Dimensional Reduction Assimilation

As time passed speck by speck, the graveyards lining both sides of the road grew increasingly illusory, replaced by the sight of another region.

This was a... old forest.

Before and behind them stood old trees with blackened, sparse branches and leaves. Their trunks were not thick, but rather slender, yet they stood densely packed, one after another, as though deliberately arranged.

There were no weeds in this forest. The ground held only a thick layer of fallen leaves and dead branches. No—rather than branches and fallen leaves, they looked more like skeletons and rotten flesh and blood steeped through with soil.

A layer of thin mist filled the forest, like a shroud of gloom, giving the woods a chilling air.

Yet what drew the eye was not the old forest's eerie, dark environment, but the trees that made it up.

Every tree had withered away, its leaves fallen, its body black as pitch. But even more horrifying was that upon their trunks grew... human faces.

The faces bulged from the trunks. Every one had wide-open eye sockets and an oval mouth, like faces gripped by such immense terror that their expressions had twisted into grotesque distortion.

Terrifying human faces, an old forest drifting with gray gloom, an environment so deathly silent that not a sound could be heard—beneath the crimson Blood Moon, merely looking at it sent an indescribable chill down one's spine.

The Funeral Procession Team stopped here once more.

W-Why has it gone completely silent?

Through Divine Sense Communication, the Five-tailed Fox Demon revealed deep unease.

Though the Sorrowful Spirit Race's weeping caused them immense trouble, this silence akin to deathly silence was the most dangerous thing for Nascent Soul Cultivators like them.

For a soundless death that could even evade their senses was what terrified them