The two walked downstairs while they were also cautious of each other. Josh frowned as he looked around.

“It's like a scene out of a horror movie.” he said.

“It's like a phantom domain but not one completely formed.” Mark said as they went down and felt the feeling of the area change slowly and getting colder and finally at the bottom they opened the door showing a black corridor.

Both of their eyes shined as they activated vision techniques for total darkness and both of them saw the mist vanish while the world turned twilight.

“Oh yeah, it is a forming phantom domain made by the dark specter but it is in its formative state, unlike my own that is fully formed, this must be what normal poltergeists with the potential contain in their bodies. Dark specters don’t even have a complete soul so they can’t contain this inside until it fully forms.” He said.

The corridor had scarred and damaged walls and areas with openings showed disgusting rooms covered in black blood and body parts.

They just looked around before walking forward carefully to the first door and Mark wasn’t one bit courteous as he put force and kicked the doors off their hinges all the way to the back door.

“What are you doing!” Josh shouted.

Without even responding, shouts and screams came from all over.

“Waking them up, it is much easier to kill pests when you agitate the nest.” Mark said and they both looked around as the darkness, parts and blood seemed to slowly take form into warped disgusting figures.

“This is serious!” He said, extremely disgusted.

“The spirits here are more warped than normal, it must be because of the dense dark force.” Marks said.

A deformed figure shot out from the dark corner crawling on all fours and jumped at him but with a swing, before it could even react, the axe smacked into its neck and its head went flying.

In a clean motion, he took out a talisman from his pocket and smacked it against the falling head but ignored the body.

“You said you didn’t prepare any talisman.” Josh said.

“I said I had only combat talisman that make a big boom, not that my sealing talisman weren’t already prepared.” he said before eight spirits suddenly jumped out through the walls and both of them suddenly moved like shadows and in seconds heads were flying and before they hit the ground they all had a seal on them.

After a moment, the bodies began to move, making Josh groan.

“You should have sealed the bodies.” Josh said.

“Leave it.” He said and looked at the darker areas.

Josh looked as the body neared a head and it somehow attached it but the talisman seemed to glow and the body instantly was paralyzed in place, unable to move like a corpse frozen in time.

The next moment, over two dozen vengeful spirits rushed out like a hungry wave and both of them had to get serious and Mark stopped head hunting and went from cleaving body parts to splitting in half. What was important was that he made it that the spirits needed to piece themselves so he put the seal on the defenseless part and when they attached it, they would in turn be sealed.

That said, they both underestimated just how many vengeful spirits were in this place.

After almost an hour, they were already starting to breathe a little heavier while they stepped deeper while behind them was a corridor filled with frozen corpses that looked like it was from a massacre.

“Is this really the lair of a Dark specter, the ten other i’ve hunted have only had a little less than a hundred or so spirits!” Josh complained.

“You can’t compare different areas to each other. This place has been here for a century and went through world war 2. How many cruel and crude medical practices do you think weren't conducted in these walls before it reached the sanitized modern practices we have now.” Mark replied.

“The errors of the old generation are all accumulating for us.” he said and spat on the ground. “How much more do you think there are?” He asked.

Mark looked down the corridor and looked around, “Will depend on how many doors you want to knock down.” He said.

They could see five doors open because of them breaking the first one and all the vengeful spirits had come from there but beyond that, they felt a cold from far back in the abyss.

“When you stare into the abyss and it stares back.” Josh said.

“Yep.” Mark said as their tension instantly skyrocketed before a banshee-like scream came from the back and they began to hear banging as door after door burst open. “The domain twisted space and mirrored the usually small space into many places instead. It seems the more vengeful spirits, the larger this place.” He said as the darkness in front of them became tangible.

“Ready to use your big bombs?” Josh asked.

Mark’s bag instantly opened on its own and several talismans flew out with his thoughts and formed a formation. They were explosion talismen and were faced forward.

He gathered his hand in some kind of hand seal. “Blast formation! Forward burst!” he shouted and all the talismen shined before they erupted into flames but the explosion, flames and all the spiritual power burst forward instead of randomly.

