The deeper you go, the more and more 'stone statues' you can see along the way.

It's easy to revert what happened here:

When the River of Eternal Darkness returns, Calderón, who had been silent for thousands of years, ushered in an expansion that was sudden and unforeseen, allowing the spirits living nearby to permeate their bodies before they could react. Eventually, Dead Silence became mainstream, covering every corner of the region.

Although everything seems to be normal, it is in line with the authority of the River of Eternal Darkness and the Dead Silence.

But before that, Calderón was the city of the dead, but the rules here were only to transform the living into the dead.

In other words, once any living creature enters Calderón, it will naturally transform in the direction of the dead, which is similar to the underworld, but it is fundamentally different, here, the living creature does not suddenly die and then slowly becomes an undead creature without the ability to think, but directly becomes an undead.

For some high-level existences, transforming into the dead does not have too negative an impact on them, let alone their strength. And if it is the extraordinary of the 'Bound' path, they can switch between entities and resentful spirits, and such a rule does not have any adverse effects.

In the same way, for some spirit creatures, such a rule is actually not disadvantageous.

For there are many spirit creatures that are not native to the spirit world, but are transformed from the dead—such as Klein's messenger, Renette Tinicol, who is both a spirit creature and a deceased himself.

Of course, being dead doesn't mean they can come and go freely in Calderón.

On the contrary, they become spiritual beings in the form of the dead, and once they enter Calderón, they will be 'imprisoned', and they will become the original inhabitants of Calderón, the kind that can never leave.

So although the deceased can be in Calderón unaffected activities, it does not mean that they will want to enter the place.

But now it is different, the rules are not just to transform the living into the 'dead', but to be the 'dead' in the true sense of the word—different from the dead such as ghosts, zombies, and water ghosts, but corpses that are immovable, unconscious, and do not have any 'life'.

Calderón has now become a place of death where even if the dead set foot in it, they will be extracted of 'life'.

Instead of trying to break the rules, Ember walked alone in the ashes.

Under the erosion of the invisible dead silence, the whole world here is gray.

The sky was gray, the ground was gray, and all around were stone statues infested with gray, without a trace of color.

Only the embers, he also has 'color'.

This kind of color deeply stimulates the 'gray and white', making them like a school of fish stirred by bait in the deep sea, gathering around Ember under the trend of greed, trying to assimilate the ember into a gray stone statue and rob him of his 'color', which also causes the surrounding 'gray and white' to become more and more intense, rich enough to instantly take the life of an angel!

However, whenever Grey tried to get close to him, they would be evaporated in an instant, without exception.

And these 'gray' escorts also made the journey extremely smooth, and all the spiritual creatures that could be met around had turned into 'stone statues', and there was not a single living thing. And as the embers go deeper, the types of stone statues also change.

The outermost part is full of strange creatures, some with the body of a bull-headed octopus and some with a slender small snake, but without exception there is no unified image. But now the large number of stone statues scattered here clearly belong to the same race, a set of translucent white robes floating in the air, without a head, without hands or feet, and seemingly held up by an invisible person.

From a distance, it looks like a neat family portrait.

In fact, these stone statues all belong to the Spirit Marauders, but each of them has a strength close to Sequence 4. And now that they are here, there are hundreds of stone statues that belong to the spirit marauders!

The group of Spirit Marauders is already scarce, and at the same time, they are also the extraordinary materials that must be used in the promotion sequence 4 of the Wizard Path, whether it is the true soul of the Spirit Marauder or the dust of the Spirit Marauder, the value is extremely high.

Perhaps it is precisely because of the hunt that the spirit marauders live in large numbers in the depths of Calderón to avoid the risk of being hunted. But now, all of these creatures have been turned to stone by the mutation in Calderon's depths.

After encountering such a catastrophe, the spirit marauders are almost wiped out!

The remaining scattered Spirit Realm Marauders are also scattered throughout the Spirit Realm, and their numbers are scarce and extremely difficult to catch.

This is tantamount to flying misfortune for the extraordinary people in the middle and low ranks of the soothsayer's path. Because this means that the path of the soothsayer to Sequence 4 has been blocked in the future, and it will be difficult for a new 'Sorcerer' to be born in the future!

Of course.

For demigods or angels who have been promoted to Sequence 4, the family portrait of the Spirit Marauder doesn't have much effect.

For the extraordinaries of the non-soothsayer path, the impact is even smaller. So in a sense, this is also the result of mutual selection. 0

Finally, as time passed, the outline of a city was finally revealed to the embers.

The first thing that caught his eye was a huge pit with no bottom in sight, and all kinds of strange-shaped buildings around this pit extended down in circles and circles, forming a magnificent city beyond ordinary people's understanding.

This city is different from normal, it does not develop to a high place, but extends to the end of the deep pit in the ground again and again, and the whole gives people the feeling of an upside-down mausoleum. The buildings inside are of all sorts of styles, but all of them are equally bizarre, some of them are tall pale stone columns, and the tops are polished into huge single houses; Some were long and rectangular, with the door open on the roof and no windows, like a giant coffin; Some are built underground, and a tombstone is erected at the entrance, and some are made of white bones, which is messy and fragmented.

From the moment you entered the city, everything around you was shrouded in a deep darkness as thick as ink, as if there had been no light for thousands of years. The gathered gray and white are blocked from the city, and they were once the masters of the city.

But now they are excluded, and they can only reluctantly watch the 'color' enter the city and enter the darkness.

Here, even angels could hardly see what was in the darkness five meters away, as if something was cutting off their probes—

That is a secret authority.

