Chapter 41: The Trial Stages 4 and 5

"Congratulations on passing Stage 3 of the Trial. Please proceed to start Stage 4."

Maria heard this and her body was forcefully dragged and thrown into a different world. She was tumbling through the air as she heard the mechanical voice again.

"Welcome to Stage 4. Stage 4 is the World of Wind. Use this place to temper yourself as well as understand the element and learn how to deal with beasts that use wind. Survive this place for 30 days to reach the next stage. Begin!" The mechanical voice repeated what it said the last 3 times it appeared.

It took Maria a couple of seconds to regain her bearings. She then looked around and wondered what nonsense she was thrown into this time. Maria looked around, but there was nothing. The only thing she felt was the wind blowing across her. She then realized that she wasn't standing on anything and that her body felt light, almost weightless. She tried to walk, but she ended up just walking in place because there was nothing for her to step on.

"What the heck is this?! I can't move? No, that's not quite right. I don't know how to move! What do I do? It feels like I'm literally standing on-air and in order to move I need something to push off of or something to push me." Maria thought as she just floated there.

Soon a fast gust of wind came by and started to carry Maria along. She felt like she was just being dragged along with the wind like a ragdoll. Maria tried swinging her sword, kicking her legs, she then used her triple draws sword art. Doing that pushed her back a little. Maria became a bit excited. She didn't want to use her Triple Draws as that would use too much energy. She tried out her Light Sword, but that didn't seem to do anything other than make her do somersaults in the air as that changed her center of gravity. This gave her an idea though. Maria used a light beam and the force that came out of the light beam made her move. She kept using this until she finally stopped being treated like a rag doll. She then wanted to try something.

Maria tried to shoot a light beam out of the bottom of her foot. She theorized that since this is her understanding of the Dao then she should be able to use it however she likes. Maria shot a light beam out of the bottom of her right foot, but this just forced her right foot to kick out in front of her and do a backflip.

After regaining her bearings again, she then tried using 2 feet this time, but this just forced her into continuous backflips. She kept the light beams active and tried to stabilize herself while doing this.

It took her around 30 minutes to stabilize herself doing this, but she was able to create a force strong enough from her feet to propel her forward. She would then shoot light beams out of her arms to stabilize herself and was finally able to 'fly' in this weightless world.

"HAHA! WAHOOO!!! This world is so much better than the others!!" Maria started to fly around with her light beams and screaming. This was only fun until some of the wind elemental beasts heard her screams and only so food.

*SCREEE*

The birds started to dive-bomb Maria.

"AH! Birds! Come ooonnnn!! Let me have my fun! Well, I guess this could be fun too! Let's see if I can battle like this!!" Maria yelled in anger at first, but the more she thought about a flying battle the more pumped up she got.

Maria grasped her sword in her right hand and left her left-hand open to stabilize herself. There were 5 Low-Stage Rank 2 Birds of varying species dive-bombing her. Maria stood there, ready to test this out.

The first bird dive-bombed her while shooting blades of wind at her with its wings. Mira propelled herself to the left and dodged the wind blades, but the bird was fast and shot towards her with its talons. She was able to dodge for the most part, but they still scratched her right arm fairly badly.

"This is hard!" Maria thought as she then propelled herself the spin around right after the bird scratched her and with that momentum that she carried along with her strength was able to clip one of its wings. She then shot forward and dodged the other 4 birds. She activated her Light Blade and used her light beams to make her somersault towards them in the air with her Light Blade Active and was able to butcher 3 of them. The other 2 birds dodged, but once Maria was done somersaulting she shot off like a rocket to the non-injured bird and cut it in half. After that bird was dealt with, she just flew over to the last bird and finished it off. It couldn't fly or do anything with its wing cut like that.

"Hell yeah!! That was awesome!! I need to battle more and more because that was too amazing!! The people who made these trials finally made something that doesn't suck!" Maria had stars in her eyes as she yelled in excitement.

The birds that she had killed had also disappeared and turned into energy as well. This energy then rushed towards Maria and entered her body through her pores. It was an odd feeling. It felt like her body was being stuffed with air and she was going to burst. The wind energy made its way into her blood and started filling it with wind and air. This in turn started to push out the impurities in her blood. Soon, her body had a thick black sludge coming out of her pores. It smelled awful, so Maria just removed her clothes and left a piece of cloth to cover her sensitive areas. Maria felt like this stage was amazing.

Maria looked up and saw all kinds of aviary creatures. Hawks, owls, reptilian-looking creatures, and other creatures that she didn't know. She returned to peak condition then shot up towards. The only thing she realized was that the higher she went the more dangerous the area got. The wind becomes so rough and sharp that it started to leave scratches all over her body. The higher up she went, she notices large tornados and other things that threatened her life. She went ahead and stopped. If she wanted to kill more things, then she will have to get them to come to her.