It instantly filled the entire corridor with flame and a shockwave that would burst ears and smash into the darkness, lighting up the place instantly before the flames swept through the place.

BANG!

Instantly the corridors began to collapse and rooms fell down.

“Move!” Mark shouted and stepped forward and moved through the spiritual spectrum. He appeared several times until he passed the collapsing space while Josh used his own movement technique and after several steps, he was beside Mark and looked back.

“That was a controlled explosion talisman formation. How were they floating?” He asked.

“I’m a Poltergeist.” Mark said simply and raised his hand and the falling rocks behind them froze and pushed back against the walls and collapsed while leaving a tight passage that Josh would be able to use to return while the ghosts would be able to easily go through it.

After he was done, they turned and found a single door at the end that was still closed.

Mark didn’t hold back as his axe changed into a full two handed axe and Josh got himself ready before they walked in and found a wide, unnatural, room. It was like a mix of an arena and a morgue with the cubicle for the bodies.

What was extremely distressing was the immensely disgusting figure at the center of the room. A distorted muscular figure with extremely long hair covering most of its back and sides while a shockingly long tongue sticking out of its mouth.

Mark looked at it with disgust and saw the blackish green claws filled with filth and dry blood that was from many dead people it had killed and parts of souls it had swallowed.

His entire being felt repulsed by this thing.

“Fuck, this is disgusting.” Josh said.

“I couldn’t agree more.” Mark said as his body began to radiate spiritual power.

The next moment the dark specter roared and it hit both of them with suffocating sonic waves. They both instantly raised spiritual fields around them to deflect but in that time, it was already approaching and Mark reacted on instinct just like his first encounter with a vengeful spirit but this wasn’t a vengeful spirit, it was a Dark specter.

Its right hand moved and caught the axe and used the energy to turn before clawing at his head like he had done so many times to the other spirits.

The next moment, Josh’s glowing blade smacked the back and burned a wound through his arm and pushed his claw away from Mark’s head, saving him.

Mark instantly turned and pulled the grabbed axe and threw the ghost out of balance but it let go and jumped away while screaming in pain from the attack it had gotten and the smoking cut on its arm.

“So you prefer to save me instead of killing me after it dismembered me.” Mark said.

“Don’t play around, this thing is the strongest Dark specter I’ve seen. Those black marks on its arms… those are bondage chains, they are stressed meaning it is actually about to break its bondage.” Josh said.

“So you can’t beat it alone?” Mark inferred.

“That much is obvious. I never expected to come to deal with a Dark specter, the job was cleaning what I could find and reducing negative energies.” He said. “Your attack was weak.” He said.

“Yeah because it attacked me first. It seems I deeply hate the feeling of my spiritual power because I can still feel its predatory glare filled with hate on me.” Mark said as he looked at the dark specter and after he said that it melted into the shadows.

“What the fuck did you do?” Josh asked, looking around.

“I’ve developed a virtuous soul.” Mark replied.

“What! Wait… the 4 thousand specters and 6 thousand fragmented souls!” He said.

“Yeah, sheer quantity helped me achieve that while I was a wisp. It’s also why my spiritual power is more effective against them.” He said and suddenly swung behind them as an unnaturally long arm stretched out and mid swing he vanished and appeared above the arm and the swing cleaved into the arm ripping off the arm and making a loud scream reverberate out before a wave of dark force spread out.

When the first scream ended, the cries and wails of the dead vengeful spirits suddenly came as the spirits began to appear and rush out from all the walls. Hands and bodies appeared from any and all directions.

“Fucking hell!” Josh shouted as the world became the synonym of a horror game in it’s late game when the world was changed to the undead world.

Mark dropped down and cleaved down at a rising head, splitting it in half.

He didn’t think twice as a house seal suddenly came out and he shoved it against the floor.

It shined and released a wave and caused all the spirits on the ground to wail in pain as they pulled back their bodies leaving the entire floor clean.

“Wha!”

“It seals all superficies, be careful because the dark specter is not restricted by it!” Mark said only for him to jump and the large hand of the dark specter to home out under the talisman.

Josh was quick and pulled his own and slapped it on the ground and jumped back and tossed out dozens in an instant making the dark specter roar and jump out of the ground while it extended an arm and swung at Josh.

