Chapter 136: Final Trial: The Trial Of Death

Death resumed its deadly activities. Rahu awoke standing knee-deep in black water that oozed decay. The surface was eerily still, yet something was moving beneath it, brushing against his legs slowly; he did not retreat.

The moment the calm water stirred upward, flooding his lungs with icy filth, he forced his body to remain upright, refusing to surrender.

He drowned standing with his eyes open and memorizing the sensation of air abandoning him.

When he returned…he was falling, no sky, no ground. Just endless,maddening descent through crushing pressure that destroyed his body piece by piece.

The fall hadn’t ended with an impact; it ended when his awareness could no longer endure being stretched infinitely.

Darkness…

He awoke kneeling on scorched ground, his hands already burned to ashes. This time, the pain was accurate and precise, almost surgical. His nerves were isolated and ignited each individually, as if the trial wanted to watch him squirm and break.

Rahu gritted his teeth, his eyes steady, and slowly allowed the fire to take him without letting out a single whimper!

Again.

Again.

Again.

Death blended into one another without any suppression; he awoke already wounded, memories flooding in his mind faster than his mind could process.

Sometimes he died before understanding where he was.

Once, he lived in a barren land, hunting nothing, speaking to no one, until his body simply ceased to function out of nothingness.

The trial was no longer speculating; it was refining its cruelty on him.

By the seven hundred and fiftieth death, Rahu noticed that the trial had stopped to surprise him. Instead, it began stripping him down, not in the literal sense, of course, but removing variables.

​His Strength was taken, mobility was taken, sight, sound, and even the sense of time…all of it.

​He just existed in awareness alone, suspended in a state where death wasn’t an event but a constant, cosmic pressure, squeezing him from all directions. There was no ’moment’ of dying, just gradual erasure.

And still, he held on. He refused to give in so early; his will was stronger than steel.

He adapted. When his thoughts became heavy, he merely simplified them. Where memory threatened to blur, he anchored it with endless repetitions. His name, his intent, his will!

And unknown to him. Inside his body, or rather his soul, a small pitch-black seed was being formed. It was so dark that no light could be reflected on it.

At death seven hundred and eighty-three, he experienced something new. He suddenly started to feel death. When will it occur, how will it occur, and why will it occur?

It was… certainty.

His awareness became vast as an ocean; this realization settled deep inside him. It was cold and undeniable.

Death was no longer foreign; it was…expected.

It was inevitable.

The next deaths came faster; he was crushed into nothingness by an invisible force, and he was erased mid-thought. He ceased to exist while still aware of…ceasing. In one single iteration, he felt himself fragment into infinite endings, each one demanding attention and each one ending before it could be even fully understood.

His mind was stretched…beyond mortal boundaries. And not cracked, but stretched.

By the eight hundredth death, Rahu no longer experienced disorientation upon awakening. There was no pause nor any adjustment. Awareness snapped instantly, as a blade relocked into its sheath.

He was back in the chamber. But it suddenly felt smaller now, not physically. But in relevance. He understood that the trial was no longer testing whether he could endure death; it was pressing something far more fundamental.

Whether having learned death in all its forms. Violent, mundane, humiliating, meaningless. Rahu would still continue; the path of Supremacy was not for everyone. Only those with the strongest of wills could hope to contend for it.

Rahu just stood there motionlessly, his eyes cold and calm, his expression devoid of any sort of emotion. It was downright scary despite his handsome face.

He just kept glancing at the ceiling; it was a form of provocation…which worked.

The air grew heavy.

The deaths continued, from the eight hundredth death onward, the trial stopped presenting the endings as experiences. Death no longer arrived ’at’ Rahu. It started to unfold within him.

He awoke to find that his body existed only partially; sometimes his limbs responded, while his torso didn’t. Sometimes his senses disagreed with one another, his sight insisting he stand straight while his touch reported he was flattened. Spread across a ragged surface, these contradictions didn’t resolve, but they accumulated.

He died standing inside his own corpse.

He died watching himself ’refuse’ to die.

He died because a previous death reached behind him and closed It’s grip around him.

The trial abandoned the ’sequentiality’ entirely.

Death no longer followed awakening; awakening began occurring inside death that hadn’t even finished yet.

Rahu became aware of multiple conclusions pressing in from different directions, demanding precedence. The sensation wasn’t the slightest bit painful, but…overloaded, it was an attempt to fracture continuity itself.

But Rahu did not attempt to prioritize; he just let them pass. By the eight hundred and sixtieth death, the trial began attacking definitions rather than the states. He died as the concept of distance collapsed, making the movements meaningless.

He died when casualty slackened, allowing effects to occur without origin.

He died fully conscious, yet he was unable to determine ’what’ had ended.

At the nine hundredth death, Rahu merely ceased to perceive death as a boundary; it had become a condition at this point.

Existence began flickering between valid and invalid states, and the trial even tested if he would cling.

But, Rahu offered none; the nine hundred and fiftieth death fractured identity itself. He experienced endings where his name no longer referred to anything real, where ’intent’ existed without an owner, where will persisted without any form.

The trial pressed harder and harder, layering eraser upon…erasure, attempting to force contradiction into surrender.

Still, nothing moved. By the nine hundred and ninety-ninth death. Rahu existed in a condition where dying and returning were indistinguishable processes, stripped of meaning and stripped of…progression itself.

Then, finally, the thousandth death…

This time it simply occurred…Rahu’s body was cracked all over, from head to toe. His once smooth skin, muscles, tendons, and bones, all of them cracked like a…shell.

And finally, after an hour, the shell burst apart, revealing a horrifying existence.

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