Tracing the Source
[After writing about Tang San, the originator of Evil Soul Master, let's write about the Holy Spirit Cult, since this organization is the stronghold of Evil Soul Master.]
[Let's first talk about the origins of the Holy Spirit Cult.]
The roots of the Holy Spirit Cult are not actually in the Sun Moon Empire, but in the Douluo Continent itself.
Its predecessor was a loosely organized small group of Evil Soul Master, the name of which is now lost to history.
At that time, the Spirit Hall had not yet been destroyed, and the Evil Soul Master on the continent were chased like rats by the Martial Soul Tribunal, and dared not show their faces at all.
This group of people could only hide in deep mountains and forests or on the edge of deserts, barely surviving by devouring each other. Occasionally they would sneak out to commit a crime, but they would immediately be spotted by the Spirit Hall's enforcement team, and they wouldn't survive more than a few days before having to move to another location.
[This state lasted for a long time, until a crucial turning point occurred: Tang San destroyed the Slaughter City.]
After the collapse of the Slaughter City, a large number of Evil Soul Master and Fallen Soul Master imprisoned inside scattered and fled, pouring into various parts of the continent.
What kind of people are these? They are all ruthless characters who survived in the Slaughter City, a place where people eat each other. Each of them has more than one life on their hands, and each of them is proficient in the method of improving themselves by devouring others.
They are the most ruthless, cunning, and survival-experienced elites within the group of Evil Soul Master.
After this group of elites scattered across the mainland, two things happened.
The first thing they did was to begin "preaching".
The cultivation method of Evil Soul Master relies on devouring the Soul Power and flesh of others to quickly break through. Although it is evil, it has a fatal attraction for those low-level Soul Master who have mediocre talent and can never get ahead through normal cultivation.
You spend ten years painstakingly cultivating to advance one level, while someone else can break through in a single night by absorbing a Soul Master of the same level. Which would you choose?
This multiple-choice question is far too easy for those Soul Master struggling at the bottom.
Thus, the cultivation methods of Evil Soul Master began to spread secretly, and the number of believers gradually increased.
The second thing was that these elites from the Slaughter City began to contact each other.
They were used to surviving in groups in the Slaughter City, so sticking together for warmth was the most natural choice when they came out and faced an unfamiliar environment.
It started as small gatherings, three or five, ten or eight.
Gradually, these small groups began to establish connections, identifying each other through secret codes and tokens.
A loose, cross-regional network of Evil Soul Master thus quietly took shape right under the nose of the Spirit Hall.
But at this stage, this network cannot yet be considered a real organization.
It has no unified program, no fixed leader, and no systematic organizational structure.
It's more like a dark web, a group of people with common interests and common enemies who come together to occasionally exchange intelligence and cover for each other, nothing more.
The real turning point came after the destruction of the Spirit Hall.
With the fall of the Spirit Hall, the control system for Evil Soul Master, which had existed for over a thousand years, collapsed overnight.
No one goes around Martial Soul Awakening for six-year-olds anymore, no one screens for potential evil Martial Soul, and the Martial Soul Tribunal's enforcement team no longer chases after Evil Soul Master.
The Heaven Dou Empire and Star Luo Empire Two Great Empires did take over some of the functions of the Spirit Hall, but they did a terrible job of it. The imperial court was busy fighting for power and profit, and the local officials were busy enriching themselves. Who had time to manage the Evil Soul Master?
These creatures, barely surviving in the shadows, suddenly discovered that the mountain that had oppressed them for thousands of years had vanished.
What does this mean for the Evil Soul Master community? It means freedom.
Nobody cares anymore, nobody chases them, nobody kills them.
They can operate openly, expand their organization, recruit more members, and move from underground to the surface.
If we compare Evil Soul Master to weeds, then the Spirit Hall is the one who weeds them regularly.
With no one to weed, the weeds naturally grew wildly.
It was during this window of opportunity that the precursor to the Holy Spirit Cult, the loose network of Evil Soul Master, began to expand rapidly.
They were no longer content with simply communicating and exchanging intelligence; they began to set out to build a truly meaningful organization.
No one remembers the organization's original name; historical records only leave a vague code name, "Holy Cult." This was the prototype of the Holy Spirit Cult.
Shrek City Academy, Inner Court Office.
Zhang Lexuan was organizing files. There were seven or eight cultivation evaluation reports of Inner Court disciples spread out on her desk, each of which required her to annotate it one by one.
But her work efficiency was noticeably low today because the Diary Copy was being reorganized line by line with new content. She was reviewing reports and reading the diary at the same time, switching between the two attentions back and forth, and her pen stopped in mid-air several times without falling.
When Zhang Lexuan saw Lin Ye's account of the history of the Evil Soul Master Network from its loose beginnings to its current form, she put down her pen and decided to finish reading the diary first.
The report can be approved later, but we don't see content like this, which traces the evolution of the Evil Soul Master organization from its roots, every day.
She noticed a detail Lin Ye mentioned: after the Spirit Hall was destroyed, the Two Great Empires took over some of the Spirit Hall's functions, but they did a terrible job of it.
She had previously read related corroborating evidence about this detail in the archives of Shrek Inner Court.
The archive contains a secret report from the Ministry of Justice of the Heaven Dou Empire, dated approximately eighty years after the destruction of the Spirit Hall. It states that the number of cases Evil Soul Master within the territory that year increased twelvefold compared to the Spirit Hall era, while the Empire's pursuit forces could only cover less than 30% of them.
At the end of the secret report, the Ministry of Justice wrote in an almost desperate tone, "Although we have the will to eliminate evil, we have no power to reverse the situation."
Twelve times, thirty percent!
Putting these two figures together is a condensed history of the blood and tears of ordinary people.
The remaining 70% of Evil Soul Master run rampant outside the empire's sight, and every day they live adds another victim.
The vast majority of these victims were ordinary civilians. Soul Master at least had the ability to resist, but ordinary people didn't even have a chance to struggle when facing Evil Soul Master.
When Zhang Lexuan turned a page of the file, she also saw a record of a village. A total of 120 people were slaughtered overnight by a Evil Soul Master of the Soul Ancestor level, and they were all turned into mummies.
That Evil Soul Master rose from Soul Ancestor to Soul King in just three months, then disappeared from the empire's manhunt and was never seen again.
"When the control system collapses, it's always the ordinary people at the bottom who suffer."
Zhang Lexuan said in a low voice, her tone heavy with suppressed emotion, "Those high-ranking figures in the past probably never thought about these issues."
She picked up a pen and wrote a comment at the end of a cultivation report, but stopped after writing two words.
Her thoughts were still swirling in her diary, from the collapse of the Slaughter City to the destruction of the Spirit Hall, from the formation of the Evil Soul Master Network to the suffering of ordinary people, every link in this chain of cause and effect made her feel a tightness in her chest.