Polishing Dao Heart Pagoda

The reason that the Polishing Dao Heart Pagoda reached the level of Quasi-Emperor instead of the Supreme Tier has to do with Wang Wei.

At an early age, Wang Wei discovered that illusion had little to no effect on him because of his mysterious soul. So, to make sure that the Pagoda affected him, when it was being refined, he released a small part of his soul into it.

Thus, after passing the Heavenly Tribulation, The Pagoda reached the level of Quasi-Emperor—which surprised many people.

The Pagoda trial is more than a tool for Polishing Dao Heart, but a way to secretly train the knowledge and experience of the Dao Opening Sect disciple. Although the cultivation techniques and realm in the Pagoda are not real, the disciples can use them as reference when creating their own techniques—if they have such talent.

### First Trial of the Pagoda

* You will find yourself in a vast and endless desert. Your body will be a little malnourished and will start with a bit of food and water. You need to walk in the desert in any direction, after a few hours you will feel hungry. After 3 days, your clothes will be tattered and your shoes and skin burnt because of the heat. The amount of food you have never increases or decreases: just the right amount to keep you alive, nothing more and nothing less. After a few days of suffering, a voice will try to make you give up. After 7 days you could not even distinguish between your skin and your ribs. Your arms will be so thin that you could use them as a ruler. The skin underneath your foot, burned off, you could only see your muscle oozing out blood with every step, leaving a trail of blood, hardship, and misfortune. If you can endure 13 days, only your skeleton will remain, and it will slowly decompose.

### Second Trial of the Pagoda

* You will find yourself in a very dim and grey space. The earth underneath your feet will lack vitality, the air you breath became stale. You will stand there alone. If you try to talk, you will hear sound coming out of your mouth, but there won't be noise after your voice travels less than a meter from you. The whole space exudes a bland, desolate, and lonely atmosphere. This trial tested a person’s ability to bear loneliness. In this eternal silence, you can hear the beating of your heart, you can hear the sound of your blood flowing through every vein of your body, the contraction, and the relaxation of your muscles. You can even hear the elasticity of your skin bouncing on the muscles underneath. The maximum amount you can stay in this trial is 100 years.

