As for why they only attack those outside the city? No one could say for certain.
However, every ghost present was absolutely sure of one thing.
Their deaths had no direct connection to those spectral demons outside.
"When the mist came in... the monsters that those nobles turned into hadn't reached the city yet," an old woman spirit said slowly, her tone chillingly calm.
"Most of us just... 'ceased' directly within the mist."
"The 'things' inside the mist bored into our minds and killed us."
Lin Gui pressed further, "What 'things'?"
"It’s hard to say."
A mage spirit who had been assisting Lin Gui in writing letters chimed in.
He pushed up his non-existent glasses and said, "It was like someone was talking in your ear... yet it felt like you were thinking it yourself."
"'Visions' would appear before your eyes."
Then, they began to describe the hallucinations born from that mental pollution.
They were absurd and bizarre; because they were so surreal, they actually diluted the horror that should have been there.
Other residents who had been rolling around on the post office tracks also joined the conversation.
A chubby cook ghost gestured as she spoke, "I was in the cellar pickling cabbage at the time."
"Suddenly, I saw every head of cabbage in the room grow legs and start running out in a line!"
"I was so anxious! I chased after them shouting: 'Come back! I haven't added the salt yet!'"
"I kept chasing and chasing... then I collapsed on the ground and knew nothing more."
The surrounding ghosts emitted a rustling mental ripple, similar to a soft chuckle.
A serious accountant ghost sighed, "I kept seeing ledgers floating before my eyes."
"The numbers on them kept jumping around, and the debits and credits never balanced."
"I calculated and calculated with all my might... finally, I spat a mouthful of blood onto the ledger."
He shook his head, his soul body still carrying a lingering sense of collapse.
The youngest one, an apprentice ghost about fifteen or sixteen years old, whispered, "I... I saw the bakery girl I had a crush on."
"She told me that she was actually a guy."
"It scared me so much I woke up immediately."
"Oh, wait, I meant I 'died'."
He scratched his head, looking a bit embarrassed.
These hallucinations were incredibly varied: some were comical, some were obsessive, and some were so mundane they were heartbreaking.
But the common thread was that they were all extremely personal, targeting the things each person was most familiar with, most obsessed with, or most longed for in life.
There were no demons biting them, no bloody massacres.
There was only a grand, silent, and tailor-made... gentle strangulation for every soul.
As Lin Gui listened, his hand grew slower and slower as he recorded.
He suddenly recalled the descriptions he had heard in the Bounty City regarding the swallowed city-states: "There was no destruction, no screams; the city-states were intact, yet the people were gone."
So, this was how they "ceased."
Within everyone's most immersive hallucination, they were quietly "smoothed away."
"Then how... did you become like this?"
Lin Gui put down his pen and asked the question that had been circling in his mind for a long time.
"These glass beads that allow you to maintain your sanity and condense your soul bodies... where did they come from?"
According to what the merman's soul had said, these beads clearly existed in large quantities on the floor of the Silent Sea.
How could they appear here, within the Wall of Sighs deep in the interior of the continent?
And looking at the quantity, there were a great many of them.
At the mention of this, the spirits that had been whispering suddenly went quiet.
A complex emotion—a mix of confusion, fear, and a hint of gratitude—diffused through the air.
After a long while, an elderly spirit whose soul outline was slightly more solidified, and who had been a mage in life, spoke slowly.
"The beads..."
"They fell... from 'it'."
His voice was very light, as if afraid of disturbing something.
Lin Gui pressed further, "It? Who is it?"
The old mage spirit fell silent for a moment, appearing to be reminiscing, yet also seeming to resist the tremor brought by that memory.
"I do not know its true name."
"But we all 'felt' it..."
"It was the source that guided that disaster."
"That... Demigod demon."
His narration was intermittent, and with the sporadic additions from other spirits, the scene from back then was gradually pieced together.
That day, after the thick mist swallowed everything, in a space of absolute silence and void, every remaining consciousness "felt" it.
An incomprehensible, unwatchable, and indescribable "presence" slowly "passed over" Blackwater City.
It wasn't walking or flying; it was more like a kind of "squeezing" or "passing directly through."
It was as if the ghosts could directly pass through a solid wooden door.
No one could remember its form; it left only a blurred impression of being "massive," "dark," and "silent."
And when it "passed by," tiny, shimmering "fragments," like dust shaking off skin, drifted down from its indescribable body.
They fell upon Blackwater City like scattered stars.
When these "fragments" touched the ground, the buildings, or the not-yet-fully dissipated remnants of the dead... they solidified into the form of these glass beads.
Spontaneously, they absorbed, encased, and stabilized the nearest lingering and lost consciousness.
"It was as if... a handful of seeds had been sown," the old mage said eerily.
"And we just happened to be the... dust that landed on them."
As Lin Gui listened, he felt something inexplicably strange about this.
Behind him, Eve, who had put down her book at some point, also stepped forward quietly.
There was clear doubt in her purple eyes as she asked softly, "If these beads truly fell from the Demigod demon that triggered the Dark Tide... then why have we never seen anything similar on our way to Blackwater City?"
She looked at Lin Gui, and the two of them exchanged a glance.
They remembered very clearly.
During their journey with the bounty hunter party into the Wall of Sighs and along the safe route to Blackwater City, they hadn't seen a single glass bead scattered on the ground.
After this question was posed, silence fell before the counter.
The spirits who had been whispering details just a moment ago suddenly stopped talking.
The glass beads hovered slightly, the ghostly lights inside them flickering.
It seemed as though even they had never considered this question before.
Or perhaps, they didn't dare to think too deeply about it.
For example—the scattering of those "beads" from that entity might not have been unintentional.
Instead, they might have been consciously "sown" toward the people in Blackwater City who failed to escape.
Those who fled out of the city turned into demons. Those who stayed inside became ghosts.
Why did it do this? What was its purpose?
Thinking upon it, a bone-chilling cold set in.
No one dared to continue that train of thought.
But Lin Gui suddenly remembered a detail he had almost forgotten.
On the floor of the Silent Sea, that Legendary merman's soul... the moment it sensed the presence of the Demigod "Sathos," it instantly lost all reason and transformed into a bloody, frenzied, and aggressive evil spirit!
He subconsciously stopped his pen, his hand tightening around it.
His gaze slowly swept over the floating, quietly waiting glass beads around him, and the peaceful, even grateful faces of the spirits inside them.
A hair-raising thought emerged uncontrollably.
Would they... on a certain day, under a certain condition... also turn into those—monsters that have lost control?
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