He blocked it but before it could attack, Mark appeared behind it making the spirits' instincts scream and he turned to block the incoming axe by swinging to hit him with the elbow but the next moment he vanished and appeared in front where his axe connected at the shoulder.

The sound of crunching bone and meat splatter came from the impact as the entire shoulder was cleaved through.

Instantly the dark specter roared and swung with its other arm, letting go of Josh.

Mark vanished and appeared away, behind it but it instantly followed with its instinct and attacked him but because he stopped focusing on Josh, the priest glared at it with sharp rage and focusing his entire power into his feet, he burst forward in two bounds and appeared above it and with a sword slash too fast to see, leaving only a wave of white light, the other arm was cut clean through.

Both of them glared at the specter and appeared in different positions as Josh was in front already mid swing when his cut to the spine and Mark appeared behind and swung, meeting at the opposite side.

CRACK!

The spine was completely cleaved through separating the body in half while both of them retrieved their weapon from the recoil of their weapons but they didn’t stop.

Mark instantly cleaved the head off while Josh cleaved the waist and split the legs before splitting the knees so it could not push itself and Mark turned to the arms in the air and cleaved the elbows.

It was done so fast that no spirit could react and when they finally landed, the dismembered ghost fell apart.

“Keep them away.” Mark said and instantly kneeled down and clasped his hand and started chanting.

The head of the dark specter opened and roared as the vengeful spirits surged into the room.

Josh held his sword straight out and his other hand like a ninja in front of his face as he focused until the last moment, “Path of light, world of sword lights.” he said and instantly his body burst out with bright light and everyone except at Mark and the scattered body parts waves upon waves of flashing sword attacks flew out and after a moment, only silence.

In the air, hundreds of vengeful spirits remained there before they split into tiny pieces as the sword attack had ground them to tiny pieces that would take a while to piece together once more.

Josh was huffing and took out some pills and drank a glowing vial of water which formed an aura of purity around him to keep the dark force off his body.

For Mark he was chanting an incredibly complex chant while items were coming out of his back and carving an even more complex and almost morbid looking circle on the ground.

Every piece of the dark specters body was pierced with a glowing iron needle which paralyzed him and his thick sin was starting to gather in a cloud above.

When the circle formed, several candles appeared and were lit and there were nine in total.

This time the dark specter roared in pain as the cloud began to gather and rip a hole through space unlike any of the others Mark had pulled.

Before, they were either shining white from peaceful specters moving on or regretful and sinful souls which formed a pitch black portal.

This time, the cloud of sin opened a demonic red entrance and strings of blood red energy came out and wrapped the dark specter who was fearing for his life. It tried to move but its limbs were unable to move but the most shocking was when a powerful wave of anger rushed out through the entire half formed realm and every vengeful spirit began to cry while in pieces or half formed and an unearthly suction began to form.

All the doors, all the energy in the walls and all the half formed rules of the phantom domain forming from the Dark specter was sucked up into this thing as the dark specter was slowly pulled, painfully, along with all its influence.

Josh had to stab his sword into the ground to keep himself from being swept up and he witnessed all the vengeful spirits and the illusion around them break like the world was being engulfed and invaded by some foreign being until finally the last spirit in the underground was sucked up and the unfinished domain fully collapsed, returning the room to the size of a normal morgue while the portal slowly stopped it’s suction and closed and the last of the sin cloud was absorbed.

When the portal closed, a bright golden light formed as if a sun had sparked in the room and Josh was shocked by the brilliance.

“My god… I’ve never seen so much karma gathered at once like this.” Josh said.

What shocked him most was that it slowly split in half and two orbs formed and one descended to Mark and landed in his hand before getting sucked into his body and the other flew to him and entered his body.

“What did you do?” Josh asked.

“Nothing… the world rewarded both of us with half of the karma. Don’t think that only the one that purges a ghost is the one to get the karma involved with the feat.” He said and looked at his hand before clenching both hands and getting up and picking up his axe and bag before looking around and finally at Josh. “So… are you planning to continue our little scuffle?” He asked.

