Mira had slept for an entire 5 of her 7 days before she woke up. She didn't know how long she had slept and only knew that it was less than 7 days as she was still in this very basic room.
The first thing she did was look around the small empty room when she woke up. The only thing other than the bed that she saw was the small table with a ring on it. Mira grabbed the ring and put it on. She then sent her energy into the ring to connect with it and sent her mind into it. She was rather surprised by how big it was.
Mira's first space ring is a measly 5 cubic meters large, but this space ring has a size of 8000 cubic meters. This may sound like a lot, but the space inside the ring was just 20 meters long, 20 meters wide, and 20 meters tall. This is like the size of a rather large house, maybe even close to the size of a mansion. She also noticed that the only thing in this ring was rations. Rations on top of rations. Mira didn't know how long this would last, but she assumed that these next 10 stages might take a while. Mira had been out of food for a while. Being in the Qi Condensation Realm, one doesn't need to eat that often as some of your body is being nourished by Qi but eating is still very beneficial to the body in this stage as well. Mira has been starving for a while now and decided to eat her fill until she couldn't eat anymore.
Mira then spent an entire day eating. After that, she went to get a good rest before she was called into action again.
Mira soon heard the voice of the mechanical voice as she was dragged out of the room and placed in another world.
"Welcome to Stage 11. Drink the poison on the pedestal to advance to the next stage. Begin!" The mechanical voice said very shortly.
Mira looked around and saw various pools of what looked like poison. Just looking at the different pools of poison, she could tell that the pool on the far left was the weakest and the one on the far right was the strongest. Over half of these poisons were capable of killing her. She then noticed a pedestal in the center and saw a glass filled with poison in it. She couldn't feel anything from it and thought it might not be poison. The only thing that kept her from thinking that was the voice told her she needed to drink that to pass the stage.
The pools of poison were the colors of a rainbow with purple being the weakest on the left with red and black being the strongest on the right. The pools weren't that big, just big enough to bathe in.
Mira assumed that this stage was to help build up a bit of poison resistance. She honestly no idea how to do that, but assumed that she needed to ingest the poison in small doses. Maybe she even needs to bathe in the poison as well.
Mira walked over to the weakest poison pool. She felt like this poison wouldn't kill or injure her. Mira dipped her finger in it. She felt the poison sink into her skin and enter her body, but it didn't seem strong enough to start eroding her insides. Mira took out her finger and waited to see if it brought any injuries or changes.
After waiting a while, she felt like this poison was relatively safe and was just here for her to build up a resistance to it. She then dipped in her finger again and dropped some of the poison in her mouth. She could feel it trying to damage her body, but her body was too strong for it. After waiting to see if there are any changes, Mira was able to confirm that this poison would be useful for building up resistance.
Mira decided to just jump straight in. She took off her clothes and went to bathe in the pool. Once she entered it completely, she drank a large mouthful of it. This time, she circulated her cultivation technique as she was feeling a bit of a stinging sensation from the poison. Mira was going to do bathe in this pool until there was no more poison left. After that, she will try something similar with the next pool. She will test out each pool before bathing in it to see if she needs to try and build a bit of resistance, but once she does she will just bathe in each pool until her body can handle the poison on the pedestal.
***
Almost 7 days later Maria woke up from her deep sleep. She woke up and was extremely groggy. She was a bit confused as to where she was and how her body felt good as new. She then started to remember that she actually lived and was dragged here as her body started healing. She then put on this ring and fell asleep. She didn't know how long she has been asleep but felt like her 7 days were almost up. She checked the ring and was surprised to see it was a bit bigger than her own. She then saw all of the rations in it and started salivating.
Maria was starving. She immediately began to stuff herself with food. She was still eating when she heard the mechanical voice and was dragged to another place.
"Welcome to Stage 11. Drink the poison on the pedestal to advance to the next stage. Begin!" The mechanical voice said promptly.
"Poison, huh. Makes sense for this crappy trial to have a poison stage in it. Hmmm, it seems this purple poison on the left can't kill me, but this black poison on the right definitely can. I can't sense how strong the poison on the pedestal is, but that only makes me feel more danger from it. Well, since I'm not done eating and this place gave such a nice dipping sauce, how can I decline such service?!" Maria said out loud as she walked over to the weakest poison and dipped her rations in at and ate them. She felt a bit of a stinging sensation from the poison in her body, but it wasn't able to damage it as her body was simply too resilient.
