Ashen Ascension: The Divided Flame-Chapter 92: Labyrinth Of The 9 Realms: 5th Realm

Halfway through the trial his breathing had grown heavier and the strain began settling into his body. Even though he had reduced his movements and used only brief bursts of mana, everything inside him was slowly draining—mana, soul energy, and simple physical stamina.

His arms ached from the endless swings and thrusts, and the muscles along his shoulders burned each time he lifted the sword again. By his rough estimate he had already cut down more than five hundred skeletons, yet the arena showed no sign of stopping. Ivor tightened his grip on the hilt and forced himself to keep moving.

The skeletons never changed their behavior. They did not grow smarter or faster. The arena simply pressed him through numbers, forcing constant reactions and trying to drag him into wasting energy.

Each time the pressure increased, he returned to his own rhythm: step, turn, strike—ending each skeleton as quickly as possible before the next one reached him.

The ending came quietly.

Skeletons continued emerging from the recesses, but the groups began shrinking. Where three had appeared before, now only two stepped out.

Then only one. Ivor noticed the change but refused to relax. His stance remained steady, his breathing controlled, and he finished each opponent with the same careful efficiency he had maintained throughout the fight. When the final skeleton collapsed into bone fragments, no new shapes emerged from the walls.

Silence slowly returned to the arena.

Ivor remained standing in the center of the chamber, listening. His Soul Sense stayed active for several moments longer, sweeping the area for any remaining presence. It found nothing except empty space and scattered bone fragments cooling across the stone floor.

His mana pool was lower than he liked.

A faint blue line of light appeared along the far wall as the stone began shifting aside to reveal the next passage.

Ivor glanced at it, then ignored it.

Instead he lowered himself to the ground and sat where he stood. The fight had taken more from him than he wanted to admit. Closing his eyes briefly, he extended his Soul Sense outward and gently drew the ambient mana of the chamber toward himself, guiding the thin currents back into his core while his body rested.

Barely fifteen minutes had passed when the blue light along the wall began to fade and the stone door started sliding back into place. Ivor opened his eyes immediately. The passage was closing. He rose at once and moved quickly across the arena, slipping through the narrowing gap just before the stone sealed shut behind him.

The passage beyond the arena sloped gently downward before opening into another chamber carved into the mountain's interior.

Ivor stepped through cautiously, expecting the same immediate hostility that had greeted him in the previous realms, yet nothing moved within the room. The air felt still, the stone walls plain and unadorned.

At the center of the chamber stood a thick stone slab rising to roughly the height of ten feet. Its surface had been battered by some blows. Six slashes covered the front face of the slab, layered over one another in different depths and angles. Some of them were shallow scratches that barely disturbed the stone, while others cut far deeper, forming narrow grooves that sank noticeably into the rock.

Next to the slab stood a tall, transparent column filled with pale sand resting in the upper half.

As Ivor stepped farther into the room, the sand began falling.

The grains slipped downward in a slow but steady stream, collecting gradually in the lower chamber of the glass pillar. Time had begun moving the moment he entered the chamber.

He studied the room again, allowing his Soul Sense to expand outward. The only objects in the chamber were the slab and the falling sand.

Ivor approached the slab and examined the surface more closely. The marks carved into the stone were clearly made by blades. Their angles suggested sword strikes delivered from many different stances, some vertical, some diagonal, others horizontal. The deeper marks were remarkably thin, their lines cutting sharply into the stone rather than spreading wide across the surface.

He glanced at the sand pillar again and saw that the stream had already begun to thin the upper chamber.

The intention of the room was obvious enough.

He drew his sword.

Mana moved naturally through his core and flowed along the blade as he formed a familiar coating across the edge. The faint blue glow spread along the steel before he swung the weapon in a clean arc toward the slab.

The strike landed with a solid crack. A shallow line appeared where the blade met the stone. For a brief moment the surface of the slab glowed red.

The color spread outward across the mark and then faded just as quickly.

Ivor looked at the scratch he had left behind and then lifted his gaze to the sand pillar. The sand continued falling at the same calm pace.

The result had clearly not been enough.

He gathered more mana and repeated the strike, this time pushing more power through the blade before the impact. The sword struck harder, the force of the blow echoing through the quiet chamber. The mark left behind was slightly deeper than the first.

The slab flashed red again. This time the glow lingered a little longer, yet the color itself appeared lighter, more muted than before.

Still insufficient.

Ivor's eyes moved to the sand pillar once more. The upper chamber had already lost a noticeable amount of its contents. Perhaps ten percent of the sand had slipped into the lower half since he had entered the room.

He shifted his grip on the sword.

Instead of simply striking again from where he stood, he stepped back several paces across the chamber floor. Mana gathered around the blade as he prepared for a stronger attack. This time he moved forward with momentum, his body turning into a spinning strike that carried the full force of his arms and shoulders behind the blade.

The sword slammed into the slab with far greater power.

The impact produced a deeper cut in the stone.

Once again the slab glowed red. The color was slightly brighter than before but still far from the intense glow he suspected the room demanded. Ivor straightened slowly as the glow faded. That strike had been one of the strongest attacks he could deliver with his current control over mana.

Yet the result remained nearly the same.

He lowered the sword slightly and studied the slab again. The deeper marks carved into the surface stood out more clearly now that he had added his own shallow scratches among them. Something about those older marks felt different. They were narrow and precise, their lines cutting sharply into the stone as if the blade had pierced the surface rather than striking it with brute force.

His own marks were different.

They were wider. He tested the idea by gathering more mana again, pushing even greater power into the blade before delivering another strike. The glow of the coating intensified, spreading brightly across the steel as he swung.

The slab flashed red again after the impact. The improvement was barely noticeable. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Ivor exhaled quietly.

More mana was not solving the problem. That meant the test was not measuring strength alone. It was measuring how concentrated the strike was.

He remembered the previous realm where he had struggled to gather mana toward the tip of his blade instead of spreading it across the entire edge. The technique had been crude and unstable, but the results had already shown him that concentrated mana produced far greater penetration.

So he decided to do that.