The sun blazed overhead, yet Su Xiao could not feel the slightest warmth. There were few pedestrians on Central Street, and he saw no one dead in front of the gallery.
Although there were no corpses on the street, several piles of pale ashes lay before the gallery's main entrance. They had most likely been civilians who had wandered into the Death Domain, their souls shattered and bodies reduced to ash.
Blood energy spread out from Su Xiao, soon covering several hundred meters around him. Cries and the wailing of babies came from all around. Before long, quite a few men carrying dinner knives and women holding children scattered in all directions. They had been frightened away by the blood energy.
There could be no civilians nearby. Whenever a living creature was buried within the Death Domain, its area expanded. It initially had a diameter of ten meters, but its upper limit was unknown.
It was not too serious if a few civilians accidentally wandered into the Death Domain. The increase in range would not be large—at most, several meters. But if a transcendent died inside, the range would increase by hundreds of meters, thousands of meters, or even tens of thousands.
Once that happened, everyone in Koto would die, and no one could escape. After the Death Domain expanded to a certain range, the increase caused by civilian deaths would actually be even more terrifying, because there were so many civilians.
The ideal way for the Death Holy Grail to grow was to first kill a transcendent, expanding its range to a kilometer, then instantly kill all the civilians within that kilometer and continue expanding. The larger its area, the faster the snowball effect became.
There had once been an incident where the Death Holy Grail completely covered an