Chapter 8

Chapter 8

I drained that bowl of rice gruel, earthy and rank with the smell of mud.

The food nourished my insides, and strength flowed back into my limbs and bones.

At last, I had won myself a little time to sort through my options from here on out.

I had to escape.

The problem was how.

Every round of resistance paid for with my life had taught me the same truth.

Here, in countless corners I had yet to see, countless pairs of eyes were fixed on me.

There was the madam. There was the man who always followed at her side. There was the endless stream of patrons the madam brought in for me. And there were others whose existence I still knew nothing about.

No one would help me.

On the contrary, every person who might have even the slightest connection to me was an accomplice.

So I began to act docile and obedient. In bed, I flattered and fawned to the utmost, all for the sake of prying the tiniest scraps of information from those men’s mouths.

Such as where this place was, how I had ended up here, what lay outside the alley, what shops stood on which roads, and even… if I needed to leave the city, what I would have to prepare.

Amid what seemed like endless torment, I finally pieced together what had happened to this body before.

The original owner really had been sold here by a gang of hoodlums.

On the most ordinary of mornings, that group of thugs had tossed a burlap sack into the madam’s yard. Inside was the original owner, already unconscious.

The haggling went far faster than I expected.

Though the hoodlums insisted I was the young lady of a wealthy household who had escaped after suffering some calamity, the madam was clearly far more seasoned.

One mention that I had already been deflowered, followed by a threat to report them to the authorities for aiding a wanted criminal’s escape, and for no more than a small piece of silver, my indenture contract changed hands.

“Who doesn’t know Madam Yi is the best at breaking people in? Even an official family’s young lady has to come here and obediently call a man master.”

As the man grew excited, his movements became even rougher. All manner of filthy words poured endlessly into my ears like a never-ending stream.

And all I could do was force out a smile and keep playing along.

I died many more times.

Sometimes I accidentally received the wrong man and was toyed with to death in bed.

Sometimes I simply couldn’t bear it anymore and found some random way to end myself.

Bamboo chopsticks were too easy to stab in the wrong place. The water vat in the yard was too cold. Smashing my head against the earthen wall didn’t kill me outright, and the madam had to go through the trouble of throwing me into the mass grave again.

It was like playing a game without knowing the conditions for clearing it. Through death after death, through loading the save and starting over again, I gradually filled in the details of this tiny patch of the world.

The madam’s surname was Yi. The man who was always with her was her lover.

The two of them had no marriage contract, yet they had ended up together in that murky, improper way.

The man served as muscle, allowing her to establish herself in this cramped alley where all sorts of people mixed.

The madam acted as a procuress, earning silver to provide the man with food and drink.

I was not the only girl under her.

She had three earthen rooms like mine.

Mine was the smallest, but it was separate.

The other two were larger. Straw curtains divided the shared sleeping platforms into three compartments, and each compartment was an individual space for business.

It was not that I had never considered joining forces with the other women and escaping together.

But first, at that time, I still hadn’t found my indenture contract.

And second…

Bringing one more person along only meant I died one more time.

I once spent an entire month building a connection with another woman named Luo Niang.

She promised to help me steal my indenture contract, while I had to take out the private money I had saved to serve as our travel expenses.

In the end, she told the madam my entire plan, handed over the ten copper coins I had painstakingly saved, then watched with her own eyes as the madam beat me to death.

As for the place where my indenture contract was supposedly hidden, of course she had made it up to trick me.

In the end, she got the promise she wanted from the madam.

She would replace me and move into my little single room.

Only then did I finally understand why the madam had cursed me back then for refusing the face she had given me.

Because of my identity as an escaped maidservant from a wealthy household, she truly had, within the limits of her ability, given me a measure of dignity.

At the very least, I did not have to lie on a shared platform, separated by nothing but a curtain, and sample men alongside different sisters.

In her eyes, this was her showing kindness to me.