Death Row Camp, a Sudden Burst of Murder

"Li Dao, Earl of Anyuan, you have offended your superiors. Your crime is unforgivable."

"If Her Highness had not spoken on your behalf, you would suffer the harshest execution today."

"Li Dao, don't blame me. Her Highness spared your life, but His Majesty refuses to let you live. Let the Death Row Camp be your final resting place."

"Nine-five-two-seven. This is your number from now on. Your identity no longer exists in this world. You are merely a man waiting to die."

In his haze, fragments of memory surfaced in Li Dao's mind.

"Whew."

After a bout of rapid breathing, Li Dao abruptly sat up from the ground, his forehead covered in cold sweat.

He scanned his surroundings: a dim space, damp conditions, wooden cages, and a foul, bloody stench in the air that was almost impossible to stomach.

Then he looked down at himself. His hair hung loose and disheveled, he looked utterly wretched, and several abrasions marked his body. All he wore was a tattered white cloth garment.

The character for "prisoner" was written on its chest. If he could have seen his back, he would have found the character for "death" there. That was his identity now.

A condemned prisoner!

And the place he was in was the infamous Death Row Camp, where human lives were worth no more than weeds.

Peering through the gloom toward the cell's dark corners, he could faintly make out other figures, dressed just like him. They were all condemned prisoners in this Death Row Camp.

At the sight, Li Dao murmured inwardly, It's been a month. Looks like I really have been reborn.

He desperately wanted to reject this reality, but facts remained facts, whatever he thought now.

As for how he had fallen this far, it could be summed up in a single sentence: drink ruined affairs, and lust emboldened men to their doom.

A month earlier, the Great Qian Imperial House had held a palace banquet.

As a third-rank earl in this life, Li Dao had naturally been among the invited guests.

During the banquet, a headache had suddenly struck him. With the emperor speaking up front, he had not dared leave without permission, so he had decided to drink, hoping the alcohol would dull the pain.

But once the feast began, his headache had not eased. Instead, he had grown drunk, so he had risen and left to sober up.

By sheer accident, he had wandered into a palace hall.

But when he entered, he had frozen in astonishment.

A swath of snowy white filled his vision, and before him stood a young woman with an exquisitely beautiful face and an extraordinarily graceful figure.

At that very moment, his headache had vanished, but memories of his previous life had surfaced in its place.

Between his drunkenness and the mental confusion brought on by those returning memories, he had lost all control of himself.

And so, in a moment of impulse, he had robbed that young woman of her chastity.

When he came to his senses again, palace guards had already brought him before the Great Qian emperor.

He had also learned the identity of the young woman he had violated.

Princess Mingyue.

The most exalted woman in the Great Qian Dynasty apart from the empress, and the emperor's most beloved eldest daughter.

He could still vaguely recall the Great Qian emperor's fury upon learning that a down-and-out third-rank earl like him had defiled his favorite daughter-how he had demanded the extermination of Li Dao's nine degrees of kin and his execution by a thousand cuts.

Yet he had never expected that, in the end, the very Princess Mingyue whose chastity he had destroyed would speak up to spare his life.

Even so, the furious Great Qian emperor had still wanted him dead.

Thus, without violating the emperor's own golden words and jade decree, Li Dao, who should have spent the rest of his life in the imperial prison, had been brought to this Death Row Camp to await death.

They had even taken steps to ensure he would die in an accident as soon as possible.

He had been specially escorted all the way from the imperial capital to a Death Row Camp on the Great Qian Dynasty's northern frontier.

This place bordered the territory of the Northern Barbarians, and clashes were frequent. Recently, there had even been several medium-scale conflicts, making it seem as though war could break out at any moment.

Under such circumstances, even ordinary soldiers here lived each day without any assurance of surviving until evening, let alone a prisoner locked in the Death Row Camp.

So being imprisoned here was practically the same as a death sentence for him.

Wait to die?

But what if I don't want to die yet?

Did anyone think getting reborn was easy?

"Food's here! Food's here!"

While Li Dao was lost in thought, shouts came from outside the cell.

After a brief silence, the previously quiet cell erupted into noise.

"Give me food! I'm starving! Just let me have a bite!"

"Move! Don't block the way!"

"Get the hell away from me, all of you, or I'll kill you!"

"Kill me? We're all condemned prisoners. Who's afraid of whom?"

"..."

Soon, amid a series of footsteps, several jailers in military uniform came in carrying wooden buckets.

"Quiet down and line up! One at a time! Anyone who moves out of turn or keeps shouting gets nothing!"

Watching filthy hands reach through the gaps in the cell, a bucket-carrying jailer impatiently banged his wooden ladle against the cell door several times.

The condemned prisoners instantly fell silent.

They knew he meant it.

Condemned prisoners in this ancient world were much like the death-row inmates stripped of political rights for life in Li Dao's previous world. They had no human rights to speak of.

Forget missing a few meals-even if they were beaten to death, no one would help collect their bodies, while the soldier responsible would receive, at most, a day in confinement.

That punishment was probably on par with the penalty for relieving oneself in public. It showed just how cheap life was in the Death Row Camp.

Seeing the food carriers approach, Li Dao picked up the little bowl in front of him and went to join the line.

If he did not want to die, he had to eat. Only with food in his belly would he have a chance of surviving.

As for how long he could survive, he could only take things one step at a time. A miserable life was better than a fine death, after all.

The line inched forward, and soon it was Li Dao's turn.

One ladleful of plain water and a palm-sized, grayish-yellow flatbread. That was a Death Row Camp prisoner's food for the entire day.

