Ya Ma was steadier and more methodical than Sang Gui. As soon as he returned to the high-orbit space station, he threw himself into scanning and compiling the Mental Portrait.
There was a more technical term for a Mental Portrait: a Faith Landscape.
Every millennium, the Myriad Gods Hall supposedly mapped the complete Faith Landscape of the Central Star Zone and its Isolated Star Systems. This let them identify the distribution of Divine Kingdom Systems, assess the foundations of faith in the Secular World, and adjust their priorities there to safeguard the influence of the Myriad Heavens Divine Kingdoms.
The Reclamation Corps, of course, lacked the technology and ability to produce a proper Faith Landscape. They could only imitate the method, probing downward through the planet-wide Abyss Zone Monitoring System. Though the resulting map drew on Mental Ocean data from all two billion of Earth's natives, outside interference was unavoidable. It was no longer objective, and the final image was rather blurry.
Yise Hui knew those limitations and said nothing when he inspected it.
Traditional religions still occupied the largest share of Earth's native Faith Landscape. They formed relatively bright regions in the Mental Ocean, along with indistinct images produced by Faith Power. That state of affairs was partly thanks to the outsiders' "kind" help in drawing believers together. Put plainly, they were all Lady Wan Kui's experimental subjects.
Beyond the bright regions of traditional religion, still vaguer and more chaotic shadows drifted through the global Mental Ocean. Most reflected Illegal Organizations, especially Evil Cults built around genuine Extraordinary Power.
The Mental Ocean, as everyone knew, was merely an accumulation of living beings' consciousnesses pressed together. It had no tangible common space. Those vague phantoms likewise arose from Faith Power converging. The Faithful of an Illegal Organization might be hundreds