After bidding farewell to the roaring vortex in the south, Ming Xin set out on the return journey to the "Rust Heart."
He had taken a roundabout route when coming here for exploration and training, but his return route was more direct—and more cautious.
The imprint of the "Silver White Stream" deep within his soul was like a faint compass needle in the darkness.
Though imprecise, it continuously conveyed a profound pull toward the west-southwest.
This guidance was not a set of coordinates on a map, but more like an intuition born from resonance with a particular spacetime structure.
The closer he drew to the core source of corruption, the clearer the sensation became—and the more unsettling it was.
He did not choose to return directly to the fissure where he had first discovered the maintenance passage. It was too close to the core installation and the Watcher.
Instead, he planned a route along an arc-shaped tangent at the edge of the Rust Heart's contaminated zone, hoping to approach the core from another angle—perhaps from a "flank" where the contamination was relatively weaker.
However, the borderlands of the Rust Heart were far more dangerous than the desert and vortex regions he had crossed before.
The terrain here carried a more diseased, more "organic" sense of corrosion.
The grayish-brown grit and crystallized particles had diminished, replaced by dark red-black ground as hardened as dried blood scabs.
Cracked patterns covered the ground. Deep within the fissures, dark purple light, thick as petroleum, flickered intermittently, releasing a heavy stench of sulfur mixed with rotting metal.
The air was no longer filled with Corrupting Energy alone. It was also tainted by something formless and intangible, yet capable of eroding the mind—"malice."
It was a pure hatred and devouring urge from the depths of Chaos,