Park Ju-Hui shut her eyes tight and held her breath. Even the sound of her rapidly beating heart seemed extremely loud right now. A second passed, and then a minute. Then came two minutes, and three, and four. Her face had turned blue from lack of air, but the sounds of crunching bones could no longer be heard.
'C-Could they be gone?'
She did not dare to step outside of the cavern to take a look, but she would die of curiosity - not to mention self suffocation, if she remained here. Slowly, she stuck her head out of the very Snell cavern entrance. Outside, flesh, body organs, and disembodied limbs littered the floor, making her grimace and throw up like a pregnant woman. Not everybody was meant to see a murder scene, and some could not handle it.
After emptying her already empty guts, she made her way out of the small cave. The creatures were gone by now, an she should be relatively safe.
_growl_
It seemed like her stomach did not really want her to continue the long journey without eating something. It had to be considered, as she had not had a meal in five days. A cultivator was far more resilient than an ordinal human, thus she could manage till now, but of she did not eat something soon, then she would doe of starvation long before the creatures could kill her.
_growl_
The second growling made the young woman stop in her tracks. It was not her stomach making the sounds. Slowly, she turned around, only to see a smiling humanlike head staring at her with empty eye sockets. Its face was frozen in a creepy smile that stretched all the way to its forehead, and its body was... Wait a minute, she had only been looking at the head. It turned out that the head was within another head. A mouth to be precise, that stretched almost five metres wide. Her eyes widened into large orbs and she froze in the spot.
'Is this how I'm going to die?...'
She had faced rejection from seventy different sects, and thirty different clans. No matter how hard she cultivated, she could not breakthrough the Qi manipulation realm. The only thing she could manage to do was sell herbs in a market stall. But she made up her mind on the very day that the Imperial Sky Emperor's Trial began. The handsome young man that had bought the spirit grade sucrose herb some days prior, despite merely being at the Nascent Body Realm, had stepped up and joined the continent's best cultivators. She herself was at the Qi manipulation realm, and if someone who was at least five realms below her had the courage to join in, why couldn't she?
Why couldn't she join in and survive till the end?
Why could she not win the Scroll of Unlimited Power and show everyone that she was not only good at selling herbs in a market stall?
No. Park Ju-Hui decided that she was not going to die here.
"Nascent Clone Avatar Technique!"
This was the only technique that she had managed to master. Her image blurred, and then three identical figures emerged from her image. It may have looked like cloning, but she was only manipulating the vision of the creature for it to seem like there were three of her. She had been here for a month, thus she knew that the creatures were impossible to injure. All she could do was to run around with her three images in different directions and hope that the beast would get confused and give up. The smiling head within the creature's mouth said something inaudible, and the creature suddenly began to give chase to the other images.
"Thank goodness, my plan worked..."
Park Ju-Hui let out a sigh of relief as the creature went off in the distance. It was a really close one, this time, and she would never have such luck in her life again. Before she could turn, she found herself facing the sky.
"What?..."
Then she began to feel dizzy. She could no longer feel her legs, and was dizzy due to blood loss.
"But how?..."
Then realization hit her. Just as she had used her ability to make image clones with her unnatural speed gotten from infusing Qi energy into her feet, the creature had also created it's own image clones using its natural body speed that far surpassed that of high level cultivators. The young woman did not want to die, but at least she could die with honor knowing that she at least tried. She turned her head to the side and saw the creature munching on her lower half, a truly revolting sight indeed, and closed her eyes.
"I tried my b-"
"Three dantian Qi strike."
Suddenly the ground shook, and the rocks split apart. Park Ju-Hui could feel her arm getting sliced off in one go, as a wave of powerful Qi undulated across the ground. Standing above her head, was a woman with silver white hair and a bandana tied over her eyes.
"W-Who are you?..."
Her vision was blurry and slowly growing dark, as she was slowly dying. But the woman smirked and replied in a cold voice.
"You're my new companion."
***
On a golden throne far above in the skies, the Imperial Sky Emperor sighed and let out a stifled curse. He had been watching everyone that was on the Trial Grounds, and could not help but shudder at the ominous well of power residing in the black haired young man.
"If he's really the Heir of Serpentis, then all our plans have been ruined..."
The Serpentis were the only beings who did not need to rise to godhood to be able to easily slay a god. They had all been banished to the far off Daemon Realm, where they could not pose a problem to the deities, but he could not just understand how one of them had managed to cross over.
"I shall have to get rid of him quite quickly if the plans are to go smoothly."
Then turning to face a being that stood by his side, a lesser deity that had life breathed into it, he smirked darkly.
"Release the Basilisk. I think its time to begin the True Trials..."