The entire Life-and-Death Boundary fell into deathly silence.
Not silence of sound, but silence at the level of the soul.
All wails, roars, groans, and murmurs paused at the same instant.
It was not that they had stopped crying out. They had been stunned by that "forbidden knowledge."
It was like someone had suddenly struck a gong beside your ear. You could hear nothing, with only a buzzing echo circling in your head.
Then the disturbance erupted.
It did not spread from a single point. It exploded simultaneously from the souls of every immortal.
Like countless bombs detonating at once, with blast points scattered across every corner of the world.
That disturbance was not sound, but a shockwave on the level of thought.
Countless thoughts—"I finally know," "So that's how it is," "I can finally die"—exploded in the same instant, converging into a torrent that battered the gray, hazy canopy.
The canopy trembled.
It did not crack. It trembled.
Like a drumhead quivering after being struck.
The Creation Trait on the barrier sensed the obsession with death within that torrent of thoughts. It was no ordinary thought, but the desire to die accumulated over countless years, compressed solid by the blessing of immortality—harder than steel, sharper than diamond.
Countless needles pierced the barrier at once. It did not hurt, but it itched. And if something itched long enough, it would eventually break.
On the ground, those living dead lying there began to move.
Not slowly. They sprang up violently. Some had calcified joints, bones fused together, muscles atrophied into dry kindling.
But they moved.
The gray-white hard shells—the scabs that had formed on their skin over decades—split open down the middle, and dark-red, sticky sludge flowed from the cracks.
That liquid was not blood. It was the obsession with death