The psychic pressure inside the quarantine ring didn’t feel like wind or sound.
It felt like a solid block of freezing lead being shoved through Lin Ke’s skull. His glassy glass spirit veins began to ring with an ear-splitting, glassy deep ring that shook through the enamel of his back teeth, and behind his closed eyelids, the world flickered in jagged, strobe-pulsing shades of sickly violet and copper red.
Outside the silver firewall, the psychological leakage alone was total.
Four surviving mercenary guards—fighters who had spent their lives fighting bandits in the mountain passes—suddenly dropped their weapons and collapsed onto the black stone floor.
They didn’t scream. They writhed in silent, glassy-eyed convulsions, white foam bubbling over their lips as their spiritual seas were wiped clean by the daemon’s passive deletion hum.
Their memories, their training techniques, their very identities were scrubbed down to blank, animalistic stupor in less than four breaths. When one man tried to speak, only a string of dry, clicking noises emerged from his tongue. His eyes were wide and vacant like unpolished buttons.
“Hold your ears!” Shen Yue screamed, her voice cracking as she slapped three Spirit-Guarding slips onto Meng Shan’s temples and four onto her own forehead.