She got just close enough to where the wind barely injured her and started shooting light beams and screaming at the birds.

"COME HERE STUPID BIRDS!! HAHA! LET ME ENJOY THIS STAGE!!" Maria screamed at them and soon some birds noticed her and started charging at her. This is how Maria planned to spend the next 30 days.

***

Mira was underwater mounted on a Mid-Stage Rank 2 shark magical beast. She had just finished killing another Mid-Stage fish and it disappeared and turned into energy that entered her body and started tempering the liquid that made up her organs. After that was done, she heard the mechanical voice again.

"Congratulations on passing Stage 3 of the Trial. Please proceed to start Stage 4."

As soon as she heard 'Congratulations' she sent the Ice Needle, which was still in the shark's skull, into the brain then exploding it killing it instantly. The shark disappeared and the energy disappeared and entered her body and started tempering it as she was transported somewhere else. Mira was thrown into a world without a ground and the only thing she felt was a constant breeze.

"Welcome to Stage 4. Stage 4 is the World of Wind. Use this place to temper yourself as well as understand the element and learn how to deal with beasts that use wind. Survive this place for 30 days to reach the next stage. Begin!" The mechanical voice said again.

Mira waited until her organs were finished tempering from the energy from the shark she just killed. Mira felt her organs and muscles were like graphene, it was a material that she learned about in one of her previous life on a planet called Earth and was one of the most durable and flexible materials on the planet. She felt that she could unleash more potential from her muscles now. After she finished examining her body, she then examined the area around her. She found that there was no ground and the only thing around her was the wind. The voice also said that this is a World of Wind.

Mira tried to move, but of course, had some trouble. She figured that she might need something to either push her or something to push off. She tried to create a small ice platform under her feet to push off of, but she just pushed the platform and only moved forward a couple of centimeters. She then tried to freeze the air around her to create steps, but her understanding of the Dao of Ice was still at a bottleneck as she didn't know what path to take down that would fit her best yet. She wasn't able to freeze this enough to form steps as she could only create little ice crystals in the air. She cursed herself a bit for this but refocused on the task. Soon a gust of wind came and swept her up into a current and just carried her in this current of wind. Mira thought about how she could get out of this current. She needed something that she could push off of or maybe even something that could affect her center of gravity.

Mira then thought of her scythe. She immediately took it out and tied a rope to the end of it and tied the other end of the rope to her. When she gathered as much momentum in the scythe as she could, she grabbed the end of the scythe and it started to swing her around in circles and she let go of the scythe and it shot her out of the current. She reached the end of the rope and came to a halting stop and started to reel the scythe in. Now that she was out of the current, she could remove the rope and just keep doing this but instead of releasing the scythe, she can just store it.

"This is a huge pain in the ass, but it's the best immediate solution that I can come up with." Mira said out loud.

Mira kept launching herself with her scythe until she saw a bird-like creature start diving bombing towards her. She started to whirl her scythe and gather momentum in it. The hawk-looking magical beast charged towards her and scythe came swinging down as the bird got closer. The bird dodged fairly easily and continued diving towards Mira. Mira grabbed the end of her scythe to dodge as the momentum from the scythe carried her above the bird. Mira then repositioned her hands to the center of the scythe and made a backward swing and pierced the bird.

"This is quite an interesting way to fight. With the scythe as something like a fulcrum. It is definitely fairly difficult and hard to control though as I'm not the one controlling the scythe, but having the scythe control me." Mira thought out loud about this fighting style.

The bird had disappeared and turned into energy which entered Mira's body. Mira soon felt like she was a balloon and the energy was causing her to expand with air. It was an odd feeling, but not necessarily painful. The energy entered every cell in her blood and started to fill it up with wind energy, which pushed out the impurities in her blood through the pores on her body. Her pores were releasing the same black sludge that came out of Maria and Mira did the same thing as her as well. She took off her clothes and just covered her sensitive areas with a beast pelt.

Mira then continued launching herself towards more and more birds even with the raging winds that were leaving cuts all over her body. The only thing she tried to avoid was the dangerous-looking tornados. Mira continued hunting like this and expelling impurities from her blood.

***

"HAHA! Dumb Birds!! A human is better at flying than you!! How do you feel?! AAAaaaanndd SLASH!! HAHA Got another one!!" Maria was flying around this World of Wind like a disco ball. She had just swooped past a Low-Stage Rank 2 Bird and cut it in half and continued flying. The energy released from the dead bird would catch up to her at some point. If Mira saw this scene, she'd claim to say that she looks like a famous superhero that used his suit of metal armor and rockets to fly around.

