"It wasn't humanity, right?" Liu Xing asked Silver Saint.

"Again, your imagination is wild! Talking to you is really, really exciting!" she giggled. "You're implying that the duty of the saints is for us to kill people!"

"I'm glad it's not, but you have to admit it wasn't a bad guess," Liu Xing crossed his arms, a little annoyed at Silver Saint. "Humanity takes resources from nature and makes them its own. It's especially true for cultivators. We absorb qi from the world and make it our own. That qi is trapped inside us, and unless we die, it won't return to its natural state."

He imagined cultivators were like maggots, greedily consuming the flesh of the dead god to advance their cultivation, aiming to one day become Immortals. It was a radical view, he admitted, but it made sense with the information he had.

"Hmm," she tapped the table with her index finger. "Your conclusion is natural, though I need to ask you something quite fundamental. The qi that is inside your body... is it all ambient qi?"

Liu Xing opened his mouth as if to say yes, but then closed it. The process of cultivation involved absorbing qi into the body and consciousness. It was true that absorbed ambient qi did not return to nature. Instead, it resided within consciousness. However, while ambient qi remained in consciousness, not all the qi in a cultivator's body was ambient qi. Most of it was their own. They generated it, and it flowed from their consciousness to their body, ready to be used at any time. As he considered this, he realized that he... generated qi.

This was an obvious fact, but applying it to his logic caused his conclusion to fall apart.

"Qi," Liu Xing muttered, "is not a finite energy produced by the dead god's corpse."

For a moment, he had thought qi was part of the dead god, perhaps something akin to coal. But clearly, it wasn't.

"Qi is generally made by cultivators. But what about ambient qi? Who produces it?"

Cultivators didn't generate ambient qi. They used it to further their advancement.

"Let's talk about it another time," she smiled mysteriously. "You will know, in time, and it is tied to one of our duties anyway. So, let's talk about the main duty of the saints. It is to preserve the dead god's corpse, or rather, the universe itself. We are indeed fighting something, and that thing is not humanity, nor spirit beasts. We saints call it corruption."

"Corruption," Liu Xing tasted the word in his mouth.

Silver Saint nodded. "Let me show you."

She rose from her chair and took several steps back. In an instant, the table and chairs they had been using vanished as if they had never existed. Liu Xing found himself standing, looking straight ahead at Silver Saint. She moved her arms, her fan snapping open, and began to move her body in a slow, deliberate motion. It took him a second to realize she was dancing. Her silver hair swayed from side to side, along with the tails of the blindfold covering her eyes. Then, the absurd scenery of flowing rivers, the stars, nebulas, and galaxies, the Ancient Beasts swimming through the void, the fiery palace, and the gigantic trees suddenly vanished.

He was suddenly standing in the middle of a lush forest. The trees towered high into the sky, their leaves a vibrant green. Their bark was covered in green moss, and the leaves, bushes, and grass swayed in a gentle wind, as if they were dancing with Silver Saint. Behind her, the corpse of a giant fox was curled up, as if merely sleeping. Yet, its head had been ripped out, and blood was gushing from its neck.

"Corruption is not really visible, but it exists. It's almost like a contagious disease. Look closely," Silver Saint said.

Liu Xing looked at the corpse of the gigantic fox. It had orange fur and two tails with black tips. The fur wasn't shiny but dull and thin. He could see the ugly skin beneath it, blackened and coated in an oily film. The great fox looked starved and emaciated, its bones pressing against its hide. For a moment, the thin fur moved as if caressed by the wind, until suddenly, the world began to darken.

Liu Xing narrowed his eyes. He sensed a shift in the area around the fox, as if the colors were growing duller. The once-vibrant red blood lost its luster, and the dull orange of the fur weakened. He looked at the vibrant green all around him, then back at the fox, seeing that the corpse and everything near it had begun to lose its color. An invisible, intangible something seemed to cover the world around the corpse, slowly turning the colorful view black and white.

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Soon, a single blade of grass right beneath the dead fox's giant paw turned entirely black, as if a hidden painter had decided to change its color. A moment after it turned black, it grew taller and its blade widened, only to suddenly wither and die. As it died, two more blades of grass turned black. They grew, died, and then four more beside them became black. He realized this phenomenon wasn't just happening to the grass, but also to the flowers behind the dead fox, the soil on the ground, the ants crawling on its chest, and even to the qi itself. It was spreading. With each death, he saw the world become a little grayer, until he could imagine it turning completely black and white. Then, the white would vanish, leaving a pitch-black view that nothing could pierce.

