None of this is particularly dangerous, though, and more importantly, none of this is enough to justify the rapid decay of the seals. This is still all downstream from whatever's happening.

They need to keep going.

The next new thing is proper spirits. Dressed in burial clothes, with burnt seals attached to their foreheads, intangible and (until Annika's holy fire lights them) invisible and filled with regret and a desire for vengeance.

Okay that's more concerning. Actual ghosts are actually reasonably rare, and the seals used in the burials are most often meant to keep dark influences away from the dead rather than the other day around. The dead are supposed to find their own way, on their own, and it usually takes rather a lot to keep them here. 

(The image that comes to mind, then, is that of the Lord of Glastheim. If something like that found its way into this cave—or maybe was buried here all along—the whole village might need to be evacuated. She hopes it's not that.)

They're noticeably stronger, too, and clearly capable of seeing Taharqi despite his cloaking. Their attacks tend to be psychic in nature, but they're not beyond summoning ghostly weapons to do some decidedly non-ghostly damage to their targets.

So they can now try to implement the strategy they planned on earlier. Despite the fact that they can see Taharqi even while he's cloaking, he's still mostly too fast for them to deal with if they're not directly focusing on him.

And Annika's main job is making sure they can't do that. She does this by being right up in their faces and distracting them with inescapable blows, while being able to soak up a lot of damage raw, in addition to having decent self-regeneration. Plus, she's less affected by the psychic aspect of the ghosts' attacks, inhabiting a nearly unshakable meditative state of mind.

(Monks are bullshit.)

...is that the sound of a bell?

Taharqi and Annika both stop to look in the direction the sound came from, once the ghost is dealt with.

There was only a single jingle, coming from over yonder, but the weak lanterns and torches lighting the way and the light of Annika's Ruwach are not enough to pierce far enough through the darkness.

"...that sounds promising."

"Mm."

"After you, milady," he says, and steps into the shadows.

There are more undead, and dead, and spirits. Every now and then, they hear a bell, and they follow its sound. And as they do, these ruins become stranger and stranger.

The ceiling is high—very, very high—their path goes further underground, and the ceiling doesn't follow, until they can't see it anymore. There are trees, petrified somehow, their leaves gone. The buildings get less and less ruined and dilapidated. These lanterns were probably not lit by the living.

It's like a whole village got teleported underground, unchanged, and preserved in stasis, except for all of its inhabitants.

The feeling of negative pressure intensifies the further in they go, and after enough walking she stops and raises a hand.

"What's up?" he appears to ask. He's trying to project his usual aura of cheer but he's clearly being affected by the spiritual pressures a lot more than Annika is: there's this tension in the corners of his eyes, and a vein in his neck is pulsating, and he's doing his best not to wet his lips too often even though his mouth feels dry.

"There," she says, pointing at a specific point in the darkness. "It's not moving. But it's powerful." Which is obvious, given the givens, but she felt it worth reiterating.

He squints. "I can't see it."

"Me neither." She looks at him out of the corner of her eyes. "Are you... feeling alright?"

"No. But there's nothing to it, we have a job."

"Mm." She'll teleport them away if necessary.

Taharqi swallows dryly and nods. "Alright. Lead the way." And he's gone again.

Annika hasn't managed the trick of maintaining five spirit spheres up, but she can do two, and that'll have to do. She closes her eyes, breathes in, and finds her center. This isn't difficult, as she's been maintaining close focus on it in order to resist the influence of the demon or spirit, but now she needs to look directly at it and it takes some concentration. 

Then she splits two pieces off her soul and externalises them. It's about as unpleasant as it sounds. They'll regenerate, eventually, and they're being propped up by mana, but she can definitely feel the lack. They take the shape of small blue spheres floating lazily around her, available for her to eventually use when needed and useful.

And she resumes walking, slowly, paying attention to her surroundings and trigger happy about her defences.

The dead and undead become rarer and rarer until they stop appearing altogether, and the unease grows heavy enough that Annika herself will start feeling unsettled. The jingles don't become particularly more frequent, but their spatial source starts to become more obvious as they get closer.