Besides the breathing methods that were demonic in nature, there were other developments that Gaia found far more interesting. She wanted to smite the demonic cultivators out of existence, especially because the benefits she gained from allowing them to develop their methods were rather limited. The only reason they were still alive was that they had not yet caused enough harm to justify her intervention, and Gaia wanted humanity to understand the darker side of its own nature. She wanted humans to see that people capable of doing terrible things for power and longevity still existed.
After all, most of humanity's great genocides were now around fifty years old. That did not mean they had been forgotten, nor did it mean that people had stopped discussing them, but for most humans, they were no longer something that happened in their everyday lives. Much of the older generation still remembered those events, yet for many younger people, the worst atrocities were already outside their living memory. They knew the history, but knowing that something happened was very different from understanding that there were still people who could willingly commit such acts.
The younger generations therefore did not always understand the darker side of humanity's nature. Many had grown up in a world where the worst examples of human cruelty existed mainly in history books, documentaries, and lessons about the past. They did not necessarily believe that someone could willingly kill a billion people if doing so granted them power and a longer life. Gaia knew better, and that was precisely why she allowed the demonic cultivators to continue existing.
She wanted humanity to understand that such people existed before something even worse happened. More importantly, she hoped that humans would eventually connect these people to the corrupted humans hiding among them. The corrupted humans were far more dangerous because their ultimate goal was not simply power or longevity, but the destruction of the universe itself. They were the kind of enemy that humanity desperately needed to understand before it was too late.
The problem was that the corrupted humans were extremely good at hiding. They could conceal themselves so thoroughly that they could appear to be completely ordinary human beings, and Gaia could not reliably identify them without looking deeply into their souls. Even then, she had to be incredibly careful, because if the Void material inside the corrupted human noticed that she was examining it, it could destroy the host rather than allow itself to be exposed. That made investigating them considerably more complicated than simply looking at someone and determining whether they were corrupted.
Gaia also could not simply examine every human being on Earth. For one thing, she had self-imposed rules that prevented her from constantly invading the souls of humans without a reason. Those rules existed for a purpose, even if she sometimes found them inconvenient. More importantly, a thorough soul examination required energy, and Gaia simply did not possess enough energy to perform that kind of investigation on billions of humans.
She already had more than enough responsibilities consuming her attention. Earth was still recovering from the damage caused by humanity, and Gaia was actively working to restore its ecosystems. Forests, oceans, soil, animals, plants, and countless other parts of the planet were still adjusting to the changes brought by mana and the transformation of Earth. Restoring everything would take time, and Gaia could not simply abandon that work to inspect every human soul on the planet.
As a result, she could only investigate people she already had strong reasons to suspect were corrupted. Once someone reached that threshold, however, Gaia investigated thoroughly. She did not want to miss a corrupted human simply because she had decided to be cautious about spending her energy. The danger posed by the Void was simply too great for her to ignore genuine warning signs.
This also made Gaia wonder about something she had seen repeatedly in cultivation novels. Why did those so-called Heavenly Dao entities not simply eliminate demonic cultivators? If the Heavenly Dao was powerful enough to control the world, then destroying a few demonic cultivators should have been relatively easy. Gaia was a planet, after all, and removing a handful of humans who threatened the world's balance was not particularly difficult for her.
That was why the legendary lightning tribulations and heavenly punishments described in those stories were not particularly convincing to her. She understood why authors used them, because they made for dramatic stories, but Gaia could not help questioning the logic behind them. If a Heavenly Dao truly possessed enough authority to destroy someone, why would it bother with elaborate lightning tribunals instead of simply removing the threat?
Perhaps the novels had simply gotten that part wrong. Most of what appeared in cultivation novels was fantasy, even if some of the ideas were strangely close to reality. Gaia had already discovered that several concepts humans had imagined independently could actually work under the right circumstances. The existence of Void energy and the faint influence of dark matter made some of those fictional ideas less ridiculous than they should have been.
Dark matter radiated a very slight presence that could occasionally influence Earth and individual beings. It was subtle, but it existed, and that meant some of the principles behind cultivation stories might have been based on things humans had unconsciously noticed. Even so, Gaia remained unconvinced that the fictional Heavenly Dao explanations were correct. She had firsthand experience with being a planetary consciousness, and her reality was considerably more complicated than those novels suggested.
Even now, she was allowing demonic cultivators to exist. That was not because she was powerless to stop them. If Gaia truly decided that they had crossed a line that could no longer be tolerated, removing them would not be difficult. She was allowing them to remain because she wanted humanity to see what humans could become when they pursued power without restraint.
While one part of Gaia's consciousness was mulling over those strange questions about fate, Heavenly Dao, and the oddities of cultivation novels, another part of her consciousness had split away to observe a breathing method that genuinely excited her. This one belonged to the Christian Church. Gaia could directly observe its development because several priests in the Vatican had already become Mortals, and she could see their cultivation method taking shape through their prayers.
For these priests, prayer was their form of cultivation. As they prayed, they received feedback from their god, and that feedback lent them a portion of their god's power. This allowed them to absorb more mana while they continued praying and maintained the correct image of their god within their hearts. Their cultivation was therefore not simply about absorbing mana themselves, but about creating a cycle between themselves, their faith, and their god.
What was especially interesting to Gaia was what happened to the cultural energy involved. The priests essentially acted as purifiers. They received cultural energy from their god and sorted through it, separating what their god could use from what would otherwise become harmful. The purified cultural energy was then returned to their god, while the less useful cultural energy served as bait that attracted mana toward the priests' bodies.
That mana could then be drawn into their bodies and absorbed. The priests were effectively using their own free will to capture the mana that had been attracted to them, turning it into something they could keep for themselves. In exchange for performing this filtering and purification process, a substantial amount of mana remained within their bodies. It created a mutually beneficial relationship between the priests and their god.
Gaia did have to clarify one important point in her own mind, however. There was not actually such a thing as objectively good or bad cultural energy, at least not in the way humans normally understood those words. To Gaia, all cultural energy was valuable. She could use it to refine Void energy and replenish her own energy reserves, so even cultural energy that humans considered terrible was still useful to her.
For ordinary humans and gods, however, it was reasonable to describe cultural energy as good or bad. No god could function properly if their mind was filled with pure chaos. Cultural energy could take countless forms, including grief, anger, greed, fear, joy, love, devotion, hope, or simply the thought of a god helping someone in need. None of those emotions were inherently useless, but they could become dangerous when combined without any kind of structure.
If all those different forms of cultural energy were allowed to clump together inside a god, the result could become something monstrous. The resulting being might possess enormous amounts of energy while no longer understanding what it was, what it wanted, or what it represented. The filtering process was therefore essential. It gave gods a way to separate the different forms of cultural energy before they accumulated into something they could no longer control.
Speaking of something being out of control, Gaia thought as her attention returned to Rome. She was still watching the avatar sitting inside the same coffee shop near the Vatican. He had remained there while she observed the developing breathing method, and she had apparently been watching him long enough for him to notice.
The avatar suddenly raised an eyebrow.
The gesture was small, but the meaning was obvious.
He had spotted her stalking him.