Josh frowned and could feel Mark was equally tired after using that immense spell. That said, Josh wasn’t in any condition to fight anything anymore. The pills were slow to build up his energy and weren’t made for quick combat. Most of the time people using them would find a safe place to recover so he just shook his head.

“Leave it… even if i wanted to, i would have an even harder time against you than the dark specter. You’ve got spells and talismans as well.” he said while letting out a heavy breath and getting up with a stumble. He had to deactivate his armor because it was still absorbing energy and looked around with what little he could activate of his eyes.

“Are all the spirits gone?” He asked.

“Yes, the usual spell for purging dark specters ‘couldn’t’ be applied here. I had to do that spell to instantly clear out everything that had been influenced by the dark specter.” He said. “From the feedback of the spell… There were roughly 530 vengeful spirits in this hospital all bound to the building. If the dark specter had destroyed this place on his escape as he became an evil spirit, all these would be free and would rapidly start growing until they were also evil spirits.” Mark said.

Josh felt his blood pressure instantly rise when he heard this.

“Let’s get out of here so I can get some fresh air, I need that.” He said and with a nod, Mark followed him but as you would expect with the collapse of the domain, there was only a small bit of distance to the door and the collapsed section was on the side meaning they could still reach the door easily and climb up. Waiting there were two inspectors who began to help them and cleanse their bodies of any excess negative energies their bodies likely had. This was especially important for Josh.

“We felt a massive surge?” one of them asked.

“I used the Purge of Evil incantation to cleanse it.” Mark said.

“Huh?! That is only usable in an evil spirit domain!” one of the inspectors said.

“The dark specter was already in the process of forming a domain so it satisfied the conditions.” Mark explained.

“This is serious, a half formed domain from a dark specter… How many vengeful spirits?” He asked.

“530.” Mark said.

They both trembled, “To think we had not picked up so many. Did you count how many you cleared on the top floors?” He asked.

Mark nodded, “There were a total of 976 specters, 87 vengeful spirits in the top three floors bringing the sum total of vengeful spirits to 617.” Mark said.

“Holy shit… if it had gone on for a little longer it would have formed a haunted zone and might have spread to the surroundings. Although it might not have had the same effect as the Elizabeth town incident with a reborn dead nearly becoming a disaster spirit, it still would have drastically increased the rate of negative energy production. Thank you both for dealing with this.” the inspector said.

“It’s fine, a good part of the dark force has been sucked up with all the spirits. That said, you might have to spend quite a while to fully remove the dark force, it was almost pitch black.” Mark said.

“That’s fine, soon we hope to fully free this place and will send to the city council the total implosion of this building and will open this space. It should also increase the market value of the surroundings that have constantly been tainted by negative energies.” He said.

“I would suggest building a small park here.” Josh said, “Particularly one with a hidden natural energy formation that helps generate positive energy to combat the negative energy that most metropolitan areas produce.”

The spirits smiled, “We all want more of that, sadly we cannot force mortals to do that, only present an offer and help on the side of preventing spiritual surges like in Elizabeth town.” the inspector taking care of him said.

Josh was just silent as the last of the Dark force was extracted from him and he just got some normal medical care before getting up. “I’m heading to HQ to report this. They need to be aware of the dangers that we're here and to go to other long standing haunted zones to do a proper cleansing.” he said.

He didn’t look back as he left the hospital.

Mark just waited a bit before finally lifting his hand and opening it to reveal two strange objects. “After i used the purge of evil, the karma gathered at my hand and dropped these things, any idea what it is?” He asked.

The two inspectors looked. In Mark’s hand was a small crystalline rock and a slightly curved, super thin needle like object.

They both looked at it close and touched it before picking each of them. Surprisingly, they turned very dull at their touch but when returned to Mark, they gained a healthy glow to it.

They looked and nodded, “The crystal we know, it is the condensed rules and power of the forming domain. If it had been a complete domain and you had been a walking corpse, you would have condensed a finger long crystal. Small ones like these tend to combine with several others. They only react to the person who made it but when combining them you need just one of your own to act as the medium to absorb and assimilate the others.” One of them explained.

“What is the purpose?” Mark asked.