### Third Trial of the Pagoda

* The Third Trial can be considered one of the harshest trials of the Pagoda. The purpose of this trial is simple and quite straightforward: that is pain. In this trial, the testers will experience all kinds of torture—both to the body and the soul—and they simply have to endure it.
	+ In the First Layer of Hell, you will find yourself bound by chains, surrounded by a bunch of demons. On top of your head, there will be a plaque with the word*: “Chamber of Tongue Ripping”.* These devils will use all kinds of means to cut out your tongue. Whether to attach chains to your tongue and pull it, or simply cutting it with a knife, or using this machine that slowly twists your tongue until it becomes deformed and unrecognizable. They will go as far as burning your tongue. The worst part is the fact that this torture will never go beyond your limits. As soon you cannot bear the pain and were about to pass out, they would stop, then a new tongue would grow out so that the pain could continue. It will feel as if they were slowly pushing your threshold of pain to a higher level. What’s even worse, this torture also has some spiritual aspects. Every time your tongue is ripped out, You will feel that you have lost the ability to express yourself out loud. Not just physically, but that you lost the determination to express your ideas, your philosophy, your views, and even your aspiration. All these will slowly be taken from you.
	+ In the Second Layer of Hell, the Chamber of Scissors, you will experience the pain of having all your fingers cut one by one. You will feel as if a part of yourself was forever taken away, that without being whole, you will never amount to anything in life.
	+ In the Third Layer of Hell, the Chamber of Iron Cycads, you will experience being hung by iron trees. The trees would penetrate your body, then impale all the organs they come in contact with. Your screams will echo throughout the chamber for hours without end.
	+ In the Fourth Layer of Hell, the Chamber of Mirrors of Retribution, you will see your true self through a mirror. In this mirror, you will see yourself achieving your goals, but also all the things you have lost, and all the suffering you have made others go through to achieve your dreams.
	+ In the Fifth Layer of Hell, the Chamber of Steam, you will experience being steam alive in a steamer. You will watch as your insides are slowly liquified by heat and steam.
	+ In the Sixth Layer of Hell, the Forest of Copper Column, you will be placed on a burning copper column and experienced the pain of your skin burning off.
	+ In the Seven Layer of Hell, the Mountain of Knives, you will be forced to walk barefooted uphill a mountain full of sharp and pointy knives. Every step you take, your foot would be impaled, blood oozing out leaving a trail behind. Then, when you reach the top, you have to return the same way you came. You need to repeat the process nine times before leaving.
	+ In the Eighth Layer of Hell, the Hill of Ice, you will be left naked in a freezing hill. Your body will start shivering. Your speech, slurred, your breathing, shallow. Your skin will become bright red, your consciousness will slowly start fading, Your body function will drop below the level of normal function. Even your ideas or memories of warmth and comfort will slowly start fading away.
	+ In the Ninth Layer of Hell, the Cauldron of Boiling Oil, you will experience how it feels to be cooked alive with fried oil in a large cauldron. You will even see the demon in charge of this level secretly put some seasoning in the cauldron. What’s even worse was that this process did not happen only once, but repeatedly.
	+ In Tenth Layer of Hell, the Chamber of Ox. In this layer, you will be abused by all kinds of animals. Some of them will use their horns to impale you, some will use a horde to trample on you until you turn into meat sauce on the ground. Some animal will slowly ate your skin, then crawled inside your body to munch on your internal organs like some kind of expansive deluxe meal. Some tiny animals will slowly crawl into your brain from your ear, then proceed to munch on of your brain. Some will use poison to slowly destroy your immune system.
	+ In the Eleventh Layer of Hell, the Chamber of Rock, you will have to hold a large rock on top of your head until your strength was exhausted. Then you will fall in putrid water made of all the world’s filth. This water was literally made of any filth imaginable; the water was so dirty that a drop of it could corrupt a person’s soul.
	+ In the Twelfth Layer of Hell, the Chamber of Mortar and Pestles, the devils will force fed you liquid lava. You will have to experience the feeling of your tongue burning, then your esophagus melted. Afterward, your stomach and other organs will be violently melted one by one.
	+ In the Thirteenth Layer of Hell, the Pool of Blood, you will be stabbed in different parts of the body. These stabs were not fatal, but deep enough to allow your blood to flow out of your body. Then you will watch your life slowly fade away from you as more blood flew out of your body.
	+ In the Fourteenth Layer of Hell, the Town of Suicide, you will be constantly lashed with a whip. However, this was not a simple whip, but one that directly affected the soul. The soul is an illusory yet real thing in the world of cultivators. The soul is a hundred times more fragile and sensitive than the physical body. As such, the pain to the soul can magnify a hundred to a thousand times of the body.
	+ In the Fifteenth Layer of Hell, the Chamber of Dismemberment, you will experience being hacked into pieces.
	+ In the Sixteenth Layer of Hell, Mountain of Flames, you will be sent inside a hollow mountain. Then, the mountain would be slowly filled with lava. The terrible thing about this layer was the fact that the lava will not directly burn and kill you. No, it slowly cooked you, then, the lava solidified and encased you inside, thus killing you due to asphyxiation.
	+ In the Seventeenth Layer of Hell, the Yard of Stone Mill, you will be placed on a stone mill, then slowly grinded like a blender until your body turned into a bloody, savoury and slurry milkshake. All your skin, muscle, organs, and bones will be grinded into slushy. This process repeated itself many times over.
	+ In the Eighteenth and Final Layer of Hell, the Chamber of Saw, you will be sawed in half in many ways. Whether horizontally, vertically, or obliquely, in this layer, your final result was to be separated into two. In this layer, you will even experience the pain of your soul being cut into two or more parts.

