"Ah, well, that is the situation..." the prefect said, eyes slightly downcast as he wrapped up his explanation, to the sect janitor.
The sect janitor had only recently returned from meditating in seclusion, and to be told that there was a mess as large as this that needed to be cleaned the very moment that he walked back in?
Someone had broken a large part of the newly constructed martial arts dojo. A good portion of the ceiling had caved in, and there was rubble everywhere.
Effort had also been made to try to clean it up to a certain extent before the sect janitor got there, though, this could be said to only be a few light touches here and there.
The mess was still quite apparent - no, it was closer to a calamity than a mess. If he didn't know any better, it was like they had let a wild rhinoceros rampage in here.
The sect janitor was the only other Golden Core cultivator in the sect aside from Elder He Xuan. He was, as such, the second strongest in the sect.
Naturally, the prefect feared offending him because of this.
The sect janitor, however, did not seem angry whatsoever. "Well, this will take some time to clean up.... but... to cause this much damage in a single blow - and you tell me this was unintentional?"
The prefect nodded.
"Right - and who was it that caused this much damage?" the sect janitor asked.
"Tang Ze!" the prefect said. Being one of the prefects, he had no attachment to Tang Ze at all and did not hesitate for even an instant before throwing him under the bus. If the sect janitor chose to deal with him harshly - well, the prefect secretly hoped that would be the case!
"Tang Ze... Tang Ze..." the sect janitor said, committing that name to memory. "Very well - thank you. You may leave now."
The prefect scurried off with a wicked grin on his face. 'Tang Ze - just see what happens to you now!' is what he was thinking as he made his exit.
The sect janitor did not take any immediate action against or even try to seek out Tang Ze, instead working on clearing out the rubble.
He had been planning on checking on Guo Jia when he came back, and he would deal with that issue first.
Two incidents had made a very large impact on his life.
The first was losing both of his parents when he was ten years old. As he had no other relatives, he would've either been thrown on the streets or had to live in a public orphanage, both of which were close to death sentences. Especially for someone like him at the time, who would've known next to nothing about how to survive in such a place having been raised in a cozy environment up till then.
Instead, he had been taken in by the sect. After all, both of his parents had been regular members, and one couldn't say that such an upbringing was pleasant or even came close to how times had been when his parents had still been alive, but it was far preferable to the alternative. He had been old enough to understand that.
Since then, he felt like he owed the sect a great debt in return. The family was the upon which the world was built, sects attempted to take this a step further by creating a giant family - many people scoffed at such an idea, but the sect janitor was someone who took this to heart.
The second incident was one that had occurred when he had been an Initiate. Being a ward of the sect, he had been allowed to join without a fee or having to take an entrance test, that was thanks to the legacy of his parents. He had trained in an outer division of the Rising Phoenix sect, a division which had been much like this one.
His youth had been spent having fun and cultivating with his squad members, when one night, calamity struck.
He did not know this at the time, but one of his friends had been harboring a heart demon. This heart demon took corporeal form, and rampaged all over that division, damaging it to the point that the location still had not been fully repaired as of yet.
The heart demon had tried to kill him as well, and the sect janitor had a scar over his left shoulder from the blow, but he had fortunate enough to survive. That day, a peculiar ability had awoken in him - one that one could normally only get by certain very specialized techniques at the Eternal Soul level of cultivation.
It was the ability to see heart demons!
At the time, he had been full of regret for being blind to what his friend had suffered from, and this regret, combined with the heart demon's attack which had nearly slain him, had caused this strange ability to be born within him.
He had already lost one family back in his youth, and when he felt like he had found another one later in life within the sect, his squad members; they too had died.
He had vowed to himself that he wouldn't let that happen again, and was ever-vigilant for heart demons since then.
What were heart demons?
As light cannot exist without casting shadows, and as yin could not exist without yang, so could positives not exist without negative.
Cultivators contemplated the Dao, and this generated positive effects in the form of their enlightenment and ascending cultivation. But, there was a negative shadow to this as well, heart demons.
That was the original theory regarding heart demons. It was the one he had been told to by other people, though through his own experiences, he felt that there was far more to them.
It was not always equal of course - the benefits gained from cultivation did not equal the risks of heart demons; more times than not, it was imbalanced in one's favor. As in, the benefits greatly outweighed the risks.
But the opposite could also happen.
Which was how he had developed his own theory regarding heart demons.
The earlier theory, which was one he had begun to doubt as it clashed with what he had seen with his own eyes, was that heart demons were the 'waste products' of cultivation, in other words that they were negative thoughts that were a byproduct of ascending to higher realms that cultivators did not carry with them while ascending.
