Yet Zhang Zhixu had never anticipated that Cheng Huaili, having lost the Soul-Returning Pill and failing to catch the thief, would go absolutely mad and redouble his oppression of those beneath him.
The tenant farmers on his estate, the workers in his shops, the derelict soldiers — he had them all flogged and punished without discrimination.
Cheng’an, unable to bear the severity of the punishment, threw every last bit of blame squarely onto Chen Baoxiang, telling Cheng Huaili that she had colluded with the thieves — working from the inside to deliberately hold them up.
——Though he had actually guessed correctly.
But this meant that Chen Baoxiang was now in serious trouble.
That day, she was making her usual patrol rounds when a group of military officers suddenly seized her right there in the street, dragging her off to prison without so much as a word of explanation.
“Officer, surely anyone taken to prison must be charged with a crime and have someone file a complaint against them?” Zhang Zhixu grabbed the iron bars and shouted outward. “Locking someone up for absolutely no reason and giving no explanation — what kind of logic is that?”
This dungeon was darker and gloomier than the last one, and looked far more likely to be the kind of place where someone could be beaten to death without anyone ever knowing.
Chen Baoxiang was full of regret: “Had I known today would go like this, I’d have brought more people with me.”
Zhang Zhixu gave a helpless, half-amused sigh: “When rank crushes all beneath it, no matter how many people you bring, it won’t do any good — if they want to arrest you, they will.”
“Then what do we do?”
What could they do? Hope they’d encounter a reasonable interrogating official who might give her a fighting chance.
Just as they were speaking, a jailer with a scar across his face came and took her away to the interrogation room.
Zhang Zhixu kept puzzling over it along the way: “The process here is strange — no formal complaint filed is one thing, but hauling someone off to interrogation without even questioning them first?”
Chen Baoxiang looked at the things hanging on the walls, her spine going rigid, the skin all over her body tightening: “They intend to go straight to torture.”
“What? There’s no charge — what is there even to torture someone about?”
“There’s nothing they want to ask.” She said softly, “Cheng Huaili simply wants me dead.”
For someone of great power and high rank to have an ordinary commoner quietly done away with inside a prison was far too easy — all those elaborate procedures were nothing more than a fig leaf thrown over the brutality of abused power.
Zhang Zhixu’s face went pale, his eyes filled with disbelief, yet the jailer up ahead truly had already brought out a wooden finger press, and was placing the fingers she had worked so hard to nurse back to soft and fair — one by one — into the slots between the wooden boards.
·
Ever since he came to inhabit Chen Baoxiang’s body, Zhang Zhixu had never stopped worrying over her.
This person had no idea how to take care of herself — she was getting hurt and bleeding every other day — and every evening he had to sit up and apply medicine for her, making sure no scars would form.
For a girl who looked so composed and refined, her hands were terribly rough, nails short and blunt, fingertips calloused. He couldn’t bear to look at them, and had secretly soaked and buffed them with cow’s milk and pearl powder for months before they had finally taken on some semblance of delicacy.
He had even clumsily dyed them a lovely water-blue tint using the juice of touch-me-not flowers.
And now, blood was streaming down from a wound on Chen Baoxiang’s head. Her fair fingers, squeezed between the wooden press, had swollen to a deep purple, and the pretty painted nails were already seeping blood into their edges.
Zhang Zhixu was in so much pain he couldn’t even cry out.
He wanted to shout at Chen Baoxiang to resist, but she was alone and couldn’t even break free of the ropes binding her, let alone escape from this heavily guarded death-trap of a prison.
He wanted to negotiate with the jailers, but these men had long since been given their orders — they paid him no heed whatsoever, and bore down with full force on the torture press.
Chen Baoxiang let out a hoarse, agonized cry, her voice breaking into near-unconscious weakness at the end —
*You said it. *
His mind drifted, and he murmured: If we had killed all those people back there and hadn’t let Cheng’an go back, would things have turned out differently?
Great Immortal.
She inhaled sharply through the pain: Two hundred and more people dead in that place — blood would have flowed through the whole street. If anyone had lodged a complaint, my fate would have been the same.
A person of low standing who gets involved in such matters is gambling with their life from the start. I didn’t have many options to begin with.
Why — why does he get to do terrible things without paying any price, while you’re like an ant, facing torture without even the chance of a public trial?
Because in the eyes of the powerful, commoners are ants.
Zhang Zhixu was deeply shaken.
In the past, he had often heard his tutors say “private power must not grow too great, lest it crush lives” — at the time, those words had not moved him much; he took them in as one takes in a rule, and left it at that.
Only now, having become the one being crushed, did he truly understand how terrifying private power could be.
Sharp, piercing pain radiated from her fingertips all the way to the crown of his head. Zhang Zhixu thrashed at the edge of death, flashes of white light bursting before his eyes, a ringing beginning to rise in his ears.
In a daze, he heard Chen Baoxiang murmuring, “I cannot die here.”
Familiar words. A familiar scene.
Moonlight poured through the window, casting the same slant of drifting dust as before.
She lay with her eyes open, staring at the dust, and repeated stubbornly: “I will not die. You and I did not die here the last time. We will not die here this time either.”
Something struck his heart like a stone thrown into a still pool, sending ripples spreading in every direction.
Zhang Zhixu heard the sound of blood dripping onto the ground, and the scrape of iron chains. Somewhere far off came the crack and roar of raging flames, and farther still, the cries of other prisoners.
His body turned cold. Those sounds grew slowly fainter and faded away, and other sounds began to crowd in, one after another.
“……When he wakes is up to him. If he is unwilling, he will simply not wake.”
“Is there anything he particularly enjoys in his daily life? Bring it and let’s try.”
“When has Fengqing ever enjoyed anything — he takes no interest in anything at all.”