The echo of a heartbeat lingered.
Lin An let out a long breath. His reason warned him for the second time to leave this place.
Yet his body seemed fixed to the chair. His soul and his thoughts both wanted to know the final answer.
After following the information Andrew had given him and thinking intensely all the way, he no longer doubted whether Andrew was telling the truth or putting on an act.
He was truly only a layer of window paper away from the truth. Like a child standing beneath the magnificent gates of a temple, Lin An could already see, through the cracks, the countless dazzling rays of light within.
Across from him, Andrew waited as calmly as ever, as if he too were merely an ant that had glimpsed reality and now only wanted to recount, little by little, the truth he had seen to Lin An.
"A preamble?"
"Go on."
Soon, Lin An raised his head and looked at Andrew with a hoarse voice.
As his words fell, Andrew smiled and nodded slightly.
"You really are the same kind of person as me."
"Yes. Even knowing that some truths are unknowable and perhaps unbearably cruel, you still stubbornly want to know."
Andrew looked at Lin An with considerable admiration, as if he were looking at another version of himself.
"Just as you guessed."
"The mission information in the Ghost Skull really is missing a great deal, and it is indeed all hidden outside that circle."
"However, there is one thing you misunderstood about me. I hid that information not to stop you from completing the mission, but for your own good."
As he spoke, Andrew sighed—a rare occurrence.
"The mission mutated. Before the mutation, knowing that information would have been harmless. But after the mutation,