Blue Phoenix

As the break in pain allowed for Hui Yue to catch his breath, Hui Yue was unsure if it helped to have this short time to breathe or not.

Although it was possible to take a breath and not be immersed in the pain, it also made it more difficult to face the pain that he knew was coming. If he had gone from this pain of suffocation to another pain it would be much easier to become numb to it, but this was obviously not allowed to happen; this small break in pain only served to make this trial all the more difficult to endure.

Hui Yue did not have any more time to think as his body tensed up, and he felt a knife cutting through his chest carving out his heart. Although the pain was indescribable, Hui Yue did not utter a sound. He was in the same seated position since he had sat down, but if one looked at his clenched hand, it was obvious that despite his calm appearance, he was in fact in severe pain.

By now the members of the Celestial Sword Sect were starting to falter. Some had already given up, but by the time their hearts were starting to get cut out many of them gave up.

Pei Ze and Pei Feng both had incredibly pale faces, and the palms of their hands were filled with sweat. Sweat was streaming down their foreheads, but even so, they persevered.

The head elders were not allowed inside the room because they were not participating in the trials, but they were all standing outside together with the elders of the other families. All of them were bragging about their geniuses of the younger generation saying how they would definitely pass the first trial.

"Tell me, this new member of your family, the bastard, how do you think he'll manage?" An elder from the Nightcrawler Sect asked curiously. Hearing the question, the elders from the Celestial Sword Sect, alongside the elder with soulforce, snorted in unison.

It was one thing to see scorn in the eyes of the Celestial Sword Sect after hearing this, as they would never doubt a member of their family, but to see the most esteemed head elder of the Nightcrawler Sect do the same puzzled everyone greatly. Had this head elder perhaps understood some of this Pei Yue's secrets?

"If we are talking about the younger generation then our hopes are on Pei Ze and Pei Feng." Pei Ziqi said honestly, "As for Pei Yue, no one knows how far he will go. Pei Yue is new to our sect, and although he has many means and abilities we don't know the nature of the first trial; thus we don't know if he can use his many abilities to pass it."

Pei Ziqi did not go into details about Hui Yue's abilities, but her words made everyone alert. It appeared that he had made a head elder acknowledge his abilities which was quite astonishing at such a young age, but when thinking about it, they too had to admit that Pei Yue actually had some ability. He had used some force to suck out the energy of other experts, something which could only be done with an overwhelming disparity between their powers. Thinking about that incident again, they realized he did, in fact, have some ability.

While the elders were busy discussing the capabilities of their younger generation, the youngsters were suffering immensely. Those who had not already given up were desperately hoping that the first trial was almost over.

Those that gave up all left the room, and their beams of light were taken by another hopeful cultivator wanting to become the new Judge of Hell.

As the members of the Celestial Sword Sect left the room, they entered the ground outside where the elders were waiting.

"Tell us, what is the trial about?" One of the elders asked, and all the other elders from every sect looked over as they were filled with curiosity.

The Celestial Sword Sect had arrived before all the other main sects, and thus their young generation was the first to enter the room and experience the trial. All the others were curious about it and hoped that they could get some information so that they could warn their youngsters and tell them how to prepare for the trial.

"It was hell," one of the young men shuddered as he remembered the pain he had to experience. "We experienced unspeakable pain. The trial is to endure through all the punishments that are administered in the different Courts of Hell."

"We only managed to get through the Second Court of Hell and had to give up when the third court’s punishment came. By the time we left only Pei Ze, Pei Feng, and Pei Yue seemed as if they would able to persevere past this court. Although Pei Feng and Pei Ze were covered with sweat, their determination is not normally strong, but... For Pei Yue, that freak, he did not even have a drop of sweat on his face. He looked as if he were just cultivating. Who knew he had such crazy willpower."

The young man was not used to talking with the elders, and he just blabbered about everything he had seen. He was proud of the two geniuses from the Celestial Sword Sect, so it was natural that he praised them unendingly. Though, the more he thought about the appearance of these two geniuses compared to Hui Yue’s, the more astounded he was by this newcomer’s endurance. Perhaps there really is a reason for him to be ranked higher than Pei Ze and Pei Feng in the hearts of these head elders thought the young man.

