A/N: Added a stat sheet to last chapter!

  By the 74th attempt Brad started getting visibly impatient.

  By trying #82 he started pistol-whipping Zane.

  Try 114, and Brad ground a boot into his face as he slumped. “Why—is it so damned hard—for you to do nothing?”

  Zane spit blood in his face.

  Try 137, and Brad started waving around $100 bill—right in Zane’s face. “Look at him. The eyes don’t lie.” He licked his lips. “$100 says he breaks in the next ten goes. Anyone? No?”

  “Sure,” chuckled a knifeman. “I’ll bite.”

  Try #147, they didn't kill him after they put him down.

  Brad changed the rules. “Beg,” he said. “That’s all you’ve got to do. Bet me, give up—and it’ll all be over.”

  Then they broke every bone in his body, and held him under torture for six hours.

  The knifeman complained

  But in the end, Zane didn’t give him the satisfaction of even a groan. He just bit dodwn and took it.

  “Zane…” Reina whispered, pleading.

  The last thing he saw was her watching him, tears streaked down her face.

  ***

  Revive.

  This time, Zane’s head was bowed. His breathing heavy. The pistol clicked against Reina’s head.

  He didn’t move.

  “Finally,” said Brad. He grinned. Held out a hand, beckoning.

  “‘Course he’d break after that,” said the knifeman. “You changed the rules.”

  “Ten tries is ten tries! Don’t be a sore loser.”

  The knifeman grumbled. “Fifty.”

  “Fine.”

  As the knifeman came closer, Brad used Zane’s head as an armrest. “You lasted longer than I’d thought,” he sighed. “This game’s been done before—to just a handful of men each Chaos Cycle. None made it past a hundred. That Nameless King of yours? He broke at 86… never was the same, after that.”

  A shadow fell across Zane’s face. The knifeman held out the money.

  Zane moved.

  He exploded up.

  In a flash that knife shredded the ropes. Brad let out a shout; guns unloaded, but Zane had put himself right between Brad and the knifeman—they ripped through them.

  The bodies dropped.

  His hands were free.

  He turned on his captors as they reloaded desperately, his face in a bleeding animal snarl.

  And savaged them.

  Three men with knives came at him. He crushed one into the ground, wrenched the knife from another, slashed down a third, used his body as a meat-shield to take another hail of bullets. This time three still punctured him.

  But by now Zane had taken so much pain, he was nearly beyond feeling.

  They didn’t slow down.

  He threw the man like a bowling-ball. The gunmen panicked. And Zane crashed right over them.

  He slammed a man’s head into the wall so hard he heard the skull crack. The hand loosened on the gun. He whirled around. Found the last two men standing.

  BANG-BANG.

  Blood splattered the walls.

  The last gunman raised his gun to Reina’s head—

  BANG.

  Then the only sound was of Zane’s heavy breathing, on one knee, blood dripping from his lips.

  Then stumbled toward Reina, brow furrowed, and started to undo the ropes.

  “Are you alright?” he mumbled. He was nearly at the point of blacking out; it made it hard to get the ropes off. He hoped she wasn’t too hurt.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  She just collapsed afterwards, like her legs had stopped working. She stared up at him, open-mouthed…

  He heard a coughing.

  It was Brad, trying to claw himself upright.

  “…How?” rasped Brad. “You were tied up—I broke you…”

  He figured by now this was meant to torture him. In body, and in mind.

  …It’d worked.

  But if this was meant to break him, they’d missed one thing.

  Zane wiped the blood off his face; he helped Reina up. “You’re mistaken about me.”

  Then Brad laughed. “Oh… I see.”

  The scene faded.

  ***

  Trial completed.

  Zane just stood there, breathing heavily.

  “…”

  He shook his head.

  It was a test. A dream.

  But somehow he knew it was more than that. If he’d let Reina die there, some part of his soul would’ve died too.

  It took a moment before his heart settled. He stood there, breathing heavy.

  They could never have broken him like that.

  If they thought Reina made him weak, they didn’t understand him at all.

  He looked on ahead.

  He stood in a bright marble chamber. All white. Under the first notification there was a marble fountain where milk flowed gently.

  To enter the Trial of Resurrection, it read. Drink of the River Lethe.

  He gathered himself, stepped forward with confidence, and drank.

  ***

  Zane woke, feeling new.

  The sun beamed in a bright-blue sky. Wildgrasses rolled over distant hills, ending at a line of dark, thick forest. He stood in a little clearing of beaten-out dirt.

  All around him lay a simple village. Smoke rose slowly from the huts in little question-marks. Somewhere a rooster crowed.

  Everything looked so much bigger.

  The calluses on his hands were gone.

  He blinked—it felt like he’d woken from a dream.

  “Kai!”

  He blinked. Before him stood an irritated Instructor Goto. “Get your head out of your ass, son.”

  Giggles went through the circle.

  All around him were teens just like him. Some on the cusp of adulthood.

  Memory flooded back to him.

