Mental Domain

Biodata

Formation and Structure

• Development: Spiritual power normally awakens around age twelve, followed by the hatching of a Mental Entity. As the entity matures toward adulthood, its owner’s Mental Domain forms 2.
• Underdevelopment: Failure to hatch or fully develop a Mental Entity can prevent a domain from forming. These conditions are collectively classified as Mental Entity underdevelopment 2.
• Stabilization: The Federation distributes Mental Entity growth potions to help stabilize developing domains. Zhu Rongtian later reveals that commercially available potions also contain an energy intended to expose offensive-type guides 2 49.
• Landscape: A sentinel’s domain is a tangible manifestation of their Mental Entity. It commonly resembles somewhere the owner feels safe, such as a bedroom, playground, or natural landscape 4.
• Psychic contents: Objects and animals within a domain can be formed from spiritual power. Heisha Draven’s black-footed cat hunts a realistic, spiritually constructed mouse in his desert 4.

Boundaries and Movement

• Lin Sheng’s domain ends beyond its mountains in a blank, mosaic-like expanse resembling an unfinished game model. When Luo Ruzhuo steps across it, she returns to the lake where she began 5 6.
• A domain can extend beyond the landscape immediately visible to a visitor. Luo Ruzhuo locates contamination at the distant edge of Chiya’s grassland by expanding her perspective above it 13.
• Luo Ruzhuo suspects that movement inside a domain can affect her physical body after returning from Lin Sheng’s domain to find herself leaning into his arms 6.

Mental Barriers

• A mental barrier is a manifestation of the Mental Entity within its domain. Ordinary barriers vary in strength and thickness; higher-ranked sentinels generally have thicker barriers 6 28.
• High sentinel–guide compatibility makes crossing barriers easier. Low compatibility can cause their Mental Entities to repel one another or prevent entry altogether 6.
• Direct contact with a Mental Entity can establish entry. Luo Ruzhuo enters Heisha Draven’s and Lin Sheng’s domains by resting her forehead against their entities; guides treating Chiya previously used tools to maintain distance 4 5 13.
• Sealing a domain and lowering sensory input are defensive measures against contamination, but sufficiently powerful contaminants can overwhelm them 26.

Known Mental Domains

Contamination

Forms and Effects

• Environmental erosion: Contamination can obscure a domain as black fog or clouds, progressively concealing its original landscape 4 5 25.
• Attacks on the Mental Entity: In Luo Xi’s domain, shadowy figures beat his Siamese cat while the training room remains intact. His entity’s unusually severe erosion is attributed to its advancement from C-rank to B-rank through repeated confrontations with pollution 11 12 13.
• Emotional intrusion: Contamination forces violent emotions and unwanted memories into the mind. Inside a black cocoon, Luo Ruzhuo experiences negative memories from the apocalypse before her Mental Entity helps restore her awareness 24.
• Near-total engulfment: During Cang Yun’s worsening aberration, her goshawk lies injured and bound by black tendrils inside a domain almost completely swallowed by contamination 27.

Mental Domains as Breeding Grounds

During the starship incident, Luo Ruzhuo concludes that the black cocoons use captured hosts’ contaminated domains to produce new pollutants. She tests this explanation by freeing a captive sentinel and finding that almost none of their original landscape remains visible beneath the black mist 25.

Implanted Pollution

• Offensive-type guides can bypass a sentinel’s barrier and implant pollution directly inside the domain, causing contamination to rise far faster than ordinary external exposure 49.
• Zhu Rongtian states that survival requires another guide to enter immediately, purify the contamination, and reinforce the mental barrier 49.

Purification and Treatment

Guide Purification

• A compatible guide’s presence alone can make contamination dissipate. This contactless method is especially useful when the guide’s Mental Entity is not fully developed, but its effectiveness depends heavily on compatibility 4.
• Routine purification generally removes between 5% and 50% of contamination. Rank differences and compatibility affect the result 12.
• Poorly matched treatment can be painful and provoke agitation. Forcing purification risks collapse of the sentinel’s domain or backlash against the guide’s mental power 6.

Luo Ruzhuo’s Mental Attacks

• Her Mental Blades can destroy contamination within a domain. Repeated attacks eliminate the shadows tormenting Luo Xi’s Siamese cat and reduce his contamination to zero 12.
• She can isolate and compress contamination rather than destroy it, enclosing mist from Chiya’s domain in a psychic cage until it becomes a black sphere 13.
• Her attacks are not inherently harmless to the domain itself: during an assassination attempt, she directs blades through the attacker’s domain, inflicting incapacitating damage 30.

Guide Element and Suppressants

• Guide Element acts directly on a sentinel’s domain within an hour of injection and continuously reduces contamination. It bypasses normal level restrictions, although compatibility still affects its effectiveness 16.
• Suppressants are made from heavily diluted Guide Element. They temporarily suppress contamination at roughly one percent of the effectiveness of a direct injection 16.
• Luo Ruzhuo’s Guide Element affects Xianzhu despite the normal barriers to treating a Dark Sentinel 40.

Documented Treatment Results

Exceptional Cases

Shared Domain: Liu Qing and Liu Sui

• The brothers are described as the only twins in the world capable of sharing both a Mental Domain and Mental Entities 31.
• Their double barrier weakens incoming mental attacks in two stages. Luo Ruzhuo observes an attack lose more than half its strength at the outer layer before becoming harmless at the inner layer 28.
• Both swans inhabit the shared lake. The narration suggests that the double barrier may explain Liu Sui’s comparatively low contamination 39.

Dark Sentinel Domains

• Ordinary guide purification is ineffective on Dark Sentinels and instead causes backlash. Consequences range from a reduction in the guide’s rank to complete destruction of their domain 32.
• Xianzhu’s barrier blocks eighty percent of incoming damage, but contamination accumulated over years still becomes a hidden danger 41.
• Zhu Rongtian deliberately chooses Xianzhu’s rampaging domain for her chip-compelled attack on Luo Ruzhuo because its backlash can weaken her own strength 48.

Zhu Rongtian’s Contaminated Town

Luo Ruzhuo’s forced entry places her in a child’s body within a town populated by humanoid contaminants. The environment recreates the circumstances surrounding Zhu Rongtian’s awakening, while a child version of Zhu Rongtian does not recognize her visitor 43 45 47.

An attempted escape loops back to the town after a day and a night. Luo Ruzhuo’s attacks only disperse its inhabitants temporarily, whereas Zhu Rongtian can kill them permanently. These features lead Luo Ruzhuo to suspect a mental-type Pollution Domain 46 47.

The two guides coordinate their mental attacks with a dagger strike to break the chain binding Zhu Rongtian’s scorpion to a controlling chip. After the chip is destroyed, the town gives way to Zhu Rongtian’s true domain: a desert beneath a starry sky 48.

Damage and Destruction

• Psychic assault: Direct attacks can devastate a domain and incapacitate its owner, as Luo Ruzhuo demonstrates against the starship assassin 30.
• Treatment backlash: A failed attempt to penetrate Xianzhu’s barrier sends contamination back along an S-rank guide’s mental tendrils, turning the guide’s own domain into a sea of fire 15.
• Artificial alteration: Ankang Pharmaceuticals implants chips intended to raise domain rank. The assassin reaches S-rank after implantation, but his Mental Entity subsequently begins physically merging with his body 30.
• Self-destruction: Zhu Rongtian reports that some imprisoned offensive-type guides deliberately destroyed their own domains after repeated abuse, leaving themselves permanently crippled 48.