Before this, Zeng Mu admitted, he had never dreamed he would be locked up in the Qin Kingdom's underground jail.
"Perhaps this is the essence of coincidence-the intertwining and overlapping of cause and effect," he sighed.
The Underground Prison was bitterly cold, and the farther down one went, the colder it became. This was the Third Level, where even the highest temperature at midday reached only five degrees Celsius. At night, it dropped below freezing, and by midnight, it approached minus ten. Prisoners often died here before they were even sentenced, most of them elderly inmates who froze to death.
Terrifyingly, the Third Level was not even the deepest part. This dungeon had four levels, and the farther down prisoners were confined, the graver their crimes were.
The Third Level held prisoners facing the most severe sentences of execution. As for the Fourth Prison, everyone confined there was sentenced to permanent imprisonment. They would never see sunlight again, never have enough to eat, and slowly witness their own destruction under the torment of disease and freezing cold. The cruelty of that process surpassed any instrument of torture or punishment. It was the curse of time.
Life in prison was anything but easy. Each cell measured less than five square meters. Aside from an earthen bed covered in straw, not even five feet long, there was almost no room to lie down.
The bed base, built from reddish-yellow earth, was hard and cold. The straw spread over it was less than two inches thick, barely enough to keep a sleeper warm at night.
Sitting on the bed, Zeng Mu knew without looking that more than half the straw was rotten. He could hear insects crawling inside the stalks and smell the odor of decaying bark in the air, along with the