As soon as Mark’s soldiers took control of all the settlements that were under the elders, there were instantly problems. The elders did not work under a united worth ethic, each treated the territory just like a bar, it was literally no different, they used workers to focus only on produce that had been viable to turn into benefit for their bars.

Basically it was the sole monopoly work chain in the entire domain and each of them worked differently.

Mark just shook his head at this as he had the librarians go through all the remaining files that were left because he didn’t want it being taken away.

Thankfully they were useful enough to actually go through a huge grade 1 and 2 catalog of spiritual herbs and plants and had basically created a specific book of plants that grew strong and healthy.

This still pissed Mark off and began to fix the problem. The first part was using the remaining librarians that weren’t working in the settlements to work as researchers.

Their job was to go through the local flora and gather samples of every herb native to the domain before researching and comparing it to the natural earth herbs.

In his mind, he thought that everything was based off of earth. Those that didn’t grow healthy would be changed.

It is just that the domain hadn’t grown large enough to actually demonstrate a huge number and the savage butchering had likely destroyed a lot.

After that, a census was taken but it naturally didn’t need to be done face to face as Mark could sense all the souls in his domain so for each settlement he sent a police force of around 200 men to maintain the order and start restructuring everything.

The first was to develop a ‘healthy’ wood farm so that it didn’t devastate the remaining forests. The kinds of wood also needed to be analyzed and documented because there might be different types of wood.

He kept several spirit grain farms before looking at many of the normal crops. By normal it meant all the vegetables and fruits that are present in farms without any problems and began to distribute them through many farms to have a distributed production so that there would be a balanced farming economy.

For those who wanted to make bars, brewers and more, Mark actually gave them the incentive if they desired that. He wasn’t going to control the economy, he wanted the souls to actually think of themselves and in every settlement that he fixed up he would say that before leaving.

The economy was not created by the ruler.

As such, besides the farms which were funded purely by Mark, the rest of the economy was meant to be built by the ghosts.

That said when he finished the last settlement, his face was somber because of the population density.

Even with all the farm communities, small towns and even his soldiers, there were barely more than 20,000 in the entire domain.

When he asked the Soul Society members, they just smiled weakly, “We can’t force people to come to a domain.” one of them said weakly.

Mark slightly nodded in thought.

With that thought process he decided to do what he had been avoiding and that was recruiting pieced up souls. The main reason is that there was no filter for it. That said, before he could do that, he needed at least the first page of life and death formed.

The fragment had absorbed absurd amounts of energy while inside his body during his trance as did the void key and he knew he could make more anchor points now but he needed the pages because he needed the function in both to identify names, merits and sins. He didn’t want to recruit mass murderers without even knowing they were one.

He looked at his phone and saw that his large orders of book embryos and the materials for refining them had arrived at the Elizabethtown HQ building so he popped out and gathered that stuff along with the herb seeds of the confirmed herbs and crops he could already plant.

He paid upfront before heading back inside and distributed the seeds and headed to his altar and locked it down to take out the page.

It was the size of a normal piece of paper but it still needed to double in size before it would naturally split.

There were a lot of small creases and pores in the paper which came to be due to not being active when it absorbed energy but he knew that the burst of growth it needed would come with this.

He sat down and locked the altar so that he could focus and starting at the original corner he slowly filled the pores and creases and slowly the page glowed lightly.

He made sure to always keep the image of the functions and the final product in mind and slowly the material of the paper slowly restored to pristine state until it finally reached the last one at the opposite side.

When it was done, it began to draw a lot of power and he tossed the paper into the central altar and watched as it began to expand to all sides for a bit before he noticed a surprisingly thing as dark stains formed on the page before moving to one side while leaving the areas it left pure white to the point of glowing.

On the other hand, a golden radiance came from these areas which surfaced and moved around between each side and slowly the black gathered until the gold and black each filled one face of the paper showing their duality.

The black was sin and the gold was karma. They were two halves of the same coin.

It remained like that for a while before the two colors literally peeled off each other to form a gold and black paper very slowly.

It went on for a while until they finally split and he felt a pang in his soul as that happened before both pages flew into his soul and began to radiate a different aura that spread through his soul.

