"AAAAHHHHH!!!"
The scream echoed through the inheritance cave of the Barbarian Queen, bouncing off ancient stone walls carved with the scenes of battles and glory of the past.
But it wasn't a scream of agony.
It was ecstasy.
Ma Li hung suspended on a massive wooden cross shaped like a huge 'X,' her arms and legs spread wide and bound with chains of dark iron.
The cross itself was positioned at the intersection of four torments. Each torment was different from the other. They were designed to push a cultivator beyond their limits and into madness.
In the direction of her left hand, roaring flames licked at her skin; the heat was so intense her skin was slowly becoming charred.
The fire was burning strangely.
It was not just physical heat, but something inside it stirred the qi within her meridians, setting her entire cultivation base ablaze from within.
"Ahhhnn~" Ma Li was not just suffering in vain. 'I am becoming stronger; I can feel it.'
The more the fire burned, the stronger her body was becoming, and her resistance to the fire was becoming stronger.
When the trail had started a month ago, her flesh was not the only thing that was being burned.
To her right hand, there was a pit of absolute cold.
Deep inside you could see shards of absolute ice. Just from the mist produced by these ice shards, she was suffering 'pain' no different from the fire's torment.
"Mmm~ I am wetting myself! How shameful… if only Noah were here to watch—no, no… what am I thinking? I have to focus on the trial."
Ice crystals formed on her exposed skin; frostbite was slowly flickering across her body, making her look no different from a dead body.
The temperature was so low that normal cultivators would have their blood frozen solid within seconds. Each breath she took felt like inhaling shards of glass.
But Ma Li was no normal cultivator, 'it feels like I am losing the virginity of my throat, hehe...'
Around her left foot, a pool of viscous poison bubbled and steamed. The corrosion of the poison was so strong that even the strong chains binding her body were slowly starting to rust. But at the rate it was happening, it would take a few months before it shattered completely.
Noxious green vapors rose up, burning her legs, seeping into her bones, attacking her body from the inside out.
The poison was designed to corrupt cultivation bases and to shatter meridians. Even Golden Core experts were not immune to the effects of the poison. Without the cultivation technique of the Barbarian Queen, which she had obtained in the domain trial back in the Quan Kingdom, she would have been turned into a withering husk.
And finally, on the last plank, suspended in a basin that slowly tilted and poured its contents over her right leg, was hot boiling molten metal.
It was in a state of matter that existed at temperatures incomprehensible to mortal flesh. Just a drop of such metal could extinguish a mortal out of existence.
And such hot-blasted metal was being dripped onto her legs, each droplet a new universe of suffering.
Any normal person would have been dead within seconds.
Any sane person would have begged for death within minutes.
Ma Li threw her head back and laughed.
"YES!" she screamed, her voice raw with pleasure. "MORE! GIVE ME MORE!"
The elemental torments intensified, as if responding to her demand. The flames roared higher; the ice spread faster; the poison burned deeper; the metal fell in heavier drops.
And Ma Li's expression shifted between pain and pleasure so rapidly that they became indistinguishable—two sides of the same coin, both feeding the same insatiable hunger within her.
'I can't decide,' she thought, her consciousness fragmenting under the assault of sensation. 'Which one feels better? The fire? The ice? The poison? The metal?'
She tried to focus on the flames, to savor the way they seemed to caress her skin even as they destroyed it.
But then the ice would send a spike of cold. It was so pure and so perfect that her attention shifted.
And then the poison would create a new flavor of agony in her lungs, like a lover trying to demand her attention, jealous she was paying attention to others.
And finally, the metal would—
"FUCK!" Ma Li screamed again, unable to choose. Her mind was drowning in a sea of perfectly balanced torment.
Sometimes it was heaven. Sometimes hell.
Yet, It was everything she hoped for.
High above, within the massive stone statue of the Barbarian Queen that stood on top of the inheritance cave, something stirred for the first time in thousands of years.
A faint wisp of energy stirred. It was blue in color on the outside, but on the inside a magnitude of colors flashed.
The wisp gaped and deformed, taking the shape of a woman. If any barbarian saw her, they would slam their heads on the ground, screaming their greetings and pledging their bodies to the Barbarian Queen.
'Finally,' the soul fragment thought as she looked down. 'After all these centuries... finally, someone worthy.'
There was something else in her voice besides recognition and relief. It was something akin to jealousy. The reason for the jealousy? No one knew.
The Barbarian Queen had been many things in life. A conqueror. A warrior without equal. The ruler of savage lands and fiercer people.
But more than anything, she had been like Ma Li.
Someone who understood that pain and pleasure were not opposites but the same thing. In her opinion it was the universe's way of reminding mortals they were alive.
Most people feared pain. Spent their lives building walls against suffering.
But people like her, the Barbarian Queen, embraced it.
To her agony was ecstasy. She used to find joy in the very things that should have broken her. And in doing so, she had become unstoppable.
'Only someone who truly understands,' the soul fragment continued, watching Ma Li writhe in her bonds with that insane smile on her face, 'can inherit what I've left behind.'
