A series of silent ripples were unleashed from the barrel and covered a fan-shaped area in front of Angor, which completely engulfed the gallows.
Prelude to Elimination would kill souls by using special soundwaves to disrupt their negative energy. The soundwave was almost visible while it traveled in the air.
The attack didn’t show any immediate effect when it reached the souls, but they all stopped sobbing all of a sudden.
When Angor began to think that his weapon had failed, the souls suddenly began to release black smoke from their forms before they turned into ashes.
Angor was excited at his success. He did some more experiments around the graveyard and easily eliminated a number of undead souls.
Those smoke trails seemed to be the negative energy that supported the souls. If the energy were disrupted, the souls would disappear.
The weapon worked as intended, but he had yet to figure out the nature of “Mystery energy”.
Next, he moved to the giant crater near the graveyard gate. The pit was full of rotten corpses and armies of souls.
He held the revolver and shot into the pit.
There was no noise from the pit. Thick black smoke rose from it, which almost blocked Angor’s view.
Meanwhile, Angor got a feeling that something just came into his gun. It seemed to be a… white dot.
Am I seeing things?
Again, he moved around the graveyard to test. He didn’t see anything special again until he wiped out a large group of souls. He saw another “white dot” emerging from the smoke and entering his gun barrel.
What’s that? Is that the “Mystery energy” mentioned by Isabelle?
He spent more time doing research and realized that every killed soul would create such a “white spot”. But it was so weak that it was almost invisible to the eyes. Only groups of more than a hundred souls could leave something obvious behind, which was as small as dust.
In order to find out what the “white spot” was, Angor searched for more souls.
He almost cleansed the entire graveyard without finding the result, so he decided to check out Black Forest next. However, he didn’t mean to venture inside the woods for real.
About half a day later, he had slaughtered nearly two thousand souls, which was when he finally noticed something changing on his gun.
Prelude to Rebirth was shaped like an ordinary revolver, but the ammo cylinder was only a decoration since the gun didn’t need actual bullets.
At first, he planned to use physical bullets enchanted with different runes which could help him attack other creatures as well.
He did leave the cylinder design. However, without using the knowledge of expansion runes, the revolver only had room for six bullets.
Before Angor could spend time crafting more bullets for it, the cylinder of Prelude to Rebirth was cosmetic only.
However, something changed on the cylinder after he had killed two thousand souls.
The tiny white dots slowly gathered inside one of the six chambers and occupied the space intended for a physical bullet.
Angor wondered what did this thing do. Maybe this was the “Mystery energy” he meant to find out?
His spirit feelers told him that the white bullet did contain foreign energy, but he couldn’t tell any other details.
Which meant he had to “give it a shot”.
The bullet was probably meant for dealing with undead creatures too, so Angor looked around for more souls.
He failed. He had wiped out most of the souls around the edge of the forest.
He walked back to the main path and headed to the other half of Black Forest. But he was surprised to notice a single wandering soul in the middle of the road.
This one wasn’t weeping like the others. She was looking into the distance, in the direction of Dark Castle, and Angor could only see her back as well as her long, black hair.
Still, he felt overwhelming negative energy and the sharp emotion of malice coming from the soul.
“You’re next then.”
Angor held up Prelude to Rebirth and aimed at the strange soul.