Some time passed since Nero understood the sword codex and he was in a weird state. He was still stuck in the same hellish environment he had been in before, but now, it was like his whole body was protected by a silver aura that would destroy anything that got close enough to him.
While being protected was a very nice thing, Nero felt like something was wrong whit his situation. He didn´t sense it before, but he had felt a slight connection whit all three elemental hazards when he got here, now, he could only sense the silver tornados.
'It´s like I was listening to a concert before. I could focus on the drummer, the singer, or the guitarist individually and still hear the other two play, now tho, it feels like the drummer is slamming the plates and the other two were drowned by the noise… Not that I have been to a real concert before.'
He closed his eyes and concentrated on the image of the sword codex. It had the appearance of a saber completely made of silver and passed a calming sensation to Nero every time he focused on it, like gazing at a painting or other artistic piece of art, it felt perfect and complete.
'There has to be a way to deactivate this and restore the previous harmony, but how do I do that?'
Nero tried imagining the sword aura stopping, and, to his surprise, it responded to him. He felt a very strong rejection sensation emanate from the silver sword in his mind like it loathed the idea of letting Nero get touched by something other than itself.
'Are you some kind of obsessive girlfriend!? Don´t you see that you are not helping? The more you waste our time keeping me protected, the longer we will be kept locked in this hell! If you want to help, keep the silver jets at bay.'
It seemed like the explanation worked, as soon as Nero conveyed to the codex his intentions, the sword aura around him changed. While it was still present, like a silver hurricane two meters around him, the purple fog and the red mud were, once again, allowed passage to break his body down.
Regret and panic were the first things to fill Nero´s mind, the sudden pause from all the pain made his body forget how much it hated the burning sensation in its lungs or the frightening sensation of having its blood running backward. But after a while, he reached a calm state of mind once again, it was like the fog didn´t burn as much as before and the red blood was acting way more peacefully. It was like they were scared of something this time around, and that made them act whit new respect in their minds.
'Is it you Sword? Did you scare them?'
A proud feeling emanated from the sword codex.
'Thanks for that.'
After the sword aura subdued its behavior, the balance between the three essences was once again restored. Nero could again feel a slight connection whit all of the surrounding hazards, but it was slightly different now. While before he felt like they all were equal, he now knew that they couldn't be more different.
The sword essence from the surrounding silver tornados was something that couldn't be explained by words. It felt imposing and divine, like the pressure from the administrator had been before but way deeper. It was like the sword god had personally descended in front of him just to create the silver tornadoes.
'And maybe, he did. The administrator said that nobody could use sword essence without being direct descendants of the sword god or being bestowed the codex from him directly, which means that, even he, the administrator of the trials, couldn't create something so powerful directly.'
A somber realization was forming in his mind.
'Those this mean that I am directly looking at something made by a god himself? and that I learned a codex from it?'
Nero suddenly made a deep bow in the direction of the biggest silver tornado.
The blood essence he felt from the red mud, while not very powerful, felt very profound to him. It was like he was gazing at something very far and abstract and his mind couldn´t make sense of it, this sensation could be compared to a first grader looking at university-level math.
The blood essence also had something that differentiated it from the sword essence. While the latter gave him a sensation of perfection, the blood essence felt incomplete, like it was missing the thing that made the sword essence so perfect.
By last, the poison essence felt by far the most shallow of them all. This didn´t mean that it was weak or inferior to the other two, it just felt like while the other two essences were deep pools, the poison essence was a shallow pond.
But this didn´t mean that the poison essence was a weak one at all, even if it was shallow in comparison to the other two essences the corrosive properties that it had were something that deeply fascinated Nero, and made him focus on learning its codex before the blood essence codex.
After a lot of time and suffering, Nero made some progress on his trial and understood the poison codex. Like the sword codex, it manifested an image in his mind, a large purple spiral that emanated a deadly and still feeling. It didn´t seem to have the same characteristics that made the sword codex so perfect as well, it had a mark on his mind, but it didn´t act on its own. It felt more like a tool, contrarily to the sword codex that was capable or augmenting whit him.
After a lot more time he managed to comprehend the blood codex as well. It had the same dead and still feeling of the poison codex, and something about it made it even more unique. It was incomplete, like an unfinished drawing, Nero first thought he had made some kind of mistake and tried to comprehend more from the red mud, but it was to no avail, the drawing didn´t budge.
And now, after what seemed to him like an immeasurable amount of time, he felt the same deprecating sensation and was finally teleported out of the red swamp trial grounds.
His trial was complete.