### Fourth Trial of the Pagoda

* In this trial, you will forget who you are and where you come from. Now you are the Emperor of the Great Xia Empire who ruled an extremely vast amount of land. Your empire is prosperous; all common people had enough food to eat, proper clothes to shelter them from the winter cold, and enough reserve wealth to spend freely. The ministers are all loyal to the Emperor, the generals who hold vast amounts of military power are loyal and had no desire to rebel. All the other foreign countries in the world worship Great Xia and dare not encroach on its border. They would send large amounts of taxes in the form of offering every year.

But in fact, all of these are your delusions. At this moment, the Great Xia Empire is actually on the verge of collapse. The majority of the land and wealth of the country are in the hand of the aristocrat family. Most of the officials were corrupted and fighting with each other for power. The court was divided between the Head Eunuch and the Prime Minister. These two people hold more than 90% of the capital’s power. In the different Prefectures, the local governors held all the political power and control the city guards. On the border of the Great Xia Empire, the armies are loyal to their commanding officer and do not even recognize the Emperor. The live of the common people are more miserable than wandering street dogs. They have gone through many famines due to the recent drought. The government treated their lives as if they were more cheap than dirt in the slum. The aristocrats exploite them for their labor and gave them a small amount of food to support them long enough to continue working. The lives of the common people living near the border were even more miserable. The foreign countries who lust after the fertile land of the Central Plains have repeatedly attacked the Great Xia border. However, the border generals did not fight these invaders, instead they open the gates and allowed them to kill, rape, and plunder their own people. After getting what they desired, the foreign race would leave and return back to their own country.

While all this happens, you will be enjoying your harem full of beauties. There were many different kinds of women. The cold and aloof Goddess, the charming and sensual demoness, the innocent girl next door, the maternal one that takes care of you, the one you just want to ravage with all your might. Any kind of woman that existed was in your harem. On top of that, they practice some very special techniques. These methods allow them to use their cultivation to lubricate certain areas of their bodies to ensure smooth penetration and maximum pleasure. Some practiced techniques that connect the soul to ensure both spiritual and physical pleasure. Your task is to return the glory of the Great Xia Empire.

After you pass the first part of the trial, there is a second. One day, you will go to seclusion in order to break through to a higher level of martial art. While meditating, suddenly a pink cloud of gas will rapidly envelop the whole room without giving you the time to respond. The pink cloud gas will enter your body and immediately began to work. You will be suddenly aroused, all your other emotions will be suppressed while leaving an unimaginable amount of desire and lust. All you will think of is about was how to vent all your energy. Soon, a great number of beauties of your harem will enter your seclusion room: they are all without a single garment on them, thus revealing the temptation of their beauty, youth, and vigor. As soon as those women entered your room, a message will be sent to your mind: "If you touch even one of these women, your Primordial Yang will be sucked up and you will die a very miserable death."

### Fifth Trial of the Pagoda

* In this trial, you will find yourself as the patriarch of a mortal clan. Your clan is lavishly wealthy to the point that the royal family and other aristocratic families are jealous enough to form an alliance and put aside their thousand year feuds. They want to destroy your clan and carved up its wealth. If you try to hire some powerful body guards with your wealth, it will unfortunately not work, the influence of the royal family and other clans is simply overwhelming.

After a few days, you will find a book that was hidden in the altar that was used to worship the family’s ancestors. The book described a way for a person to quickly gain strength through human sacrifices. By drawing a formation, then killing a few people, you can absorb the blood and soul of the sacrificed people to not only step in the path of cultivation, but also quickly increase one’s strength. After the death of a few people, you will absorb the pool of blood and theirs souls. A great amount of energy will be poured into your body, and immediately afterward, a cultivation manual will be inserted into your head. When you start cultivating the manual, after a few hours you will feel a great amount of strength in your body, you will feel like you could easily kill anybody that stood in your way; you will feel invincible.

One of the most obscure part of this manual is that after you make a sacrifice, you need to always sacrifice more people in order for the ritual to be effective. For example if you sacrifice 10, and then try to do again the ritual with 10 or less people, the ritual will be ineffective. Also, after using the ritual you will slowly become more gloomy, more irritable, and you would severely punish any one who made the slightest mistake. You will become a completely different person.

