As soon as the Human Emperor Banner came out, I became the Lord of the Old Ones

Chapter 90: Spiritual Erosion

Combined with the kind and generous "Aunt Leiliana" he heard "Crazy Cat" Chris mention at the garbage dump.

Xu Yan sketched out a clearer, more three-dimensional and vivid figure in his heart.

An orphan girl in the wilderness whose parents are both dead.

With his stubborn character and extraordinary card-making talent.

The tortuous road under my feet is half thorns and half flames.

We are moving forward through all obstacles towards the holy land in our mind, the Dawn Academy, which can provide complete card-making education.

Unfortunately, she ended up staying at Rolling Stone Castle, which was just across the wall from Dawn Academy.

It stopped at the Rolling Stone Club, a place where black and white, good and evil are hard to distinguish, and the place is full of twists and turns.

Xu Yan catered to her needs and fine-tuned his own personality based on Leiliana's experience.

Create yourself into an avid technology enthusiast.

A young man from the wilderness who rose from the grassroots like Leiliana in the past, with nothing but talent and ambition, very sophisticated in some aspects but extremely naive in others.

He made extensive use of the "Seven-Star Soul-Piercing Nail" technique when handling the cards, and deliberately slowed down the process so that Leiliana could observe his movements.

He even accidentally revealed several other more advanced talisman-making techniques.

He had never mastered these techniques. He had only seen the masters of the Wanhun Sect perform them and imitated them.

As for Leiliana's card-making notes, he also raised a lot of questions based on his own practice in the world of cultivation.

These questions do not necessarily involve very profound theories of psychic operation.

However, it was completely different from the normal thinking mode of the Age of Heroes, and it would definitely broaden Leliana's horizons, making her feel unfathomable and as if she had found a treasure.

Leiliana really took the bait.

Both Xu Yan's talisman-making technique and the questions he raised surprised and delighted her.

For some questions, after pondering for a moment, she gave answers on the spot, and both parties felt suddenly enlightened.

There are some questions that cannot be answered for the time being, but she will give a densely packed written reply the next morning after careful consideration.

From her flamboyant handwriting, one could tell she was extremely excited.

Her guidance not only gave Xu Yan a deeper understanding of the combat cards in the Era of Heroes.

The proficiency of the Wanhun Sect's "primary talisman-making technique" has also been greatly improved, almost reaching the level of perfection.

Under Leiliana's guidance, Xu Yan was soon able to handle the primary bronze battle cards below three stars with ease.

In addition to praising him highly, Leiliana also brought a large number of intermediate bronze battle cards above four-star bronze for Xu Yan to repair and strengthen.

The residual souls in these cards are more powerful and violent.

The rune array on the card is more complex, and the degree of wear and tear and damage is more serious, making it ten times more difficult to handle.

Xu Yan didn't think it was troublesome.

Instead, I regard it as an interesting challenge and a rare practice.

On the third day after arriving here, he and Leiliana discussed for a full three hours.

Dozens of extremely tricky questions were raised from various bizarre angles.

After much thought, Leiliana gave him a fifteen-page reply.

She highly praised Xu Yan's sharpness, and frankly admitted that there were many issues that even she had no conclusions about.

On the fourth day, they discussed for four and a half hours.

The content of the communication is not limited to low- and mid-level bronze battle cards that need repair.

Instead, it expanded from the "Seven-Star Soul-Piercing Nail" to other classical talisman-making skills that Xu Yan deliberately threw out.

Leiliana is worthy of being the chief card maker of Rolling Stone Castle.

Almost single-handedly, she sorted out Xu Yan's imitation techniques from the surface to the internal logic.

Thus, Xu Yan lit up a new skill on the system panel:
[Wanhun Sect: Intermediate Talisman Making Technique]

Xu Yan returned the favor.

He let it slip several times, telling others that his card-making skills all came from his adoptive father "Lao Ba".

When Lao Ba was young, he was most likely a "treasure hunter" who frequently went in and out of polluted areas, specializing in hunting residual souls, searching for lost technologies, and creating legendary cards.

Leiliana and Big Boss might know something about the Shadow Ruins.

But it is impossible to know the truth about the ruins of the metropolis haunted by the past deep in the contaminated area.

Xu Yan changed many rumors and anecdotes in the world of cultivation, twisted them upside down, incorporated elements of the Age of Heroes, and told them vividly, which made Leiliana marvel.

This fabricated information seemed to have improved Leiliana's situation.

In the following days, the injuries on her face and body had obviously faded a lot, and her expression was not as panicked, as if the person behind the scenes was very satisfied with the communication between the two.

Xu Yan seized the opportunity and asked again about the truth of this place.

Perhaps it was his performance in the past few days that won the other party's trust.

Perhaps after an in-depth investigation, the other party confirmed his identity - he was indeed just a card-making apprentice at the Star Shop and had no vested interests in any of the various forces.

Or perhaps the person behind the scenes instructed Leiliana to release some information appropriately to test Xu Yan's reaction.

This time, Leiliana was no longer silent.

She told Xu Yan the reason why the Rolling Stone Club was divided into two parts: "inside the city" and "outside the city".

This is because the club's core business is extremely dangerous and sensitive: the research and treatment of spiritual erosion.

Soul Corruption, the most terrifying incurable disease in the Age of Heroes.

