Chapter 104 "I never expected to see you here..."
Ianne crouched down and thrust a dagger straight at the old groom.
She had kept this exquisite dagger hidden on her person without anyone knowing when.
After inserting, she pulled out and then thrust in again, Ianie thrusting twice.
The old groom stared at her in disbelief, opening his mouth as if to call out, but no sound came out. He was about to tremblingly raise his hand to call for help when Iani suddenly pulled out a dagger and plunged it into his heart again.
This time, he didn't even utter a sound before collapsing to the ground with a thud.
As the torrential rain intensified, the group of men in black rushed forward with cries of alarm...
——
The rain was torrential that night, so heavy that some members of the aristocratic circle found it difficult to fall asleep.
A case, neither too big nor too small, occurred on this rainy night. The deceased was the illegitimate son of a famous conglomerate in the East. He could be considered minor, but he was also the most favored illegitimate son of the conglomerate, making him quite important.
The incident only caused a minor ripple in the aristocratic circle, becoming a topic of conversation during casual conversation.
Ianie and I were initially imprisoned. After dawn, Ianie was released but then locked up in her own house, not allowed to leave the house at all.
All the eyewitnesses said that I stabbed the illegitimate child to death, just to protect the mistress of the house with whom I had a deep affection.
I was thrown into the lowest level of the capital prison.
The prison has six underground floors, and I was taken to the sixth floor after dawn.
The sixth level of the prison was filled with the most vicious criminals in the Eastern Territory. Some of them had crooked noses and mouths with fierce eyes, some had pointed mouths and monkey cheeks with a vicious and scheming look, and others had high cheekbones and thin cheeks, looking ruthless at first glance.
Disheveled and soaking wet, I was pushed forward by the prison guards. As I stumbled along, some inmates jeering and lunged at me, their hands waving wildly through the bars as they tried to grab me.
"A woman, it's actually a woman!"
"Finally, a woman has arrived!"
We're all so hungry!
"Take off your clothes, take them off, hurry up and take them off!"
I was so shocked I almost fell over.
The criminals roared with laughter, stretching their arms out even longer and pressing their bodies even closer to the fence. If the fence hadn't been thick and strong enough, they would have already broken through and torn me to shreds.
Still shaken, I dodged left and right, trying my best to avoid it.
Seeing that they couldn't catch me, the prisoners became enraged and started cursing, spitting, and sticking out their tongues at me. Some even took off their pants and swayed back and forth in front of me, laughing so hard they were doubled over.
I shrank back in fear, passing through the flying spittle, foul language, and insulting laughter like a rabbit with its tail between its legs.
The cell door at the far end of the cold, damp corridor opened, and I was shoved inside. It slammed shut with a bang, followed by the cold click of chains locking.
I was locked up for more than ten days, and I spent those days in complete darkness.
Everything I ate and drank smelled sour, and I had diarrhea more than ten times. It wasn't until the tenth day that I got used to it and it started to get a little better.
Countless times I've wondered, why me? What did I do wrong? Why do I always encounter such terrible things? I've thought about it again and again, but I still have no answer.
On the fifteenth day, the warden, accompanied by several guards, came to deliver my sentence—life imprisonment.
“You were originally sentenced to death,” the warden said sarcastically, “but I heard that Lady Iani went on a three-day hunger and thirst strike for you, and her parents had no choice but to pay a large sum of money to spare your life.”
I lay on the bed, half-dead, feeling confused. Ianie’s family looked well-off, but they didn’t actually have much money. Where did they get the money to spare me from the death penalty?
Besides, will they really pay for it for me?
Seeing that the warden was about to leave, I struggled and cried out that I was innocent, "I didn't kill anyone, I'm truly innocent."
The jailer slammed the cell door shut with a cold laugh. Just as I was about to shout, "I am the Prime Minister's wife of the Kingdom of Achia, release me!", I suddenly pursed my lips tightly.
With a strange intuition, I felt that these words would not only not help me, but would also make me die faster.
Life in prison is deathly silent; you never see the sun, and you are unaware of wind or rain. Every day is night.
Every five days, the vicious prisoners, who were kept on the sixth floor of the prison, would be allowed to go up to a tiny courtyard on the fifth floor to move around.
That tiny courtyard is said to be dark, but the air circulates well, making it a bit more comfortable than the sixth floor.
I never go. Because I know what will happen once a woman shows up.
—It's even more terrifying than a little white rabbit falling into a wolf's den and being torn to pieces.
I don't know from which day it started, but I began to use pebbles to carve out time, to record how long I had been here.
The marks I made on the damp wall grew more and more numerous, densely packed, almost filling half the wall.
I dare not count how many marks there are, nor dare I think about how many days I have been locked up here.
I had pinned my hopes on my special abilities, but they never materialized.