Eventually part of it settled into his eyes and another in his mind before connecting them to each page.

When it was done, he shook his head.

“What was that?” he said and looked around but felt nothing had changed but he knew better because he could feel the aura of the pages.

He checked the time and was happy that only a few hours had passed before he opened up and went to see if there was a difference and he instantly saw it.

As soon as he looked at a passing soul, their names would appear on both pages and he would see their names like you see in video games but most importantly he also saw the sins of a person and all the good they did in life and even after that.

The soul society members had a lot of good due to their work both before and after life while when he looked at his soldiers, despite the energy of their sins being extracted, he could still see the death count on their hands for being soldiers.

He smiled when he saw that so he appeared in Elizabethtown and went to look for any recent deaths that had resulted in fragments and happily found one and spotted a fragment from the cleared town and instantly both pages inscribed a name before he shockingly felt them try to summon the soul.

He blinked and frowned as he looked at the fragment.

He sensed the merit and sin before parking and while looking at it he supported the ‘summon’ and the fragment shined and jumped to his hand before several other fragments shot over one by one until the ninth before the sin appeared and reformed a small soul orb that was still not active and under his control.

He looked and grinned before closing his eyes and sending the soul on.

“Oh this is going to save me so much trouble dealing with specters now.” He chuckled.

He looked through the store app and eventually found a soul transport tool. It was something that soul society tended to use for moving large numbers of souls and he checked the capacity and purchased the grade 3, which walking corpses can use, which could move thousands at a time and store their souls.

After that he decided to do a cleaning job in one of the towns under his jurisdiction and he grabbed one of every fragment and looked through each name.

He divided those worth keeping and those that would move on.

After he got the Soul Pearl, as the tool was called, he summoned forth all those that he aided in passing on before turning to the recruits and summoned the souls forth and stored them in that orb state where they were still not awake and almost filled the pearl but in one sitting he purified the small town.

After that he tried to test it on a specter to see the result and he could also see their sins and merits but including that was their danger level if left to age.

Both with his superior power, he just pulled the specter to his hand before his body was formed into the form of a soul orb and he summoned the remaining fragments.

He checked the state of the orb once it was fully formed. It radiated excessive negative energy.

“Hmm… so this is the kind of souls that netherlight lamps were used to purify. The damaged soul fragments would be slowly strengthened while sin would be weakened until the soul was healed. They would also ‘pay’ for their sins.” He muttered.

Mark thought about the subject and all the many souls he just randomly purged but could be imprisoned and properly processed before moving them on.

“Right, I need to plan properly for something like that because it would get out very quickly if I was torturing sentient souls once they were pieced up so I should only do this with dark spirits.” he muttered

He sent the soul along but it was a true resentful soul instead of a victim of another.

“I need to plan this out really well because I will need to register souls so I need to check with them on this.” he said and with a nod he headed to his next objective and that was the surrounding communities and towns under the range of his domain and with the Void Key out, he used its ability to find the flow of negative energy if each place to find where it pooled and spent a few hours to make a slightly deep underground cavern and built the portals.

It should be said that this ‘range’ was based on the size of the domain. He didn’t immediately go to counties, he went to towns with equal size to Elizabethtown and had other domains protecting it.

He made sure to do it in stealth as he made the portal which would draw the negative energy from the city and the dark force. As for the material for it, the Void Key had produced enough for 8 towns, exactly the amount of settlements that mattered under the range of his domain including Louisville.

He forged the statues from the material he extracted to make the small cave.

He had to be careful when in towns surpassing 15,000 because there were several confrontations since last year in small towns like this that matched elizabethtown.

After about a day of working, he finally drove into Louisville and scowled as he felt the increased pressure of negative energy beyond even what he felt two years ago and he checked what the problem was and soon found on the notice board that it was caused by a wraith nest, they are evil spirits that had gain sentience and this nest had a shocking number of such beings with 80 confirmed and about 30 that escaped. There was a large tunnel system under the city but for the most part, the heart of this network and most of the tunnels had spirit suppression formations added in making it dangerous for them leaving only creatures as strong as dark specters at most.

He smiled because he knew a city with 600k in population would have such a massive concentration.