The closer you get to the bottom of the pit, the more intact the building is, and the closer it is to the top, the more it collapses, full of decay and dilapidation washed by time.

And the deeper you go underground, the quieter the surroundings become, and the strange buildings are clearly intact, but they seem to have been dead for many years, and even the breath has become cold, dull, and decaying.

The whole world was pitch black, and only the embers had 'color' left on them.

In the deep darkness of ink, the color is so dazzling that countless 'darkness' swarms in. Just like the 'gray' before them, they greedily gather here, trying to swallow up the color and assimilate it into a part of the darkness.

The black and white world of the dead can't tolerate half a bit of color!

However.

The convergence of darkness did not work in real time.

The more they converge, the more they are 'vaporized'.

By the time Ember entered the depths of the city, most of the darkness had evaporated, and even the buildings that had been shrouded in darkness revealed their original shape, because the darkness that had evaporated most of them and became extremely thin could no longer envelop the entire city.

But even if it costs a lot, it is always in vain, and even contact cannot be done.

Step by step, Ember walked for a long time, and finally saw the bottom of the pit, where huge, dark palaces blocked the way down.

The palace was made up of huge pillars, inlaid with various bones and corpses of different parts, and in some places even covered in bloody skins belonging to different races.

Ember stopped in front of the palace, and so far, what he had encountered was completely different from what Crane had described - the last time Crane had been there to hunt spirit marauders.

And perhaps because of the death of the spirit marauder, or because of the breath of the 'Source Castle', or perhaps because of the appearance of the 'Angel of Destiny' Ulorius, the river of eternal darkness in the depths of Calderon suddenly changed, and a large number of 'gray floods' gushed out like a rising tide.

That turn of events prevented Crane from delving deep, so he had to return to the gray fog before making another plan.

But this time.

The embers had reached the bottom of Calderón, but they had not been hindered. The River of Eternal Darkness was like a completely dead thing, and did not react to his coming.

Ember didn't think about it, no matter what happened it wouldn't affect the purpose of his trip.

He walked slowly to the palace gates, resting his hands on the two bronze doors that had closed at some point.

Crunch!

In the silent darkness, the dull pouring sound that was not too loud was now extremely harsh, and the sound resounded almost throughout the city.

But even with this movement, Calderon still didn't react, just letting the embers push the door open a small gap.

The gap was not large, but it was very small, too small for two people to enter side by side.

But for Ember, such a gap was sufficient.

He calmly walked into the darkness and into the palace.

In the darkness, the first thing that catches your eye is a spacious hall.

On both sides of the hall are coffins of different shapes and colors, which are quietly placed there, as if even existence itself has been weathered by death.

Ignoring these things, Ember headed straight into the depths of the hall, where there was a gray-and-white stone staircase leading downward, and a large stone monument stood at the entrance.

At the top of the stele stands a slender statue of a giant bird made of bronze with various pale symbols on its wings.

Under the bird-shaped bronze statue, on the surface of the stele, the words derived from the 'Words of the Dead' seem to be very simplified birds of different shapes or snakes coiled into different shapes, forming two sentences with vague meanings:

"Even the gods can't get rid of it;

"Even if you die, you will be detained."

It's like Tutankhamun's curse inscription:

"Whoever disturbs Pharaoh's sleep, death will spread its wings and come upon his head."

"Whoever enters this tomb with an impure heart, I will strangle him by the neck like a bird."

Such a curse, if it appeared in an ordinary mausoleum, would only make people laugh.

But beneath the city is a river of eternal darkness, a phrase that is more of a warning than a curse—a real warning.

Even gods, once they enter the earth, will fall and drown in the river!

Ember withdrew his gaze, ignoring the warning.

Skirt the stone monument topped with a bronze statue and descend the gray staircase step by step.

The underground was dark and cold, but there was an occasional faint, illusory clattering sound.

Somewhere underground, the River of Eternal Darkness is flowing silently.

Ember moved in the direction of the sound of the water, a deep, incorporeal tide beneath his feet. Just like a normal tide, there were high tides and low tides, and as the embers went deeper and deeper, the tide almost completely submerged the embers, but he still walked in them, unaffected in the slightest.

And when the tide recedes, the gray staircase is revealed again, straight down.

Finally.

He reached the end of the stairs.

Beyond the end was nothingness, and out of the void flowed a straight, wide, colorless dark river.

That is the River of Eternal Darkness, the ultimate home of all the dead!

Ember stopped and didn't move on.

Because on both sides of the river, huge and pale stone pillars were erected, as if they were supporting something, not letting each other collapse. At this moment, between these stone pillars, at the edge of the river, countless slightly blurred translucent figures walked back and forth, wandering, slowly but without stopping.

And among those blank figures, there was a tall figure standing at the edge of the river, quietly watching the embers standing at the end of the stairs.

He was so huge, about the same size as the stone pillars around him, and it was draped in a deep black robe, and its sides were old.

His face had a distinctly southern continent character, but it had rotted one mark after another, and white feathers stained with pale butter had grown.

Ember had seen Him, in the frescoes, in the Hall of Conspiracy, when He was still known as the God of the Dead.

In the Fourth and Fifth Ages, he is best known as the Grim Reaper, the 'Emperor of Hades' Sallinger.

There was a momentary blankness on His face, but it soon became firm, and his voice was low:

"He told me to kill you and set me free."

His voice was hoarse and stiff, as if he hadn't spoken to a person in a long time.

"Guessed."

Ember smiled, he now understood why he had not encountered any obstacles along the way.