The Martial Unity

The difficulty of the task was much greater than if the forest was merely two-dimensional. But alas, it was not to be that easy. He definitely understood that this was a feature of the challenge, not a flaw. 

In order to find the Hypnomaster, one needed to possess a powerful mind, or one needed to possess extraordinary perseverance and determination. In both cases, there was a good chance that the Hypnomaster would accept them based on those traits, so it made sense that there was a challenge the key to which were such traits.

Rui didn't spend too much time dwelling on too many thoughts despite how out of character that was for him. Thought consumed mental energy and within the Great Forest of Hypnonarak, mental energy was a precious and vital resource that dwindled by the second.

He forged on forward heading deeper and deeper into the forest. At this point, his senses had long lost their ability to determine which direction he was walking on. The worst part was that compasses also seemed to malfunction in the forest due to the electromagnetic disorientation caused by the same phenomenon that caused bioelectrical suppression.

Yet he knew which direction he was walking in thanks to documenting his travel in his Mind Palace. The biggest hurdle that Martial Artists were seeking to travel deeper into the forest was maintaining geographic and directional awareness.

Once these two key things were lost, the bad stuff followed after. Getting lost meant that the probability of returning home before your mind was drained was low, and this was the reason that most missing Martial Artists did not return.

Rui had greatly improved his chances of survival by cleanly avoiding this pitfall. Not only did he have several rejuvenation potions that he could use in an emergency, but he also knew where he was relative to the human domain of the Gereign Region and the forest as a whole.

'Hm?' Rui narrowed his eyes as something entered his senses. He froze, growing alert as he tried to figure out what it was.

"Hel..." The figure uttered at it stepped into Rui's sensory field.

His eyes widened as he saw Martial Squire step in front of him. Yet there was something very disturbingly wrong about him. Flowers had begun growing from every inch of his body, even his eyeballs were missing as beautiful daffodils had sprouted from within his eye sockets.

The man's mouth opened, yet his body collapsed before he could utter a single word.

Rui narrowed his eyes. Thankfully, the Beggar's Sect had not disappointed and he even knew what he was dealing with.

"The Garden of Nightmares," Rui murmured as he sky-walked to a certain altitude, rising high as he got a good look at what was ahead of him. 

A dazzlingly beautiful and awe-inspiring array of flowers greeted his eyes. It drew an immense amount of joy from him, such that he almost couldn't focus on anything else.

'Is this some sort of evolved passive hypnotism or is there some odorless airborne substance that makes it extremely difficult to draw away my attention from the garden of flowers?' Rui narrowed his eyes. 

Yet the flowers weren't the only thing that caught his eye. There were numerous corpses scattered across the Garden of Nightmares, each of them had flowers growing out of it as roots could be seen spreading across the entirety of their bodies.

it was a particularly grotesque sight that gave him the creeps, that along with his resistance to its strange effect on the mind and he managed to steer clear of the entire area. 

'Brutal.' Rui murmured inwardly. One of the things that he didn't necessarily like about the Great Forest of Hypnonarak was that the forest attacked Martial Artists in ways that they were unaccustomed to incurring.

Although mental techniques were used by a decent number of Martial Artists, they were rarely used as the actual attack itself. They were generally used as a way to augment other attacks, specifically in their execution, against the opponent.

Most Martial Artists were unaccustomed to being attacked mentally directly, and that was true for nearly all kinds of Martial Artists. Unfortunately, it was rarely the case that mental attacks were exchanged in battles. 

This was true even for Rui, he had only been truly hit with offensive mental techniques during the first round of the main Martial Contest in the Virodha Theocracy.

Thus to go from very little experience to being thrust into an environment that was infested with such things was too drastic a transition for most Martial Artists. That was the reason that there were so many ways in which one could fumble such matters so badly.

If not for the fact that Rui had an edge in this aspect, he wasn't too sure that he wouldn't have fallen for the various sprung traps even with the knowledge of the Beggar's Sect.

The disturbing sight of the many corpses littered across the field was in sharp contrast to the flowers atop and around them. It was brutal, yet such was nature. It was eat or be eaten.

Rui had to admit that it truly was an entirely different thing to experience these dangers in the flesh than to read about them in a carefully curated report from the Beggar's Sect.

Rui carefully evaded the Garden of Nightmares, avoiding it from a high altitude. Yet he didn't want to get too high either.

His eyes narrowed as he gazed up into the dark clouds that were uncharacteristically close to the forest. Unlike normal forests, not even the skies of the Great Forest of Hypnonarak were safe.

BZZZ!

Rui grew alert as he heard mass fluttering in the clouds of the forest. He didn't like the sound of those, based on what he knew about the forest, the skies weren't too much safer than the forest itself.

BZZZZZZZ!

Rui's eyes widened as an enormous wave of angry hornets flew towards him, ready to surround and consume him in one go.