Colette surveyed the group of teenagers before resuming her lecture.
"Once again, Qi corruption is a concept known to everyone, a blight that sank into this world five decades ago. But that is only the surface. After years of study, we finally uncovered what brought it here..."
The students showed no reaction.
They had heard the story countless times and carried the patience of people enduring repetition.
For Kyle, however, it was entirely different.
This was the first time he had heard that the cause was known.
Until now, he had assumed the corruption had simply appeared, punishment from distant gods who wished to see humanity erased.
That assumption had been wrong.
His own bitter judgement of mankind aside, he realised how far behind he stood.
Knowledge of this scale existed, and he had not been aware of a single part of it.
On reflection, the fault was hardly surprising.
He had never gone out of his way to deal with others, nor had he immersed himself in their world.
If he was excluded, it was not because anyone intended it, but because he had kept himself apart, or so he reasoned.
"...When the gods died, which should never have been possible, their essence ruptured across creation and caused the first crack in the sky. Since no god was meant to bleed, their fallen bodies did not decay in any natural manner. Instead they broke into fragments that began to sink into the world through the cracks. This was Qi corruption, and it rewrote the laws of existence..." Colette paused, pressing her hands together before releasing a long breath.
She cast a brief look at the instructor, who remained unmoved.
Kyle, on the other hand, finally grasped the concept itself.
The gods had not turned their faces from the world, nor had they chosen to watch it collapse.
They were all dead, and their ruin had poisoned everything.
But again... who killed them?
It could not be that they grew old and perished, that was far too absurd for beings called immortals.
They were not even creatures of form, more like unrecognised shapes adrift beyond human comprehension.
He understood more than half of what Colette had explained with absolute clarity.
Qi corruption had reshaped the world into a zone where chaos bred freely, forcing a new order to take hold.
It erased old knowledge, dissolved martial legacies, and tore through modern society.
Even cultivation, once a pursuit for prestige or ascension, had been twisted into something else.
Nature's laws themselves had been bent into nonsense.
Animals warped into things that belonged outside the natural order.
New species emerged without origin.
Entities without trace or root began to surface.
And every environment shifted... until the entire world had become a deadly zone.
Once corruption touched a being, it could never be cured, only slowed if one was fortunate.
It gnawed at the mind and the soul, dragging them towards three inevitable stages: mutation, collapse, and finally oblivion.
Na-Ri, however, was the single exception. She had been infected, her body already breaking under its weight, and yet she had been cured entirely by him.
The reason was simple; his Yang Qi contained a Purified Qi Pool, thanks to his damned manual.
From where she stood at the front, the beautiful stranger spared him a glance.
The moment Colette spoke of Qi corruption, Na-Ri was reminded of her own brush with death, when Kyle, sadistic and a bit suffocating as he was, had done what no one else could.
He had dragged her back from the edge of an end that should have been certain.
His aura still lingered within her sight in bright and defiant light.
But it seemed that she alone could see it.
'...I still cannot reason it. Who are you really, Kyle?'
Corruption spared no one.
Every teenager in the room, along with Colette and the instructor at the front, knew that infection would come for them eventually.
It was only a matter of time...
The awakening of the manual had never come as a rescue, nor had it offered any form of salvation, but merely carved out a narrow pocket of survival within a collapsing world, while corruption spread ever further and deepened its hold.
Colette inclined her head slightly before raising her voice so that none could mistake her words:
"The manual you all hold was born from the ripples of divine death. It is a forced adaptation that tore apart the old cultivation systems and replaced them with imposed limits, stages, ranks, and relentless requirements. Humanity was driven into this structure, not by choice, but because survival itself had been rewritten. The manual is no gift but a restraint, holding back the order born of corruption only for a time, and even then remaining shaped by that same corruption, so that in the end survival proves nothing more than... temporary."
Yes, it was never salvation, but only a lengthening of the road where death still lingered at every turn, waiting with patience until the day came to claim its due.
Survival under such a system felt less like freedom and more like walking with a silent executioner, the kind that let you take one more step, one more breath, all the while knowing it would eventually lead you to the same end.
To live in such a state was to exist under constant reminder that life itself was borrowed.
It was as if death had become a companion that marched alongside every man, woman, and child, offering no comfort, only a cruel encouragement to keep running even when the path ahead narrowed to nothing.
Each attempt to resist became another act in a game where the outcome was already fixed.
In time, the residents began to feel the weight of this truth settle differently in their minds.
They had been told the same warning almost every day, as if repetition could harden them against fear, but there are truths that cannot be accepted by sheer habit.
No matter how often one rehearsed for it, death never became easier to meet.
It was bitter knowledge to accept that no measure of effort, no height of strength, and no sacrifice of will could alter the inevitable descent.
However hard one tried, the end remained the same, and each person was forced to carry that realisation as both burden and reminder of the futility woven into survival itself...
Some of them had to avert their eyes from Colette, forcing themselves to fix their attention on the table before their emotions surfaced.
Even Orion, usually the one to make light of any moment, wore a sombre expression.
His gaze shifted towards Na-Ri, standing beside him, who remained entirely composed with her indifferent expression.
When Orion's eyes drifted once more, they settled on Kyle at the far back.
He stood there with the same detached air as before, as though nothing spoken by the female leader carried the slightest weight or concern.
The female leader pressed on, aware that time was slipping away.
Her voice carried a harder edge as she continued, "What we must keep in mind is not complicated. As hunters, we are able to endure any hardship if we place raw determination and the will to survive above all else. No zone is truly unbreakable. A trial zone, however, is not structured like a city. It forms a world of its own, appearing without warning and dragging the impossible inside. Many fail to live through the transmission alone. Yes, it could emerge even here. Within such a place, powerful entities may arise, some equal to Stage Four, and even a Tier 5 - Elder could be shredded upon contact."
She cast another glance at the instructor, reminding herself that he was a Tier 5 while she remained at Tier 4.
The thought only reinforced the reality that even Mr Vincent, the man responsible for drilling combat skills into them day after day, might not survive for an hour inside a trial zone.
The force contained within such a place compressed with such intensity that the aftermath could hardly be described.
The greatest cause of death during transmission was not the sheer gravity pulling bodies down, but rather the unstable energy surges it created.
When a trial zone was on the verge of breaking open, the spiritual energy within a cultivator could spike without warning, reaching over seventy percent output despite the absence of deliberate input.
The air itself would respond to the distortion. Its pressure would drop suddenly, leaving extensive damage in its wake.
Even lower-ranked mutated beasts were not immune.
They possessed a sharper instinct for danger than humans, and so they would begin to flee long before anyone else understood what was coming.
Their abrupt migrations often broke natural patterns, resembling the way creatures scattered when a zone boss was slain and the veil upon their minds dissolved.
However, during this moment, the hunters scattered throughout the surrounding area would begin to falter.
The mounting pressure upon the air itself gradually weakened their bodies, leaving them vulnerable and turning them into easy prey for the migrating beasts that rushed past in their desperate escape.
Kyle's eyes caught the light as he first looked up to Colette at the front, and then slowly shifted to each of the residents gathered in the space.
The words that had haunted his mind for so long finally connected with what he now understood.
Those cultivators in the market had not been frail or incompetent to the point of failing against the oncoming hordes.
They had simply been forced into collapse by the sudden dip that stripped their strength away.
'...Everyone here is going to die. There will be a Trial Zone breakout soon.'