Eventually you will find a bottleneck, the only way is to kill your mother. If you don't kill her, you will pass the trial .

### Sixth Trial of the Pagoda

* In this trial you will find yourself as a very powerful cultivator, you will also be the Sect Master of one of the most powerful sects in the world. Your every word can dictate the life of countless people. Under your leadership, the sect has reached its most prosperous height since its creation. While everything seems to be going well for you, an enemy of yours sneak attacks while you are leading the sect’s disciples to a Secret Realm. The worst part about this is the fact your enemy did not kill you, but abolished your cultivation level, then shattered your Dao. After this incident, you will find yourself living a life of hell. You will become a crippling beggar. You will have no home to live in and have to beg in the street to live.

When the winter’s cold arrived, you will have to find throw-away clothes and stitch them together as a blanket to warm yourself and prevent yourself from freezing to death. When the autumn’s rain washed away the world, a few Temples provided shelters to a group of beggars and you were lucky enough to be one of them. The worst part of this experience for Wang Wei was not the constant changing mood of mother nature, but the never-ending hunger and the constant humiliation. Every day, Wang Wei had to go forage for food in the city. Since he is a beggar, he lives in the slum—the poor area infested with crime. The people living in the slum barely had enough food to feed themselves, let alone help others. Once in a while, some good samaritans would feel bad for you and provide you with enough food to barely keep you alive.

On some good day, some rich merchant or nobles would pass by the slums and give the beggars some food. However, they usually do it with a look of arrogance on their face and will usually throw the food on the ground and watch with pleasure as the beggars fight over such little food. In order to survive, you are usually one of the beggars fighting for food. Due to the fact that you used to be a powerful cultivator, you are still much stronger than an ordinary person, let alone a malnourished beggar. In fact, the act of these nobles and rich merchants throwing food in the ground are actually quite benign. Usually, they will vent their anger on the beggars by severely beating and insulting them; they spit at them, throw rotten eggs and feces at them, or even directly murder them.
Also, some cultivators will recognize you as the former Sect Master of one of the most powerful Sects. They all took pleasure in humiliating one of the most powerful cultivators in the world.

Things continue as such for many years until one season, a great famine envelops the kingdom where you are currently located. Due to the famine, the nobles hoard the majority of the food, while the rich merchants raise the price to make a profit. The majority of the poor people in the slum starve to death, while the number of beggars drops exponentially. During this period, you won't eat any food for more than two weeks. The only reason that you will last for so long was due to your former powerful body. On a particular summer night, you will lie on the floor with an excruciating pain in your stomach. Your throat is dry and your vision becomes blurry. You realize that you were about to die of starvation. Then a man appears before you. The man throws a piece of bread on the floor in front of you—which immediately delighted you. However, his joy did not last long as the man actually urinated on the bread, then looked at you with a mocking smile and watched with an expectant joy for him to reach out and eat the piece of bread.
If you refuse to eat the bread you will fail the Trial, but if you eat it you the bread, you will survive, then a few days later one of your former loyal advisors from the sect will find you, and will provide you with a pill that could heal your crippled body at the cost of losing all your previous cultivation. It will only take a few years to heal your shattered Dao and reach a height beyond your previous peak.

### Seventh Trial of the Pagoda

* You will enter a world where there are many powerful religions and cults, who rely on people’s belief as a way to cultivate. . As a result of these religions’ desire for people to devote their entire life and belief to them, they develop techniques that brainwash people and forcibly distort their minds, ideology, memories, and even personality. You will find yourself in an empty room with one meditating cushion on it. You are sitting cross leg on top of it. As soon as you sit down, a grand and ethereal murmur will appears in your mind. The murmur will at first be very blurry, but soon, you will start to understand its meaning. The voice preaches about this majestic and otherworldly power; he claims that if you believes in it, it would grant you wealth, power, and even eternal life. The words of the ethereal voice seem to contain a deep power of seduction; each word seems to be able to leave an imprint on the core of people’ soul. No matter what action you take, the only thing left riveting in his mind is the promise and seduction of that voice. If you succumb to the voice you will become a devout believer of the All Mighty One Beyond Fate, then the Pope will proclaim that a sacrifice is required by the All Mighty One Beyond Fate, if you follow the Pope' s orders and sacrifice yourself, you will fail. If you endured at least 15 days you will enter the second part of the Trial.

