Chapter 54

[Rest assured that nothing really horrible happens, but nothing good’s happening, either. My poor baby… translating your suffering is suffering itself…]

I can see that this is a considerably large stone room. Judging by how dark and moist it is, it should be underground. There’s a pile of bizarre junk on the floor.

Yuan Qingyun is evidently quite pleased at my current ‘dangling naked’ state, as he looked me up and down and smiled. “Sir Zhang, this look really suits you… slut.”

That malicious smile and resenting tone… though I know his obscenity is for Zhang Qinglian and not me, I still shiver. Furthermore, even though it’s summer, this stone cell is extremely wet and cold, and I’ve already gotten goosebumps from the chill.

But now is the time I should try to break out of this situation. I compose myself and don’t acknowledge his insult, keeping my cool. “Who do you think you are? What do you think you’re doing capturing me? There will definitely be a storm brewed up when I’ve disappeared from the Everfragrant House. None of you will escape that misfortune lightly.”

Yuan Qingyun let out a loud laugh. “Am I going to go back and let them catch me? —Sir Zhang, you must not recognize me. It’s surname Bao, first name Yun, third son of Bao Cunxin. Because of my unworthy nature, I was exiled to the Western Region by my old man to study martial arts, a very long time ago. When you caused his and the rest of my family’s deaths, I was still over there. You didn’t finish the job, Sir, so very sorry for that!” He restrained his laughter and put out a softly-toned sentence. “Don’t worry, Sir, this place is very well-hidden, and no one’s going to bother you and me.”

My heart is cold. I was under the impression that he was a foreign spy or something, and that way I could still play it by ear, fabricate some kind of method, and dupe him with a few fabricated words. So long as people have schemes and desires, they have weak points. If he’s greedy for wealth, I can lie to him about where some hidden treasure might be; if he loves power, I can swindle him with promising that if he doesn’t kill me, I collaborate with him on the inside to eliminate whoever or ascend to the throne or whatever; if he likes a certain beauty, I can say that there’s a way I can help him get a hold of them. The only issue is the difficultly of prescribing the specific medicine to the other party’s illness to manipulate them, but there’s always a method to be used. Yet he’s thought this through, wanting revenge with hatred steeped deep in a sea of his family’s blood, and seems like apart from getting that, he doesn’t care about anything else. That’s difficult to manage.

rack my brains for an emergency solution, abruptly calling to mind his two black-clothed, masked accomplices. In a eureka moment, I ask him sternly, “Was that assassination attempt on the Emperor your instigation?”

Yuan Qingyun paused, then smiled. “I’m one who loiters about jianghu, what would I want to be Emperor for? —Wasn’t me.”

I stare him in the eyes. “Don’t lie to me.”

“You’re not going to leave here alive anyways. What would I lie to an about-to-be-dead man for? I only collaborated with that guy to take revenge. He helps me some, I help him some. He wants to make himself Emperor by sending his own people to assassinate him – what even would I be instigating?”

Huff, Yuan Qingyun doesn’t even want power. I wasn’t actually hoping for that, but this is the first time I’ve heard about the behind-the-scenes power that I had suspected of. My heart inevitably tightens, and I hastily steady my voice to investigate. “Who is he?”

Yuan Qingyun laughed chillingly, coming forward to pinch my chin and lift my face up, his loose hair draping over us and obscuring my line of sight as he did so. His long and beautiful fingers are like iron tongs, causing extreme pain in my grasped chin.

“Since when has the majestic Sir Zhang wanted to change over to being a loyal servant?” His tone is capriciously disdainful. “You’re still protecting that idiot ruler’s bastard son? Could it be… that’s your type?” Again moving close to my ear, he bites the lobe, saying in a disgustingly sweet voice, “Want to know who he is, Sir Zhang? —I’m not telling you.

This… this pervert!

I looked at him coldly. “You want to kill me now?”

Yuan Qingyun looked out me, then bust out laughing as if he’d heard the best joke ever. “Haha, Sir Zhang, you really must be kidding. I worked so hard to capture you alive, how could I let you die just like that! It’s so I can get close to you, I even had to be a prostitute…” He sticks close to me in an embrace and slowly gropes my body, using his sort of deliberately drawn-out cadence to speak in a velvet-soft voice, “I had planned to make you enchanted by me, so when the time comes you’d be in so much anguish you wouldn’t want to live. I didn’t expect you to be so stone-hearted… I give you my body and you can actually be so cold the next time we meet, looking like you can’t wait to go… Didn’t seem to be much hope for someone so frigid, so I had no choice but to make a spur-of-the-moment plan to get to mess around with you…”

Being felt up by him makes the hair on my body stand up, and his pompous-prick manner of speaking sets annoyance alight within me. “Would you have been a prostitute if you didn’t enjoy it? Don’t put that on my head,” I mock.