Once Maria felt comfortable bathing in it, she took off her clothes and started to wash herself with poison. She continued dipping her food in it and whenever she got thirsty, she would take large gulps of it to quench her thirst. Maria was going to do this until she was too full to eat anymore. She can keep a piece of her sanity if she does this.
***
Mira was currently bathing in the black sludge poison. It looked like she was in a large boiling pot as there were a lot of bubbles forming in the poison, but it wasn't hot inside the black poison. Mira was gritting her teeth as the pain from this sludged was pretty insane. It felt like her body was rotting away or trying to disintegrate. The poison was corroding every part of her body as it was removing layers of skin, corroding her bones and muscles, her organs were working as hard as they could to prevent from being destroyed. Mira was circulated and sending Qi into every part of her body as fast as she could. If she wasn't bathing in poison right now, then she would be covered in a thick layer of sweat as she prevented her body from collapsing. This continued as she took gulps of this poison down her throat as well.
Mira lost track of the days she stayed in this pool. It was a week at the very least. Possibly weeks in it as the black sludged finally started to clear as her body was able to fend off all of it and destroy it. After Mira felt like she had gained resistance to the poison and all of it was gone, she got out of the pool. Mira cleaned herself off and put on some clothes. She took this time to return to her peak.
After feeling ready, Mira got up and walked over to the pedestal. She opened the vial that contained the poison, stared at it for a second, then dumped all of it straight down her throat.
*THUMP*
Mira grabbed her heart as she started struggling to breathe. She fell to her knees and went into a fetal position. It felt like this poison was trying to stop all motor functions in her body and only got worse as time went on. Mira circulated and sent her Qi to try and help her body, but that would just get dissolved almost immediately.
"AARRRRGHH!! FUCK!!" Mira screamed as she started to send her blue lightning to help her body. She was gasping for air as her blue lightning started to slow down the poison by a bit. She used this extra bit of time to sent Qi through her body to help heal it.
She had to stay on the verge of life and death for what seemed like an eternity before the poison stopped trying to consume her. Mira took advantage of this and started to use her Qi, circulate her energy, blue lightning, and willpower to push back the poison and heal her body. Her blue lightning was also doing more than healing her body as it started to add more of her Extreme Yin Physique to the corroded parts of her body.
The only thing that kept her alive to this point was this along with the vitality of her blood and will to live.
After fighting back for hours, she was finally able to dispel the poison as part of it was absorbed into her body, giving her more resistant to poison.
She then heard the mechanical voice ring out.
"Congratulations on passing Stage 11 of the Trial. Please proceed to start Stage 12."
Mira was still recovering as she was thrown into another world. It was an empty world with 8 different buttons to choose from.
"Welcome to Stage 12. This is the Elemental Dao Stage. This stage is optional and you can end it at any point. You can either choose to try to deeper your understanding of your Dao or move onto the next stage and continue with the Trial. Please choose the element you want to gain insights into or proceed to the next stage!"
Mira was a bit surprised by this. Nevertheless, she chose Ice as that was the only Dao that she could actually utilize with her special physique.
After choosing, she was then brought to a world that was filled with ice. This was nothing like the World of Ice back in Stage 6. This place was much colder and the ice here was incredibly dense. There were thin clouds of ice above her, the wind was made of ice shards, the ground was incredibly hard and dense ice, trees were made of ice and it even had flowing ice waterfalls. There was also a very weird atmosphere that seemed to make this the perfect place to comprehend the Dao of Ice.
Mira walked to the center and made a throne of ice as she sat down on it and meditated on the Absolute Ice Dao.
"To progress in this Dao, it has to be unstoppable, indestructible, perfect, colder than anything in the universe, should be able to control or affect any ice that is not as strong as mine, it should even be able to affect time." Mira talked to herself in meditation.
"What makes Ice? Ice is when water's thermal energy drops enough to where it can freeze. The molecules that make up ice start to slow down the colder it gets and will come to a stop when it hits absolute zero. This is what science has taught worlds that don't have Qi, or heaven and earth energy. Qi essentially allows everything to grow and become stronger. Things flourish with life and can live for extremely long periods of time when Qi is absorbed in them. A Dao is the understanding of the universe. There are a seemingly infinite amount of Daos that one can progress in as there is no limit to understanding and affecting the universe. I can use my knowledge of past lives to progress further in my Absolute Ice Dao." Mira thought out loud.
