THE GOD EATER

Chapter 38: Psychological Warfare.

The fact that many people quit only made him angrier. Then his anger made the whipping more painful for those who were still willing to be tortured by him. So more people quit, which in turn made him angrier and whip harder.

The whole second month was pure torture for them. Perhaps what made the whole experience worse was the fact that they still had to cultivate, train, work in the market, and hunt in the hunting grounds after being tortured earlier in the day.

But the fact that they had to cultivate quickly became something to look forward to after a few days of physical torment. Everyone became more eager to spend their time on anything else that was not hurting them physically.

That month, four of them were eliminated again. One of them was eliminated every week, and each week, Muni took the eliminated party to be auctioned.

With each passing week, the chances of them being eliminated became greater and higher. After all, they were reducing in number. This encouraged everyone to train harder and do better in the tests.

In the third month of the initiation program, Muni started what he called Psychological warfare for the training of their Dao Heart. In this training, there was very little physical pain. But there was a lot of mental pain and trauma to go around for years.

For psychological warfare, Muni put them in the same room and didn’t let them eat, sleep, wear clothes, or have any privacy. If he allowed them to sleep, they were only allowed to sleep in mud while naked, and if he allowed them to eat, it was to eat each other’s feces.

The experience was brutal. It forced them to ignore the state of their bodies and to stay within their minds for most of the time. The training forced them to prioritize the state of their minds above the state of their bodies.

Some people couldn’t handle the torture and slowly began losing their minds. It started with useless ramblings, at which Muni would send them away for treatment.

Muni didn’t force them to undergo the process, and he always stopped those who had reached the limit of what they could take from going further, so he couldn’t be blamed. But even those who remained completely sane after the program were never the same again.

In the fourth month, Muni began drilling them on impulse control. He asked them to cut themselves instead of him cutting them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he made them hold a hot coal for as long as possible, even though it was burning their hand.

The goal of the training was to make them overcome the body’s instinct of self-protection and self-preservation. So for the rest of the month, Muni encouraged them to self-harm.

At this point, someone completely lost their mind. They couldn’t be saved because they lost the will to live, too, and committed suicide in the privacy of their room.

In the fifth month, Muni began using the tactics of empathy removal. He asked them to torture other living things.

At first, they were to torture animals to death. They started with rabbits and moved to monkeys. Then he asked them to torture other humans.

The humans that he made them torture were slaves. So the process didn’t have any impact on Slav since he grew up doing it, while it was especially impactful to Loki and many others who used to be slaves.

In the sixth month, Muni turned them into cold-blooded killers. He did this by making them kill children, pregnant women, and even babies.

Muni always came up with something new and novel that would either do despicable things to them or make them do despicable things to others. The things he came up with were bad enough, but what made them most effective was the fact that he didn’t force them to partake in it.

There was the constant weekly reminder of what would happen to them if they were eliminated, so they didn’t lack for encouragement. They had to do whatever they could to survive.

Being willing to do anything to survive was exactly what he had asked them to do the day they were awakened. So no one could say that he didn’t warn them.

Month after month, their state of mind was sharpened. Everyone could be smiling or laughing, but underneath the facade that their faces put on was a mind like a well-oiled engine running with uttermost precision.

If they wanted to feel pain, they would feel pain. If they wanted to feel joy, they would feel joy. Their experience didn’t make them immune to emotions. But it made it more and more difficult for emotions to affect their decision-making.

They went from crying for their mother when they lost an arm to only flinching despite the immense pain. This was because they had made up their mind not to cry, so they didn’t cry after their arm or leg was cut.

Not even a session of skinning could make them shed tears. Physical and emotional pain stopped being able to dictate their reaction and actions.

No one was sure if this was because they no longer felt pain or because their minds had gotten used to this kind of pain. What they knew and were content with was that their willpower was constantly improving.

Training continued like that for twelve months. In those twelve months, Muni fulfilled his promise of molding their bodies and minds into tools worthy of the Four Directions Sect.

At the end of the training, only 34 of them remained alive. 52 were eliminated by Muni. The remaining 14 either killed themselves, were killed by beasts in the hunting grounds, or killed each other.

The remaining 34 could be called the best of the best of the initial 100. Just like that first day when they came for awakening, Muni arranged them into a formation and gave them a speech.