The sight within Myriad Souls Hall surpassed the limits of everyone's imagination. The instant they stepped through the gates, a stench mixed with the wails of countless dead souls, rotting blood, and burning sulfur rushed at them. It was so intense it seemed almost tangible, assaulting everyone's senses and souls. As far as the eye could see stretched an incomparably vast space. The ceiling was so high its end could not be seen, built from countless pale, twisted skulls. Ghostly green flames flickered within their hollow eye sockets, casting shifting, bizarre shadows.
The ground was not solid earth, but a thick, dark-red pool of blood that seemed to flow slowly. Stepping on it brought a sickeningly soft, slippery sensation. At the center of the hall stood a towering pyramid-shaped altar, vast as a mountain and entirely constructed from ominous black crystals. Its surface was covered in dark-red runes that writhed and flowed like living things. Every rune resembled a greedy mouth, madly sucking in the deathly aura and scattered soul power drifting in from the battlefield beyond the hall.
At the altar's peak floated the phantom of a Primordial Stone Coffin, shrunk countless times over yet so solid it made one's heart quiver. A crack had opened in its lid, and thick, bloodlike dark-red death aura poured continuously from within, like an umbilical cord of life connecting to and nourishing the altar below.
Eighty-one core priests, clad in black robes embroidered with bizarre reincarnation vortex patterns, sat cross-legged around the altar like lifeless stone statues. They slit their own wrists, allowing blood essence infused with origin soul power to flow soundlessly into the rune channels of the altar. From their mouths came hoarse, frenzied, blasphemous ancient incantations that sustained the operation of this evil ritual.
Before the altar, Cult Master