Thirty riders broke the night curfew in the west of the city.
The horseshoes were stripped of their cloth, making a loud noise as they smashed against the bluestone slabs.
The thin frost was crushed by the iron hooves, and the ice slag formed on the ground due to the temperature difference between day and night splashed out, mixing with the sand and hitting the door panels along the street.
Xu Qinghuan rode alone in the front, followed closely by Li Sheng, who steadily held the red gold wooden box in both hands. The Son of Heaven's Sword was inside.
Goudan was tied to the back of the personal guard's horse, half of his body limp, with only a breath left. He raised his hand and pointed to the northwest.
"Ahead... turn the corner of that barbican gate, and you'll find the death row of the Ministry of War's Defense Department."
Xu Qinghuan looked in the direction he pointed.
Behind the barbican gate was a cluster of low buildings, unlit, lying heavily in the night. The death row was located in the most remote corner of the west side of the city, with three sides against the city wall and only a narrow path leading to the outside.
It was easy to get in, but not necessarily to get out.
The sound of hooves alarmed the guards outside the death row.
Before Xu Qinghuan's horse team turned the corner of the gate, a row of pine resin torches lit up on the narrow path ahead.
More than twenty armored soldiers rushed out of the duty room, hurriedly formed two rows, with their long spears pointing diagonally, and the spearheads trembling in the firelight.
The leader was a medium-sized centurion, in his forties, with loose flesh on his face and his eyes narrowed in the firelight, showing the shrewdness of an old soldier.
"Who goes there!" Centurion Chen Kui shouted at the top of his voice, "This is a heavily guarded military area of the Ministry of War's Defense Department. Idlers quickly retreat! Trespassing in a heavily guarded military area at night is punishable by death without question!"
Xu Qinghuan reined in her horse.
The warhorse snorted and pawed the bluestone slabs twice with its front hooves, stopping less than five steps away from the spear formation.
She didn't speak.
Li Sheng rode forward, held up the wooden box with one hand, picked it with his thumb, and pushed open the lid of the box.
The red gold background lit up under the torches, and the more than twenty long spears opposite all shook together.
The gold-mounted Son of Heaven's Sword.
A five-clawed golden dragon coiled on the scabbard, with the dragon's head facing Chen Kui's face.
Acting on behalf of imperial power, anyone below the third rank must treat seeing the sword as seeing the Emperor's face.
Chen Kui's Adam's apple rolled up and down. He stared at the sword for three breaths, realizing that it was the rumored imperial envoy!
Eventually, his legs began to go weak uncontrollably. He held on for a while, but his knees still smashed heavily on the bluestone slabs.
"The last general... the last general, Centurion Chen Kui, commander of the death row guards, pays his respects to the imperial envoy!"
The more than twenty armored soldiers behind him also knelt down.
The long spears knocked on the ground, and a few slipped directly from their hands, bouncing twice on the stone slabs.
The light of the torches shone on the people kneeling on the ground, and no one dared to look up.
Xu Qinghuan looked over Chen Kui's head and glanced at the gate of the death row. The two iron-clad thick wooden doors were half-closed, and dim yellow light seeped out from the crack in the door.
"Open the door."
Chen Kui knelt on the ground without moving.
His forehead touched the ground, and after a few breaths, his right hand moved slightly by his side, with his index and middle fingers together, making an extremely subtle gesture to the side.
Xu Qinghuan saw it.
A soldier kneeling behind Chen Kui on the right received the signal and retreated two steps on his knees. After retreating from the area illuminated by the torches, the man stood up, crouched down against the bottom of the wall, and ran away along a narrow alley.
He was going to report to He Minghu.
Xu Qinghuan didn't stop him.
She just wanted He Minghu to know she was here. In today's game, she would kill one if one came, and chop a pair if a pair came.
Chen Kui dawdled and climbed up from the ground, bending his waist extremely low. His hands unfastened the bunch of keys at his waist tremblingly and retreated to the door. The iron key was inserted into the keyhole and turned twice, and the sound of the lock tongue springing open sounded.
The two iron doors were pushed open.
A burst of smell rushed out.
Everyone felt stinky.
She stepped over the threshold.
"Li Sheng, take ten people in with me. The rest guard the door. Without my order, not even a mouse is allowed in."
