Start in Terra, immortal

The environment changes drastically from the scorching desert to the concrete jungle, but the deathly silence permeating the air remains the same.

The modern city, which should be bustling with traffic and glittering with neon lights, is now covered with moss.

Broken glass curtain walls reflected the bleak sunlight, rusted vehicles blocked the long-abandoned streets, and rampant plants sprouted from the cracks in the concrete, making the whole city seem as if it had been abandoned by time for many years.

Rosso hovered above the city, his invisible spiritual senses spreading and rapidly covering the entire city. Moments later, the general layout of the city clearly appeared in his mind.

With a casual grab, he snatched a "being" wandering blindly among the ruins and brought it before him. It was a walking corpse with human features, but its skin was gray and festering, and its eyes were empty and bloodthirsty.

Rosso's brow furrowed slightly.

Driven by primal instincts and the lust for food, it overwhelmed all other consciousness... This state of soul seems like a clumsy creation of some demon of desire.

He examined the struggling soul in his hand. 'Yet, these beings bear no traceable link to divine faith or imprint of divine power.'

Goddesses of desire like Venus can indeed distort the will of living beings, but their methods often leave a unique "signature" on the soul. At Rosso's level, tracing back to the origin is not difficult.

But the spiritual pollution of these "things" presents a more "natural," or rather, more "physical" characteristic.

"It feels more like... the body underwent some fundamental mutation, which forcibly distorted and solidified the state of the soul, rather than the soul driving the body as usual."

Releasing his grip, letting the walking corpse fall back into the ruins below, Rosso's figure appeared on the city ground the next moment.

He stood before a nearly completely decaying "corpse" that emitted a pungent stench. The body's vitality had been reduced to a minimum, but the soul trapped within it continued to stir restlessly, as if enduring endless pain.

"Zombie virus?" The word, common in many world legends, flashed through Rosso's mind, but he quickly dismissed the simplistic analogy. "What kind of virus could so directly and domineeringly affect and imprison souls?"

Strictly speaking, these beings are already dead. But their "dead" bodies maintain a minimum level of activity in an unusual way, imprisoning their souls within them, unable to escape.

This phenomenon is highly unusual in the Marvel Universe, which has multiple dimensions and many forces vying for the ownership of souls.

Hell, dimensional lords, and even abstract cosmic entities like death... every soul that dies on Earth every moment is their "resource".

Such a large-scale imprisonment of souls within decaying bodies and lingering in the material world is almost impossible for those beings to tolerate—just as the spirit world would not stand idly by while souls that should belong to it are forcibly intercepted by other planes.

"Then, the only reasonable explanation is..." A sharp light seemed to flash in Rosso's eyes. He suddenly raised his head, his gaze piercing through the barriers of material space and casting it into the deep space of the universe and even the gaps between dimensions.

"Someone is consciously 'raising' these souls. They're confining them within specially made 'containers,' preventing their normal circulation, in order to achieve some purpose."

As if to confirm his conjecture—

Above the city ruins, in a higher dimension, a gigantic, pale blue, phantom head quietly emerged.

He was bald, his face dignified and indifferent. Most striking were his enormous eyes, like two blue stars, which were now "gazing" at the dimension where Rosso resided. A vast stream of information swept across his gaze, transforming into a silent whisper: "...external universe...unknown dimension...interference that should not exist..."

They are the observers and recorders of the Marvel Universe.

"Have you seen enough?" Rosso's lips suddenly curled into a knowing smile as he spoke to the gaze from that higher dimension, as if talking to himself. "Let's take a break."

The moment the words fell, a power beyond the conventional understanding of the universe quietly spread out, as if drawing a "veil" of absolute isolation over the reality where Rosso was located.

Beyond the dimension, the enormous blue-eyed, bald phantom suddenly paused, its words tinged with disbelief.

"Impossible... He... he blocked my observation?! He blocked the observer's observation!... I need to confirm this again!"

The observer Vatu's voice echoed continuously through the latitudinal fissures.

He forced himself to calm down and turned his "gaze" back to that specific dimension. However, all he got in return was a chaotic barrier of "unobservable" information.

That latitude seemed to have never existed; the place that originally belonged to that latitude was now nothingness, and nothing could be observed.

"It's...really." This time, the observer, having confirmed the result, quickly calmed down.

Throughout his endless years of observation, although he had never witnessed such a situation before, after the initial shock, he began to think about more.

"To be able to so effortlessly block information observation at the level of a single universe... why would an existence of this caliber intervene in this 'zombie universe' branch that has already deviated from the main timeline and is on the verge of withering away? What... is its purpose?"

Vatu ceased his futile attempts to penetrate the barrier. He turned his enormous head toward other dimensions and timelines that were still functioning normally, continuing his eternal observation.

......

The interior of Earth, temporarily "shielded" from zombies.

Rosso paid no attention to the observer's retreat; he began to deal with the "cage" of souls before him.

Raising his right hand, palm down, Rosso gently pressed it against the desolate city.

There was no earth-shattering explosion, no dazzling light. A more fundamental force of rules, acting on the level of the soul, quietly rippled out from him.

In an instant, all the zombies in the city below, no matter where they were hiding or whether they were moving, froze in their tracks.

Immediately afterwards, one after another, hazy, twisted, grayish-white spirits, displaying forms of pain and hunger, were drawn by an invisible hand, breaking free from their rotten and foul-smelling bodies and slowly rising into the sky.

Thousands of souls converged into a pale river, flowing silently toward Rosso suspended in the air, circling behind him like pilgrims.

On the ground, only empty shells remained, standing motionless and lifeless.

"Although these souls may not be 'unclaimed souls' but rather part of some kind of 'creation of rules,' taking them in rashly may lead to unnecessary conflicts with the rules."

However, these distorted souls are, in the spirit world's eyes, a more unique batch of "material" than the imposters.

With a thought, the vast, pale river of souls behind him began to slowly rotate, flowing towards a tiny passage leading to the spirit world that gradually unfolded before him.

With his experience dealing with imposter souls, Caron should know how to handle the remaining tasks.

Just as he was focused on guiding the torrent of souls, not far away, at a survivor's stronghold, several exhausted but sharp-eyed figures were nervously watching the zombies that had suddenly stopped moving.

"What's going on? Zombies, something seems off!"

"Guys, look, look!"