"Gaaahhhh!"

Min Hong screamed in agony as he took his third step…

The first step had the flesh at the sole of his feet stuck to the floor, and when he raised that leg to take another step, the skin peeled, as Min Hong's exposed feet touched the scorching grounds of the second step…

But oblivious to him, the muscles beneath the sole of his feet though were hurting like hell, but weren't scorched as they seemed to have been cooked by the red flames…

No single inch of flesh on his person was spared from being scorched, and the crazy thing about the test was the fact that, there was no resting spot between each level…

Min Hong was taken to higher levels of agony with every stage he climbed and ran across…

By the time Min Hong exited the red flames, he was looking like a disfigured BBQ with the smell of scorched meat permeating the area, there were no flesh on his body; only cooked, tensed muscles were visible as well as steam coming from the evaporation of every liquid contained within his body…

He was rendered bald, and even his eyebrows and lashes were gone…

Min Hong climbed into the next level which was like a lake of blue flames, and this time, it was the cooked muscles that suffered, as they began to shrink…

All the fats within his muscles shrunk as oil like fluids began to seep out of them, and the moment they came in contact with other part of his muscles, they fried it, making Min Hong feel like a mortal who was plunged into a massive lake of burning oil…

"Arrgghhhh!"

Min Hong's tone was severed at this point as only coarse screams were blaring out of his mouth…

His speed had slowed to an ordinary jog, but all the muscles on his body, including his face were now crispy dry, and several cracks were already appearing on them as Min Hong exited this level…

But mysteriously, as all these were happening within the trial realm, Min Hong's real body was actually suffering the same damage as his body was currently being engulfed in blue colored flames at this point…

Then all of a sudden, the flames burning his body changed to green, signifying that Min Hong had stepped into the fourth stage within the trial realm…

Within the trial realm…

Min Hong at this point was a total nightmare… There were only bones and the tendons holding each bone together, as well as all the vital organs within his skeletal frame being visible…

But at this point, this tendons were searing and began to snap one by one causing Min Hong's ears to fall off, then his nose, and finally his lower jaw slacked open the moment the tendons holding it in place fell off…

Min Hong couldn't understand why he wasn't dead yet, but at this point, he didn't care anymore, because he had been taken to the physical extremities of pain that he wasn't even feeling anything again…

He was exhausted and could only walk across the fourth stage as other parts of his skeletal frame that weren't joints began to fall off…

He couldn't scream anymore as his vocal cord seemed to have been burnt away, causing Min Hong to look like a skeletal zombie with agape jaws; a true nightmare…

Min Hong climbed onto the next stage which contained black flames, and he realized what this flames were going to do the moment he stepped into it…

His bones began to soften as he walked across this floors… He began to wiggle from left to right as his structure began to flex like a solid plastic that had been exposed to heat…

He fell on to the ground due the bones in his body being deformed from its regular shape as he began to crawl through the stage with a dead expression…

His pain receptors and other nerves had been scorched off and he couldn't feel any sort of pain anymore [or so he thought…]

He finally crawled out of the fifth stage and rolled into the sixth stage, and this was when he understood that he could still feel pain…

The flames of this level were unique; it was bone chilling cold [like the North Pole to the power of 1 billion, cold] and just like a metal rod which was just taken out of the furnace and plunged into cold water, his bones solidified till they began to crack…

The level of torture Min Hong felt in this level was unprecedented…

His bones felt immensely chilly and icy, but the sensation Min Hong was actually getting was like he had been thrown into a volcano filled with lava…

Hoooowwl!

Like breeze being blown into a hollow tube, Min Hong howled…

If he had tears and vocal cords, then he might as well shed oceans of them…

He grabbed the floor of this level, elbow by elbow as he crawled his way through the flames…

All his organs froze; his heart, eyes, kidneys, lungs, and all of the organs which resided within his skeletal frame were frozen solid on the outside, whilst being scorched from within…

There was only one thought pushing Min Hong through this process;

'As long as I reach the altar, everything will end…'

He kept reciting it all like a mantra as clawed his way out of the fifth level into the sixth.

On getting to the sixth, the pain Min Hong felt created the first doubt within his mind…

There were no flames here…

Only ashes, and Min Hong could have sworn that they were his, and in reality, they were actually his…

It was like all the ashes of his skin, tendon, muscles and blood were here, and the moment he crawled into the ash, Min Hong lost all energy and fell face flat into these ashes, as they wreaked havoc on him…

These ashes were like tiny dusts that held the heat on the same level as the core of the sun within them…

They spread over every inch of Min Hong's body delivering the blistering heat of the sun's core to every part of what was left of him…

But it was also at this stage that something unique began to occur…

As this ashes latched onto Min Hong, they began to form new sets of bones for those that were lost and strengthened those that were left…

New tendons were made, new tissues and muscles also formed, and finally flesh began to cover every ounce of his body, until Min Hong was whole once again, and his eyes snapped open as he cried out with pain;

"Aarrrghhh!" Min Hong roared as the mysterious voice once again sounded;

"Body Smelting Trials – Passed…"

Min Hong who was looking like a demon from the deepest depths of the most petrifying abyss finally stood to his feet…

All his body was black, and even his eyes were all black, and the moment he reached the edge of this sixth stage, cracks began to form on his skin, running through every part of his body in vein-like patterns, and when they reached his eyeballs, red veins appeared within them, and just as Min Hong reached the edge of this sixth stage, all these cracks finally met, and Min Hong shed his outer layer which drifted away without the presence of any wind, revealing a dazzling Min Hong beneath…

Min Hong at this point had a skin that glistened with a golden sheen, making hit look almost metal like…

His hair was lush black, with golden trim running through either sides of his head…

His eyes were pitch black, with golden buttons at its center…

"Rebirth Trials – Mind Cleansing!"

The moment Min Hong stepped onto the seventh stage, he entered a green colored flame, which looked a lot like the ghostly flames from the netherworld…

Instantly, memories began to playback within Min Hong's consciousness one after the other, and whenever it came to a part where Min Hong had done something he wasn't particularly proud of, the memory bubble will explode into streams of green flames that would wreak havoc within Min Hong's mind…

This trials was unique in the sense that it will search Min Hong's minds for memories, and allows Min Hong's heart to judge it…

If Min Hong felt deep within his heart that his actions there weren't just, logical and good, he would suffer retribution by the netherworld flames…

Memories after memories came flooding through Min Hong's mind with blistering speed, and Min Hong truly suffered this time around…

Several stupid actions and decisions, mistakes, evil and bad deeds, times where he had hurt people or been the cause of someone else's suffering for no just cause, he suffered through it all, with the latest being the decision he made with his ladies…

As these memories exploded into streams of flames, they began to taint Min Hong's consciousness…

Changing it from white into a mixture of white and green, as Min Hong continue to suffer from the retributions of his decisions…

The more Min Hong approached the edge of this seventh stage, the faster the memories and the flames surged causing Min Hong to clutch his head in pain as he rushed out of the stage before collapsing into the eight stage where a purple flame was burning…

"Mind Cleansing Trials - Passed!"

"Rebirth Trials – Soul Duality!"

The voice announced both statements consecutively, as the purple flames on the stage began to surge towards Min Hong before transforming into a giant battle axe, and just as they axe were about to descend, the greenish part of Min Hong's consciousness gathered to one part of his body; the left side;

Swoosh! Boom!

"Gahhh!"

Min Hong bellowed in pain as the axe then descended and cleaved him in two halves, the white part on one side and the green side on the other…

Then the axe dispersed into flames and surged into the green part until the left part of Min Hong's consciousness was demonic purple in color…