Over the past three years, the inheritance cave had tested Ma Li with trial after trial. She'd been buried alive in shifting sand, her lungs burning as she suffocated slowly.
She had been impaled on blades taller than a person that somehow didn't kill but left her suspended in a state between life and death.
She'd fought in illusory barriers against spirit beasts while poisoned, injured, and even half-dead from exhaustion.
Each trial was designed to break the spirit of the contender. To make them crawl between life and death. To prove to themselves that they were not just another Barbarian or human trying to eye the inheritance of the Barbarian Queen.
Others may have cracked from trying to reach the expectations of the first barbarian queen.
But Ma Li never broke. Because she didn't want to break.
Every trial was a new experience. A new sense of pleasure she had not tasted before, and now she could savor it all. No, she wanted to have it all.
