The Primordial Sacrificial Altar.
Qi Sheng focused his gaze on the Lord of Rot, who was undergoing a breakthrough.
Countless broken ancient runes fluttered through the scene surrounding the Lord of Rot's clone.
They shrouded the entire space in gloom, with eerie ghostfire serving as this world's only light.
At the center of the space floated a cloud of turbid mist, within which hung a miniature black city.
The city was small, yet it contained a world of its own.
Phantoms of evil spirits continually sprang into existence within it.
The newly born evil spirits had incomplete bodies and blurred outlines, barely able to maintain their forms.
As the power of the black city's supreme rules rained down, the incomplete figures began to evolve through successive iterations.
Their damaged bodies rapidly became whole, their outlines gradually solidifying.
Soon, batches of fully formed evil spirits clad in black armor stood within the city.
But their evolution continued, branching out from a single form into different troop types of the Dark Tide's various systems.
Following different evolutionary paths, these evil spirits climbed all the way to the divine realm, tremendous evil energy swirling around them.
But the instant they reached their peak-
Boom!
Every divine-realm evil spirit shattered, all their power flowing back to the city's foundations as they returned to their incomplete initial forms.
Thus, from birth to ascension to godhood, the evil spirits within the city were caught in a cycle of reconstruction and growth.
This was the origin left behind by Si Xie, a Demon God who had fallen during the Cataclysm War.
The Black City was the manifestation of City, the supreme origin he had wielded.
This origin's defining trait was completion.
Deficiencies in the physical structure of living beings, flaws introduced while crafting objects, imperfections in rules-any