"…"
'Well that is not good.'
Although all Qing Shan could see was endless darkness, he could hear the unsettling sound of thousands of insect beasts humming around.
Finally tearing his thoughts away from his horror at the situation in which he had just found himself, Qing Shan noticed a stairwell descending from around the side of the abyss and disappearing into the darkness. Still unnerved, and on his guard to a crazy degree, Qing Shan disappeared down the staircase.
At this point, even if Qing Shan wanted to move fast, he would not be able to. He had to carefully check for each step before moving downward. He had no clue if this stairway was broken or not, or when it would stop.
After continuously moving downward for almost ten minutes, he finally lost sight of the small amount of light provided by the opening at the top of the stairs. Now, Qing Shan felt like there were multiple insect beasts buzzing directly around his ears. He could only be sure about this after making sure that there was no wind from wings blowing onto his neck.
Still creeped out beyond anything he had experienced before, Qing Shan continued downwards; he lost track of time before he hit solid ground. However, Qing Shan knew that this was not the bottom of the abyss. He could still feel the slightest updraft coming from below, and the darkness had not receded at all. It had just gotten darker, the darkness taking on a humid quality.
Now, contrary to before, Qing Shan was absolutely sure that there were multiple insect beasts somewhere near him. The buzzing was still the same volume as before, but Qing Shan could now feel many different gusts of wind flowing over his body in a simple beat. The gusts were coming from multiple directions, and based off of these gusts, there were at least three different large sized insect beast near Qing Shan.
The only thing that Qing Shan found strange was that the bugs were not attacking him. Could it be that they did not know he was there?
Soon Qing Shan felt that this must be the case. He had been standing silent, and waiting for the insects to attack. Finally confident that he would not be attacked, Qing Shan began to walk forward, slowly. The buzzing grew louder and louder as Qing Shan moved past the insects, and once he was sure that there were no more left in front of him, Qing Shan silently punched a fist into the air in celebration.
"Puchi!"
Qing Shan felt his had hit something soft and somewhat squishy, and then felt his had pass through the object. It was only when the blood splattered his face did Qing Shan realize he had punched an insect beast.
Qing Shan suddenly heard the buzzing much closer than before. He could tell now that these were bees. They were all buzzing angrily, and Qing Shan remembered the wiry feel of the bee's hair. What really told Qing Shan that these were bees was that they all turned right over to Qing Shan when he killed their brethren.
'Oh shit. They have a hive-mind.'
This was the last thought Qing Shan had before he lost himself in the rhythm of the battle. He could not tell how much time had passed, only that the number of insects was not decreasing. It was as if two more would take every the spot of every dead insect beast.
While none of the insect beasts were all that hard to destroy, this was not that relevant during this fight. As Qing Shan could not see any of the insects, he spent most of the beginning of the fight literally stumbling around in the darkness. Meanwhile, he was stung time-after-time by the angry bees.
However, for Qing Shan pain was one of the best reasons to improve. He soon found himself focusing only on the wind gusts on his skin, and their frequency. In this way, he was able to find out the general locations of each insect beast, and the size of those that were left.
From his deduction, there was only one more large bee, and around ten middle sized bees. He was not able to count the number of normal sized bees, but he could now tell that they had been creating the illusion of more bees coming in by moving in groups and flapping their small wings at exactly the same frequency.
After Qing Shan managed to figure this out, it was not hard to take care of the remaining beasts. Qing Shan just judged each bee's general position and attacked. As the bees could not see, they just sent their attacks toward the corpse of the most recent bee that Qing Shan killed. Because of this, Qing Shan managed to kill all of the bees in under two minutes.
After all of the bees, were dead, Qing Shan carefully walked around the area, checking to make sure there was no continuation into the sides of the abyss. After that, he found the stairs and continued down the stairs.
Suddenly, Qing Shan felt a change around him. He felt the buzzing get louder and louder until he felt like there were hundreds of thousands of bees next to his ear. Fortunately, he could tell that this was not the case. He only felt one pair of wings sending wind at his body. So, this meant that there was only one bee. Unfortunately, these gusts were far more powerful that anything he had felt before. The wing beats were so terrifyingly powerful that Qing Shan felt his whole body pushed back every time he faced one.
'That is one damn big bee!'
Due to the size of the insect beasts so far, Qing Shan inferred that this bee was the Queen. Only the Queen bee would be this large. Qing Shan felt the bee move directly at him. The wind whistled around its sharp stinger, and Qing Shan barely managed to shift his body in time to dodge the attack. This attack showed Qing Shan just how terrifying this bee was.
In his complete analysis at this point, the bee was 4th level Formation Soul, it had a Strength two levels higher than its cultivation level, and it could see in the dark.
This analysis was terrifying. While Qing Shan's normal battle prowess had approached upper 9th level Formation Soul so far during the trial, he was greatly limited by the darkness. Now, it was probably somewhere close to the bee's in front of him.
