As the five-man group descended the stairs, just as Xia Nan had guessed, what came into view was an extremely crude-looking underground prison.
The air had gone uncirculated for a long time, and every breath brought a rotten, fishy stench into their nostrils.
The dungeon was not large. Under the flickering firelight along the walls, they could see its far end at a glance. The ceiling was only one and a half men high, forcing Haoge, the Half-Orc in the squad, to lower his head from time to time as he moved.
The ground was soft soil that had been lightly trampled firm. A passage deliberately left open extended from the entrance to the wall at the end of the dungeon, with locked metal fences standing on either side.
Clearly, they had not been maintained for a long time. The surfaces of the metal fences were rusted, and many of their joints had twisted slightly, showing obvious signs of deformation. Some of the iron doors could not even close properly and had merely been forcibly fastened with chains.
Nineteen people were locked behind those iron bars.
Their beds were filthy piles of straw in the corners. Their food and water had been stored in iron basins, much like livestock kept in captivity in his previous life, and were currently giving off waves of stench.
Men and women, young and old, had been crammed like cargo into this cramped space beneath the ground. Their clothes were tattered, and their exposed skin was covered with wounds—some healed and scabbed over, others still bleeding and showing raw crimson flesh. Bruises and ulcers were everywhere as well.
An elderly man whose body had gone completely rigid sat alone in a shadowy corner untouched by the firelight. His head drooped at an unnatural angle, his