The remnant souls of the past have unknowingly invaded the flesh and blood and spiritual world of human beings.

Constantly distorting and alienating human nature, turning people in the present world back into their old selves.

Chronic spiritual erosion can transform a living human being, cell by cell, piece by piece of flesh and blood, into a magical creature or complex structure over several decades.

An acute outbreak of spiritual erosion can transform people in this world into monsters from past nightmares in the blink of an eye.

At present, people do not know the cause of spiritual erosion, which is difficult to treat and even difficult to prevent.

I just figured out a few rules:

First, the closer you are to a contaminated area, the more likely you are to suffer from spiritual erosion.

Second, before and after the Old Scourge comes, there will be a large number of people who will hear the whispers of the Old, see mottled phantoms before their eyes, and have ancient demons appear in their nightmares, thus suffering from spiritual erosion.

Third, the more frequently the seal card is used, the worse the quality of the card becomes. The more spirits are repeatedly sealed, the more likely one is to suffer from spirit erosion.

Fourth, madly agitating vitality, overloading the guardian spirit that is far beyond one's own level, entering "super fusion mode" or even "collapse mode", will 100% cause spiritual erosion.

Fifth, there is currently no evidence that spiritual erosion is contagious in a physically significant sense.

However, patients with soul erosion often have highly uncontrollable aggressiveness, and when the soul erosion breaks out acutely, their extremely terrifying appearance can easily break down the mental defenses of the bystanders, causing the bystanders to lose control of their minds, be taken advantage of by the remnant souls of the past, and suffer from soul erosion.

In a nutshell, "the longer you stare into the abyss, the more likely you are to be stared at, entangled, and swallowed by the abyss."

It is conceivable that the wilderness area adjacent to the polluted area and where natural disasters frequently occur is the hardest hit area by the outbreak of spiritual erosion.

Whether they are caravans, bandits or refugees, in order to survive in the extremely cruel environment, they have to repeatedly activate the forbidden cards of evil spirits of unknown origin.

Ultimately, there are only two outcomes.

Or, by overusing forbidden powers, one will be contaminated by the past, suffer from spiritual erosion, and become a monster possessed by a residual soul.

Or, fearing suffering from spiritual erosion, they refuse to use forbidden powers, and thus are eliminated by the former in the competition for survival.

There is actually a third outcome.

By using the forbidden power, he turned into a monster and gained powerful strength.

Still unable to win the race for survival, he became a victim of the law of the jungle and fell into the endless darkness at the bottom of the abyss.

——For the vast majority of ordinary people, this is the most common fate.

Including the four major card-making companies, all major forces in the Heroic Alliance want to completely conquer the "century-old problem" of spiritual erosion.

But up to now, no force has found a way to completely cure the spiritual erosion disease.

The closest result is to control the deterioration of the spiritual erosion disease, which requires regular use of priceless special medicine and strict control of the time and frequency of activating the guardian spirit.

The financial and technical background of the Rolling Stones Club is far from comparable to that of the four major card-making companies.

They can only take unconventional approaches and try to use unconventional methods to overcome this incurable disease.

Conditions are limited, and many treatments are too extreme. In the eyes of bystanders, they seem like horrific torture - there is nothing that can be done about it.

On the other hand, those who come here voluntarily or involuntarily for treatment have often developed their disease to the middle or late stages. Even from the outside, they look like monsters that are neither human nor ghost.

After treatment at the Rolling Stones, a small number of them may regain some semblance of humanity.

However, the condition of most people will worsen or even flare up acutely, and they will completely return to their former state.

This alone is an unforgivable crime in the eyes of many morally upright and knowledgeable people.

But what if we don’t do this?

If we let these patients with mid- to late-stage spiritual erosion run around in the wilderness, won’t they inevitably die, and even drag others down with them?
"You can simply think of this place as a combination of a psychiatric hospital and an infectious disease hospital. What we do here is disgusting, but we have to do it.

"So, it's best to find a hole to crawl into like a rat, so that those kind-hearted people who can't tolerate any grain of sand in their eyes won't see so many deformed, ugly, dirty and bloody things."

Leliana concluded with a smile.

There is deep helplessness and bitterness hidden in the smile.

Xu Yan had seen a similar smile on Lao Scar's face.

In a sense, the Rolling Stone Club and the Ten Thousand Souls Sect are doing the same thing.

No matter what era it is, the world is always full of things that are disgusting but have to be done.

But is it that simple?

In the next few days, Xu Yan no longer concealed his strength.

He studied wholeheartedly and devoted himself to the maintenance of spiritual cards with great enthusiasm.

He completed the processing of hundreds of bronze broken cards in one go, repaired sixteen of them, and strengthened and modified three cards.

Considering that these cards are all damaged cards that have reached the scrap standard.

A repair rate of 10% is already a pretty astonishing number.

As for the cards that could not be repaired, he also tried his best to analyze the extraordinary materials in them to maximize the net residual value.

Of course, he accepted the hundreds of residual souls contained in the card without any hesitation, and transformed them into the ferocious purple energy of Hongmeng.

[Current Merit Points: 71433]

This is the largest amount of wealth Xu Yan has accumulated since his rebirth.

In the spirit of "spending all the money and making it back again", before he even had time to warm up, he invested all his merit points into strengthening his own basic stats and the two guardian spirits.

(End of this chapter)