Prisoner

When Luo Ruzhuo opened her eyes, there was barely an uninjured patch of flesh on her body. For a moment, she thought she was about to die all over again.

She struggled to open her blood-caked eyes a sliver and saw where she was: an iron cage, her hands and feet in shackles, and a small room with a single window and an iron door. Nothing else.

Clearly, she was a prisoner now. This was a prison.

Before she could think about how she had ended up here, a voice came through the cold iron bars, followed by the soft patter of footsteps that stopped outside her cage.

"Look, sir, this is the prisoner who deserves ten thousand deaths," the guard responsible for her said to the man beside him in a fawning tone.

The man wore a formal suit of fine clothes and thin gold-rimmed glasses, the retro style currently fashionable among the interstellar elite. His icy gaze fell on the huddled figure on the floor, whose condition was unknown, with undisguised malice. Everything about him showed how badly he wanted the person before him to die on the spot.

He asked, "Is everything ready? When is the trial?"

"Tomorrow!" the guard said at once. "Rest assured, sir, all the evidence is conclusive. Starting tomorrow, she'll be a death-row convict for sure."

The two decided the fate of the person on the floor as they spoke, seemingly paying her no mind.

Luo Ruzhuo didn't know how she had crossed them. She wasn't even sure how she had been locked up.

It was strange.

She was a level-five psychic ability user who had endured ten years of tempering, day and night, in the apocalypse. Even if she lost consciousness in a horde of zombies one second, she could force herself to reboot the next. Even if she lost all five senses, her psychic power would still be working. It was an instinct almost everyone in the apocalypse had developed.

Even yesterday, in the final moments after fighting a seemingly endless horde of zombies and dealing with an unprecedented crisis at the base, Luo Ruzhuo had been keenly aware that she was dying.

And the world after death shouldn't have been like this.

"A mere lowborn commoner-even her death isn't enough to accompany my son to the grave!" the man said through gritted teeth, as if something had occurred to him.

The guard bowed even lower and wiped the sweat from his face, smiling apologetically. "That's true, but as you know, we've already used every torture we could. Any, any more... and she might not last until tomorrow's trial." To tell the truth, he was already surprised the commoner was still alive.

He had worked at the detention center in Federation Star's central district for many years and knew full well that a stone thrown at random here could hit someone powerful. The so-called detention center was little more than a fixture most of the time. Many young masters and young ladies came in only to go through the motions; they had only to brush off their sleeves before their families came to get them out through all manner of connections.

The torture instruments that had gathered dust for years had only really been put to full use today.

At the thought, the guard couldn't help glancing at the woman on the floor, who was breathing only faintly.

An ordinary person, she had lain in wait as a maid in the home of a manager at Ankang Pharmaceuticals for two years. When security was at its most lax, she had seized the chance to secretly drug the manager, then slipped into the room with a knife in the middle of the night.

One stab each to the heart, the aorta, and the brain; every blow fatal.

The young manager had died on the spot. Even a medical pod that could save someone whose limbs had all been cut off, leaving only the torso, couldn't bring him back.

Such careful planning and ruthlessness were astounding. The thought flashed through the guard's mind as he carefully saw the still-fuming man out. When he returned, he breathed a sigh of relief and wiped away his sweat, preparing to get off work. But the woman who had still been breathing a moment ago had gone completely still, as if dead.

The guard cursed inwardly. Damn it!

If only she'd died one day later-even just one day!

He approached the cage, and the instant he opened the door, he summoned his Mental Entity to guard against the person on the floor. He went through the motions of prodding her shoulder with a stun baton. Seeing no response, he touched her with it again on the lowest setting. Still nothing.

He breathed a sigh of relief, but the instant he turned her over, something unexpected happened.

This was the moment Luo Ruzhuo had been waiting for. Forcing herself to endure her body's discomfort, she unleashed her level-five psychic power, bearing down on the guard's mind like a raging flood and a savage beast.

The guard cried out. The Mental Entity he had just summoned retreated into him to battle the powerful foreign presence in his mind.

It hurts... it hurts so much... The pain blurred his consciousness. His psychic barrier was like paper before her, easily pierced.

No, she isn't an ordinary person at all! The guard gritted his teeth, and the Mental Entity in his mind did its utmost to attack the intruder. But before it could, a blue light flashed from the intruder, and he suddenly could no longer sense his Mental Entity.

A powerful wave of dizziness and pain followed. The guard's eyes rolled back, and he lost consciousness.

Luo Ruzhuo took two great gasps. She was exhausted too, and lay on the floor for quite a while longer.

This man was a psychic ability user too?

Puzzled, Luo Ruzhuo began searching through his memories.

Who would have thought? It turned out she hadn't survived. She had died and come back to life, in another world at that.

