"Since you're neither a believer nor someone who's been in this Sub-district for long, what do you know about the Goddess?" The female Player scoffed at his explanation. "You're just a mental Super Evolver, so you can withstand all this mental pressure."
"So you do know," Xu Huo said with a chuckle.
The female Player realized what he meant a moment later. Her expression darkened, and she stopped talking to him.
Ordinary believers aside, the Players in this Sub-district were a deeply contradictory bunch. They knew how the game worked and understood that the "Goddess" was actually the Dungeon Boss, yet they still believed in the existence of a "god" and took pride in it. It seemed they weren't trying to use this Dungeon to control the people of their Sub-district and deal with Outer District Players, which was truly perplexing.
Xu Huo stood in the middle of the hall where the Goddess statue was displayed, gazing at the wall behind it. Under his steady scrutiny, the wall—covered in patterns of eyes and other markings that looked like graffiti—seemed to slowly come alive.
As before, the patterns initially flowed slowly like a mass of writhing snakes. As some areas began to move faster and others slower, the wall grew uneven, gradually transforming into a vortex.
If he stared at the vortex for too long, each individual swirl seemed to turn into a passageway. Only after he ventured deep inside would shifting lights and shadows appear in the darkness. Shadows emerged from them, like people passing by, or like moving paintings.
Xu Huo hadn't managed to keep watching long enough to make out the paintings during his previous attempts. Today, he wanted to try.
As he kept watching, he began to feel the pressure. Fortunately, he'd recovered well over the past