DEMON GROUPI ACCIDENTALLY ENTERED THE EVIL CHAT!

It was nearly midnight.

Yuan Lin sat on the floor of his apartment, a profound quiet enveloping everything around him.

Two full days had passed since he resigned from his job.

Two days he had spent trying to adapt to his new life. A life with no alarm clock, no manager, and no clear purpose other than that vague and urgent goal: to become stronger.

He looked at his mental interface.

The number glowed with a quiet light, but it represented a fortune that would have been unimaginable just a week ago.

[Current Balance: 1030 Chaos Points.]

"One thousand and thirty points..." he whispered to himself.

The `[Cosmic Mind-Calming Sutra]` had cost him 1200 points, a massive investment that he felt had completely drained his "savings account."

It was a gamble. A gamble that this mental "scripture" would be enough to protect him from insanity.

Tonight, he would test the outcome of that gamble.

He took a stick of `[Soul-Soothing Incense]` from his pocket. It felt cool and smooth to the touch.

He lit it, and a deep, woody, earthy scent spread through the room, a scent that seemed to calm not just the air, but the noise in his mind as well.

He felt the tension in his shoulders ease slightly.

"Alright," he thought. "No more delaying."

He closed his eyes and sank into the sea of his consciousness.

The storm was still there.

That massive ball of dark purple energy remaining from the `[Chaos Orchid]` was still spinning violently in his spiritual center.

It was like a sleeping beast, and he was about to poke it with a stick.

Before he approached it, he did something different this time. He focused on the new technique he had bought.

"System, activate the [Cosmic Mind-Calming Sutra]."

There was no shock or flow of information like with the other skills.

Instead, he felt a sense of deep calm seep into his consciousness.

It was like building walls of silence and ice around the core of his thoughts.

His emotions didn't disappear, but they were now... behind a barrier.

He could observe his fear and anxiety from a distance, as if they belonged to someone else. He had built a fortress in his mind.

With new confidence, he extended his mental "hand" toward the orchid's storm and pulled another thread of raw energy from it.

Immediately, the echoes attacked him.

An image of a sterile white room... the smell of disinfectants... the sound of a distant, muffled scream...

But this time, the images didn't overwhelm him.

Thanks to the "Sutra," the phantom memories were like a film being projected onto a screen behind a thick glass wall.

He could see them, hear them, and feel their coldness, but they couldn't touch the core of his consciousness.

He had become an observer, not a victim.

This allowed him to focus on the real task.

He began to carefully filter the energy thread, passing it through his own pure flame of Qi, separating the pure "fuel" from the psychic "waste."

And with this new control, he began to see more details in that horrifying memory.

It wasn't just a doctor and a patient.

He now saw that the patient was restrained to a metal bed.

He saw on the patient's wrist a faint tattoo of an eight-pointed star.

And he saw that the dark substance the doctor was injecting into the patient was glowing with a chaotic energy similar to his own, but more brutal and aggressive.

He heard the doctor's voice clearly in his mind for the first time. It wasn't just an echo; it was a calm voice, filled with a cruel, scientific curiosity.

"The possibilities of chaos are limitless," the doctor said to the trembling patient. "Pain is but a key to unlock the door. Be grateful, for you are contributing to the greatest discovery in human history."

Yuan Lin felt a shiver of horror and disgust. This man wasn't just a mad doctor. He was a researcher. A researcher into the same kind of energy he used, but in brutal and horrifying ways.

Yuan Lin pushed these thoughts from his head and forced himself to focus on the filtering process.

He continued to work for hours, pulling thread after thread, facing the painful memory fragments, filtering them, and then absorbing the pure energy to strengthen his inner flame.

The process was mentally exhausting, and every part of his consciousness was screaming for rest. But he continued.

He was driven by a mixture of fear of leaving this unstable energy inside his body, and a greed for the feeling of power and purity that washed over him after absorbing each new thread.

He didn't know how much time had passed, but at some point, he felt something change.

He felt the Qi energy inside him had reached a saturation point.

His small flame had turned into a real fire, warm and stable, glowing powerfully at his core.

A series of notifications appeared in his vision.

[40% of the Chaos Orchid's energy has been assimilated.]

[Thanks to the effect of the "Cosmic Mind-Calming Sutra," 98% of the external psychic echo has been successfully isolated.]

[A viewable "Memory Fragment" has been acquired: "Blackwood Experiment 013".]

[Cultivation progress is increasing... The peak of the First Stage of the 'Qi Condensation Realm' has been reached.]

"The peak of the first stage..." he whispered, feeling a rush of satisfaction.

But it was the last notification that caught his attention. "A viewable memory fragment?"

He focused on the concept, and a new icon appeared in his interface, resembling a piece of broken glass. The System had categorized that painful memory and stored it as a data file he could access later.

He opened his eyes. The scent of the incense had almost faded, and the light of early morning was beginning to seep into his room. He had spent the entire night cultivating.

He felt his body. It was different. He no longer felt that deep exhaustion. Instead, he felt a quiet vitality. His senses were sharper. He could clearly hear the faint sound of traffic several streets away.

He stood up and went to the mirror. His appearance hadn't changed, but his gaze was different. It was deeper, calmer. The anxiety of a stressed-out employee was gone, replaced by the icy calm of someone who had faced internal ghosts and won.

"So, this man, the doctor..." he thought as he stared at his reflection. "He wasn't just a madman in an abandoned asylum. He was studying chaos energy. Here, in my world."

This was a disturbing realization. He wasn't the only one who knew the secret of this power. There were others. And their methods were more direct and bloody.

The mystery had transformed from a simple "chaos rift" into a potential conspiracy, a secret deeper and more dangerous than he had imagined.

He looked at the flashing icon of the "Memory Fragment" in his mental interface. He didn't open it. Not yet. He knew it contained more horrors, but he also knew it contained clues.

His goal was no longer just "to get stronger." He now had a real mystery to solve. A mystery that might be more dangerous than all the demon kings and their followers.

He was beginning to realize that the greatest danger might not be in the other world, but here, in his own, hiding behind a veil of ordinary, daily life.