Everyone who had been in the room and seen Hui Yue’s face was able to see that Hui Yue was of another caliber than Pei Feng and Pei Ze. It was clear that his performance was many times more astonishing and although Pei Feng and Pei Ze were considered peerless geniuses of the Celestial Sword Sect, now a young man had appeared who might actually be more outstanding than them!

This shocked the young members of the Celestial Sword Sect and caused fear to appear in the other sects as they heard this youth recount his time in the trial. Even the Nightcrawler Sect was no exception; they were rather nervous because of the sudden emergence of a genius.

One peerless genius was all it took to make a family leagues better than another. If this Hui Yue truly became a genius amongst geniuses, a dragon amongst men, then he would bring the Celestial Sword Sect to newfound heights, heights gained by stepping over other sects.

Although the other sects were worried, none of them even thought about killing Pei Yue. These sects held sparring matches against one another and were always fighting to be the strongest sect, but in truth, all of them had a great friendship and alliances with one another despite their outward appearance of animosity. They needed their alliance not to be taken over by other sects and families, and because of this friendship, they did not fear that their sect would be overrun by the Celestial Sword Sect either. Although this sect could possibly climb to the top, they would still remember their friends.

Inside the chamber, the kind of pain that Hui Yue was going through had changed. He no longer felt his heart being carved out of his chest. Instead, he was feeling a scorching heat on his back, and his body was incapable of moving.

This kind of heat was different from the first. In the first punishment it felt as if his body had been thrown into a volcanic pit, but now he could feel his skin being roasted. He could smell the scent of roasted meat, and it was as if he were strapped to a furnace that was roasting him.

The pain was at first almost unbearable, but even so, Hui Yue held his voice and did not scream out. He imagined that the pain to come was even more severe, and he could not give up.

Soon he became numb to the pain, but even so, it continued. At the start of the trial, the pain would have subsided as soon as one overcame it mentally, but now that was no longer the case. One had to truly experience the full penalty of the courts, and their bodies died time and time again only to be restored by the powerful Ancestral Worldpower within the beams of light.

This grilling was the longest of all the punishments so far. Hui Yue had been cooked for a full three hours before the pain started to subside and a moment of respite arrived. Hui Yue had managed to get through the Third Court of Hell, but although he could take a deep breath and relax for a moment, he knew that he still had quite a long road ahead of him. He had only managed to get through a few of the punishments.

As Hui Yue had a pause to breathe, he looked around only to see that the majority of the people he had seen in his last break were gone, and now new experts had replaced them. Some were familiar faces from the banquet while others were unknown experts. While he was looking around, he spotted a few experts from the Celestial Sword Sect looking very pale and distraught.

Pei Ze and Pei Feng were both still feeling the punishment of being grilled while the others had not gotten that far. It seemed that the amount of time one took in each punishment truly was different from individual to individual. Looking at Yanluo, Hui Yue noticed that the supreme expert was looking at him with a slight smile on his face. His eyes were sparkling with expectations, and Hui Yue understood that this King of Hell had a lot of expectations of him.

Hui Yue lowered his head and looked at himself. His body had been subject to unspeakable torture already, but he was far from having finished the first trial. Since it was like this, Hui Yue just wanted the next trial to begin, and the moment he thought this he felt as a massive stone mallet hit his body beating it to a pulp.

This was painful, but compared to the grilling, Hui Yue found it much easier to handle. The pounding was not very different from some of the battles he had encountered where hard fists and frightening strength had been used against him. This was just quite a bit more powerful and destroyed his body in the process, but when thinking about the fact that he could not die from this, the pain was really not that unbearable.

Living through the pain of being pounded to death by a mallet, the kind of pain changed from being pounded to being ground.

Being ground by a stone was many times more painful than being pounded by a mallet, but although it was painful, Hui Yue just grit his teeth, clenched his hands, and endured. His lips were tightly shut, and his body was trembling from the severe pain, but he refused to give in to it and stayed strong. In his mind the picture of Wang Ju Long appeared and as long as he looked at her, Hui Yue was able to completely ignore the pain his body was going through. During this trial, he was fully focused on the first woman he had truly loved.