Suspicions

Translator: Cinder Translations

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Could it be that the creatures that attacked them were like this?

At that moment, everyone fell silent, all of them realizing the problem.

"Heh," the silence was broken by a light-hearted laugh. Following the sound, everyone saw the handsome face of the young master. He looked at the creature visible on the door and shrugged, saying, "No one really believes such a thing exists, right?"

"Everything in this mission is something that really happened at some point in the past, and everything that appears here can be traced back to its source in the real world. You're all not newcomers; you should know whether I'm right or wrong," the young master said. "Moreover, the biological structure and form of this creature clearly don't align with reality. This place…"

He looked around and continued, "This should be a place like a church or a place for priests to perform rituals. Undoubtedly, it was man-made, and the people who built it must have been a human group that has lived by the sea for a long time."

"In the long history, the ancestors survived by the mountains or the sea. For the indigenous people here, the ocean was their means of survival."

"When the catch was good, everyone survived; when it was bad, they had to endure hunger."

"Over time, they inevitably developed a distorted reverence for the sea, even for the mysterious deep sea."

"In their imagination, natural disasters, bad weather, shipwrecks, and other ominous events were all attributed to the anger of the ocean, which was anthropomorphized and given emotions."

"Because people needed something extraordinarily powerful to embody their worship," he calmly added, "more precisely, to embody their fear and awe!"

"The oldest and strongest emotion in humans is fear, and the oldest and most intense fear comes from the unknown."

"The ocean, the deep sea, is one of the few unknowns on this planet."

"This is why they built this structure. They must have performed rituals here to worship the sea god, praying for a safe return and a bountiful catch."

His speech, which felt almost like a lecture, seemed to have a hypnotic effect. His elegant and natural tone, like a beam of light, tore through the fear everyone had of this unknown creature.

After all, when dealing with ghosts, one can fulfill their wishes, such as vengeance or escape, to end the mission.

But if such a strange creature appeared in the mission, like the one on this door, there was nothing they could do but wait to die.

This creature should only exist in the imagination of novelists or in mythological stories.

Gradually, someone opened their mouth. It was the little girl who hadn't spoken much. She looked at the young master and said slowly, "So you mean this thing doesn't exist, but was just imagined by the people who lived here to express some kind of wish?"

When she said the last few words, her eyes subtly glanced at the silent woman hiding in the shadows.

The woman was sitting there quietly, like a statue.

"That's right," the young master nodded. "It's similar to the totems that evolved in early hunting tribes, mostly taken from things they couldn't conquer—wind, fire, lightning," he paused, adding, "and fierce animals like lions, tigers, and wolves."

The young master's words shifted everyone's thinking. Several subtle glances began to size up the silent woman. Was what she said really true? Or had everything been fabricated by her for some reason?

Although the logic seemed self-consistent at first, upon deeper investigation, the holes in the story were glaring. The time, place, people, and events were unclear, and even the encounters were vague, based only on a baffling recording.

And the woman claimed that for confidentiality reasons, she couldn't provide details.

Of course, her current explanation was that she had forgotten.

Maybe she hadn't forgotten at all; perhaps everything was fake!

She might have been trying to lead everyone into a misconception.

There was no shipwreck, and she wasn't a member of a secret organization. She was just a poor soul trying to survive in the nightmare of the mission.

After all, this place was a nightmare, a place that devours people whole.

At the first encounter, she had insisted that everyone leave immediately, before they had even explored the terrain or encountered any crises.

This would have been unimaginable in previous missions.

And she said she had been here before. If that was the case, she certainly wouldn't have overlooked such a conspicuous building that resembled a church. A preliminary search of the building would surely have led to the discovery of the stone door.

Yet, before finding the stone door, she had shown no familiarity with the place. The stone door had been found by the others through searching.

Some even speculated that she might be crazy, a newcomer who was frightened by the suddenness of everything in the nightmare world and had gone mad, speaking wild nonsense afterward.

A flood of information, true or false, or shrouded in mystery, was quickly injected into everyone's minds, and they needed to make a decision.

The young master glanced sideways and noticed Jiang Cheng whispering to the fatty, his face showing no sign of anxiety or thought.

On the other hand, the fatty seemed overwhelmed by the barrage of information, his mind barely able to process it.

He couldn't afford to be distracted. His primary focus was the silent woman. He didn't need to reveal everything; just planting a seed would be enough.

"Doctor," the fatty's eyes widened, swallowing nervously, and whispered, "Are you saying that everything this handsome man said earlier was a lie?"

"Is it to provoke… no, to manipulate that old woman and the team, forcing her to reveal everything?"

"Tsk," Jiang Cheng shot a disapproving glance at the fatty, clearly displeased by his inappropriate comment, but after a moment, he squinted and explained, "That's more or less the idea, but it's unrealistic to make her spill everything. Whatever she reveals is fine. At least it should make everyone feel enough doubt about her."

"So," the fatty's large body began to tremble, his gaze shifting toward the stone door, "that thing up there, does it really exist?"

Jiang Cheng also looked at the stone door but didn't directly answer the fatty's question. He simply said faintly, "At the time, we hadn't discovered this door yet."

The fatty blinked in confusion and then froze, his face darkening.

The doctor was right. At that time, they hadn't discovered the door yet, let alone the mysterious creature on it.

So, how did the woman know there was something in the sea, and how did she fabricate the story of being attacked by an unknown creature in the sea?

(End of the Chapter)

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