However, after his own study, the sect janitor had a different idea on what they were.
One could nurture positive thoughts through cultivation - and advance, but what about the opposite? What if one cultivated negatively, or in the wrong direction so to speak? That was his own theory as to how they formed - which would explain how he could sometimes see them even among mortals.
Some people never get heart demons. They were either complete psychopaths who had no regrets in life, or those with transcendent wisdom who had completely cleansed their souls.
As such, they depended on the mental state of the person in question.
Heart demons were extremely malevolent by nature. The weaker ones would disrupt one's cultivation or make it harder to ascend - while the stronger ones could even take physical form. Not only that, they had a habit of remaining hidden, biding their time until it was the right opportunity to strike. The 'right' opportunity being the moment when they could cause the most havoc and destruction to a cultivator.
Cases like what had happened to his friend, where they grew strong enough to cause significant damage were thankfully, extremely rare.
Naturally, he wanted to do something about them whenever he found them to nip the problem in the bud, but he had no methods with which he could directly strike a heart demon. Perhaps someone at Nascent Soul or Eternal Soul level might be able to create such a move, but he could not. Instead, all he could do was nudge people along the right path.
However, dealing with heart demons was tricky.
No matter how friendly he was, people would not usually open up to him, a complete stranger, about what was truly bothering them.
He had made it his goal in life, after his second home had nearly been destroyed, and that too due to what he felt like was his negligence in not recognizing what his friend had been going through, to help others with their heart demons.
If he had been on Earth, he likely would have become either a psychiatrist or a therapist. He tried to fill out a similar role for the cultivators in the Rising Phoenix Sect - to help them deal with their heart demons before they became too big of a problem.
Right now though, in the Raswatian Empire, no such occupation existed. As such, all he could do was to give other people pointers in which direction to move in.
Being sect janitor gave him ample such opportunities.
Coming to Guo Jia, she was a Qi Condensation stage cultivator. The sect janitor usually saw heart demons as small black wisps above people's heads - in that stage, they were not too dangerous and people usually dealt with them on their own.
However, what he saw above her head was a dark cloud, and he had been meaning to check up on her to see if it had gotten worse. He had a good idea as to what was causing it, but if the problem had already resolved itself, there was no reason for him to but in.
For now, though, he kept a low profile, mopping the floor.
Truth be told, his ability to become inconspicuous and fade into the background made it so that he had the most far-ranging eyes and ears in the entire sect. If he were a spy, he would easily be a top-rate one.
However, he had no such malevolent intentions.
Several people passed him by while he was working, some with scornful looks on their faces.
The fact of the matter was that, as a Golden Core cultivator, his strength would be unknown to those of the Qi Condensation realm, and as such, many of these Initiates thought of him as nothing more than a lowly janitor - and as one who had no Qi to speak of, not worthy of their respect or acknowledgement.
Such people were those who had recently joined the sect and did not know the truth about him, or mortal workers and assistants in the sect who didn't know who he was.
But, it was not like the sect janitor minded.
Truth be told, he was not a vindictive person. There were some cultivators who would not only kill someone for looking at them wrong, but also their entire families and villages as well. But, the sect janitor was not like that.
He considered everyone in the sect part of his family, and wished them all well within the depths of his heart, regardless of what opinion they had of him.
Soon enough, Guo Jia approached and sat down on a nearby bench. His heart fell as he saw that the cloud above her head had become thicker and darker. This was not good - he had to act.
The sect janitor approached her while mopping, and as he did so, he dropped several coins onto the floor.
While Guo Jia had her brows furrowed in deep rumination, the sound of the metal striking the floor shook her out of her reverie.
Guo Jia knew was an exceptional Initiate, she was at the tenth minor realm of Qi Condensation, and as such, knew who the sect janitor was. She was not shocked by his presence - but rather, by the way he kept dropping coins on the ground without picking them up.
Initially, she figured that once he was done cleaning, he would pick them up, but no - he kept moving on, the metal coins glistening as they caught the light of the sun.
She couldn't help but notice this odd scene - and eventually, found herself compelled to say, "Wait! Don't leave your money like this here!"
The sect janitor gave her a long look. "Ah, you see, when I dropped those coins, they became dirty and tarnished. They've lost all of their value now, so why would I bother picking them up?"
Guo Jia was bewildered hearing those words. "That's not true at all though! You can just clean the dust off, they're still just as valuable as before."
"So you say…" the sect janitor said, scratching his chin, as if Guo Jia had just uttered some words of profound wisdom rather than what was common knowledge to even a child. "In such a case, why have you been doubting your own worth then, simply because of one failure?"