Chapter 282: Too Easy
The reward windows remained in front of Kael for a while, hovering over the corpse of the Dark Beast as if the Tower wanted to make sure he properly appreciated the result before moving on.
He appreciated it.
Mostly.
His arm still shook from the final punch, his shoulder was still bleeding, and the torn remains of his Journeyman’s Leather Jacket made him want to curse for an entirely different reason. That thing had taken effort, materials, and pride to make, and the Dark Beast had treated its defensive properties like decorative stitching. Still, the Beast was dead, the ranking had been recalculated, and the Tower had finally coughed up what it owed.
Kael collected the loot one piece at a time, storing the Dark Beast Core, the Corrupted Getava Fang, and the Beast Hide of Broken Night into his inventory. The Rune Fragment took longer to look at. It sat in his palm like a broken piece of something that should have been much grander, its octagonal shape immediately drawing his attention. Runes had shapes for a reason. The Tower did not hand those out carelessly. A complete octagonal rune meant something legendary, something beyond what he had any business holding this early. Yet this thing was only a fragment, cracked, unstable, and reduced to Epic Tier because most of its original authority had been lost.
He looked at the Beast’s corpse, then back at the egg.
The Dark Beast had been shaped like a corrupted mammalian predator, somewhere between a great cat, a gorilla, and a nightmare that enjoyed eating shadows. It had fur, paws, fangs, a chest, lungs, ribs, and everything else his fist had just spent a great deal of internal energy punching through. Nothing about it suggested eggs. Then again, this was the Tower. Questioning whether a mammal-like monster could be born from an egg felt almost petty.
He turned the egg once more, then gently placed it into his inventory.
"Fine," he said. "Egg."
The arena dissolved soon after.
The corpse, the fires, the cracked stone, and the last drifting remnants of red vapor all faded into darkness. Kael felt the familiar pull of transition take hold of his body, though this one was less violent than the forced transfer into the Dark Beast challenge. The world folded around him, his weight vanished for a breath, and then the ground returned beneath his feet.
He stood before the entrance to the next stage.
No crowd. No companions. No Christy limping beside him. No Hakim watching quietly from behind cloth and tired eyes. Just Kael, his loot, his damaged jacket, and the odd sensation of having finished one miserable trial only to be presented with another. The door ahead was plain black, without carvings or visible locks, and the moment he stepped toward it, the Tower accepted the movement as consent.
The world went dark.
Not dim.
Dark.
The kind of darkness that erased the hand before the face, the floor beneath the feet, and the distance between one thought and the next. Kael’s eyes opened wider on instinct, but nothing answered them. Even his Eyes of the Basilisk found no purchase. There was no faint outline, no weak glow, no shift in temperature that painted the room in usable shapes. It was as if the Tower had not simply removed light, but had banned the concept from existing in the space around him.
Notifications appeared.
[Fifth Floor Entered.]
[Trial of Penance: Doubt.]
[Trial of Doubt has begun.]
[Objective: Do not fall to Ignorance and Doubt.]
[Trial Duration: 72:00:00]
[Condition One: Remain within a place where no light, brightness, or visible illumination exists.]
[Your senses will be severely dulled for the duration of the trial.]
[Warning: Ignorance breeds Doubt.]
[Warning: Doubt invites Fracture.]
[Survive until the end of the trial.]
Kael read the windows once.
Then he read them again, because the first reading made the trial sound too simple.
"Stay in the dark for three days?" he said.
His voice came out strange. Not muffled exactly, but distant, as if even sound had lost confidence in itself. He could barely feel the vibration of the words in his throat. His feet touched something solid, but the pressure was weak, almost uncertain. His breathing existed, but it felt farther away than it should have, as though his body had become a thing he was controlling through several layers of thick cloth.
For most climbers, he imagined this would become annoying first.
Then uncomfortable.
Then terrifying.
Utter darkness where no direction existed. Dulled senses that made every movement questionable. No visible enemies, no visible walls, no way to measure the size of the room, and no reliable way to tell whether the Tower was being honest about the duration. An hour could feel like ten. Ten hours could feel like one. Hunger would arrive, then thirst, then exhaustion, then the crawling thought that maybe the trial was lying. Maybe there was no end. Maybe something was in the darkness with them. Maybe the system had not mentioned the true condition. Maybe they had already failed and simply had not been told.
Doubt would do the rest.
Fracture would rise from inside the climber’s own head. Not because a monster attacked, not because the environment crushed them, but because the mind hated being denied proof. The trial was not asking for strength. It was asking a person to sit inside ignorance and not let that ignorance become fear.
Kael stood there for a few seconds.
Then he snorted.
"This is it?"
The darkness gave no answer.
For him, the trial’s greatest weapon felt embarrassingly familiar. Presence had already taught him something very similar. The rune lowered his presence, made the world around him feel dull, distant, and half-dead whenever he used it. When someone actively searched for him, the effect became even more exhausting. It did not simply hide him from others. It made his own connection to the world feel weaker, as if he had been pushed slightly outside of himself and told to keep walking anyway.
That had been disturbing the first few times.
Then it had become training.
The Tower had added complete darkness, which was irritating, but darkness was just another missing sense. Kael had spent too much time being miserable under Fist King’s training to panic because the room was quiet and his body felt wrong. If anything, the absence of distraction made the situation almost clean. No monsters charging him. No group politics. No ration arguments. No old men trying to cut bridges. No sandstorms. No corrupted Beast turning into a red giant because someone shoved a broken legendary rune into its flesh.