“Well… under normal circumstances, it can be absorbed into a phantom’s soul and they will be able to absorb that complete crystal and form their own phantom domain if they can fully piece and power the assimilation. For people with existing domains, it can be used to expand the ‘completeness’ as people call it. How to do it, we don’t know.” the other one said.

“Oh, I’ve heard that these things are also quite flexible and can absorb elemental energies and they tend to produce domains affected by this element.” the first one said.

“And the needle?” he asked, holding up the white thread like object.

“Who knows, never heard of anything like that. Then again, there are a lot of unknown items that have formed from the Purge of Evil. It’s been confirmed that the Dark specter and all the vengeful spirit’s dark force and ectoplasm is stripped from the soul, purified by the force on the other side and condensed into a solid object. They are as varied as can be and can have any number of effects or none at all and just be some kind of material.”

“I see…” Mark said.

“Are dark specters like this one’s setting common?” He asked.

“Well… they aren’t extremely uncommon…” the first inspector said with a hard expression. “1 in 50 can be in this kind of setting. That proportion grows higher the larger the metropolis and the more dangerous the city is. Basically the higher the death count, the higher the probability of finding dark specters almost ascending to evil spirits with a half formed domain.”

“Do you directly cleanse those confirmed of this?” He asked.

The inspectors smiled weakly, “We hope to do it but we are limited on manpower and even walking corpses are neck deep in work. Also, the capacity to properly identify things gets harder each rank higher something goes. That is why specters and vengeful spirits are so common on the bounty board but dark specters are maybe one or two per city and you only find the bounty of evil spirits but not localization. It is like a cold case in mortal detective agencies.” the second one said.

Mark sighed and took out his phone and began to surf the market, “What is this crystal called?” He asked.

“Domain fragments.” they said together.

He smiled, finding it ironic that he didn’t think about it, and searched for it. “Oh… the price is actually pretty cheap, only $5,000 a piece.” he said.

“That is cheap for you, for common phantoms, that is an impossibility.” the first one said.

“Yeah… especially with this job.” he said and asked to confirm the payment.

“976 specters, vengeful spirits 617 and 1 dark specter. specters in this condition are 150 a piece, vengeful spirits are max price at 4,000 a piece because of the danger they had posed for their rapid growth to evil spirits and the dark specter is 150,000 because it had a premature domain which made it more dangerous than normal.” the inspector said.

“I never checked but the dark specter's general price range is?”

“From 50,000 to 100,000.” the inspector calculating said.

Mark nodded as he let them work the numbers.

“Okay, 976 specters equaled out to $146,400, Vengeful spirits equaled 2,468,000 and the dark spirit is as we said.” he said. They both began to unload wad after wad of spirit dollars.

Because spirit dollars come only in value of 1, it turned into quite the pile of money you would see in movies and he smiled as he saw that. He just levitated each wad of cash and ran his spiritual power to rapidly count. Each wad was 500 dollars, there were 5,528 full wads and the extra 400 was the last one.

“You’ve got a lot to work with now.” the inspectors said.

“Yeah, doesn’t change much though because I still have a lot to invest into.” he said and began to search up information on the domain fragment as the inspectors headed downstairs to continue their jobs.

Sitting there, Mark just recovered while channeling what he had left of spiritual power while reading about domain fragments.

“Domain fragments, a shard formed by using the Purge of Evil against any dark specter or evil spirit with an unfinished domain. It will break the domain and gather all of the formed powers into a solid crystal and purify the dark influence. Only the maker of the crystal can actively use it but crystals can absorb other fragments to grow into a Domain Crystal. These crystals can be actively absorbed by other domains to expand their capacities and improve their existing functions and expand their natural size permitting greater expansion capacity. These crystals can be influenced by natural elements to form nature energy rich domains which can also affect the phantoms that choose to live in them, making them gather those natural energies.”

He read this and wondered and kept reading and skimmed until he came upon an interesting article.

“Although it has never been achieved, it is hypothesized that domains can become more realistic if domain crystals with each of the elements of nature and incorporated at one time into a domain. Besides the rapid expansion that the crystal naturally does, it is believed that it could cause elemental balancing and form a large healthy ‘world’. Sadly, although it has been attempted a total of 5 times, the phantoms of these domains were unable to handle the stress as the domain was connected to them and also affected them so further testing was never done.”

