Torture Looming

"Has the third quarter of the noon hour not arrived yet?" Behind the hanging curtain on the execution platform, Li Chenggang, the Regent Crown Prince of the Great Jing Empire, paced irritably.

"Reporting to Your Highness, it has, it has. The third quarter of the noon hour has just arrived." At one side of the curtain, a red-robed eunuch hurriedly replied. Fine beads of sweat covered his forehead, yet he did not dare wipe them away.

The half hour since Li Chenggang had arrived at the execution ground had felt to the red-robed eunuch like the endless agony of holding in urine to the very limit.

The sun's climb toward Middle Heaven had been unbearably slow. That short half hour had seemed like several days.

Half an hour earlier, when the Crown Prince's carriage had arrived at the execution grounds, he had pressed the eunuch for the time no fewer than ten times.

Every answer the eunuch gave had been a repeated leap back and forth along the edge of life and death.

If the Crown Prince impatiently waved a hand and said, "Drag him away and behead him."

The red-robed eunuch would become the first innocent ghost to die upon the execution platform that day, departing even before the assassin about to be sliced into a thousand pieces.

The red-robed eunuch was not merely frightening himself. It was something that could very well happen.

Ever since the assassin had attacked him and caused his manhood to retract, the Crown Prince had been so ashamed and furious that his eyes had turned red.

At the slightest displeasure, he would fly into a rage and kill.

More often than not, he did not kill one by one, but group by group.

By now, corpses had piled up like mountains within the