Maria has been doing this for the past 30 days until she heard the mechanical voice again, except this time she nearly wanted to cry as she knew that fun days were over.

"Congratulations on passing Stage 4 of the Trial. Please proceed to start Stage 5."

Maria was then sucked out of her fun and placed into a barren world filled with nothing but dirt and rocks.

"Welcome to Stage 5. Stage 5 is the World of Earth. Use this place to temper yourself as well as understand the element and learn how to deal with beasts that use earth. Survive this place for 30 days to reach the next stage. Begin!"

Mira just stood there with a small tear coming out of her eye.

"NOOOO!" Maria screamed. She then regained her composure and swore in her heart that she will rule the skies like that again someday!

Maria now took this time to examine this world. There were only 2 things she noticed. The only thing here was rocks and she felt immense pressure on her body pushing her towards the ground.

"Both this world and the previous world were filled with nothing, but I hate this one." Maria pouted a little bit. She then focused on the rocks a bit more and saw that they were moving. These rocks were actually magical beasts. She saw giant tortoises with their shells made of rock, she saw golems, reptilian creatures whose scales were made of earth, and she also saw normal creatures that were covered in rocks or their fur was a rock-like shell. These creatures were much slower than they normally would be, but she guessed that they held much more power mainly due to their size and weight.

She also noticed that a lot of them were Mid-Stage Rank 2 with less Low-Stage Rank 2. Maria knew that she could run away from these things, but killing them might be difficult.

Maria shook off these thoughts and crept up behind the large earth tortoise, and jumped on top of its shell. She activated her Triple Draws and swung down. Her sword got lodged in the shell, but she was only able to leave a few centimeter deep gash in the shell that is 20 centimeters thick.

The tortoise felt something hit his shell and began stomping on the ground and shooting earth spikes at her. Maria jumped off the shell to dodge the rock spikes and started to rethink her plan. She wanted to go for the head, but she was afraid of being squashed like a bug as the pressure weighing down on her is making her movements slower. She wanted to stay away from the legs too because she doesn't think she can cut them off in just one or two swings.

She decided to just stick with attacking its shell until she broke through it and pierced the tortoise.

Maria hopped back on its shell after it stopped shooting earth spikes and wanted to try something. She jumped up as high as she could and the pressure she was experiencing pushed her down as she accelerated and activated her Light Sword and Triple Draws.

*BOOM*

The impact reverberated throughout the rest of the shell as her sword went another 6 centimeters in the shell. She just needs to do that 2 more times and she will reach inside the shell, but now the tortoise was pissed. He started stomping so hard that the ground around it started to shake from its weight. Earth Spikes were shooting everywhere and Maria worked on dodging all of them. She wasn't able to dodge all of them in time and her skin got pierced by one and a couple of them banged into her body fracturing some of her bones.

She kept dodging until the tortoise stopped shooting spikes at her. After it finished, Maria popped a Rank 1 Rejuvenation Pill in her mouth as she felt like that was enough to fix these wounds.

After her wounds were healed enough and she regained her peak condition, she repeated what she did. But instead of falling down after jumping up, she turned it into a dive and put 90% of her energy into her Triple Draws and Light Blade. As she was diving, she also added her little Light Beam boosters on the bottom of her feet to push her down faster.

*BOOM**CRACK**CRACK*POP*

The force that came from that strike was terrifying for someone only at Stage 3 Qi Condensation! Her blade forced its way through the shell with brute force and went straight through the tortoise's neck! The force of the impact was so intense that the ground underneath the tortoise started cracking under the weight of it.

The huge tortoise then started to disappear after it was killed. This guy was massive and the energy that came from its body after it died felt heavy just from looking at it. After it completely disappeared, this energy then forced its way into Maria as it surrounded her bones. The energy then constricted around her bones and started cracking them.

"U-Uuuuggghhh!!" Maria gritted her teeth in pain. Every time this energy cracked her bones, it would enter into the cracks to heal and temper her bones. It felt like a mountain had wrapped itself around her bones and started to try and crush them into dust. The energy wrapped around her bones the more it used up to keep up with the tempering before all of it was used to temper her bones.

"Ah... Ah... Ah... Damn... this... place..." Maria cursed in between her breaths.

Maria looked around and saw that any beasts around her would take a while to reach her. She then spent this time circulating her cultivation technique to recover all of the energy that she used up. After a while, she finally stood back up and returned to peak condition. She looked around and found a 3-meter tall Mid-Stage golem. She's heard that golems have a core that keeps them alive and to kill them, you have to destroy the core.

