Zhang Tie was held alone in a cramped cell. Outside the cell was the torture chamber. Here, the only thing that let Zhang Tie sense the passage of time was the light filtering through several tiny windows high up in the walls of the cell and torture chamber, each scarcely larger than a fist.
Apart from Zhang Tie, the entire torture chamber and cell contained only Navas and several jailers responsible for tormenting him each day. This was no longer the manor where he had first awakened, but Zhang Tie had no idea where it was. He only knew it had to be somewhere near Tokeyi City.
In just three days here, Zhang Tie had been tortured until he was covered in wounds. He passed out several times a day. Three of the ten fingers on his hands had been broken, four toenails had been pulled out, and the bones in the calf of his left leg had been crushed into countless fragments beneath an instrument of torture called a crushing roller.
Anyone else would have broken down long ago under such torment, but Zhang Tie had not.
What the Sainer Family wanted was the formula for the Panacea Potion. Zhang Tie knew that once he opened his mouth, only death awaited him.
On the fourth day, Navas inserted red-hot steel needles beneath the nails of all ten of Zhang Tie's fingers, driving them into his flesh. Zhang Tie's whole body trembled. In that indescribable agony, he let out a scream before passing out.
When Zhang Tie lost consciousness, he remembered light still shining in through one of the vents in the torture chamber wall. Yet when a basin of water was splashed over him and woke him, no light remained in that vent.
Zhang Tie did not know