I had encountered many evil people in my life, but I had never faced such pure malice. Even though I had not met it in person and only glimpsed it through the narrator's account in a book, a wave of nausea and fear rose in me.2

The creators of the Heavenly Demon God Sect differed from ordinary wicked people. Most wrongdoers knew, at some level, that their actions were immoral. They felt, at least ideologically, that they had crossed a line.0

In other words, they carried the minimum sense of guilt. The kind of guilt I meant was unlike ordinary guilt—it was the simple awareness that one had done something wrong. When I spoke of an evil person, I referred to someone who committed heinous acts without a trace of shame or remorse.0

Yet the author, or even authors, lacked even this rudimentary sense of guilt. They kidnapped innocent children and gouged out their eyes, believing wholeheartedly that their acts were righteous. That belief made their cruelty all the more horrifying and revolting.0

In my world, only the dark cults exhibited such extremes. Unsurprisingly, both groups were religious. At that moment, I felt like I understood why the empire's greatest enemy was the Dark Church.0

I forced myself to breathe slowly and...0