his wildly beating heart, Xiao started crawling on all fours around the corridor, passing the room the man had disappeared into and continuing onwards to see where he had come from. Variants, summoning, insane people, it all had to fit together somehow. He just had to continue investigating and escape. After a bit more crawling he suddenly found himself blocked by a large wall erected in the middle of the corridor composed entirely of different pieces of furniture.

Just as he was about to see if he could squeeze through, he heard what must have been an elephant rushing up behind him.

"Little pig!" Xiao's blood froze in his veins and he instinctively tried to jump onto the furniture to see if he could climb over it when a hand suddenly grasped him from behind by the neck and he was shaken like a rag doll. Two rough large lacerated hands turned him around as he struggled and found himself staring into the mutilated face of a large and fat man missing the skin on his forehead and around his mouth and grinning happily. The man heaved and threw Xiao to the side with another shout of, "Little pig!"

The glass that Xiao was thrown against broke and as he fell he glimpsed a view of the room below. Then he landed, his bones rattling as if trying to escape his body and more pain than ever before erupting through his being. He realised that from the descriptions of those who had failed, this was where they'd given up. This meant that from now on he didn't know anything anymore, not that the small amount of knowledge that he'd had had helped him any.

The option of leaving the Illusion Room hung heavily at the back of his mind as the pain wracked his body, reaching if anything higher levels as his adrenaline subsided slightly. He refused to bow, however. Vengeance drove him and wasn't so easily extinguished. This wouldn't be enough to stop him. He passed out.