Outer District Players might get brainwashed after coming here, but not everyone could be successfully brainwashed. Even if the people from Goddess Hall took pains to raise the normal children born here, they couldn't guarantee that every one of them would become a believer with no will to resist. And even if all those children were brainwashed—or failed to grow up because of various accidents—wouldn't the people watching over them start to have questions?
If all it took was children with Outer District blood to grow up healthy, then what was the point of the Goddess Cult's persistence all these years? They were no longer the nearly extinct nation they had once been, and no longer needed to sacrifice people of both sexes.
It was easy for Xu Huo to find Outer District Players who had stayed behind, but after talking with a few of them, he discovered something else: there might be more descendants of Outer District Players and locals who had stayed behind than he'd imagined. Some of these Players lived together and raised the children they had with locals as though they were the children of two Outer District Players.
This group was larger than he'd expected. They even held regular gatherings and worshiped the Goddess, yet the Temple hadn't made things difficult for them.
One of the Players who had stayed behind led Xu Huo to a small shrine they'd built for the Goddess. She casually offered the flowers she'd brought, then said, "The Goddess in this Dungeon isn't as powerful as you think. The eye patterns you see everywhere in the Holy Land are her eyes and ears, but without them, she can't see or hear much."
Xu Huo had already told her he wasn't a Player who had cleared the Dungeon, so he asked