As for why they only attacked people outside the city?
No one could explain the reason.
But all the ghosts present were absolutely certain of one thing.
Their deaths had no direct connection to the spectral demons outside the city.
“When the mist rolled in... those monsters the nobles had turned into hadn't even entered the city yet.”
An old woman's spirit said slowly, her tone frighteningly calm.
“Most of us simply... ‘vanished’ directly inside the mist.”
“We were killed by ‘things’ in the mist crawling into our minds.”
Lin Gui pressed, “What ‘things’?”
“It's hard to say.”
A mage ghost who was helping Lin Gui write letters nearby chimed in.
He pushed up his nonexistent glasses and said:
“It felt like someone was whispering in your ear... yet also like your own thoughts.”
“And then... ‘visions’ would appear before your eyes.”
Thus, they began to describe the hallucinations caused by the mental pollution.
They were absurd and bizarre, and because they were so surreal, they actually diluted the terror that should have been there.
Other residents whose beads had been rolling along the various tracks in the post office joined in.
A plump cook's ghost gestured as she spoke:
“I was in the cellar pickling cabbage at the time.”
“Suddenly, I saw all the cabbages in the room grow legs and run out in a line!”
“I was so frantic that I chased after them, shouting, ‘Come back! I haven't added the salt yet!’”
“I kept chasing them... until I collapsed, and then I knew nothing else.”
A few nearby ghosts emitted rustling mental ripples that resembled soft laughter.
A solemn accountant's ghost sighed:
“An account book kept floating before my eyes.”
“The numbers on it kept jumping around, and the debits and credits would never balance.”
“I calculated desperately, over and over... until finally, I spat a mouthful of blood onto the ledger.”
He shook his head, a lingering sense of breakdown still radiating from his soul form.
The youngest, an apprentice ghost who looked to be only fifteen or sixteen, said softly:
“I... I saw the bakery girl I had a crush on.”
“She told me she was actually a guy.”
“I was so startled that I woke right up.”
“Oh, I mean, I ‘died’.”
He scratched his head, looking a bit embarrassed.
These hallucinations were incredibly varied—some comical, some obsessive, and some so mundane they were heartbreaking.
But they all had one thing in common:
they were highly personal, targeting the things each person had been most familiar with, obsessed with, or yearned for in life.
There were no demons biting them, no bloody slaughter.
There was only a grand, silent, and tailor-made...
gentle strangulation for every single soul.
As Lin Gui listened, his hand recording the words slowed down.
He suddenly recalled the descriptions of the devoured city-states he had heard back in the City of Bounties:
“No destruction, no screams. The city-states were perfectly intact, but the people were gone.”
So, this was how they had “gone.”
In the hallucinations they were most immersed in,
they were quietly “smoothed away.”
“Then how... did you all end up like this?”
Lin Gui put down his pen and asked the question that had been lingering in his mind for a long time.
“These glass beads that allow you to maintain your sanity and stabilize your soul forms...”
“Where did they come from?”
According to that merman's soul, these beads clearly existed in large quantities at the bottom of the Silent Sea.
How could they appear within the Wall of Sighs, deep in the interior of the continent?
And looking at the sheer quantity, there were so many of them.
At the mention of this, the spirits who had been whispering around him suddenly fell silent.
A complex emotion mixed with bewilderment, fear, and a hint of gratitude spread invisibly through the air.
After a long pause, an old man who had been a mage in life and whose soul form was slightly more solid slowly spoke:
“The beads...”
“They fell... from ‘Him’.”
His voice was very soft, as if he were afraid of disturbing something.
Lin Gui pressed, “Him? Who is He?”
The old mage's spirit fell silent for a moment, as if reminiscing, or perhaps resisting the shiver brought by that memory.
“I don't know His true name.”
“But we all ‘felt’ it...”
“He was the source... that guided that disaster.”
“That... Demigod demon.”
His narrative was disjointed, interspersed with sporadic additions from other spirits, gradually piecing together the scene of that day:
That day, after the dense mist swallowed everything,
in an absolute, dead silence and void,
all remaining consciousnesses “felt” it.
An incomprehensible, unviewable, and indescribable “existence”
slowly “passed over” Blackwater City.
It wasn't walking, nor was it flying.
It was more like a sort of “squeezing through” and “passing directly through.”
Just as ghosts could pass directly through solid wooden doors.
No one could remember His form,
leaving behind only a vague impression of something “colossal,” “dark,” and “deadly silent.”
And as He “passed by,”
tiny, shimmering “fragments,” like dust shaken from skin,
drifted down from His unspeakable body.
Speck by speck, they rained down upon Blackwater City.
When these “fragments” came into contact with the ground, buildings, or the not-yet-fully-dissipated remnants of the dead...
they solidified into the shape of these glass beads.
Spontaneously, they absorbed, enveloped, and stabilized the closest remaining, bewildered consciousnesses.
“It was like... sowing a handful of seeds.”
The old mage murmured.
“And we were just the... dust that happened to land on them.”
Listening to this, Lin Gui felt an indescribable sense of strangeness.
Behind him, Eve, who had put down her book at some point, also stepped forward gently.
Her purple eyes held a clear confusion as she asked softly:
“If these beads really fell from the Demigod demon that caused the Dark Tide...”
“Then why did we never see anything like them on our way to Blackwater City?”
She looked at Lin Gui, and the two exchanged a glance.
They both remembered it very clearly.
During their journey along the safe route into the Wall of Sighs with the bounty hunters to reach Blackwater City,
they hadn't seen a single similar glass bead scattered on the ground.
After this question was posed, a silence fell over the counter.
The spirits who had been whispering details a moment ago suddenly stopped talking.
The glass beads floated slightly, the dim light inside them flickering.
It was as if even they themselves had never thought about this question.
Or perhaps, they didn't dare to think too deeply about it.
For example—
the scattering of the “beads” from that existence was not accidental.
Instead, they were deliberately “sown” toward the people inside Blackwater City who had failed to escape...
“sown” right to them.
Those who escaped outside the city turned into demons.
Those who remained inside became ghosts.
Why did He do this?
What was the ultimate purpose?
Thinking deeper into it sent a bone-chilling shiver down their spines.
No one dared to think any further.
But Lin Gui suddenly recalled a detail he had almost forgotten.
The Legendary merman's soul at the bottom of the Silent Sea.
The moment it sensed the presence of the Demigod “Sathos”...
it instantly lost its sanity, turning into a bloody, frenzied, and highly aggressive evil spirit!
He subconsciously stopped his pen, his hand gripping it slightly tighter.
His gaze slowly swept across the floating, quietly waiting glass beads around him,
and the peaceful, even grateful faces of the spirits inside them.
A spine-chilling thought uncontrollably surfaced in his mind:
Would they...
on some day, under certain conditions...
also turn into those—
out-of-control monsters?
Rate on N.U.
