In the gloomy dungeon, torchlight flickered.
Curses and screams occasionally echoed from the cells as Bugbear guards prowled back and forth.
Alger leaned silently against the stone wall. He had grown gaunt, and an unnatural pallor showed through his dejected face. Clearly, he had not seen sunlight in a long time.
Several horizontal lines had been carved into the wall.
He had used them to keep track of time.
But after dozens of days in this dark dungeon, he could no longer tell the time.
After that interrogation, he had been thrown into the dungeon and left unattended.
There had been no imagined torture, nor any deliberate abuse. He simply ate a daily paste of unknown ingredients and spent his days in the dark dungeon.
Other than thinking and sleeping, there seemed to be nothing else he could do.
The Bugbear guards at the entrance could not be bribed at all. These simple-minded, muscle-bound brutes only chatted idly with their colleagues and had no ambitions of their own.
Yet from the Bugbears' conversations, he learned that Ember Nest was growing ever stronger, as was that terrifying Red Dragon.
Alger had wanted to starve himself and calmly embrace death.
But whenever he recalled what the Red Dragon had told him, he always felt as if a fog shrouded his memories. He simply knew too little.
And what chilled him most was that the Red Dragon's words seemed to be true.
The duke had never once left the castle. He never basked in sunlight. Ever since Alger had entered, the man seemed to have always kept company with shadows.
When he executed the Tieflings, they had not displayed the power of devils. They had seemed more like ordinary, innocent beings. The sight had brought him no joy of vengeance; instead, it often