The second part of the trial involves you reading numerous cultivation techniques and scriptures, then you have to distinguish which one is secretly tempered with to influence the mind. The purpose of this is that the cultivation world can be quite dark and full of malice. Some poor bastard might think that he is lucky by discovering a peerless cultivation sutra, later to discover that this sutra is tempered it by a more powerful cultivator to turn people into their slave, or make them their faithful and devout believer, or to make it easier to take over their body after raising them like fat sheep to be slaughter.

### Eighth Trial of the Pagoda

* In this trial, you find yourself invincible among your peers. No matter what Heaven Chosen you fight against, you will always end up the victor. As time passes, you begin begin to grow a Heart of Invincibility. You will have the confidence that no matter who you face, you will win in the end. As your arrogance and conceit grew with time, your effort in cultivation starts to lack behind your peers. Then one day, you will face your first defeat—and it is against an opponent that you had previously won against numerous times. This defeat will provide you with a severe blow to his self-esteem. The purpose of this trial is to teach disciples the values of constant hard work and the mindset needed when encountering major failures in life

### Ninth Trial of the Pagoda

* In this trial, you will live a joyous ordinary life. You will have a family that loves you, an abundance of wealth that allowed you to enjoy life as much as possible, a fulfilling a job as government official who is loved by the common people, and a healthy body without any major disease. You did not participate in things like drugs, alcohol, or prostitution. you could be considered quite the responsible and filial son. The only major event expected to occur in your life is the day when you chose a bride and got married.

Unfortunately for you, you did not live for that long. On a certain cloudy day, you will have the day off from the office. While taking a walk in the garden with your mother and father, suddenly the heaven will trembles. You and your family will hold each other as a form of support. Then, they will raise their heads and look into the sky. What they saw would leave an everlasting memory or trauma deep into their soul for as long as they exist. When you looked in the sky, you will see a gigantic hand descending from the heavens heading toward you. You will feel that this idea is absurd, but as the massive hand starts to somehow enlarge itself, you realize that your first assumption was actually quite right. In fact, the hand is not enlarging itself, but as it approaches you, all you could see is the palm of the hand—which is quite massive in proportion to your size. As the hand approaches, you will find yourself incapable of talking, moving, or defending yourself. Even your thinking process becomes increasingly slow and sluggish. The air or atmosphere around you becomes solidified which results in a heavy pressure—both physically and spiritually—to the people around. It is often said that when a person comes face to face with death, they will see all the memories or significant moments in their history flashing through their mind.

After your death, you will not immediately exit the Pagoda. This time, the setting of the trial is different. After the first death, the participants will find themselves rebirthed to a younger version of themselves—at around fifteen years old—with all the memories of the previous life intact. Their mission for this trial is to ensure their survival from that gigantic hand. But it doesn't matter what you do, you will always fail because the trial was designed as such. The trial is about despair of having an undefeatable enemy. The point that the Elders were trying to teach is to always insist and keep on fighting to the last breath. And during the process, temper the will and the heart as much as possible.

## Trivia

-When the sect members of Dao Opening Sect tried the fourth layer, a lot of people failed and tried again the trial, but not to strengthen their Dao Heart, but to experience such a bliss again. The sect heavily awarded the Fox Demon Clan for helping them realize that such a huge defect existed in their training of the sect’s disciples.

-The first time Wu Hong appeared in the story was in the Fourth Trial as an illusion, later on she will become Wang Wei Dao Companion and wife.

-Wang Wei was the only person that passed Ninth Trial, something not even the Great Elders and even Sect Master did.