Fortunately, Qing Shan was no longer surprised by situations such as this one. He had faced way too many terrible situations ever since he faced the trial. In the last situation where he faced an opponent stronger than himself, all he had to do was learn and exploit the opponent's weaknesses, or grow to the point that he was strong enough to beat those opponents.
Thus, Qing Shan did not flinch under the threat of the Queen insect beast. However, he knew based off of his first exchange with it that his counter measures were not enough. He needed to somehow create an image of the situation and covert the feelings and sounds he heard into an image.
Of course, this was much easier said than done. With the amount of time he had, he had no problem imagining the atmosphere, stairs on the edge of a virtually bottomless abyss, and no problem imagining a Queen bee around the meters tall attacking him. The problem he had was connecting the things he felt the movements of the bee.
Soon, he was shaken out of his thoughts by the shift in the wind; the bee was about to attack again. Somehow, Qing Shan did manage to see the bee attacking him on the image in his mind, and his brain somehow picked up the stray gusts of wind and used some of Qing Shan's other senses to show the Queen flipping over and rush and slash at Qing Shan with its stinger like a sword.
Not really believing the fact that he had somehow created this image in his mind involuntarily move, Qing Shan decided to go with it. He held up his Staff, ready for the attack that may be incoming. Sure enough, he felt a hard slash downwards hit the side of his Staff.
His eyes widened. He had not expected that to work. Somehow, imagining the image in his mind made it easier for him to comprehend the gusts of wind.
Qing Shan put this ability to good use. Unfortunately, after the Queen bee's next attack, he found out that he was not really accounting for the landscape properly. Qing Shan tried to dodge the Queen's next attack by moving backwards, and he stumbled as his foot hit the stair behind him.
From that point on, Qing Shan started to fight defensively, standing in the same spot and blocking the Queen's attacks, sometimes parrying when he could. Even though the fight was very straightforward in theory, this battle was very tough for Qing Shan. He had to pay complete attention every moment in order to track the Queen's motion. Even though he did not really get to do any complex attacks or movements during this fight, it was still rewarding. He had managed to somehow 'see' the battle through the images that he imagined in his mind.
It took Qing Shan a whole twenty minutes to kill the Queen bee. Although this was not his toughest opponent, the Queen had taken him the longest to defeat, not counting the five hundred battles.
After Qing Shan killed the Queen, he moved on, continuing down the stairs. He started advancing step by step as he had before, but soon he got excited. The reason for this was that he saw a light appear at the bottom of the abyss. Qing Shan could not hold his excitement, and he ran down the stairs, becoming ecstatic as he started to be able to see the stairs in front of him.
Once he got to the bottom of the stairs, Qing Shan became confused. He could not clearly see a source of the light, but was confused that there was nothing else in the bottom of the abyss but the warm orange glow from that light.
'Was did I kill all of the bees in this hole? I don't really remember how many bees I killed, but there may have been over a thousand… I guess it would make sense if the final part of the trial was killing the Queen?'
Qing Shan walked toward the brightest part of the orange glow, and was surprised to see a hallway with a door at the end. For some reason, the entire hallway was filled with a brilliant orange glow.
Qing Shan hurriedly entered the hallway. He wanted to exit this trial as soon as possible.
As soon as Qing Shan entered the hallway, he felt a strange feeling come over him, and he was momentarily blinded by a large flash. Once Qing Shan could see again, the first thing that he saw was a large flaming rock hurtling at him. It was way too large for him to be able to avoid it, so Qing Shan tried to minimize the blow. He shrank to the ground, activated his Fifth Qi loop, and folded his body inward. He grabbed at his locket, hoping beyond hope that this was not his end.
Moments later, Qing Shan opened his eyes and noticed that he was entirely unharmed. However, more surprising that this was that Qing Shan was actually inside of the Primal pocket dimension.
As if he was inside of a dream, Qing Shan tentatively walked into the Primal Water, and walked in reserved awe as his body started to heal as per usual.
"Okay… this is definitely not a dream."
After relaxing in the Primal Water for a long period of time, Qing Shan finally convinced himself to move. There was something that he had to do.
After forcefully causing breakthroughs on his body and mind, but not actually gaining the power from the breakthroughs, Qing Shan needed to catch up his soul. Thus, Qing Shan sat down and started his Circulation. His Dantian filled up surprisingly fast, especially considering that he barely had any Qi left inside of it. Qing Shan vaguely felt the pop as his Dantian expanded suddenly, and continued absorbing Qi without stopping. It was only once Qing Shan experienced six breakthroughs that he stopped, his mind, body, and soul, finally back on the same level.
"Oh Hell yeah! Peak Formation Soul!"
Qing Shan had stepped from the 4th level to the 10th level of Formation Soul in under one day. It was truly amazing how he felt his Qi grow so much denser, his thoughts grow so much clearer, and his body surpassing his prior limits. The only problem was that Qing Shan's Life Core and Third Eye were the same size as his Dantian, which was about sixty times larger than it was before. It would take him an unimaginable amount of time to fill it up; on top of that, he had a feeling that filling up his Major Vessels was not the only thing he had to do to increase his cultivation to the next realm…