Absolute darkness.

"This is corruption," he muttered, feeling his heart beat faster. He sensed immense danger emanating from it, as if he had suddenly plunged into a bottomless ocean, deprived of light, and felt his body compress until it would implode.

"Indeed," Silver Saint kept dancing, her movements fluid and her form graceful. "The death of this fox happened deep in the Northern Forest around five hundred years ago. There was no one there, so the corruption rampaged uncontested for a while. I was late, and when I arrived, this is the view that greeted me."

The view shifted. They were still in the vibrant green forest, but instead of a gigantic corpse in a clearing, a gaping black wound tore space apart. Upon seeing this, his heart hammered so fast he thought it would explode. It was a profoundly wrong tear in the fabric of reality, as if a monster from hell had successfully clawed its way through. From the center of this tear, rivers of darkness flowed across the ground, branching and spreading like blood vessels. Where this blackness touched the ground, black smoke rose into the air, as if reality itself were sizzling and burning.

Silver Saint ended her dance and began to loosen her beautiful red dress, revealing her shoulders while her hands covered her body. "It was a significant corruption. The biggest in the last several hundreds thousands years. And it was my mistake. There was a period when I was just... tired. I didn't want to be a saint and just ignored everything. It was a shameful act." She loosened her robe until her upper body was bare, her hands attempting to cover her breasts. But she fully showed him her stomach and the left side of her body.

Liu Xing was a straight man. In his two lives, he had been attracted to women several times. But he was certain he couldn't have a relationship right now. He was a man with a mission, and a relationship would only hinder and burden him. Still, that didn't mean he could remove his feelings entirely. When Silver Saint began to undress, a part of him was... excited. But all those silly feelings evaporated when he saw the horrific wound on her body, replaced by a terror that gripped his heart.

On the stomach and side of Silver Saint were three claw marks running diagonally across her body. They were not normal wounds. They were gashes of gaping, bottomless darkness; if he were to fall into one, he would never find its depth. Visually, the marks were not too intimidating, yet the feeling they emitted made his feet tremble, his teeth chatter, his eyes widened, his breath shortened, and a strong headache and profound ache washed over his entire body. The wound felt so, so wrong. The feeling it emitted was even worse than that of the gaping tear in the fabric of space behind her.

"Hideous, isn't it?" Silver Saint asked as she put her dress back on.

"H-how can you live?" It was so horrifying he couldn't even fathom it.

Silver Saint's smile curved down a little. "I live because I still feel the shame of that day."

When her dress properly covered her body once again, Silver Saint snapped her fingers. The horrifying view of the black tear vanished, replaced by the sight of stars, galaxies, and Ancient Beasts swimming through the pitch-black sky.

"That corruption then manifested a troublesome monster, and I had to fight it for a month straight. The one time it attacked me, it almost killed me. And so, I don't want you to see that side of me." Then, she sighed. "That's what we saints do. Not every time is the corruption that severe. Most of the time, it was invisible. Often, it's merely a spot, or a point, or if you're a bit unlucky, as big as a palm. But when it was let alone, it would grow until a tear manifested. We still don't know what corruption is, although we have learned to recognize several signs before it appears."

"What are the signs?" Liu Xing asked.

"It's quite easy, actually. We just need to see if people are suffering. If they are, chances are, corruption will manifest." Silver Saint paused for a moment. "It usually manifests inside some kind of anchor. These anchors can be anything. Sometimes it's cultivators, sometimes mortals, sometimes spirit beasts, sometimes even an inanimate object. There was even one case where I had to deal with corruption that manifested from a single river rock. It was quite bizarre."

Liu Xing nodded, though his mind let her words pass without trying to catch or digest them. Instead, it was busy making a connection. The moment Silver Saint had ended the vision of the tear in reality, his mind had started screaming. It had connected the sight of the black smoke sizzling from the river of darkness to something he was already familiar with. Comparing the two, he was sure his conclusion was correct.

"Can people harness corruption?" he asked Silver Saint.

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