A wind rose in the Lost Realm. It was no ordinary wind.
In the gentle breezes that curled around him, Jiang Wang sensed a faintly complex impurity that did not belong to the wind's elemental energy. It was so subtle that, if he had not been observing everything with utmost vigilance, he might not have noticed it.
Or perhaps "impurity" was not the right word, since those "attachments" had no physical form.
He thought about it for a long time before he could roughly identify it as something emotional in nature. Then he used Soul Hidden Snake to make contact, and finally confirmed that they were indeed connected to the cultivators who had died in battle in this realm.
They were not whole souls, or even remnants of spirits, but something akin to an obsession: an attachment stranded in a place like the Lost Realm, with nowhere to return to, yet unwilling to sink into oblivion.
Only then did he make the connection: today was the fourth day of the fourth month, the annual Sea Sacrifice Day.
The cultivators of the Near-Sea Archipelago were performing the sea sacrifice, welcoming the Heroic Spirits' return with a solemn ritual.
To die in the Lost Realm was to lose one's soul.
Not that the body was destroyed while only the Divine Soul remained. Rather, the body died, and the Divine Soul was lost as well.
Even with the body intact, it was easy to lose one's way, let alone when only the Divine Soul remained, cut off from the pull of the Starlight Saint Tower.
Some people lost both body and soul, while certain obsessions became trapped in the Lost Realm, wandering without a home. It was similar to how a fragment of Guanyan's True Spirit drifted through the Forest Sea Source Realm,