Zhong was the strongest of the three, so he knew full well that the time had come for a "sacrifice."
The only question was "who."
Who would be sacrificed?
Shi and Niu could not handle the situation before them. He was the only one who might be able to deal with it.
By that reckoning, Zhong should naturally be the first to die. If Shi and Niu were lucky enough to survive, all the better.
If they could not survive, there was nothing to be done.
They would all have done their best.
The flash flood that suddenly surged out of the mountains ahead was strange.
The flood roared and churned, a murky, earthy yellow, as though it carried countless grains of sand and mud.
Yet the mountains before them were bare rock, without so much as a blade of grass.
This flood could not possibly be carrying mud and sand from those mountains.
But that was not the most important thing. What mattered most was that it carried a person!
At the sight, Zhong sharpened his focus to its utmost limit.
In this barren land, especially amid a manifestation of "nature," the appearance of a "person" was the most inconceivable thing of all.
Even if he had been washed out by the flood.
It was still profoundly abnormal.
There should not have been any living people here.
Even Shamans with survival abilities as formidable as theirs could not be certain of living to see another day.
A naked, living man, submerged amid these rocky mountains.
He should have been doomed.
Yet his groans told them all that he was alive.
A person with no clothes, no weapons, and no tribe.
Out in the wilderness.
Never mind "nature," hunger, thirst, wild beasts, or cold.
Even certain manifestations of "nature" could