“I can agree,” said the Azure Dragon, “but I have a condition as well.”
“Whatever…” The Earth Dragon coughed again. “As long as you agree… the next demand has nothing to do with me.”
The Azure Dragon smiled and nodded. “Indeed, you can die now. What follows is between me and Qi Xia.”
Qi Xia frowned upon hearing this and turned to the Azure Dragon. “What do you mean? How does this involve me?”
“Exactly. I can let these people go,” the Azure Dragon said. “But the ‘Cangjie Game’ will continue, and the ‘Life Gambit’ will proceed—only now, the players are you and me.”
Qi Xia chuckled lightly. “So, to put it bluntly, you just want a justified excuse to kill me, right?”
“Oh? Is it that obvious?”
“Painfully obvious,” Qi Xia nodded. “Killing me outright with brute force would feel meaningless to you, so you’re using this ‘Life Gambit’ to eliminate me. You can tweak the rules at will, and the referee will blatantly favor you, making your victory seem fair and square.”
The Azure Dragon grinned widely before stepping closer to Qi Xia. “Precisely. I want to defeat you with what you pride yourself on the most—my home turf, the ‘Cangjie Game.’ Do you dare?”
Qi Xia shook his head. “Move aside, please.”
“You…?”
Qi Xia sidestepped the Azure Dragon and approached the Earth Dragon, once again gazing into her eyes.
“You’ve worked hard,” he murmured softly.
The Earth Dragon could no longer speak, but she managed a faint smile before her bright yellow serpentine eyes slowly dimmed, lifeless.
A dull ache pulsed in Qi Xia’s head, and he gripped his hair tightly.
That unbearable pain, long absent, surged back violently, mercilessly drowning out the emotion called “grief.”
He wanted to cry, but no tears came. He wanted to scream, but no sound escaped. All his sorrow instantly transformed into searing agony.
This was the path he had chosen for himself.
Just then, black hair rained down like droplets around Qi Xia as the Black Tortoise descended from the stands.
Sensing something amiss, Qi Xia tried to stand, but the splitting headache forced him back down, leaving him clawing at his scalp for relief.
“Bold. Suicide. Foul.” The Black Tortoise’s icy, lethal voice drifted through the air, mingling with the cascading strands of hair. “Foul play. Punishment.”
“Stop…”
Qi Xia struggled to lift his head, only to see the Black Tortoise raise her hand.
A freshly stilled, shattered heart, crimson and raw, appeared in her palm. She studied the bloody organ curiously, as though puzzled by its sudden stillness.
“Dead… dead must still be punished.” After a moment of silence, she added, “Death is foul play. Foul play demands death.”
With that, she raised her hand again, relentlessly plucking organs from the Earth Dragon’s corpse. Qi Xia gritted his teeth, fighting to rise, but the agony crashing through his skull like tidal waves left him utterly paralyzed.
Most of the onlookers, witnessing the Black Tortoise’s methods for the first time, stood frozen in shock, their surroundings forgotten.
A corpse, already dead… yet its organs could still be extracted from thin air.
Why was the Black Tortoise doing this? How was she even capable of it?
Had the Earth Dragon still been alive, what unspeakable torment would she have endured?
A minute passed, and Qi Xia watched as the Earth Dragon’s chest and abdomen collapsed like deflated balloons.
Wasn’t this, in a way, good news…?
The Earth Dragon had chosen her own death. She hadn’t suffered. And now, the Black Tortoise’s actions seemed nothing more than impotent rage to Qi Xia.
She was merely carrying out the Azure Dragon’s orders—mechanically, numbly, without thought.
“Enough,” the Azure Dragon said impassively. “There’s no need.”
The Black Tortoise nodded, shaking the blood from her hands before dragging her long hair across the ground and returning to her place behind the Azure Dragon.
A moment later, the Azure Dragon turned his disdainful gaze back to Qi Xia.
“Headache,” he sneered. “Agony, isn’t it?”
At those words, Qi Xia’s expression finally settled into calm.
Yes, agony.
But this was no time to be ruled by “grief.” With the Earth Dragon’s death, everything was truly beginning.
It seemed neither the Azure Dragon nor the Black Tortoise had noticed the colossal secret hidden within the Earth Dragon.
Meanwhile, in the Red Team’s “preparation zone,” Zheng Yingxiong suddenly paused, glancing up at the sky. A moment later, he frowned, looking toward the opposing team’s side before tilting his head back up, his expression deeply puzzled.
“What’s wrong, Hero?” Tian Tian crouched beside him.
“Something’s off…” Zheng Yingxiong muttered. “I’ve never felt this before… What is this?”
“Are you feeling unwell?” Tian Tian asked. “The game’s almost over. Rest afterward—does your nose hurt?”
“No… It’s not me.” Zheng Yingxiong sniffed the air sharply. “Sister, something in the ‘Land of the End’… just disappeared.”
The others stiffened slightly, baffled.
“Something disappeared…?” Chen Junnan raised an eyebrow but quickly shook his head. “Kid, things vanish here every day, every hour, every second. Even people disappear.”
“No…” Zheng Yingxiong looked up again, though he seemed disoriented, as if dizzy. “It’s hard to explain… It’s like something that’s always been covering us from above suddenly vanished.”
“Huh?”
Chen Junnan followed Zheng Yingxiong’s gaze upward, but what “sky” was there to see? Above them stretched only endless darkness.
“I don’t know how to say it…” Zheng Yingxiong struggled to articulate the sensation with his limited vocabulary. “It’s like a lid covering the sky was removed. But the lid was already thin, and now it’s even thinner… No, it’s completely gone…”
“Someone took off the pot lid?” Chen Junnan quipped, still staring upward. “Great, now we’re really exposed.”
“This scent has always been there!” Zheng Yingxiong insisted, afraid the others wouldn’t understand. “No—it’s been here since I can remember! It felt like part of this place… I thought it was part of it, but now it’s gone. That means it wasn’t one with this place! It was just here for a long time!”
Zheng Yingxiong wished everyone around him had “Spiritual Scent” so he could force this understanding into their minds. Describing such an abstract feeling with words alone was nearly impossible.
That thing had existed in the sky, fused with the “Land of the End” for ages—yet now, it was dissipating.
Chen Junnan and Tian Tian exchanged glances. They knew Zheng Yingxiong often spoke startling truths, but he had never lied before.
If he was right—if there had indeed been a faint, colossal presence looming over the “Land of the End,” unnoticed by all but him—then it couldn’t have been a physical object. Otherwise, everyone would have sensed it. It must have been an invisible, ever-active “ability.”
And if that thing was now fading…
What had caused its dissipation?
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