Yuan Qingyun- no, Bao Yun tilted his head, then slapped my face to the side with an immense force. The pain is scorching, a buzzing sound set off in my mind and the inside of my mouth is filled with the flavor of blood.

I kept my head to the side it was forced to and didn’t make a sound.

Bao Yun hasn’t stopped smiling as he brutally snatched my hair to pull my face over, fingers carelessly entangled with the strands.

“Come,” he says softly, “I’ll take you on a tour of this room. I spent so much time thinking of how to prepare it for you… Ever since I visited your Residence that night and got jabbed by that back-stabbing brat Yao Jinzi, I was determined not to let you die too easily. I went to a lot of trouble to gather most of these things…”

He released my hair and went to a table, first picking up a set of needles. “We’ll start with a simple test later. These needles, for example, are for inserting into the crease between the skin and the fingernail. They’re mostly for women’s use…” He then picked up some kind of grate-like array of iron wire and giggled. “Have you seen this one before, Sir Zhang? You hold it over the skin and press down hard, and when the skin squeezes out from the mesh, you take a knife and cut it off piece by piece by piece. It’s said to be just like lingchi.” He goes off into a corner, then points at a wooden horse-looking thing. “You must have seen this one. It’s the wooden donkey for punishing harlots and parading them through the streets.” He consciously reached out and stroked the wooden donkey’s saddle, then clenched hard around an immense protrusion coming from it. “This will probably be too much for a man to handle, but it probably matches up with Sir Zhang’s achievements.”

He explained each and every one of the 70-80 things in the room with great detail. The more he spoke the more brilliantly his smile glowed, and with every thing I heard I felt my own face get a few degrees paler. If I can get out of this alive, I will write the words ‘liquor is a poison that pierces the intestines, sex is a steel blade that scrapes the bones’ in big characters and hang it up in my hall as a warning for later generations. There truly isn’t a good end to going whoring!

Bao Yun finished all that talking yet didn’t need a drink of water, instead continuing on. “…There’s still some things I’ve yet to prepare, like chili water, but today came about so suddenly. So sorry to have wronged you, Sir. Once we’ve tried out all these and I can’t think of any other fun things to do, I’ll cut a hand off, then the day after, half your nose. It’ll be slow, but I’ll kill you eventually. Only after three or five months would I be willing to deliver you to the afterlife, Sir…”

When he said that, I contrarily calmed down a bit. If he’s “begrudging” to kill me, I can drag this out for a few months so Jinzi and the rest can find me. I just have to endure these tortures…

Can I really do that, though? I might not even last a day before I’m crying and begging for Yuan Qingyun- no, Bao Yun to kill me. My knowledge of myself tells me that my psyche under pain has always been stronger than my sensitivity to desire.

Bao Yun comes over to me and strokes my jaw with his hand, seeming to speak as his mind thinks of it. “Which should we start with? …Look at that fine skin and tender flesh. We can’t make your body too unsightly, can we? Or I’ll lose my appetite…” He turned and touched the container of needles. “How about this one, hm?”

I watched the flash of cold light from the needle’s tip, imagining that they were put under my fingernails and finding that my blood is refusing to supply itself to anything above my neck. I tremble uncontrollably, quickly bowing my head to avert my eyes lest he see the fear in them.

Bao Yun is spellbound by the needle, then shakes his head. “Too feminine. No good, no good.” He ponders it, then seems to come to a decision. “Whatever. I’m typically a compassionate person, and you can’t withstand anything too intense, Sir Zhang. So let’s start with the easiest, and slowly add on to it…”

Saying that, he takes a black, slender whip from off his waist.

A whipping? I let out a faint sigh of relief. That’s much better than the needles.

Yuan Qingyun plays with the thin whip in his hand, movements practiced. The corners of his mouth are held in a faintly seductive smile, his expression serene, yet with a slowly rising flame of excitement in his eyes. “Don’t be nervous,” he spoke with ever the more gentleness. “I’ve been training with this Inkworm Whip for nearly ten years now. I won’t break your skin, certainly not.”

Hearing him use that increasingly sado-masochistic way of speaking, my heart goes cold with trepidation. I can only shut my eyes.

When the first lash fell on me, it felt as if all other parts of my body ceased to exist, my entire consciousness focused in on that long, narrow strip. That spot on my skin screamed for me to pay attention to it, and the painful, burning, intense sensation that followed lasted without end.

