Chapter 35: Prison

It took Luo Qi quite a while to figure out where he had been brought. This could not be blamed on him not being smart; ordinary humans who had committed no crimes might know what a prison looked like just by watching television, but for the average Mage, the Qionglin prison was too remote—as remote as the depth at which it was buried underground.

Luo Qi suspected he was deep underground. He had been dragged into a Pendragon Orbital System and brought here, and he hadn't seen sunlight since leaving the orbital system. They stuffed him into the only room outside the gate of the orbital system; as he entered, he caught a glimpse of the sign on the door: "High-Energy Anti-Social, No. 2137." After that, he was plunged into pitch darkness, and the door was tightly shut behind him. The suddenly deepening loneliness and fear left him no time to ponder the meaning of the doorplate.

Luo Qi waited anxiously in the darkness. After a moment of silence, the ground suddenly trembled. He pitched forward, lost his balance, and instinctively crouched down, one hand bracing against the floor, realizing the room was moving. The surrounding space seemed to be slightly compressed; the room was like an elevator moving upward, though perhaps it should be said the room was more like a bubble floating up from the bottom of a pond.

With a slight popping sound, the bubble-elevator came to an abrupt halt, and light appeared above Luo Qi's head. He looked up at the brightness, feeling like a frog at the bottom of a frozen pond, staring in confusion at the light screen overhead. Then, the four walls suddenly brightened. Luo Qi raised his hand to shield his eyes; a moment later, he lowered his hand and stared blankly at his surroundings.

It wasn't that the four walls of the room had become bright, but that the four walls had become transparent, and light was filtering in from the hall outside the room. Luo Qi's room was a small square of about nine square meters, like a transparent Cube cage. Through the walls, one could clearly see another cage ahead, separated by a narrow corridor, with a silhouette behind that wall as well. Luo Qi felt his scalp tingle as he turned his head; behind him, there was an almost identical transparent cage, with a silhouette standing behind the glass. To his left, to his right, and even in his field of vision to the front-left, back-left, front-right, and back-right, it was as if he were placed in a nine-grid square, with identical three-meter-long Cube cages and identical silhouettes. If he could rise into the air now, he would see a boundless underground hall, with countless transparent Cubes arranged neatly at one-meter intervals, each Cube trapping a moving human figure.

Luo Qi stood quietly for a while, until finally, frustration dragged him to the floor. He sat down, his mind a blank.

Luo Qi had been in this prison for a long time, so long that time had become somewhat blurred. There was no natural light here, and no one cared about the schedule; Luo Qi suspected they might be deliberately trying to confuse the prisoners' sense of time. Once prisoners lost their ability to judge time, their days would be harder to endure, and their spirits would be more likely to collapse. He could only estimate based on how many times he had been hungry that he had been trapped here for over two days.

At first, it took him several hours to calm down—not that he had a choice, he had plenty of time. It seemed that after they threw him down, they decided to simply forget about him. After being nervous, anxious, and miserable for several hours, he really couldn't focus on worrying anymore. He gave up and let things slide; he didn't even want to look at his first meal, but now he had started to distinguish the origin of the food with relish.

As for the purpose of this place, or what type of Mages this magnificent prison was used to hold, he had long since figured it out. It would be hard not to: the lunatic in the cube next door kept conjuring Fireballs, setting fires incessantly under the protection of Protective Magic; his cube looked like an atomic bomb Sandbox. Luo Qi had now decided to call him Magmar, a name derived from a great game—"Pokémon." As for the woman in the cube in front of Luo Qi, Luo Qi called her the Snow Queen; whenever she saw Magmar setting fires, she would summon a Blizzard in her own cube. She had already buried herself alive at least three times. Every time the Blizzard engulfed her, her cube would automatically raise the temperature, melt the snow into water, and drain it out through the drainage system at the bottom of the cube.

They tormented each other in turns, completely insane. Luo Qi could, of course, see the huge commonality between them: besides both being insane, they both possessed abundant magical power, and if not for the cubes blocking them, both had the potential to destroy the world. In this sense, the people locked in the other cubes, because they weren't as much like mad rabbits, might be even more terrifying. Luo Qi actually knew which category those people would be classified into: High-Energy Anti-Social Personality. High-Energy, indeed; every such Mage was like a burning energy block.

Luo Qi never dreamed that he would also be labeled with this tag.