Mark frowned at the last part and thought very hard on this aspect. He would risk his life to try this instead of just incorporating this to make his domain larger and function better.

“I’ll hold onto this idea. The specific elements however are the Chinese spectrum so I’ll keep that in mind. Fate has its ways of working so if it comes to it then it might work out.” he said.

Getting up, still tired, he walked out of the creepy hospital and went to his car. He checked the time and it was already 2 am. He shook his head and began to drive and was happy to find some 24 hour fast food places that he ordered food to regain so much energy before he set his GPS back home and started the drive back.

***

Josh walked out, tired, after turning in his report with irritation that he was criticized for the same ‘blunder’ of not killing Mark but they all understood that he was no longer easily killable by Josh. He had already trained and improved by a great deal compared to his recently awakened state.

If not for his moveable bondage to the book, he wouldn’t have gotten away honestly.

That said, they took the threat serious once Josh revealed the number of vengeful spirits located in that one hospital and some higher ups almost spat their drinks when they heard that there were over 600 vengeful spirits within a single hospital in the middle of a large city like that and they hadn’t ever cleared it.

They could only remain slightly happy that the Soul society hadn’t noticed this but were worried when they heard it was because of a half formed domain the dark specter had been making.

They rewarded him for the proper cleansing of the place. Even if it was together with Mark, it was two men against a literal army and was not an easy feat by no means. It is said that enough ants could kill an elephant so what about vengeful spirits against two people one rank higher than their state of power.

Their powers weren’t infinite, it had an end so they were smart to incapacitate the dark specter before using their full force to stop the surge of spirits while the other purged them all at once.

He got out of that with merit instead of failure and was given appropriate reward for doing the job beyond the requested.

The reward was irritating though, it was a group of crystals and a note was on it, “Space crystals: Can be refined into a small mobile living hut to make large micro land. Use it to create your own mobile spirit mountain so that you can produce your own mystical resources.”

“Fuck those old men, are they planning to bench me into management or training?!” He groaned in anger. That said he saw writing in code. It irritated him more because the HQ had thousands of code keys and he was made to learn them all but going through them all was a pain even with his higher mental capacity but as he looked his mind suddenly clicked and his eyes shined with spirit sight.

The words instantly changed into a proper message, “Do not think this is benching you. The danger of the world at large is growing worse and worse and we’ve begun to search through all our personnel for those who can support extra large micro worlds to prepare for hiding people. The spiritual side of the world is getting more uncertain so it might reach a state where we might have to house common people so we need places that could contain them.”

He looked at the writing and knew it was his master, the person who originally trained him personally. He looked at the crystals and he remembered feeling something similar coming from Mark. “He obtained something like this I think. He tried to hide it but the fluctuation is kinda hard to hide.” He said and then looked at the crystals. There were 10 white crystals and two sets of 7 crystals with elemental properties of the elements that constituted matter.

He thought a long while before going to his room and focusing intensely on a skill he wasn’t used to using and focused a huge amount of power into his eyes and looked at the message despite the pain in his head and eyes and saw a new message.

“The phantom you fought, you said he had a virtuous soul and formed a phantom domain as a poltergeist. The others do not agree but I want you to find him and give him 5 of the white crystals and a set of the elemental ones. His obsession is to be known as the greatest exorcist, it is ultimately an idiot thing to many but you’ve seen his effort and result. I am one to believe that he could be one of the keys to resolving the problem that exists by lacking a systematic way to make spirits move along. I believe a ghost with this kind of obsession and dedication to his obsession will eventually breed something akin to a grim reaper. Do not reveal this to the others and burn this message after you read it. After that, try to locate him and pass him these crystals.”

He finally finished and shut his eyes because of the pain and using his mental energy he found some healing pills and calmed the pain in his head before looking at the paper and tore it to shreds before conjuring spiritual flames that burned the paper not even leaving ash. He looked at the crystals before separating his set and stored the rest in a storage container before going to a professional refiner to properly build a micro spirit mountain which is an isolated domain world that is man made.