After a month, Li Dao had grown used to it. He took his portion and found an empty spot to sit down.

He tested the rock-hard flatbread with his fingers. It felt as though one bite might break his teeth, so, as before, he put it into the water to soak and waited for it to soften before eating.

The soldiers soon left after distributing the food.

Once his flatbread had soaked enough, Li Dao prepared to eat.

Just then, a tall figure suddenly cast him into shadow.

"Kid, give me your food."

Li Dao looked up and saw a burly man at least a meter ninety tall standing before him.

A long scar ran across the man's face, making him look especially vicious.

His eyes were bloodshot as he stared fixedly at the softened flatbread in Li Dao's bowl, greed filling his gaze.

For someone of his build, a palm-sized flatbread was barely enough to fill the gaps between his teeth, let alone his stomach.

What did a man do when his portion was not enough?

Naturally, he stole someone else's food to fill his belly.

And Li Dao was the burly man's target now.

To him, this scrawny pretty boy looked easy to bully. He surely would not dare resist.

And things went exactly as the burly man expected. Li Dao did not resist, but lowered his head and remained silent.

"Ha! You know what's good for you, kid."

Delight crossed the burly man's face. He crouched and reached for the bowl containing the flatbread.

Many people in the cell witnessed this, but none stepped forward to stop him. Their expressions varied.

Mockery, indifference, amusement, and more.

In short, not a single person pitied Li Dao.

These were the rules of the Death Row Camp. This was reality.

The weak were meat for the strong, and only the fittest survived.

Nowhere was that saying displayed more starkly than here.

These men would not pity Li Dao. They would only envy the burly man for acting first instead of them, because if they had moved first, that flatbread would have been theirs.

As he picked up the bowl, the burly man continued with his sneering remarks. "Kid, don't say I'm bullying you. Since you're so sensible, I'll look after you in this cell from now on. But you'll have to hand over half your food each day. Hear me?"

When Li Dao remained silent, the burly man felt slighted and raised his hand to slap him.

Suddenly, an inexplicable chill gripped the burly man's heart.

At that very moment, Li Dao raised his head.

Clutching something in his right hand, he thrust it swiftly toward the burly man's face.

Squish!

The sound of something piercing flesh rang out.

First came silence, then an agonized scream echoed through the cell.

When everyone in the cell recovered their senses, the burly man had already dropped the bowl. His trembling hands hovered in the air as cries of pain poured from his mouth.

Somehow, a sharp wooden spike had been driven into his left eye. Blood streamed from the socket in a horrifying sight.

But it was not over yet.

After destroying the burly man's eye, Li Dao decisively looped the chain between his hands around the man's neck, pulled it tight, and jerked backward, dragging him to the ground.

Then Li Dao planted both feet against the burly man's shoulders and pulled the chain again with every ounce of strength he had.

Now the burly man could no longer spare any attention for the pain in his left eye. He began clawing at the chain around his neck.

Losing his left eye meant losing only an eye, but the chain around his neck would cost him his life.

Yet no matter how he struggled, it was useless. Above his head, a thin young man pulled on the chain with all his strength, the veins in both arms bulging.

"Spare me... urgh..."

With death drawing near, the burly man chose to beg for mercy.

Li Dao remained expressionless, merely tightening the chain with numb determination. His entire body began trembling from the exertion, but he refused to give the burly man the slightest chance.

He knew that if the burly man survived this time, he himself would be the one to die next time. He did not want to die, so the burly man had to.

An unknown amount of time passed. The burly man's struggles grew weaker, and his face grew redder until it turned purple.

At last, the burly man gave out first and died with bitter resentment in his heart.

He had never imagined he would die at the hands of a frail young man.

Li Dao, however, did not release his grip merely because the burly man had stopped struggling. He kept strangling him for another half minute, only stopping once he confirmed the man was completely unresponsive and truly dead.

"Whew."

Li Dao let out a long breath, lay on the ground, and stared at the pitch-black ceiling as he muttered, "Never thought killing someone would be this tiring."

As for the nausea people often described after killing someone, he felt none of it now.

As an adult, he had heard about places like prisons and seen reports about them in the news in his previous life. He had also heard how vicious condemned prisoners could be, and he had always assumed the worst possible intentions of others.

So before entering the Death Row Camp, he had prepared himself mentally for everything, including being forced to kill.

His month in the Death Row Camp had also shown him that those preparations were right.

He was not the first person to have his food stolen.

During this month, he had personally watched seven or eight condemned prisoners starve to death after having their food stolen for prolonged periods, or die here from severe weakness. He had simply been luckier, lasting a month before becoming someone's target.

Precisely for that reason, the moment the burly man chose to steal his food, he had already been ready to fight for his life.

For now, it seemed he had won that fight, preserving both his food and his life.

Glancing at the burly man's corpse, Li Dao removed the chain between his hands from its neck.

He had pulled so hard that the chain had left a deep, bluish-purple groove in the man's thick neck.

Li Dao stood and walked over to where the bowl had fallen.

The bowl had shattered, and the water had seeped into the ground. Only the soaked flatbread remained beside it, lying in the dust.

Without disgust, he reached down and picked up the flatbread. After looking around, he found a corner and quietly walked over.

The moment he sat down, the nearby condemned prisoners scattered as though they had seen an evil ghost.

Killing was simple. Most people in the Death Row Camp had killed before, and some had killed quite a few. After all, everyone here had committed a capital offense.

But a murderer who killed so casually, without uttering a word, was the most frightening kind.

No one knew when someone like that might suddenly erupt into violence and kill.

Li Dao welcomed their reaction. At the very least, it seemed no one would trouble him again for a while.