  He was Kai. The shy, cowardly son of a crippled watchman of the humble town of Brightflower, nestled in the Blue Valleys in the heartlands of the Grand Xia kingdom.

  Goto held out a staff. “Will you fight, or not?”

  Kai grabbed the staff.

  “I’ll fight,” he said.

  They put him against an older boy named Han—a boy almost twice his size who took a special pleasure in grinding Kai into the dust. When he saw Kai, all shivering and frail, it was like blood to a hound.

  But this time when he found no coward.

  Twenty seconds later, Han hit the ground. Red marks lit up his body.

  Silence.

  Kai looked at his hands, baffled.

  “...I’ll be damned,” said Goto.

  Kai made his way back in a daze. His friend Ton ran up, wide-eyed—“What was that?”

  “I…don’t know.”

  Within a year, despite being scrawny and small, the youngest of the candidates, he rose to the rank of guardsman.

  He filled out fast, too—growing a good foot, and then some. He packed on muscle fast. Something had changed in that shy little boy. It was like all of a sudden, in mind and body, he was made to fight.

  He went on raids, hunting the Spirit Beasts that terrorized their crop. Even led the charge against the Black Dragon Bandits, going toe-to-toe with the Bandit King, and slaying him.

  It wasn’t long before news reached the local hegemon—the Red Peaks Sect—of a kid with a heaven-given talent for combat.

  He joined their Outer Sect. He became the first disciple of the cranky hermit master Yuwei, whose Sky Piercing Spear still shook the kingdom.

  He learned that spear, refined it—and with it, carved a bloody warpath across the continent. Challenging every expert he could find.

  He fought with joy and rage; he knew it was what he was meant to do.

  He was searching for something. He never knew what—but he went after it a single-minded focus.

  He could never shake the feeling something was missing.

  When Kai was 22, the Seer of Kith read his palm, threw the crow bones, and saw his destiny—to dominate wherever he wandered. His shadow would stretch over the known world.

  He tore through all the greatest figures of his age. Wrecked the Sickle Horseman. Broke the Barbarian Hordes of the far, icy north, wrestling with their beast-forme champions. Even Ai Wei, the White-eyed Dragon, could not stand up to that spear.

  He was given the sobriquet “the Spear that Carves the Heavens.”

  Before long the prophecy came true.

  Kai stood at the highest peak of the continent, and looked out.

  There was nothing left to conquer.

  Every expert there was—the strongest of the strong—had bent the knee.

  And yet…

  This was not what he’d been searching for after all.

  There was an emptiness in this greatness.

  And for the first time since he stepped into this world, he knew.

  Kai reached out a single finger. And made contact with the fabric of reality.

  “This world…” said Zane. “Is not real.”

  It all shattered like broken glass.

  Memory came flooding right back.

  ***

  Trial passed.

  That had been a trial of conviction.

  It was nothing like as brutal as the last. But it was just as difficult a test. He saw that now.

  It tested whether time—subtle, yet inevitable… could make him lose his way.

  By the time fifty years had gone by it was easy to forget.

  That felt like fifty years.

  But even now—as he thought of his friends back on Earth—he felt the same thing.

  His conviction was as strong as ever.

  In that respect, nothing had changed.

  The Final trial commences in 60 seconds.

  The 999 Comets of Hellfire.

  This was the trial that concluded every single Minor God breakthrough. The one known trial.

  He would go into it knowing what was coming. For this test, that didn’t matter.

  It was a raw test of the soul.

  It was the one chance the Heavens got to blast him, directly with soul attacks.

  In that time he just sat there meditating and collecting himself.

  60 seconds passed very slowly, and quickly, at once.

  3…. 2…. 1…..

  He looked up.

  A roar choked the room; the mountain began to tremble.

  The astral plane had broken open.

  And the skies were falling.

  It was like a night-sky full of stars—but all the stars were streaking straight toward him. So many they torched every inch of sky that blazing white color.

  There was nothing to do but to stare them down, and take it head-on.

  So he braced himself, Aegis shining above him. And watched.

  The comets grew from the size of a pinprick, to a coin, until they seemed to swallow up the sky—faster and faster they grew, and he could make out the furious motion-streaks rippling down their faces—

  The first comet shattered three layers of his Aegis.

  CRACK!—the second, third, fourth, thudded in quick succession.

  Then the wrath of the heavens was truly upon him.

  He felt each slam down to the bones of his soul. But he gritted his teeth and his will held strong; his Aegis flared brighter.

  More thudded in—CRACK-CRACK!

  It was the most intense soul assault he’d ever faced.

  But when it came to soul defense, he knew what he was capable of.

  The mountain was shudering so violently it started to split open around him. Comets glanced off here and there—but still Zane sat cross-legged, unmoving, brows furrowed. The calm in that storm.

  He’d survived the first volley. He knew the worst was yet to come.

  Just as he was steeling himself for it—

  Error.

  Zane’s eyes snapped open.

  Error. Tampering detected.

  He frowned at the sky.

  Error—

  The blue screen fizzed out.

  Then the very skies began to tremble.