She then started to take inspiration from her surroundings. The ice on the ground was incredibly dense. Mira noticed that the energy in the ice was static but tight and strong. It seemed to be pieces of ice that were combined together to form. Mira then started to get insights from this as she tried to perfect her own form of this. She would try to combine 2 separate pieces of ice together but keep the size the same.
Mira kept trying this over and over again. Most of the time, they refused to combine and crack before she could even try. After enough tries though, she was able to get the 2 pieces of ice inside of each other, but they started to expand, and when Mira tried to stop that they exploded. Mira kept attempting to combine them until she was finally able to combine both the pieces of ice together and keep the size the same.
After she did this once, Mira continued until she could do it every time and once she could do that then she tried to shorten the time needed to form it until it was natural for her ice to form like this. Mira knew her ice was 2 times stronger now, but the next time she did this, her ice would be 4 times stronger, then 8 times, and so on. Mira then tried to repeat this until she hit another bottleneck.
After trying to combine her new and stronger ice together for an unknown amount of time, she was able to fuse them twice and make her ice 8 times stronger than before she got here. Mira guessed that her ice was now useful. When she got into the Qi Condensation Realm and after all of the recent body tempering, her ice has started to be less effective against her enemies.
She tried to combine it again, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn't even start the process. She gave up on trying to combine her ice again, and went to try to gain insights and test how she can control ice that wasn't made by her. She went to find some small ice shards and began with that. She knew that the ice had to be similar in strength or weaker than her ice to manipulate it.
She then began focusing on trying to manipulate these tiny shards like how she manipulates her ice. This was going to take her a while as she had no idea where to start.
***
Maria was in the black sludge right now and was still eating food. She had never stopped eating food this entire time. Maria was using the poison as a dip and beverage for her meal. The black poison was a bit different for her though. She was still eating food and drinking it, but she was chewing very hard and often gritted her teeth in pain as she was trying to enjoy her meal.
Maria continued doing this until all of the black sludge poison was gone with most of it being in her stomach or body. Maria actually had more resistance than Mira to poison inside her body because she was constantly eating and drinking it. Her outer body wasn't as resistant as Mira's to poison, but Maria didn't know this as she just wanted to eat to keep her mind sane through this painful process.
Once all of the black poison was gone, Maria got out of the pool and went straight over to the pedestal to get this over with. She opened the vial and took out a piece of meat. She put all of the poison in her mouth along with the meat and swallowed them.
The poison started to burn Maria's insides, but she didn't feel like her life was threatened or anything from the poison. All she did was circulate her cultivation technique and send some of her Qi to the spots that were stinging and she was able to resist the poison relatively quickly and without much pain. After the poison was dealt with, the poison was soaked into her body and gave her even more internal poison resistance. She then heard the mechanical voice and was transported to another place.
"Congratulations on passing Stage 11 of the Trial. Please proceed to start Stage 12."
Maria was brought to a room with 8 different choices.
"Welcome to Stage 12. This is the Elemental Dao Stage. This stage is optional and you can end it at any point. You can either choose to try to deeper your understanding in your Dao or move onto the next stage and continue on with the Trial. Please choose the element you want to gain insights into or proceed to the next stage!" It said as Maria was stunned.
"An optional stage?! And I can choose when I want to proceed to the next stage?! It's also a Dao Stage?!" Maria exclaimed as she was extremely happy. Usually, people meditate in a calm environment with no distractions when deepening one's understanding of a Dao.
Maira immediately selected the light symbol and was teleported to a world full of light. Bright lights, dull lights, wavy lights, straight lights, hot lights, cold lights, fast and slow lights, every kind of light was here. The ground was made of light and everything around her was light.
Maria immediately went into a meditative state as soon as she entered as all of this light granted her tons of insights. This was the perfect place for one to understand the Dao of Light. Maria also hasn't hit a bottleneck yet in her Dao. She also knows what Light Dao fits her best. Maria likes to be free, go with the flow, and she often doesn't think before she makes her decisions. She wants to go down the Unfettered Light Dao. She would continue to meditate on her Dao until she hit a bottleneck then do whatever she feels is right when that time comes. This is her nature and doing this will also help her progress in her Dao.
***
Mira was swinging a double-bladed scythe around while shooting ice blades and throwing ice needles. All of her ice now had a cold sharp look to them. They were incomparable to the ice Mira used before this stage. Mira continued practicing with her Dao before she stopped, nodded her head, and asked to proceed to the next stage. She had gotten everything she could out of this stage.