"Yes." Li Sheng held the Son of Heaven's Sword and followed closely.
The soles of their boots stepped on the passage of the death row, making a wet and sticky sound.
The ground was covered with a layer of liquid that was hard to tell whether it was water or blood, and stepping on it felt like the soles of the shoes were sinking.
The passage was extremely narrow, only allowing two people to pass side by side. Several oil lamps that were about to burn out hung on the walls on both sides, and the wicks jumped with bean-sized flames in the turbid air.
A sound came from behind the iron bars.
Xu Qinghuan turned her head to look.
In the first cell, a person was hung upside down from the beam. The hemp rope around his ankles cut into his flesh, his arms hung down naturally, and his fingertips touched the ground. The flesh on his back was rolled up, and the whip marks crisscrossed, with the new ones overlapping the old ones.
The person was still alive. The upside-down body was shaking, and a vague groan came from his throat.
It was hard to know whether to rejoice.
Going further.
The second cell, the third cell.
Someone was half-immersed in a wooden barrel. The water in the barrel was yellow and gave off bursts of pungent salt smell.
The person's mouth was propped open by a wooden stick and he couldn't speak. He could only squeeze intermittent breath sounds from his nose. The salt water soaked the wounds below his waist, and every breath made his body spasm.
The passage went deeper and deeper, and the oil lamps on the wall became sparser and sparser. In the last few cells, there were no lamps at all, and they could only rely on the torches held by the personal guards to light the way.
In every cell illuminated by the firelight, there were broken human figures: some leaned against the corner motionless, and it was hard to tell whether they had fainted or died; some curled up in the corner and shrank to the bottom of the wall when they heard the footsteps, their bodies trembling uncontrollably.
Finally reaching the end, they saw an iron door with a fist-sized iron lock hanging on it.
Goudan was supported by the personal guards and followed behind. Seeing this door, he trembled even more intensely.
"Below... below is the water dungeon."
Xu Qinghuan looked at Chen Kui.
Chen Kui had been following at the very back of the team. When swept by Xu Qinghuan's gaze, his legs went weak again. He quickly took out another bunch of keys and opened the iron lock tremblingly.
The iron door was pushed open, and a stronger stench wrapped in damp water vapor rushed up.
Stone steps extended downward, leading to the underground.
Xu Qinghuan walked down.
The stone steps were covered with moss, and every step was slippery. The further down they went, the damper the air became, and water seeped from the walls and flowed down the stone cracks.
The space at the bottom was cramped.
The residual charcoal in the corner lingered on, barely haloing a small circle of dim yellow.
At the edge of the light and shadow, there was black water with bloody foam.
Following the surface of the water upward, there were thick cast iron chains, tightly stretched, connected to the torture rack in the center. It was a person.
Everyone's eyes fell on that lowered face.
Xu Zhan.
Finally saw him.
His head was lowered, his chin resting on his chest, and his wet hair covered most of his face. He only had a torn prison uniform left on his body, and the strips of cloth hung on his body, unable to cover the crisscrossing wounds underneath.
The whip marks on his back were deeper and denser than those on Goudan's body. In some places, the flesh was split open, and even the white bones inside could be seen.
Next to the torture rack stood a burly man with a face full of loose flesh, holding a scabbed ghost-head sword in his hand. This person was He Minghu's personal guard leader, Wang Biao.
Wang Biao held a confession with a bloody handprint in his other hand, and grabbed Xu Zhan's hair, forcing him to look up.
"Centurion Xu, don't pretend to be dead here!"
Wang Biao slapped the thumbprinted confession against Xu Zhan's face, cursing viciously, "You think I don't want to just butcher you with a single slash? If I weren't worried about your father bringing in those coroners from the Ministry of Justice! Those bastards are as shrewd as ghosts. A dead man's fingerprint lacks the ridges of living blood, and once the flesh shrinks, we wouldn't be able to make this an ironclad case!"
"This charge of treason—you can stamp it while you're still breathing today, or you can stamp it when you're clinging to your last breath! You refused the easy way, so now you're going to get it the hard way!"
Xu Qinghuan stopped in her tracks.
She looked to his right side, her gaze suddenly freezing.
The right sleeve was completely empty, leaving nothing but a dangling, tattered strip of cloth and a severed stump.