No one speaks to me, I can't see the sunlight, I eat worse than a dog every day, and I can't even smell fresh air. I'm on the verge of a breakdown.
One midnight, I developed a high fever, so high that it felt like my bones were aching—this was probably what it meant to be worse than dead. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and decided to reveal my "identity" at all costs, even if it meant being killed by someone with ill intentions. I lay "corpse" on the bed, agonizingly waiting for the jailer to bring me food at dawn.
A strange noise suddenly came from under my bed.
I endured the discomfort, rolled off the bed, and pushed the bed away with all my might. There was a small hole under the bed. Just as I was about to look into the hole, the knocking suddenly stopped.
I was so terrified I could hardly breathe. Who knocked this hole? Wasn't the prison supposed to only have six levels? Is there a seventh level? Are the seventh level for even more vicious criminals? What if they get out and kill me? Should I call the guards right now?
After thinking it over for a long time, I still couldn't make a decision, and I didn't dare to look closely at the small hole, so I pushed the bed back to its original place.
The next day, after waking up, I thought about the matter again and finally decided not to report it, but to wait and see.
If he's a reasonably decent prisoner, perhaps we could cooperate with him.
I don't care what kind of person he is, as long as he doesn't harm me, we can work together to escape. In my current state, there's not much difference between being alive and dead.
—As long as there is a glimmer of hope, I will not give up.
In the middle of the night, I pushed the bed aside again, leaned over the cave entrance, and whispered into the pitch-black cave, "Who are you?"
My answer was a long silence.
I was a little disappointed, so I pushed the bed back into its original position.
The next night, around midnight, the knocking sound started again, and I pushed the bed open once more.
Perhaps because I am a woman, my cell was surrounded by walls on all four sides, not by bars, so if the knocking wasn't loud, it wouldn't be heard outside.
This time, I heard a faint female voice coming from down in the hole, "Help me, dig from above."
A woman? I was shocked. There was a woman locked up here? And in a place even more vicious than mine—the seventh level of prison.
In my cell, there were some pebbles that had fallen from the mottled walls, some of which were quite sharp, so I used them to dig holes.
She was tapping from below while I was digging from above, and we dug like that for about ten days.
One morning, after the prison guards delivered food and made their rounds, they finally dug a larger opening in the hole under the bed. I saw her, the one who had been digging through the wall. What shocked me was not her, but them.
two.
One big one, and one small one.
In the dim candlelight, the two of them emerged from the cave one after the other.
The older one was quite old, with messy, graying short hair that covered half of his dirty face, but his originally delicate features were still vaguely visible, and his eyes were calm and composed.
The younger one was about six or seven years old, with a round bald head and a face so dirty that it was impossible to see her original features, but her innocent expression revealed that she was a little girl.
They were also surprised to see me. The older one, in particular, stared at me with an unusually shocked look, so intensely that it felt like she was burning a hole through my face.
Until the little girl gently tugged at her clothes and murmured, "Mother."
She slowly came to her senses.
“It’s you!” she said calmly. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
I was taken aback and stammered, "Excuse me... who are you?"
She looked into my eyes for a long time before slowly answering, "Silver anklet."
This time it was my turn to stare at her in shock.
“I knew we would meet again someday, but I never expected it to be here.” She stroked the little girl’s bald head beside her.
“I have never seen your face clearly before,” I said slowly.
“You don’t need to see clearly.” She said, brushing a strand of gray hair from beside her ear. “I used to have a full head of black hair and I was quite good-looking. If you saw me clearly, you would only look at me with pity now, which would make me feel pain.”
I was speechless, unsure how to respond to her.
“We’ve been locked up here for seven years,” she said, hugging the little girl beside her. “She was locked up here when she was still in my belly.”
"Why are you locked up here?" I asked.
“I was in someone’s way,” she answered simply. “But they didn’t dare kill me. Considering that I might still be of value in the future, they locked me up first.”
In the dim candlelight, she looked to be in her thirties, but judging from her eyes and speech, she was younger than she appeared, which showed how much prison life had tormented her.
“I wanted to see where I could dig, I never thought I could escape,” she said. “I don’t care which man I dig into, I just want to see people, anyone will do, I’m being driven crazy.”
“Yes, I can imagine,” I said.
Imagine someone being locked up seven levels underground in a prison for seven years—just thinking about it would drive you crazy. I've been locked up for about six months now, and I'm almost insane too.
"If it weren't for her, I might have gone crazy long ago." She gently touched the little girl's face.
The little girl was very well-behaved and stayed quietly by her side the whole time.
Since that day, we've chatted often. Occasionally, she would bring the little girl up from the cave entrance, and I would occasionally go down, but most of the time we would just exchange a few words across the cave entrance.
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Author's Note: Thank you everyone for your continued support with nutrient solutions, comments, and more! Mwah!
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