Torrential rain poured down the mountains, thunder roared, and the peaks trembled.
Rising and falling loud explosions echoed through the narrow mountain pass, overlapping one another in a vast, surging tide. Amid the deafening clamor, they had to shout at the top of their lungs just to speak.
Yet in that instant, everything abruptly fell into utter silence.
It was as if their ears had suddenly stopped hearing.
In that dazed, bewildered moment, breathing, heartbeats, even the echo of blood flowing through their brains—everything became startlingly clear.
Then, immediately after, came something that seemed to sprout from the deepest part of their hearts—piercing wails!!
It was as though every pain and disaster from their memories had reappeared at once, erupting in a chain reaction. All the grief, frustration, torment, unbearable experiences, and painful pasts they had witnessed in their lives rose again, crashing, colliding, boiling over, until at last... despair emerged!
As the phantom of the corpse-wraith opened its mouth and screamed, endless Spirit Essence Poison fell from the sky with the violent rain and wind, sketching wave-like flashes through the darkness like hallucinations.
One-third of the Spirit Essence Cage's reserves were drained in an instant, erupting with a thunderous blast.
Resentment, hatred, hunger, killing intent, greed, venomous malice—the Spirit Essence Tidal Wave, laden with countless negative emotions, howled past, surging back and forth through the narrow ravine. Like a living thing, it wriggled, twisted, split apart, and bored into every soul and consciousness, invading, permeating, and swelling through every opening.
Like a serpent lunging from the darkness, it gnawed at its prey and injected venom saturated with Fiendification Pollution. In the blink of an eye, one blank face after another twisted into grotesque shapes.
Unable to restrain themselves, they screamed!
The wailing spread like a plague at a scalp-numbing