Ghost Arena: The One Who Unravels Deadly Dilemmas

The exile cart rolled over the blood-rusted road to the underworld. Lu Zhao touched the black cloth over his right eye, hiding a scar left by the power of the netherworld as it gnawed at him on the night his family was slaughtered ten years ago.

Three days earlier, he had found half of a bloodstained jade token in a mass grave. That night, eighteen rotting corpses crawled out of the earth and bit through his chains for him.

"A deathmatch arena locked in a thousand-year stalemate. Living souls enter; those who lose pay with their lives."

As he climbed onto the arena to the wailing of the dead, bronze lantern trees illuminated three hundred hanging coffins. Each held half a corpse: a living upper body, a skeletal lower half, and a bloodstained chess position lodged in its throat.

His Netherworld Eye suddenly burned. He heard the wronged spirits scream in his ear: "Young Master Lu, this arena isn't meant to let you live!"

The Netherworld Eye, which could be opened only three times a day, could uncover the memories of the dead, but not the deeper conspiracy.

Summoning the dead to break the game drained his soul power like sand slipping through a sieve. Yet the more he investigated, the more horrified he became: every murder's method of death was exactly like what had happened the night his family was wiped out.

Most uncanny of all was the tomb-guarding woman who was always brewing tea in a corner of the chessboard.

Chu Li rolled a bone chess piece between her fingers and smiled. The red mole at the corner of her eye looked like a drop of blood that had yet to dry. "You think you're solving a deadlock? Every soul here is a bargaining chip for the living."

The blood moon rises; the dead weep.

Lu Zhao crushed the last bone chess piece, and the wind lifted the black cloth over his right eye. In the hollow socket, ghostly blue flames were devouring something.

Would this game break a thousand-year deadlock, or draw him into a game within a game spanning the worlds of the living and the dead?