I desperately bite my lips to stop from screaming for mercy. I still haven’t adjusted to the severe pain from the first lash when the second, and the third, come down.

It’s so painful…

I look down to see the beginnings of straight, scarlet criss-crossing welts on my body. Contrasting with the fine, fair skin, it’s extravagantly obscene. Sure enough, it’s not lacerated, displaying the skill of the flogger. I seem to have read in a book once that experienced executioners can make it seem like a person’s skin is full of cuts and overflowing with blood, when the damage isn’t actually heavy at all. It could also be like me where the skin isn’t broken, but flesh under the skin has been ruined, and when it’s been destroyed, treating it later is twice as difficult. The key point lies in the ultimate strength of the whip when it hits the skin.

I tremble in my steadfast endurance, teeth clenching harder, the taste of blood slowly contaminating my mouth. As I’m afraid of inciting Yuan Qingyun’s lust, I’ve been dead-set from the start to not cry or shout or move to dodge, only silently and stiffly standing in place as I do everything I can to endure his whipping.

But Yuan Qingyun suddenly lashed me in that sensitive place, and I couldn’t stop my body from faintly twisting away to avoid it. Once that began, it was like a dam broke. I was unable to keep my guard up for even a moment, throwing out my reservation and doing my utmost to twist my waist away, just wanting to avoid a little bit of whip’s tip from hitting the most painful area.

Yet his whip is spitefully precise, and with every swing it inevitably gets a sensitive area like my thighs, the base of the part, and so on. I still refused to scream and wail, but with all my wriggling and sidestepping, tears have silently wettened my face, and sweat has gradually dampened my body…

Between the sounds of the whip hitting flesh in the vacuous stone interrogation room may have been a fleeting whimper that I was unable to keep from spilling out.

Yuan Qingyun- no, Bao Yun’s breaths gradually got hoarser… at last, the lash that should have landed according to the previous tempo didn’t come. I opened my eyes, continuously gasping for air and gulping due to the pain…

If it was to interrupt this constant, overlaying suffering, I would even be willing to accept another kind of suffering.

“Tramp,” he pants. The fire in his eyes glows even more. He viciously took the lower half of my body into his embrace. My lower abdomen knocks against his lower body, an obviously hard bulge pressed against me.

“Don’t,” I can’t help but mumble.

Compared to rape, continuing with the lashing is better.

His breathing is still unsteady, chest moving up and down. “Don’t?” A smile arose as he panted. “I didn’t say anything when you were on me last time, but favors are to be returned. Sir Zhang should serve me up some joy this time, right?”

I have a rotten defect when it comes to this guy. I’ve been internally tough since I was small and I can normally handle things smoothly, but once my temper is forced out, my mind always goes to self-destruction with no room for compromise. It’s gotten harder to find as I’ve gotten older, but it still occasionally comes. Speaking of now, for example, I think yet don’t think before I open my mouth and scorn him. “With you being a pervert, how could it not seriously affect a man of honor and pillar of the state like your respected father? It’s no wonder he’d want to punt you far away! Ha, you don’t even feel anything for him, yet you’re talking about revenge! You’ve had a tendency for this perverted stuff from the outset, and now you’re in luck – you have the pretense of family-wrought hate, so you playing around like this is the right and proper thing to do… pah! You’re just a cowardly hoodlum who dares to do things but doesn’t dare own up to them!”

Though Bao Yun didn’t understand what a ‘pervert’ was, he still understood the meaning behind it, and was predictably furious. Two slaps resounded as my face was slapped to the left then the right, even more forceful than the slap at the beginning. I can already feel a thin stream of heat flowing from the corner of my mouth.

“Whore!” He swore fiercely. “Death’s nearly reached your head and you’re still showing off your tongue!”

“Want to enrage me into killing you?” He sneered. “Don’t you worry. I’ll kill you after I’ve defiled you enough and raped you into a mess.” He turned my body around 180 degrees, using his hands to pry open my ass. I reject my fate and struggle, the chains binding my hands sending a clanging noise echoing out.

One hand settled on my waist to fasten me to him, the other going to remove his own pants. I’m at the peak of desperation now.

I already feel something pushing against my backside with no gap. I’m doing everything I can to pull back the muscles on my cheeks and pull my waist forward to keep far away from the threat, but the effect is minimal.

Just as the already-desperate situation reaches a point of grave danger, I suddenly hear a light and clear, faintly shaking voice. “What are you doing?”

We did it. We found him. The worst fucking character.

[-] 乌蚕鞭 – lit. Crow (colored) Silkworm Whip = Inkworm Whip.