“I can agree to that,” Qinglong said. “But I also have a condition.”

“It doesn’t matter…” Earth-Dragon coughed again and said, “As long as you agree… the next condition has nothing to do with me.”

Qinglong smiled and nodded. “Indeed, you can die now. What comes next is between Qi Xia and me.”

Qi Xia frowned upon hearing this and looked at Qinglong. “What do you mean, it still involves me?”

“That’s right. I can let these people go,” Qinglong said. “But the ‘Cangjie Chess’ will continue, the ‘Life Gamble’ will continue—only the participants will change to you and me.”

Qi Xia let out a soft laugh. “In other words, you just want to find a legitimate excuse to kill me, right?”

“Oh? Is it that obvious?”

“It’s extremely obvious,” Qi Xia nodded. “Killing me with brute force would feel meaningless to you, so you’re using this ‘Life Gamble’ as an excuse to eliminate me. Since you can arbitrarily modify the game rules and then have the referee blow biased calls, it would make your victory look respectable.”

After hearing this, Qinglong grinned and walked step by step to stand before Qi Xia. He opened his mouth and said, “Exactly. I want to defeat you using what you’re most proud of. In my home court of ‘Cangjie Chess,’ do you dare or not?”

Qi Xia shook his head. “Please move aside.”

“You…?”

Qi Xia walked around Qinglong and came to Earth-Dragon’s side, looking at her eyes once more.

“You’ve worked hard,” Qi Xia said quietly.

Earth-Dragon could no longer speak. She only managed to grin, and those bright yellow snake eyes finally slowly lost their vitality.

Qi Xia felt a faint throbbing pain in his brain and reached up to grab his own hair.

He wanted to cry but couldn’t shed tears. He wanted to shout but couldn’t make a sound. All his sorrow instantly transformed into severe pain.

This was the path he had chosen with his own hands.

Just then, countless black hairs fell around Qi Xia like raindrops. Xuanwu descended from the spectator stands.

Qi Xia seemed to sense something was wrong and tried to stand up, but was struck down by intense headache. He could only forcefully grip his own hair to ease the pain.

“Audacious. Suicide. Violation.” Xuanwu’s cold and murderous voice drifted over, accompanying the cascade of long hair as it reached everyone’s ears. “Violation. Accept punishment.”

“Stop…”

Qi Xia struggled to lift his head, only to see that Xuanwu had already raised her hand.

A bright red, freshly stopped broken heart appeared in Xuanwu’s hand. She looked at the crimson object in her hand with some curiosity, as if she didn’t understand why it had stopped beating.

“Dead… even dead must be punished,” Xuanwu said after a moment of silence. “Dead means violation. Violation means death.”

With those words, she raised her hand again and continuously pulled out internal organs from Earth-Dragon’s corpse. Qi Xia gritted his teeth, trying to stand up, but he couldn’t do anything.

Waves of severe pain came crashing through his brain like ocean waves, completely preventing him from moving even slightly.

Most of the people around were witnessing Xuanwu’s methods for the first time. They were so shocked they remained frozen in place, even forgetting where they were.

A corpse that was already dead… yet organs could be pulled out from it out of thin air.

Why would Xuanwu do this? How could she do this?

If Earth-Dragon were still alive, what kind of hellish torture would she have endured?

A minute passed, and Qi Xia watched with his own eyes as Earth-Dragon’s chest and abdomen deflated like a punctured balloon.

But wasn’t this also good news…?

Earth-Dragon had chosen her own manner of death. She didn’t suffer. At this moment, what Xuanwu was doing, in Qi Xia’s eyes, was nothing more than impotent rage.

She was only helplessly, numbly, mechanically executing the orders Qinglong had given.

“Enough,” Qinglong said expressionlessly. “There’s no need.”

Upon hearing this, Xuanwu nodded, shook off the blood stains on her hands, dragged her floor-length hair a few steps, and stood behind Qinglong again.

A moment later, Qinglong looked at Qi Xia with contempt once more.

“Headache,” Qinglong said with a smile. “So painful you wish you were dead, right?”

Hearing those words, Qi Xia’s expression finally began to return to calm.

Yes, so painful he wished he were dead.

But now was not the time to be controlled by “sorrow.” Once Earth-Dragon died, everything would truly begin.

It seemed that neither Qinglong nor Xuanwu had discovered the enormous secret hidden within Earth-Dragon.

Zheng Yingxiong, who was in the red team’s “preparation area,” paused at this moment and looked up at the sky. After a moment, feeling something was wrong, he looked toward the opposite “preparation area,” then looked at the sky again a few seconds later. His expression was very puzzled.

“What’s wrong, Yingxiong little brother?” Tiantian crouched down to look at him.

“Good heavens…” Zheng Yingxiong said. “I’ve never had this feeling before… What is this feeling?”

“Is something uncomfortable with your body?” Tiantian asked. “The game will end soon. You should rest well then. Does your nose hurt?”

“No… it’s not that I’m uncomfortable,” Zheng Yingxiong lifted his nose and sniffed vigorously. “Sister, in the ‘Land of the End’… it seems like something has disappeared.”

Everyone was slightly stunned upon hearing this, as if they didn’t quite understand.

“Something disappeared…?” Chen Junnan beside them raised his eyebrows, but quickly shook his head and said, “Kid, in this godforsaken place, things are disappearing every day, every hour, every moment. Even people are disappearing.”

“No…” Zheng Yingxiong looked up at the sky again, but he seemed unable to distinguish the direction of the sky and felt a bit dizzy. “This feeling is hard to describe… It seems like something that’s always been covering us from above the sky suddenly disappeared.”

“Huh…?”

After hearing this, Chen Junnan also looked up following Zheng Yingxiong’s gaze, but where was there any “sky” here?

Looking up, all one could see was endless darkness.

“I’m not very good at explaining…” Zheng Yingxiong struggled to describe his current feeling with his limited vocabulary. “It’s like a lid covering the sky was removed, but that lid was already very thin to begin with, and now it’s thinner than before… No, I should say it’s completely disappeared…”

“Did we have someone lift the pot lid?” Chen Junnan asked while looking up. “Suddenly wearing a hat out of nowhere, huh?”

“This scent has always been there!” Zheng Yingxiong, worried that others wouldn’t understand, hurriedly explained. “No, I can only say that this thing has been here since I have memories! It’s like a part of this place… I originally thought it was a part of it, but now it’s gone. This means it and this place are not one entity! They’ve just been together for a very long time!”

Right now, Zheng Yingxiong wished everyone around him had “Spirit Sniff,” so he could forcibly instill his thoughts into their brains. Otherwise, relying on his own language to describe this abstract feeling was truly too difficult.

That thing existed in the sky, having long merged with the “Land of the End,” but now it was dissipating.

Chen Junnan and Tiantian looked at each other. They both knew that although Zheng Yingxiong often said shocking things, he had never lied until now.

If what he said was true—that there had always been a faint, gigantic thing that only Zheng Yingxiong could notice covering the sky above the “Land of the End”—it could only mean that thing wasn’t a “physical object.” Otherwise, everyone should have noticed it, not just Zheng Yingxiong.

So it should be some kind of invisible, continuously active “ability.”

And now that thing was beginning to dissipate…

What was causing it to begin dissipating?