Although the overall structure of the Underworld is based on the Myth, Li Xingkong is, after all, a modern person, and the purely physical torture of the eighteen levels of hell is still a bit too inhumane.
Moreover, although these punishments seem cruel, most of them are ideas conceived by people in ancient times. In ancient times, when there was no professional torture science as a foundation, the punishments that people could think of were often physical.
Tongue-pulling with scissors, climbing mountains of knives and boiling oil—in essence, they are all the same kind of punishment.
Since we live in a civilized society, the way we punish people should naturally be more civilized.
There's no need to force it to have eighteen levels. Let's start with two or three levels, and then decide whether to add more after it's running smoothly.
The first part is the same as before, mainly focusing on physical punishment. However, the previous punishments were still somewhat bloody. Moreover, the ultimate goal of the punishment is to make the individual realize their mistakes. While punishing them, the person being punished should also deeply understand the crimes they have committed.
Human beings have a very strong tendency to get used to things. Physical pain can be endured for a long time and eventually become a habit. Moreover, the Underworld judges souls, who already know how long they will be punished before they even enter hell.
In other words, they clearly knew that no matter how they were treated, they would not die; at most, they would only suffer unbearable pain.
Li Xingkong believed that starting with personal obsessions, those who commit crimes and are sent to this place are mostly influenced by the Seven Emotions emotions: joy, anger, worry, thought, grief, fear, and shock. The extremes of these emotions are usually what induce people to commit crimes.
Therefore, when designing, you might as well put a little effort into it. First, design a fantasy world based on his deepest emotional expectations. Then, when his life in the fantasy world reaches its best moment, drag him out for a public trial, or make him experience the life of someone he persecuted.
Punishing a person holistically from multiple psychological and physiological perspectives is no less effective than mere physical torture.
Of course, while this design is quite good, physical torture is sometimes unavoidable, so Li Xingkong designed another layer of hell specifically for physical torture.
Working 007, high-intensity work schedule, no lunch break, and countless demanding and mean bosses who do nothing but nitpick. My daily salary is only enough for three meals and a cup of veterinary stimulant injection that I have to pay for myself.
Add to that the hunger, the exhaustion, and then add a 500-pound wife who starts berating him for being useless as soon as he gets home, and a landlord who comes to collect rent every day.
Isn't this more agonizing than being cut by soft or hard knives every day?
Finally, add a hell for the most severe punishments, where each soul is stuffed into a box of nothingness, only the size of a person, immobile, with nothing to interact with, no light, no sound, nothing at all.
It's like a soul version of the solitary confinement cell.
Li Xingkong wasn't a professional after all; these few designs he could come up with were already pretty much all the way through. The rest would have to be left to the vast number of cultivators in Divine Land to unleash their creativity.
With the punishment in place, the next crucial element is the structure: the Samsara.
The main difficulty in designing Samsara lies in the fact that a new soul begins to form at the moment of birth, or even while the newborn is still developing in the mother's womb. When should this Samsara soul be released to be considered a true Samsara, rather than a mere possession?
This is not a technical issue, but rather an ethical one.
Although neither cultivators who use Samsara nor ordinary people can understand the principles behind this, and may be completely unaware of the details, their ignorance does not mean that Li Xingkong did not need to consider this issue when designing it.
The Samsara soul is life, and so is the newly born soul. Just because one comes from Samsara, does that mean it can rightfully replace or even devour the other? This is clearly problematic.
To understand this, we must first understand when the human soul is born.
Is it the moment the fertilized egg unites? Or the moment the embryo evolves into nerve cells and the brain?
To be honest, although Li Xingkong considered himself to be more familiar with the human body than anyone before, he had never really thought about this question.
From a biological perspective, without nerve cells, human consciousness would cease to exist.
For example, when a person is given anesthesia, they are completely unaware of their own state during the anesthesia. By the time they regain consciousness, the effects of the anesthesia have already worn off.
It could even be said that the state of consciousness during anesthesia is the same as after death, as one loses all means of perception and becomes unaware of everything in the outside world.
However, some also believe that human consciousness and body are separate entities; the cessation of bodily functions merely severs the connection with consciousness. The body may be dead, but the soul remains alive.
This is indeed a question worth pondering.
However, this is all in the case of humans. The design for other creatures is not so particular. After all, other creatures are not yet intelligent, and some give birth to several or even dozens of offspring at a time. It is common for them to abandon their offspring because they cannot afford to raise them.
For these animals, whether the Samsara soul is original or not is of little significance.
Li Xingkong will set aside this controversial issue for now and start by designing the framework for this Samsara, focusing on the animals first.
Souls participating in Samsara cannot carry memories of their past lives. Samsara with memories is no different from being reborn. Therefore, before Samsara, the soul must first detach itself from its memories.
The memories gained after leaving the cycle of reincarnation cannot be directly destroyed, since they are essentially personal files. As long as the individual remains within the Samsara system, these files must not be lost.
Therefore, there needs to be a place to store memories, just like the River of Forgetfulness in the Myth.
Therefore, the so-called Three Lives Stone is actually the operating terminal of this massive archive storage system.
That makes sense, given the vast Divine Land People. Finding one's past life in the boundless River of Forgetfulness is like finding a needle in a haystack.
The layering of hell requires the creation of space, the construction of the River of Forgetfulness also requires space, and the design of Samsara requires spatial means that allow for free movement. The construction of the entire Underworld is basically centered around the Spatial Consciousness.
All top-level architectures are based on theoretical foundations; this is an ironclad truth, even within the Myth.