Defense Towers stood in rows, and traps were scattered everywhere.
At Glimmer Camp, built against the mountain, a group of people stood ready in formation.
After the Mid-tier Game Zone opened, unprecedented changes had taken place at the Preliminary Selection site. It was not an increase in the number or strength of the monsters attacking the city, but a change in their forms.
If the previous monsters had belonged to the category of common monsters, then the ones that came afterward could all be considered aberrations.
The most obvious effect of this change was that the beams from Launch Towers dimmed and went out every moment. Glimmer Camp, built against the mountain, was in slightly better shape... but only slightly.
As everyone waited vigilantly, the darkness before them finally stirred.
The darkness ahead was like dyes mixed together and constantly stirred, as though an invisible hand were squeezing and kneading it, forcibly crushing all that darkness together into an utterly twisted void.
A few seconds later, a human hand slowly stretched out from within. But dense, white thread-like maggots coiled around its fingertips like hair, while a gaping bloody mouth opened in its palm.
The instant the Players saw that hand, an indescribable sense of absurdity rose in their hearts, followed by overwhelming nausea. For ordinary people, just one glance at this monster was enough to make them dizzy, vomit, and lose their minds.
These monsters known as aberrations generally carried tangible negative emotions within them—fear, chaos, hatred, disgust, distortion, brutality, and all manner of other feelings mashed together.
Players had much greater resistance than ordinary people, but they could still sense the hysterical madness within those emotions.
And once their mental defenses fell, their Sanity would rapidly decline.
Sometimes, no matter how brave a person was, all it took