The Story Within the Story-Here, Take the Pen and Write It Yourself

Above him was a Mediterranean bald patch. The greasy dead fat man, his eyes blank and spiritless, slowly turned his head and looked with dead-fish eyes at the lower half of the water curtain.

Upon this water curtain, like a Sky Curtain, countless Dead Spirits gathered. There were also many humans, though their proportion was not that high.

A hundred boats raced in the current, rowing upstream, all to crawl out of this Sky Curtain, to crawl out of this pure land of death.

Every Dead Spirit here that failed to climb out had only one ending in the end.

They would fall into the black sea, dragged back into its waters by those Dead Spirits who could never find release. Even if they were devoured by the enormous bizarre monsters that appeared in the sea, they might not gain liberation.

Instead, they might suffer torment for who knew how long within those bizarre monsters' bellies, unable to seek transcendence from this place, nor release from it.

Every Dead Spirit who could appear here had been an outstanding figure in life, or someone who had left behind legends.

Any living being who had gone unmentioned, left no name or trace, and had not been some great shot had no chance whatsoever of appearing here after death.

The boundless black sea was already the final destination of all living beings. They would merge into this place; everything they had would blend into it, and they would no longer be themselves.

When one day all their traces vanished from the world, and no one ever mentioned their names again.

That was true disappearance—an extinction more thorough than death itself. Nothing would remain.

When those who truly had the ability reached the end of the black sea and saw this Sky Curtain, what