From Now On, You're the Challengers! (Monthly Votes, Please)

This was a negotiation over life and death, with one man's life wagered for everyone else's survival.

Inside the Relay Station's hall, the air seemed to have solidified into lead, pressing down so heavily that no one could breathe.

Outside, the ghost mist surged against the doors and windows, making hissing, scratching sounds like the drumbeat of death urging them onward.

Huang Shendu looked around, his gaze sweeping across familiar and unfamiliar faces.

No one answered him.

Silence was tonight's greatest accomplice.

"Is there really—" Huang Shendu asked again, "no other way to end this killing game besides killing me?"

No one spoke.

Guo Kai turned away, his clenched fists turning white.

Hua Jingshan closed his eyes, his lips moving slightly as though he were reciting the Rebirth Mantra, ashamed of his helplessness at this moment.

Thick-skinned as ever, Fang Jingnian broke the deathly silence.

Rather than look at Huang Shendu, he stared at a point in the sky and said, "A man must uphold the greater good. If sacrificing me alone could save everyone, I, Fang Jingnian, wouldn't utter a word of objection."

Liu Yuan opened his mouth, but the thousand things he wanted to say finally became one heavy sentence: "I'm sorry."

As a martial fanatic, he believed a strong fist was the ultimate truth. Yet faced with this unsolvable killing game, his Through-Arm Fist could not shatter their fate of certain death.

Miao Xiyue sat in a corner, her eyes holding little pity, only a kind of indifference.

In the Miao Frontier, death was part of life.

She had seen far too many people die while refining gu, seen friends and family turn against one another over a single life-bound gu, ultimately becoming piles of white bones.

It's only death, Miao Xiyue thought. *From ancient times to