He was able to find a map of the mapped out layout but seeing that it was a monitored place he had left the town and prepared the twelve statues before going near the area and sneaking through the ground using a perspective block technique he had picked up to blend into the elements. It wasn’t something ghosts had, it was something he had just picked up when doing this several times and going through the earth. He had learned to run earth energy through his body making his aura identical to it and would make others see him as nothing different and not notice his aura.

He went through the rocks until he quietly appeared at the heart of the tunnels which had a sickening amount of energy rivaled with Elizabethtown's Reborn Dead’s nest.

The system of tunnels all had small channels to the surface clearly meant to do the same thing as the reborn dead had done.

He knew normal ghosts could not survive in this kind of environment but they could patrol and he waited a bit and as expected, some patrols carrying special barrier tools to keep the dark force away appeared.

“Fuck this, aren’t we done?” One of them complained.

“Yes, we are. That was our rounds and we even purged five dark specters as well which will fetch a lot of money so let’s bail.” the other said.

Together they headed up through the small vents.

Similar to them, there were almost 20 other groups that were ending their patrols until the entire underground was cleared of any spirits.

With a grin, Mark stepped out from the wall and didn’t waste time talking to himself as he went to the very center and after checking his phone’s compass, he set up the formation properly and established the portal and saw the thick energy plunge into the area.

“Now I have a passage to all those settlements.” he said and didn’t stick around as he flew out before hidden spirits could arrive and rushed out back to his car.

When he returned, he looked up at the waves of fragments that had pained expressions from the mist.

“It is going to take a long time for the negative energy of the surface to be pulled down so I should properly schedule some time to come to Louisville and clear out the fragments. However, now I need to support the pressure of Louisville. Wait now that i think about it…” he muttered and thought about the information in the Sin Eater’s knowledge. “Right, the domain evolution conditions, it says that once I have 10 anchors and support them properly, I’m supposed to face a tribulation. I should be careful from now on because the tribulation is pretty serious. Although domains face a normal tribulation, most people are always stiff corpses and up and deal with them pretty easily but they only come every 50 or so years. Knowing one is coming means I can prepare and avoid activating it.” He said as he felt his heart beat fast at the thought that he had 9 anchors, counting the main one which had centered his domain. “I should first figure out how mortal cultivation affects me.” He muttered before calling on his own contact with a possibility to explain that.

Josh was reluctant and a distance away but because it was important for Mark, he eventually got to schedule a meeting.

That said the meeting wasn’t quick and in fact, it was month's away because Josh was in another part of the world for his job.

With that in mind Mark returned to Elizabethtown, he had thought about returning to the mansion but he doubted the place was left standing. It honestly didn’t matter though since his farmers were in the domain already and all of them took care of a big spirit tea farm there.

As such, he simply parked his car and transported himself back inside before going to contact Soul Society and asked about populating the domain with fragmented souls.

The person at the other side of the camera sighed, “We’ve no problem with it, I’m sure back before you had a domain you were even told that you could fill your farmers and staff with the same so we see no problems but again, warn us of the number you plan to revive so that we can prepare staff.” he said.

“Perfect, I should be able to properly house about 100k spread among the eight settlements and the rest of the communities. However, I’ve all but cleared Elizabethtown’s fragmented population so when I do this, I’ll go to Louisville to clear that out.” he said.

“Be careful because many undesirables would slip in if you do that.” He said.

“I know but that isn’t a big problem.” Mark said before thinking a moment and getting serious, “What are the regulations on prisons? There are regular phantoms of prisoners and I’m unsure if I should just send them on their way or not?” He asked.

The spirit on the other side sighed, “Phantoms in the domains have solid bodies, although most can figure out how to phase through, it is possible to build formations to block that capacity so you can indeed make a proper prison with the works to punish people who deserve it after death.”

Mark smiled and nodded and got just what he wanted, however he wasn’t going to make it a prison like they expected, that was for sure.

The best part is that the materials for the Netherlight Lanterns weren’t actually that steep, only the forging required a proper mystic forge so he had to properly purchase and build that, most of his special tools for the book and weapons are similar.

