Chapter 55: Peering Child
Yanyin didn’t wait for the doors to fully open. She squeezed through the gap and sprinted frantically toward the cell, the rest of us following closely.
"Uncle?!" she called out, her voice pitching up into an almost musical tone. "Uncle Zhenhao! I’m here! I came for you!"
We all held our breath, waiting for the joyous reply.
No voice answered.
Yanyin didn’t seem to notice the silence. She reached the thick iron bars of the cell and immediately pushed up onto the tips of her toes, her small fingers curling tightly around the freezing cold iron as she eagerly peered inside the gloomy space. "Uncle, I-"
She stopped. The words died in her throat.
From where I stood behind her, it initially looked like mere hesitation. I assumed she simply hadn’t spotted him in the heavy dimness of the cell.
She leaned further forward, pressing her soft cheek briefly against the rough bars, trying to change her angle to see deeper into the shadows of the enclosure.
Sensing the shift in the atmosphere, the rest of us slowed our approach as a heavy dread began to pool in my stomach.
The cell was undeniably empty.
It bore the unmistakable signs of recent use. Heavy shackles open from the far wall, one of them twisted at an odd angle as though forced apart in haste or struggle. The floor was scuffed and darkened in places where something had been dragged.
The little girl turned her head slightly, still gripping the bars. "Is... is he hiding?" she asked. There was no fear in her voice yet, only confusion. As though this were a simple game she didn’t understand the rules of. "Maybe he’s somewhere else?"
No one answered immediately.
Her grip on the bars tightened. She looked back into the empty cell, as if staring hard enough might make something appear. Some missed detail or some hidden corner where her uncle might step out smiling, apologizing for the delay.
Longwei didn’t say a word. He vanished from his spot with a soft pop of displaced air. A split second later, he reappeared in the exact same spot, his robes swishing as the air settled.
He looked directly at me, his face utterly blank. "I swept the whole place. He’s... not here."
Ten minutes later, we were standing outside the Bastille.
Lying on the grass a few feet away was Aunt Hua, still unconscious from our initial breach. Longwei walked over to her, knelt down, spread out his palm, and pressed it against her forehead.
A surge of his qi flowed into her, simultaneously healing her concussion and jolting her awake.
A few paces away, Yanyin had finally broken. She was sobbing uncontrollably, her small body shaking with grief, while Qinyue and Mei knelt beside her, wrapping her in a tight embrace, trying in vain to console a pain they couldn’t fix.
Aunt Hua groaned as her eyelids fluttered open slowly. The moment her vision cleared, Longwei reached up, grabbed the edge of his mask, and pulled it off, exposing his true face to her.
I watched the exact moment her soul seemed to leave her body. That single glance at the monster unmasked was more than enough to ensure she would answer truthfully.
"Where is he?" Longwei asked.
"Zhenhao?" Aunt Hua gasped, scrambling backward into the dirt, her eyes wide with panic. "He’s... he’s not here! He’s been transferred! They moved him to the king’s pagoda! That’s all I know, I swear it on my life! Please, I beg you, don’t kill me!"
Longwei stared at her for a long moment. "I won’t. But only if you conveniently forget we were ever here."
"My lips are completely sealed," she nodded hard.
"What do we do now?" I asked, looking between Longwei and the sobbing little girl.
"Let’s just go home for now," Longwei replied softly. He slid his mask back into place, concealing the monster once more, and walked over to Yanyin, gently placing a hand on her head.
Jian and Liangyu silently fell into step behind him, and the group began the slow, heavy walk back toward Yanyin’s hut.
I didn’t follow immediately. I just stood there in the cool air, watching their retreating backs, my mind racing as I tried to process the terrifying new revelation that had just been thrust upon me.
Can you actually believe it? Literally the second kingdom I had messed with, involuntarily, might I add, and I was already on a collision course to put myself directly in front of another bloody king. It was Ironbell happening all over again!
Fine, I’ll admit that Ironbell was, in some small, technical ways, kind of my fault for willingly getting involved. But this? This was ridiculous. It was starting to feel like severely pissing off royalty was deeply embedded in my bloodline.
Despite my own mounting dread about storming a royal palace, my heart ached for Yanyin. Uncle Zhenhao was quite literally all she had left in this brutal world, and she had been forced to endure all of this grueling emotional pain just to find an empty cage.
I was glad that, at the very least, our chaotic group was there to help shoulder the burden for her.
With a heavy sigh, I finally shifted my gaze sideways. Aunt Hua had managed to stand up and was dusting the dirt off her robes. She froze the second she noticed me, her eyes darting nervously as if expecting me to finish the job Longwei had started.
"Can I ask you something?" I asked, keeping my voice neutral.
"Y-yes," she answered, taking a tiny, terrified step backward.
"How did you trap us?" I asked, furrowing my brow. "Qi isn’t supposed to work around here, right?"
She swallowed hard. Slowly, with trembling fingers, she reached into the collar of her robes and pulled out a necklace. Suspended from the chain was a crystalline stone that gave out a red glow.
She held it up timidly for me to inspect. "I use this artifact to create and sustain my illusions. It operates on its own internal matrix. It doesn’t exactly require any external qi from the user or the environment. It’s also kind of rare to acquire.
After we built the prison, we knew we had to take care of the security weakness somehow. So, this is what we came up with."
"Of course you did," I agreed, nodding slowly as the mechanics of the trap made sense. It was a clever workaround. "But I have to ask... did you really have to go that extreme? Just to scare us off?"
She lowered the glowing necklace, suddenly looking away. A faint blush of embarrassment crept up her pale cheeks.
"I... I mean..." she stammered, awkwardly kicking at a pebble with her heel. "Normally, just Lai’s illusion is more than enough to scare people off. But even then, realistically, not a lot of people ever actually show up attempting to break into this prison.
It had been a very, very long time since I had any ’visitors’, and I was just so bored. I just wanted to... you know... have some fun."
I stared at the woman who had trapped us in a mind-bending, symmetrical hellscape because she was having a slow time at work.
I let out an exhausted exhale that carried a fraction of my soul away with it, and started the long walk home.
I was glad that at least I was out of the awful prison stench at last.
Never go to prisons, people.
Prisons smell the worst.