In his tedious waiting, he recalled several cases of such Mages. Most of their targets were humans, and every period of large-scale human war was the golden age for these people. At such times, the Mage Committee was too busy protecting its own people to care about anything else, and human war capabilities were becoming stronger and stronger, leaving the Mage Committee already overwhelmed. However, in times of peace, it was ultimately not easy to do such things.

Luo Qi remembered the most recent examples, including the Ghost hotel murderer in Japan, the gas explosion fanatic in the Central Plains, the self-driving tourist devourer in the Northwest, the modern corpse-driving king in Western Hunan... there was even one who named himself the Northeast Tiger God-Devouring King Extinguisher of the World; it was said that this Mage was only sixteen years old when he was caught. Luo Qi decided to give himself a resounding code name too. He spent several hours pondering, and finally made a difficult decision: he decided he should be called "King of Kings Great Civet Cat King Swallowing Heaven and Devouring Earth."

Luo Qi also spent time observing the few slightly quieter Mages around him, but this was nothing compared to their interest in him. Except for Magmar and the Snow Queen, who ignored outsiders in their own worlds, Luo Qi had long noticed that the others had all walked up to the transparent walls of their Cubes, observing his every move from all directions. This was perhaps why the prison was designed to be transparent; every prisoner placed within it was stripped of privacy.

The Cube was open and transparent; it felt like a soft plastic, yet it could block the power of Magic. Besides this, the Cube could even completely isolate sound; what Luo Qi experienced in the Cube was almost absolute silence. In this silence, the sound of his own breathing was as noisy as static—it was a maddening feeling; Luo Qi even wanted to stop his own breathing a few times.

Gradually, he realized that absolute silence was a more terrifying torture than the deprivation of privacy. He listened to the sound of his own breathing, his own heartbeat; for a while, he seemed to hear the tidal sound of his own blood flowing in his vessels. He couldn't distinguish which was a real sound and which was a hallucination. After staying here for a few hours, he began to have tinnitus; white noise entangled him, and he tried every way to distract himself by thinking about something. Fortunately, he was very good at being distracted; his shortcoming of letting his mind wander aimlessly became his lifeline.

As for the people around him... a few hours after he first arrived here, the middle-aged lunatic in the cube to his left slowly took out a faucet and sprayed a stream of urine at him. Since then, he had almost given up on observing them.

But it didn't take long for him to discover with a splitting headache that, judging from the configuration in his own room, the sub-space used as a toilet in the Cube did reserve a tiny bit of pathetic privacy for the prisoners, but this bit of privacy setting came from magical power. Luo Qi almost wanted to hate Mages for their obsession with Magic. How much trouble could it be to build a few walls? Judging from the behavior of the people around him, they truly trusted this magic barrier; they should indeed be unable to see each other. However, this privacy magic built on psychological intervention was of no use to Luo Qi at all.

Finally, Luo Qi lay down on the floor. The floor was not warm, but it wasn't cold either. He stared at the light above his head, feeling like a floating corpse lying at the bottom of a pond, or a white mouse in a giant laboratory.

He lay there, trying his best to recall things that could make him feel happy; he had always been an optimistic person. But even for him, after being trapped in the Cube for a long time, his mood became increasingly gloomy, and despair descended silently. He thought aimlessly about what would happen next; Du Zhengyi would notify those who needed to be notified, and according to the Mage Execution Regulations, the people from Qionglin should also notify his parents.

He didn't know what would happen if his parents found out. It probably wouldn't be easy for two Doctors to come to Qionglin; just filling out forms and going through the process would take several days. He couldn't say for sure what would happen afterward; they would probably be helpless. His parents' requirements for him could be considered strict, but sometimes he was a bit suspicious that his old man didn't really care that he was so accomplished in nothing. He had vaguely hinted to his old man that he might choose to be a human in the future, and his old man hadn't been particularly disappointed. But at that time, Luo Qi was the one who was disappointed; he vaguely sensed that his parents didn't really care about him as a son. Perhaps what they hadn't said explicitly was that they had actually been deeply disappointed in him for a long time.

Perhaps his parents wouldn't pay any attention to this news at all, mostly likely thinking that Du Zhengyi, who told them this, was crazy. He didn't even know how Du Zhengyi would explain it to them, or if he would lose his patience again during the explanation.

He thought about these things hazily, and finally fell asleep. In his dream, he fell into a big pit, stumbled head-heavy, and suddenly opened his eyes, only to find that he had been plunged back into darkness; the Cube was moving again.

Had they decided to interrogate him?