The back hall on the first floor of the castle had kept the Hell Staircase open for nearly two hours. Mo Lin had told everyone to spend the morning preparing and that the trials would begin in the afternoon, so no one had appeared in the hall for the past two hours.
"Fuck!" Mo Lin slapped a palm against the floor of the back hall, then twisted his body and dragged himself off the Hell Staircase and into the hall.
Out of sheer stubbornness, Mo Lin had made it back from the three-hundredth step without activating his Martial Soul. By the final ten steps, though, he had been so exhausted that he collapsed onto the staircase and barely managed to crawl back to the starting point.
He had to admit, the Hell Staircase was far more torturous than the Sea God's Light. Mo Lin had underestimated its difficulty. Qi-State Origin-Flow kept his Soul Power flowing endlessly, but it couldn't restore his physical strength. If he wanted to use the Six Treasury Immortal Thief to recover quickly, he also needed to bring enough food.
This time, he had already distributed all the resources he'd gotten from the Spirit Hall convoy. He hadn't brought the Storage Soul Tool containing his own supplies with him, either; he'd left it in his room. If Mo Lin had been able to eat even one bite of food, he wouldn't have had to crawl up the last ten steps.
Of course, part of the difficulty had been self-imposed. If he'd activated his Winged Dragon Martial Soul, he wouldn't have ended up in such a sorry state. His rate of recovery would surely have kept pace with how quickly he was expending his strength.
He was only worried that, if he went farther in the future, he