Ethan’s confident smile slowly froze. He was not a fool. On the contrary, as an elite capable of making the Hunter Ranking, he possessed keen combat instincts.

He simply trusted his own strength and gear too much, used absolute force to crush problems, and had grown accustomed to overlooking deeper logical traps hidden beneath the surface.

Now that Lin Jie had pointed it out, he immediately realized something was off.

A "whirlpool of emotion" fed by the desperate resentment of more than forty miners and nourished for nearly a century should have left a spiritual contamination as conspicuous as a lighthouse, enough to drive ordinary people nearby mad.

But here it was as quiet as a stagnant pool. There was only one explanation: all the "water" had already been drained by a far larger, hungrier Leviathan.

The enemy they faced was far more terrifying than the simple "Black Dog" projection described in the files.

Ethan’s voice took on a solemn tone. "You mean that UMA doesn’t just feed on fear, it may already have assimilated the grudges of those forty-plus miners?"

Lin Jie corrected him with a more precise term. "Not assimilated. Consumed."

"What we’re about to face inside won’t be just one UMA. We’ll be dealing with the forty-plus deaths’ fears themselves, amplified by it."

That conclusion made the atmosphere oppressive. Ethan silently took two spare Sunwheel Traps from his backpack and adjusted their positions, tightening the trap grid’s coverage.

William added, "Since we’re already at the gates of hell, we can’t return empty-handed. Whether it’s one or forty-one, something has to end."

He was the first to step down the slope of collapsed rock, heading toward the mine entrance half-buried under rubble.

Lin Jie and Ethan exchanged a glance and immediately followed.

The mine entrance was narrow and suffocating. The metallic stench of rust and a nauseating sweet, fishy odor from damp phosphate rock burst upward from the darkness, like this plateau exhaling the dying breaths of rot.

The three of them turned on their lights. Ethan used an expensive alchemical lantern that emitted a steady white beam. William lit a plainer but exceptionally sturdy military carbide lamp, while Lin Jie carefully set his small carbide lamp to its lowest brightness, just enough to illuminate the ground at his feet.

They bent and squeezed through the one-person-wide opening in single file, crossing an invisible boundary between life and death.

The howling night wind and the patter of rain were instantly cut off, leaving only maddening absolute silence.

But that silence was only physical.

On the mental plane, a silent yet horrific "symphony" had already begun the moment they entered the mine.

"Uu... uuu..."

It was not sound traveling through air. It was an information stream acting directly on the cerebral cortex, on the depths of the mind.

Countless fear emotions, thousands of invisible tentacles seeped from the black rock walls in every direction, trying to crawl into their minds and tear their sanity apart.

Vivid, shocking hallucinations burst before Lin Jie’s eyes.

He saw faces turning bluish from lack of oxygen, twisted by terror, flickering on the surrounding walls.

He heard multiple voices in his ears, howling and praying in accented English with regional dialects.

"Save me... I don’t want to die... my child... my wife is waiting for me to come home..."

"Darkness... endless darkness... God, have you abandoned us..."

"No air, there’s no air... my lungs are going to explode..."

"It was the mine owner, he killed us! He cared more about those damned tin veins than our lives! I curse him! I curse them all..."

These were the pure spiritual imprints left in the miners’ last moments. Now roused by the Black Dog’s fear-aggregation ability and amplified a thousandfold, they had become an indiscriminate, mine-spanning, collective psychic weapon.

It used this method to declare absolute sovereignty over the domain to the three intruders.

William’s thunderous shout sounded in both their ears in time. "Hold your minds! This is illusion! Dead men’s meaningless babble!"

Lin Jie bit his tongue hard. The pain dragged his consciousness back from the abyss the hallucinations were trying to pull him into.

The Serene Heart on his person flared a bright halo at that moment. Its Zen field, which stabilized the mind, spread warmth that swept aside the cold tentacles trying to invade his skull.

He forcibly stripped the hallucinations and mutterings from his perception.

He knew that if he tried to empathize with those desperations, if he felt pity for these lingering resentments, his mental defenses would immediately crack and be overwhelmed by that massive torrent of negative emotion.

He lifted his head and looked at the other man in the team.

Ethan’s condition looked dire. The noble hunter was propping himself against the slippery rock with one hand while the other clutched his golden short hair in pain.

The handsome face was drained of color, beads of cold sweat streaming down his temples. His eyes were unfocused and bloodshot, trapped in a nightmare he couldn’t break free from.

Although Ethan’s willpower was strong, he had little defense against this continuous fear-corrupting attack aimed at dismantling mental fortifications.

His great strength shone in direct confrontation with enemies;

the long prelude before that moment was his greatest weakness.

A top ace on the verge of collapse from the "background music" before even seeing the enemy was in an embarrassingly lethal situation.

Lin Jie hurried over, grabbed Ethan’s shoulder, and shook him hard. "Ethan! Snap out of it!"

Ethan’s body jolted like he’d been electrocuted. He lifted his head and looked at Lin Jie with hostile unfamiliarity.

"Don’t come near... get away! It was you... you killed me... if not for that damned 'diamond'... we never would have gone into that cursed old tomb!!"

He had fallen into the illusion;

the mine’s fear had pulled up a buried, painfully repressed memory.

As Ethan was about to lose control and point his gun at his comrades, William’s hand darted in and snatched the Morning Star pistol that Ethan had begun to raise.

William’s behavior against this psychic tsunami could only be described as astonishing.

He stood there calmly within the fear "symphony," as if born deaf.

When the fear flowed through him, it crashed into a wall constructed of pure indifference and void.

Lin Jie looked at William with surprise in his eyes. "What’s going on?"

Even Lin Jie needed the Serene Heart’s protection to barely stay lucid, yet William could resist everything purely by his own will?

William turned to Lin Jie.

"Fear... when a man has truly faced tens of thousands of pure deaths, when he himself has once lain among piles of corpses for three days and nights with rot and vultures for company, waiting for a rescue that may never come..."

The sadness was audible in William’s voice. "Fear from dead strangers like this is too distant, too luxurious for me."

He had already left all his fear on the blood-stained battlefields.