I asked Ye Jinghong, "Tell me, was this Buzhou Mountain really an illusion?"
No matter how hard I tried, I could not understand how we had jumped straight from the castle to Falling Clouds Valley on Buzhou Mountain.
Then we had met Shadow Demon and Gonggong.
Yet our time with Gonggong had felt so real.
"No, this is not an illusion. At the very least, Shadow Demon and Gonggong truly exist," Conan answered before anyone else could.
Ye Jinghong nodded slightly, agreeing with Conan. She did not think this place looked like an illusion either. Gonggong's oppressive aura had been incredibly powerful, so she believed he was real as well.
"If this is not an illusion, then how do we explain that sea of fire? It looked so fierce, yet we only imagined the scorching heat. That makes no sense," I said.
No one said anything else, because none of them had an answer either.
At last, we passed through the sea of fire and arrived at the entrance to the underground.
The entrance was not the narrow hole I had imagined. On the contrary, it was enormous, a descending staircase whose end could not be seen at a glance.
We followed the stairs down, continuing ever downward.
Conan said, "I made a rough calculation. We would need to keep walking for at least ten days or so before we could possibly reach the Earth's core."
More than ten days? Was it really that far?
At that moment, whether we looked up or down, all we could see were endless stairs.
There were not even any other structures on either side.
"Oh my God, are we going to keep doing this for more than ten days?"
Ye Jinghong looked terrified. She had just said that walking like this would bore