Gray mist began to churn across the sky.
It was not stirred by the wind, but by the death-obsessions of countless immortals on the ground.
Those obsessions rose from the ground like countless pillars, stabbing straight into the gray mist.
The gray mist was pierced full of holes. The edges of those holes were grayish-white wounds, and light leaked down from within—not sunlight, but the color of the void beyond the barrier.
That color was grayer, whiter, emptier.
Those mutated animals began to move as well. Feral cats crawled along the ground dragging human palms, wild dogs ran with human ribs on their backs, and insects flew with human muscle fibers hidden beneath their shells.
They did not know what they were doing. They merely followed that "knowledge" on instinct.
The cell fragments within their bodies urged them in that direction, toward the place where they could die.
Some animals died along the way. Not truly died—their bodies simply broke apart, their cell fragments scattering. The fragments drifted through the air, carried by the wind in that direction.
In hell, the hungry souls sensed the change.
That life-and-death barrier was trembling, as if something outside were knocking on it. Not the soft, weak knocking of soul bodies ramming into it before, but sharp, dense knocks, like hail battering against glass.
Countless needles of death-obsession pierced the barrier at once, stabbing in from outside.
They made the barrier itch, made it go numb, made it begin to loosen.
The hungry souls' scarlet eyes lit up.
Not with their former dim glow, the kind that was about to fade away, but with a crazed, blinding brightness, like a lightbulb filament burning at its brightest just before it burst.
They knew their chance had come!
Not because they knew it themselves, but because