Here, psychic ability users weren't exactly everywhere, but they made up roughly thirty percent of the population-far more than the extremely rare psychic ability users in the apocalypse.

To be precise, they shouldn't be called psychic ability users. They were sentinels and guides.

They all possessed something psychic ability users didn't: Mental Entities, which took the form of various animals. Only then did Luo Ruzhuo understand what the little mouse inside the guard's mind was.

She waved her hand, and the little mouse the guard had been unable to sense appeared in it at once. It felt soft and furry, with a slight prickliness.

It seemed no different from a real one.

Luo Ruzhuo examined her own psychic power and found nothing resembling an animal for the time being. This condition had an explanation in this world too: it was called underdeveloped psychic power.

She squeezed the still-unconscious mouse, glanced at the collapsed guard, and considered this world's attitude toward sentinels and guides, and how to tell them apart...

Luo Ruzhuo composed herself and lightly rubbed her thumb against her index finger twice. In the end, she returned the little mouse she was holding.

When the guard woke, he found himself inexplicably slumped over the table, holding a ring of keys. His head was dizzy, and his mind was blank.

What... was I just about to do?

As if waking from a dream, the guard patted his still-dazed face, but he couldn't remember anything that had happened after he saw the man out.

Right, the prisoner!

He jolted and hurriedly looked over.

The bloodied woman was still lying on the floor where she had been, her breathing growing weaker. She plainly wasn't going to make it.

The guard rushed over, opened the cell door, and took out his stun baton to prod her shoulder. As he did, it felt vaguely familiar, as though it had happened before. He shook his head and quickly dismissed the unlikely thought, then strapped her to a stretcher and took her to the medical room.

Even when he heard the doctor's words, the guard still felt as if he were dreaming, still slumped over the table and not yet awake.

"Say that again?" He stood there dumbstruck.

The doctor adjusted the ordinary black-framed glasses on his ears and said calmly, "This prisoner awakened her psychic power on the verge of death. She's currently showing signs of differentiating into a guide. You can't touch her anymore."

Luo Ruzhuo had chosen not to escape, partly because she was in such poor condition, and partly because she had learned from the guard's memories about the privileges this world granted sentinels and guides-especially guides. Of the thirty percent of this world's population who were sentinels and guides, only two percent were guides. They were rare and useful, able to soothe sentinels' psychic power and clear the contamination from their mental domains.

If sentinels were a blazing fire that kept the world running, then guides were the fuel that kept it burning fully.

But she hadn't expected such preferential treatment.

The Federation's emblem hung high above the judge's bench. Under the lights, the design created jointly by the Sentinel and Guide Association cast a shadow that fell squarely across the case files before the judge.

"This court finds that the facts of defendant Luo Ruzhuo's crime are conclusive, and that she has confessed without reservation. Furthermore, she awakened as a new guide last night, as confirmed by instrument testing. The legal basis for the original judgment is amended to the Guide Law."

"The sentence is as follows: defendant Luo Ruzhuo, formerly a Federation citizen, having now awakened as a new C-rank guide, is assigned to compulsory service at the Black Tower, a frontline outpost in War Zone A, for a term of five years. Her mandatory quota, in accordance with the Guide Association's purification regulations, shall be no less than..."

The verdict carried no emotion. It was neither stern nor gentle, merely stating a fact: the person who had been certain to receive a death sentence yesterday had become a prisoner forced into service today.

The man at the plaintiff's table was livid. He leaned slightly forward, both fists clenched tight, his gaze fixed on Luo Ruzhuo like a sinister, dark venomous snake. People in the gallery began talking in low voices. Every now and then, an exclamation rang out, seemingly one of disbelief, or perhaps a helpless sigh.

Luo Ruzhuo let out a long breath and allowed the court officer to remove the shackles from her hands. He nodded to her. "Sorry for the offense, esteemed Guide. Your leg shackles must remain on until you reach your place of service."

She flexed her wrists, which had been bound in heavy handcuffs for who knew how many days. Two stark bands of bruises marked them. As for the other injuries, they had all been healed in the medical pod she was taken to after awakening yesterday, as if the torture had never happened.

The court officer remained where he was. Only after everyone had left in an orderly fashion and no one else remained did he escort Luo Ruzhuo to the aircraft bound for the front line.

Luo Ruzhuo walked out of the courthouse into pleasant sunshine. Just before boarding the aircraft, she looked back. The man stood at the entrance, his dark, vicious gaze still following her like a shadow. His lips parted slightly, and he mouthed a few words.

He said, "Just you wait."

The corners of Luo Ruzhuo's mouth finally lifted in her first smile since coming to this world.

We'll see who has to wait for whom, she thought.