He had them build it within a clear space of the central city and during the construction that took roughly a day, he procured a lot of material, most of it was iron but there was some special material he had to sense around his domain to obtain and it was a crystal. The color was unique to each domain but it was always the same, it contained the ember of a tiny green flame at the center and the lamp was meant to house and kindle that ember into a flame.

His domain had begun to produce this thanks to the sin eater’s formation in his domain and now he had a couple hundred ready and with determination, he went over the blueprint and threw the material into the massive forge and spewed out spiritual flames and forged all the separate pieces slowly and built their separate formations in each part.

Most of it was iron alloys but at the end, he added the crystal and piece by piece they connected and the crystal matter slowly melted and fused into the metal turning it slowly into violet iron with white glass while the ember slowly went to the lowest point and when the top finally connected and the last of the crystal was absorbed, an open panel door on the lamp opened and sucked in all the spiritual flame into the ember until nothing was left and the violet lamp with green flame floated there and radiated a very faint but dangerous feeling for all souls.

He grinned because he felt no fear as his Sin was gone but he was sure this would make for a great item to cause fear and maintain order.

Should trouble makers start appearing, the police and soldiers who carry this will use it to seal their souls. There was an entire formation around it meant to target and isolate a single soul and the greater the strength difference, the easier it gets to capture the soul.

When used on dark spirits in the world, it would instead capture them and slowly split their dark force while also doing what investigators did and actually rip dark force from the surrounding atmosphere. Again, the higher the stage rank compared to the energy of the captured target, the better the effect.

For specters, it would be perfect for Mark to get the soldiers to capture them in these and then he summons forth the missing fragments and cleanse a normal soul. At the same time, he couldn’t use this against his soldiers because his book automatically starts cleansing their sin upon registry.

“This is perfect, I just need a couple hundred… or maybe a few thousand just in case and then I start making the version 2 child books to upgrade the structure of the book.” he muttered.

He was quite happy with the recent changes as he began to produce many lanterns as long as he had supplies and naturally only made about a hundred, due to the number of crystals he had.

“This should work for now. Let’s take the opportunity to make the books with higher quality equipment instead of free handing it.” He said with a smile as he took out the bag of material and a shocking 1,350 book embryos.

Soul Society's capacity for making these was surprising even when so many were going into making new books but the price was still the same.

He put all the raw material and began to change them into the spiritual runes before putting in the books to build the formations into. Mark was aiming for 1000 child books with this many embryos. Even if it stayed only at 6 names per book, that would be 6,000 soldiers but he knew that wasn’t going to be the case. He was making dozens if not hundreds of books with a certain kind of formation to build new segments and then adding other kinds all to build an increasingly more complex system. He was sure that his book was going to be the most abstract and complex version of the book because the others would need hundreds of years to make the same changes.

It was also why he made changes despite only 325 books existing. Every 100 books was another group of fragments.

The support of a mystical forge improved immensely his capacity to forge books much faster and besides the first pair of 75 books that were fused soon after to complete the formation and restore the material, the rest were in groups of 100.

It took about 12 hours to go through all the books, much faster than the several days he would take before.

When he was done he sighed as he had 675 books, burned but fully formed and smiled.

“With so much power coming through the portals, I’m kinda happy to have these acting as valves to offset some of the energy.” He said while sweating and getting some water to help cool down. “The forge is quite a good thing, I should have gotten one sooner instead of wracking my head to make items in the open with so much energy being lost.” He said.

As the saying goes, there is always a proper tool for the job.

He stored it all away and took it to the altar where he started to put more and more into the four altars. The one with the main book supported 10 others like the original but the others, he kept adding until he finally felt the energy through the entire thing weaken after he surpassed 100.

“Damn.” He said.

With 300 books in each altar there was so much power running through the altar and he knew he couldn’t train normally. He filled the central altar and as the largest valve, it fit the remaining books in one go, showing just how much energy the pits under Elizabethtown and Louisville produced and will keep producing.

“I really hope the common cultivation can fill the gap to support this impact.” He said with a sigh and took out his main book and put it into the mix to drain more power. Then he took out his exorcist book and flipped to the walking corpse stage to finally learn exactly what goes on in this stage.