Maria charged towards the golem and was able to spot a dark red core in the middle of its body. The golem used its fists to try and punch Maria, but she was able to see this coming and dodged to the side as she ran behind this golem and did the same thing she did with the tortoiseshell. She used her triple draws on it and was able to pierce the rocks that surrounded the core. She kept staying behind the golem and ran back and hit the same spot him an almost full-power strike. The cut wasn't enough to completely slice through the core, but the cut along with the reverberations was enough to shatter the core killing the golem. The rocks that surrounded the core fell and began to disappear as the energy gathered then rushed towards Maria after it was done.

"U-Uuuuggghhh!!" Maria gritted her teeth in pain again as the same thing happened. Maria would keep using this method to hunt down these earth creatures.

***

Mira was currently somersaulting through the air in a tight little ball as she hugged the middle of her 2-meter long double-bladed scythe. She came barreling into an unsuspecting Low-Stage Bird Magical Beast.

The energy that it turned into then entered her body when she heard the mechanical voice.

"Congratulations on passing Stage 4 of the Trial. Please proceed to start Stage 5."

Mira was quite glad to be done with this stage. She was getting really dizzy from launching herself with her scythe and she felt like she was constantly using her brain to calculate distance, force when to store her scythe, better ways to fight around the momentum of her scythe, and not being able to actually move on her own was starting to bother her as it was incredibly annoying. She assumed that the next stage should be earth and hoped that it'd be a brainless stage. Her ice would also be quite useful against earth element magical beasts.

Mira was dragged into a barren world with increased gravity. She didn't have time to look around before she heard the voice again.

"Welcome to Stage 5. Stage 5 is the World of Earth. Use this place to temper yourself as well as understand the element and learn how to deal with beasts that use earth. Survive this place for 30 days to reach the next stage. Begin!"

Mira now looked around. She felt the intense gravity that was weighing her down and pulling her to the ground. She looked around and saw nothing but rocks. While looking for a bit longer she noticed that these rocks were probably beasts. Mira froze the impurities that just came out of her body and shook them off. She then put on some clothes and ran off to these beasts with her scythe in hand. She was now able to see the earth beasts a bit more clearly now. She was able to gauge that just about all of these were Mid-Stage Rank 2. She saw giant tortoises with their shells made of rock, she saw golems, reptilian creatures whose scales were made of earth, and she also saw normal creatures that were covered in rocks or their fur was a rock-like shell.

Mira went towards a tortoise, similar to what Maria did when she first got here. Mira hopped onto its back as the whole tortoise was about 5 meters long and 4 meters wide and 4 meters tall. Mira then put her hand on its shell and started to release her Ice Dao and insert the freezing aura into its shell. Mira wanted to freeze part of its shell to make it a bit more brittle, then shove her scythe into it and pierce through its neck. After Mira froze about 15 centimeters deep into the shell the tortoise noticed and started shooting earth spikes at her. Mira started to twirl her scythe to deflect the earth spikes as she continued releasing her Ice Dao in that same spot. After spending a month fighting around her scythe, she felt like she was able to understand the scythe a bit more. So far, she has only been using the scythe according to her, but the scythe is a weapon different from any other. The momentum that a scythe gathers in a fight is like a separate entity. You can't force the momentum to stop and start whenever you want. You have to be able to flow how the scythe wants and needs to flow to fully utilize the momentum.

Mira just touched upon this and felt her scythe usage raise to another level. She was able to deflect, block, and cut up every spike that came her way with the momentum of her scythe along with its fluid movements that carried from one target to another. After she finished inserting her Ice Dao into the shell making it more brittle, she used the momentum that she gathered from defending from the earth spikes and stabbed it into the frozen area on the shell. She stabbed the spear end of the scythe into it.

*CRACK**CRACK**CRACK**POP*

The force from the impact caused cracks all down this area before there was a hole in its shell. Mira grabbed her scythe again and launched the spear end of it into this hole as it pierced through the head of the tortoise, killing it instantly. She threw her scythe so hard that it was now stuck in the tortoise and she had to wait for the beast to disappear to grab it.

The tortoise disappeared and the heavy-looking energy rushed towards Mira as it entered her body. The energy wrapped around her bones and started constricting! This made a bunch of fractures form on her bones as new energy forced its way in through these cracks and tempered and healed her bones.

"Fuck! That surprised me! The energies before were much calmer, but this one is so crude." Mira compared.

The energy continued breaking, entering, tempering, and healing her bones until all of the energy was used up.

Mira returned to peak condition before looking for the nearest magical beast to attack. She would just use this same strategy if possible. She would try to use her Ice Dao to make the rocks surrounding them more brittle then attack with full power.

***

30 Days passed by extremely slowly for Maria. She had tried to focus on killing anything that wasn't a tortoise in these last 30 days as they are way too annoying. She mainly looked for golems as they were a bit easier.

Currently, she was just walking around this barren world towards another rock in the distance when she heard the mechanical voice, ready to send her to some other hell-like world.