When An Bao accepted the trial, both his body and mind were in poor shape, with no time to recover. One day, when he woke up, he thought it was still nighttime. When he pulled open the curtains, it was already 7:30 in the morning.
The voices of many toads chattered one after another, but not a single toad could be seen. Looking out the window, he only heard some distant, fragmented human voices. The invisible toads spoke in unison: "Today is the first day of the trial. You will memorize vocabulary on an empty stomach."
When An Bao heard "memorize vocabulary," he found it amusing. He was already learning his sixth language—how could he fail to memorize some words?
It wasn't until he sat at his desk, looking at the vocabulary book, that he realized it wasn't so simple. Not far outside the window, a dog's voice barked relentlessly at him. And he felt that the words he had memorized before had all become strangely unfamiliar.
The toads said: "This is the first level. The words you memorized before have all been taken away by the people in Hell. The students in Hell are more diligent than you; they've memorized your words until they're completely fluent. And in Hell, this is just the most basic thing."
"Now, what you need to do is rely only on the focus of an ordinary person and 'devour' back these words that others have stolen from you. If you show the slightest slackness, that vicious dog outside the window will bark. You may drink water. You decide how long the trial will take—but once decided, it cannot be changed."
"If you fail, there will be a second level. If you succeed, congratulations—you'll go directly to Heaven. If you fail all three levels, your soul will be sent directly to live in Hell. There, no one will be your Emotion Regulator. At that time, you'll have to learn to control your ability, rather than continuing to rely on Emotion Regulators."
Finally, they added in unison:
"Remember, during the trial, your family will not know you are undergoing a trial. Everything will proceed as usual, until the trial is completely over."