Chapter 120: The Prison’s Probe

Chapter 120: Chapter 120: The Prison’s Probe

Time flew by for Xiang Yi.

For Lu Qi, every second was an eternity.

The agony of nerves being wrenched and twisted was beyond anything a human being could endure — and it had been happening over and over again, without pause.

By now, Lu Qi had only one thumb left on either hand.

His body was covered in shallow cuts where small strips of flesh had been carved away, and fragments of Blood Crystal dust clung to the open wounds.

Each tiny nerve ending delivered its own distinct, fresh pain — different from the wrenching, a sharper, more intimate kind of suffering.

Under Xiang Yi’s interrogation, Lu Qi was barely recognizable as a person anymore. He had teetered on the edge of total numbness multiple times.

But Xiang Yi had drugs for that — compounds that accelerated wound recovery and, by extension, kept the nerves alive and screaming. There was no escape into numbness. It simply wasn’t allowed.

When the last thumb was crystallized with Blood Crystal and sliced off, Xiang Yi finally spoke again. "Ready to answer my questions now?"

"You motherfucker... just... ask already..." Lu Qi’s face was completely twisted — nothing left in it but terror and rage directed at Xiang Yi.

"I asked you when I cut the first finger. You didn’t talk. Whose fault is that?"

As he spoke, Xiang Yi pulled out a roll of bandages and wrapped Lu Qi’s ruined hands tight, stopping the bleeding.

Lu Qi watched him work — expression flat, completely detached — and couldn’t stop himself from saying, "I used to wonder... what kind of person earns a charge like crimes against humanity... Now I get it. Even without the prison... you were always going to end up—"

Xiang Yi gave the bandage an extra tug mid-wrap, cutting him off.

"The charge is fabricated. Throwing a fake label at me doesn’t mean anything. As for what I’ve done to you — why don’t you go ask the government what they think?"

"Compared to a prison that rounds up people to breed Abnormalities, what I’m doing is just good old-fashioned coercive interrogation."

Lu Qi went quiet.

A cold smile crossed Xiang Yi’s face.

Good. They were getting somewhere.

The fact that Lu Qi had said what he’d just said meant he was finally willing to talk — no more of that back-and-forth where every question was met with defiance.

Xiang Yi had to hand it to him. Lu Qi’s willpower was something else. It had taken this much to crack him open.

"Let’s start with the basics. Why are you working for the warden? How does a retired soldier end up in a place like this?"

Lu Qi’s eyes were glassy, his answer coming almost on autopilot. "Like you said. When I mustered out, I had no plan, no direction. I just spent every day drinking and chasing women until the severance was gone."

"No money meant running with gangs. I could fight, so I carved out a little standing for myself. Didn’t last. One night after drinking, I got into it with someone and killed them in a fit of rage."

"A friend of mine pulled some strings and got me connected to that prison in the neighboring Star System. The warden paid a lot of money to make the whole thing go away."

"After that, my life belonged to him."

Xiang Yi already knew the prison had been cultivating relationships with officials across neighboring Star Systems — positioning itself so that when governments needed somewhere to quietly dump inmates they didn’t know what to do with, his name came up first.

But why specifically recruit people like Lu Qi, or the brothers Guo Long and Guo Hu?

"Why did the warden bother saving you? Were you really worth the trouble?"

"Turns out... yeah. The warden has a type. People like us — the ones living in the gray zone between legal and not."

"He’d fund us, help us grow our operations, then scheme with us to set up rival gang members, get them arrested and shipped off to the prison."

"We didn’t know exactly what he needed so many convicts for, but we had a pretty good idea it was something dangerous."

That tracked.

From what Xiang Yi knew of Blood Crystal profits alone, it was absolutely worth the warden’s time and money to run that kind of operation.

Most prisons in newly developed colonies were only equipped to handle low-level offenders who could be put to work. Violent, high-risk criminals were a logistical nightmare — too much trouble, too many incidents.

Easier to outsource that to private security firms, who were usually happy to take it on given the subsidies involved. And when a facility like Liuyun-4 Satellite Prison was running its own side business on top of that, the profit margin reached an entirely different level.

Lu Qi came back to himself slightly, a bitter edge creeping into his voice. "We both kill people. You’re a hero of the Anka Star Government. I’m just a prisoner."

Xiang Yi glanced at him sideways. "If you’d broken out of prison the way I did, made it this far, and been taking out the warden’s people one by one with hard evidence to back every kill — your situation and mine wouldn’t look that different."

"So where did it go wrong?"

"Did someone put a gun to your head and make you blow your severance pay on booze and women?"

Lu Qi drew a slow breath and shut his mouth.

Xiang Yi pried it open again immediately. "What was the actual objective this time?"

He was clearly the target — that much was obvious. But honestly, Lu Qi’s crew had been laughably weak. Forty-some gang members, even mostly armed, didn’t come close to comparing with the orbital laser strike from before.

If they already knew that anything weaker than orbital bombardment couldn’t kill him, why not at least prepare something in the same league? Sending a handful of ex-military gangbangers — what was that supposed to accomplish?

Were they underestimating him?

"The objective..." Lu Qi’s broken expression flickered with something like confusion. "To probe your capabilities. The warden equipped us with a lot of things specifically designed for you, but the results..."

The way Lu Qi trailed off made Xiang Yi press harder. "Be specific."

Lu Qi was past caring at this point. He just wanted it to end — wanted to die, if that’s what it took, so long as Xiang Yi stopped.

He laid it out plainly. "This morning, something was clearly off on the warden’s end. He got... urgent. He ordered me to move up the timeline and go after that robot today."

"My original plan was to spend two more days working on him — some persuasion, some pressure, enough to make him fall in line."

"That was the approach I’d agreed on with the warden from the start."

"But something must have happened on his end, because he suddenly changed course."

"What kind of something?" Xiang Yi asked.

"No idea. Maybe whatever you’ve been doing finally got to him?"

Xiang Yi studied Lu Qi’s face carefully. He wasn’t lying.

Something external had rattled the warden badly enough to make him throw out the plan.

Whatever that something was — it was either the company, or whoever had slapped that crimes against humanity charge on Xiang Yi in the first place.

"What comes next? What else does the prison have in motion?"

"That’s above my pay grade. My job was to assess your combat capability and then figure out how to stay alive."

Lu Qi genuinely didn’t know what the next step was. That was the truth.

But the prison had supplied gear specifically tailored to counter him, and had already gathered a meaningful read on his abilities. That meant the hunt wasn’t over.

It really was... never going to end, was it.