The annihilation effect was utterly terrifying, as though they had never existed at all.
Only those monsters that were farther away or too slow to move were still futilely launching attacks.
Fallen Soul High Priest Gugash, standing beside the fountain, finally moved.
The flames in its vertical forehead eye flickered violently as the enormous bone staff in its hand slammed heavily into the ground.
The black crystal began spinning abruptly faster, emitting a piercing hum.
A visible purple-black ripple spread outward from the staff, sweeping over the remaining Nightmare creatures in the courtyard.
The moment those monsters came into contact with the ripple, their bodies immediately underwent bizarre changes.
More cracks split open across the surfaces of the eyeball-like spheres.
Long, slender tentacles extended from within.
The centipede monster's human hands began growing wildly, its nails becoming longer and sharper.
The shadow hounds' bodies swelled to twice their original size, while more anguished faces surfaced within their shadow-made forms.
The wraiths' shrieks became even more piercing, enough to distort the air around them.
"Enhanced?"
Zong Shen raised an eyebrow.
He could sense that the auras of these Nightmare creatures had risen by no less than thirty percent.
And every one of them had become even more frenzied.
But that still made no difference to him.
The gray barrier continued expanding. Wherever it passed, even the enhanced monsters could not escape annihilation.
Gugash seemed to realize this.
It no longer tried to use these low-level Nightmare creatures to drain Zong Shen's strength, instead raising its staff.
The black crystal detached from the tip of the staff, hovering in midair as it began spinning madly.
Countless purple-black threads of light shot out from the crystal, linking to the dried bones at the bottoms of the courtyard's drained fountain pools.
Those bones began