Corruption
The Sundered God's hold on the land. Areas rot, spread the Blight to their neighbours, and must be pushed back.
How area corruption works
- Every area you visit past the first kingdom carries its own Corruption meter (0–100). Left alone, it rises by 4 per hour.
- Green Plains never corrupts: the Sundered God has no foothold until you've broken at least one Seal.
- Time away is forgiven up to a point: a single stretch away builds at most 12 hours' worth of corruption, so logging off overnight won't rot clean ground all the way to Corrupted. Neglect it across several sessions and it still falls.
- An area at 80+ corruption bleeds into its neighbours (2/hour each), so ignoring one corrupted area lets the Blight creep across a whole kingdom.
- Fighting in an area pushes the Blight back: every kill there lowers its corruption by 3. An actively-farmed area holds the line on its own, so corruption is a threat to neglected ground.
- An area turns Corrupted at 66+ and only clears once it falls below 33, so it won't flicker on the boundary.
What a corrupted area changes
- Its monsters fight as corrupted variants (+30% HP, +25% damage, +15% defense), but they drop loot 1 tier higher. The added danger earns the richer reward.
- The area's merchant flees the corruption: no deliveries or shop while it stays corrupted.
- Bosses and the Hollow Warden's Gauntlet are never corrupted.
Cleansing
On the World Map a corrupted area shows a ☣ pin and a Cleanse button. Cleansing removes 34 corruption, so two cleanses clear a freshly-corrupted area back to safe. Pay for it with 120 gold, or with 40 Hollow Residue earned in the Sundered Rift. Fighting there works too, and costs nothing.
After graduation: the shared world
Everything above is your own private battle while you're still working through the story. The moment you beat the Hollow Warden's Gauntlet, you step into the shared world: from then on every graduated hero reads and fights the same corruption. An area everyone neglects drifts toward the Blight for all of you, and a single hero's cleanse or farming pushes it back for everyone.
You join the shared world fresh: whatever corruption sat on your private map is left behind, never carried in. When you spend gold or Hollow Residue to cleanse shared ground, it comes out of your purse, cleansing that land for the whole world.