Just darkness.
Just time.
Just him.
He opened his inventory and, to his relief, it answered. A skin of water appeared in his hand, though the sensation of touch was so dull that he almost dropped it before adjusting his grip. He drank carefully, then pulled out food and ate with the same slow attention. Unlike the Trial of Endurance, his inventory was not sealed. That alone made this place feel less like a death trap and more like a very unpleasant waiting room.
He then pulled a healing potion and drank it, which healed the injuries on his shoulder from having fought the beast.
His thoughts drifted briefly toward Christy.
Now that she was out of the Trial of Endurance, she could drink a healing potion and fix her leg properly. No wonder the desert had been such a pain for her. She had likely possessed the means to deal with the injury all along, but the trial had locked away exactly what she needed and forced her to keep walking on the damage. Kael could respect her more for that. Not enough to become sentimental about it, but enough to admit she had endured a nasty handicap without folding.
He finished eating, stored the rest, and rolled his shoulders.
There was nothing else to do.
So he trained.
Kael raised his fists in the dark and began throwing punches into empty air.
The first few were slow, testing the shape of the space around him. His senses were dulled, but his body remembered its own range. Shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, heel, breath. He did not need to see an enemy to know whether his punch traveled correctly. Fist King had beaten that into him through repetition until the motion existed below thought. A hundred thousand punches had been the minimum during the final months of their time together, not a poetic number, not a dramatic exaggeration, but a miserable daily reality carved into muscle and bone.
Kael began counting.
One.
Two.
Three.
The punches came steady, not rushed. A normal person throwing one punch per second would need close to twenty-eight hours to reach one hundred thousand, assuming their body did not give out first, which it absolutely would. Kael could do it much faster if he wanted. His current body, strengthened through stats, training, and the absurd mountain hell his master called instruction, could blur through repetitions at a pace that would make an ordinary fighter question whether the arms were still attached to a human being.
He decided against that.
The point was not to finish quickly. The point was to mark time, to occupy the body, and to prevent the mind from inventing enemies in the dark. If the trial wanted him to doubt how long he had been inside, then he would build his own clock out of pain and repetition.
Punch.
Step.
Shift.
Punch.
The Wanderlusting Demon followed after the fists. Kael began moving between strikes, weaving around nothing, dodging blows that were not there, slipping past imaginary claws by the width of a breath. He pictured the Dark Beast’s paws, the Stone Maw’s jaws, the sandstorm’s pressure, the old bridge collapsing beneath him, the Fist King’s ridiculous calm as he explained that movement wasted by fear was movement stolen from victory. The darkness did not matter. The lack of sensation did not matter. In some ways, it made the practice sharper, because he could not rely on the world to correct him. He had to know.
Hours passed.
Or what felt like hours.
Kael did not care which.
The count continued.
At some point, his shoulders began burning. Later, the burn became a deep ache that crawled into the back and ribs. His legs joined the complaint soon after, especially once he began mixing footwork patterns more seriously, shifting through arcs, pivots, low slips, short retreats, and sharp returns. The darkness swallowed every movement, but the count remained.
Twenty thousand.
Thirty.
Forty.
No notification warned him of rising Fracture.
No doubt settled in.
The trial waited for the mind to fray, and Kael gave it repetition instead.
He drank when thirst became annoying enough to interfere. He ate only enough to keep his stomach from complaining. Then he resumed. The Trial of Doubt had likely broken stronger men and women than him, not because they lacked courage, but because courage was difficult to hold when every sense told them nothing and every thought had too much room to echo. Kael understood that. He simply had too many habits born from worse discomfort to treat this as anything special.
By the time his count crossed seventy thousand, exhaustion began sitting heavily in his limbs. Not the desperate exhaustion of combat, where failure meant claws through the chest, but the slow, honest exhaustion of training. His breathing became rougher, though even that sound reached him faintly through the trial’s dulling effect. Sweat ran down his back beneath his damaged jacket. His fists kept moving.
Eighty thousand.
Ninety.
At ninety-seven thousand, he paused long enough to breathe, flexed his fingers, cursed the Dark Beast under his breath for the state of his equipment, then resumed from the last number he trusted rather than the one he hoped was correct. Cheating the count would only make the entire exercise pointless, and if there was one thing Fist King had carved into him, it was that lying during training only made the next real fight more honest.
One hundred thousand.
Kael lowered his fists.
For a while, he simply stood there in the dark, arms hanging at his sides, chest rising and falling with slow, tired breaths. His body hurt. His mind, however, felt strangely clean. The darkness had not become comforting, exactly, but it had lost any authority it might have had over him. There could be a wall ten steps away or a mile. There could be nothing around him or an entire arena full of silent watchers. None of it mattered. He had counted his time. He had moved. He had trained. He had given the trial nothing useful to feed on.
No Fracture rose.
No doubt settled.
Kael let out a long breath and sat down, then lowered himself fully onto his back. The ground beneath him was almost impossible to feel clearly, but it was there, and that was enough. He closed his eyes despite the fact that open and closed meant almost the same thing in this place.
A faint smile touched his face.
Of all the miserable things the Tower had thrown at him recently, this one was almost enjoyable.
"Wake me up when you become a real trial," he muttered.
Then, in the absolute dark of the Trial of Penance, Kael drifted to sleep.
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