Dark Undercurrents in the Human World; An Exchange of Conditions

Within the Tea Room of Maple Forest Temple, the scent of sandalwood mingled with the crisp fragrance of maple leaves, yet it could not conceal the gravity in Kagura Ruri's words.

"Three months ago, Black Marsh Village on the border was slaughtered overnight. Intense Demonic Energy lingered at the scene.

"None of the victims bore obvious wounds. It was as if their souls had been forcibly ripped away."

Kagura Ruri spoke softly, yet the temperature in the Tea Room seemed to drop by several degrees.

Mingyuan pressed his palms together and murmured a Buddhist invocation, his eyes filled with compassion.

"After that, a border village was attacked every half month, always by the same method."

Kagura Ruri continued.

"My father personally went to investigate, but at the final site, he found... this."

She took an object wrapped in talisman paper from her robes and carefully unfolded it.

It was a black fragment the size of a fingernail, neither metal nor jade. Its surface was covered in fine cracks, and it emitted an extremely faint yet chillingly sinister aura.

"This is..."

Mingyuan furrowed his brow.

"A fragment of a Grievance Soul Crystal?"

She nodded.

"And it was artificially refined—a defective product formed by forcibly extracting living souls."

Chiyo lifted his teacup and took a sip.

He gestured for her to continue.

"To refine such an object, one needs the souls of living people as material, then uses forbidden arts to smelt them.

"The method is crude and full of impurities. It cannot even achieve a tenth of the effect of a complete crystal, but... the threshold for refining it is very low."

"Our clan's secret records mention that three hundred years ago, there was a sect of evil cultivators calling themselves the Netherworld Path. They specialized in extracting souls and refining