The City of Balas had welcomed long-absent light.
To the creatures of the Underground World, already accustomed to darkness and one with it, the light and heat Saine represented were blindingly dazzling.
Nearly every underground creature living in Balas City could not help but raise its head and look toward the deepest part of the city center.
That glaring "sun" was now flying toward their Main Temple.
As Saine relentlessly pursued the Black-Bellied Spider Leader, drawing ever closer to the heart of the city, the enormous stone statue that had been hidden within darkness and mist gradually revealed itself before him.
It was a half-human, half-spider statue. Its upper body was that of a young, beautiful woman, while its lower half was a spider's abdomen that made one's skin crawl.
What was especially strange was that the woman carved into the statue looked lifelike and very young, yet her overall bearing gave off an air of maturity and seduction.
Combined with her seemingly pure upper body and the scalp-numbing spider abdomen below—
This union of beauty and ugliness, purity and distortion, left an especially deep impression.
For some reason, the instant he saw this enormous beautiful spider-woman statue, Saine felt as though he had seen it before.
Before he could carefully sort through his memories, the two fleeing Level-3 lifeforms of the Underground World had already hidden inside the massive temple before the statue.
The temple stood a full three hundred meters tall, an immensely towering structure.
Dozens of stone pillars, each so thick that several people would have to link arms to encircle one, were carved with countless reliefs and murals. They seemed to record the majestic past of the Spider Goddess and the display of her Divine Miracles.
At the base of the stone pillars, row after