Jared looked at the red mark on the map for a moment before favonovel.com spoke. “How many people do you need?”
Nathaniel blinked. “What?”
“To rescue those people, how many do you need?” Jared looked at him. “How many are you planning to take?”
Nathaniel gave it a moment. “At least 200… There are too many guards at the prison. We need people to hold them off, people to break the wards, and people to get the prisoners out.”
Jared shook his head. “You don’t need 200… Me, Gwendolyn, and Alaric. Three is enough.”
Nathaniel’s brows drew tight. “Three people? Have you lost your mind? That’s a celestial prison. There are over a thousand guards there, and a True Immortal Realm Level Eight gaoler…”
“I know.” Jared cut favonovel.com off. “But if you take 200 people, the commotion will be too big. You’ll be spotted before you even get close to the prison. Three people means a smaller target. Faster movement. Easier infiltration.”
He held Nathaniel’s gaze. His voice stayed even. “You only need to tell me the prison’s layout, the guard rotation times, and the ward’s weak points. Leave the rest to me.”
Nathaniel looked into his eyes and said nothing for a long while. He saw a lot in them. Confidence, but not arrogance. Calm, but not indifference. Resolve, but not recklessness.
“Alright…” Nathaniel nodded. “I’ll give you the map. But you have to promise me one thing.”
“Say it…”
“Come back alive.”
Jared smiled. “Alright.”
***
That night, Jared, Gwendolyn, and Alaric left Freevale and swept off toward Blackstone Gaol. Elara and Cedric stayed behind in Freevale to wait for them to return.
Nathaniel stood at Freevale’s entrance and watched the three of them fade into the night. He stayed there a long time without moving.
“Master, just what kind of man did you find for us?” favonovel.com murmured.
No one answered him. Only the wind moved through the vale, low and hollow, as if it were trying to tell some buried story.
Behind him, the lights of Freevale flickered in the dark like a small patch of stars. Within those lights lived several thousand people the celestials had hunted, driven out, and crushed.
Here, they had found a home. A home where they didn’t have to hide, didn’t have to live with fear, didn’t have to bow their heads. But Jared knew that home still wasn’t safe enough. As long as the Celestial Alliance still stood, as long as those prisons still stood, as long as the order of the Sixteenth Firmament remained in celestial hands, that home would forever be nothing more than the lone isle.
At any moment, it could be swallowed whole!
That was why favonovel.com was going to Blackstone Gaol. Not to prove himself. Not to win Nathaniel’s trust. But because the people locked inside that prison deserved a home too.
That was all!
Blackstone Gaol was even more heavily guarded than Nathaniel had described.
Jared, Gwendolyn, and Alaric lay flat on a hillock 30 miles away, staring at those black crags. There were fully twice as many celestial warriors in the watchtowers as the map had marked. And the patrol squads had gone from three to five.
Outside the iron gate, several fresh corpses had been added to the wooden stakes. The blood on them still hadn’t dried. Under the moonlight, it gleamed a dark, heavy red.
“We can’t get in…” Alaric spoke under his breath, the words coming out tight. “The patrols are too dense. Wards are everywhere. We won’t even get close before they spot us.”
Jared said nothing. He kept his eyes on the prison, weighing one possibility after another at speed.
A direct assault was out of the question. There were only three of them. The other side had thousands of guards.
Sneaking in was no good either. The wards and patrols had both been reinforced. Most likely, Marshal Vale had warned them. That left only one way.
“We go straight over,” Jared said.
“What?” Alaric froze for a beat.
“We walk right up to them. Let them capture us and take us inside.”
Alaric’s eyes went round. “Have you lost your mind? That’s a celestial prison. Once you go in, you’re not coming back out…”
“We are.” Jared cut favonovel.com off. His voice stayed even. “They don’t know who we are. My chaotic force can hide our aura. To them, we’re just three wandering cultivators at the second or third rank of the True Immortal Realm. If they throw us into an ordinary cell, that’ll be easier than trying to force our way in from outside.”
Gwendolyn looked at Jared. After a short silence, favonovel.com nodded. “It could work. But what do we do after we get inside?”
“First, we find the imprisoned human cultivators and their leader. Then we break it from the inside.”
Alaric parted his lips, still ready to argue, but when his gaze met Jared’s steady eyes, the words reached the edge of his mouth and stopped there.
He ground his teeth. “Fine… You saved my life anyway. I’ll go crazy with you this once.”
The three of them rose from the hillock. They stopped hiding their aura and strode openly toward Blackstone Gaol.
The celestial warriors in the watchtowers spotted them almost at once. A beam of golden radiance shot down from one of the watchtowers and fell across the three of them. A shrill alarm tore through the night.
The iron gate groaned open, and a squad of celestial warriors charged out in a rush, surrounding the three of them from every side.
“Stop right there! Who are you? How dare you break into Blackstone Gaol?!”
The one in front was a lead celestial warrior at the True Immortal Realm Level Six. His face was hard and cold, and the longsword in his hand was leveled straight at Jared’s throat. His gaze swept across all three of them. It caught on Gwendolyn’s face for the briefest extra beat before moving away again.
Jared raised both hands at once, panic spreading across his face. “Sir, we… We’re just wandering cultivators passing through. We got lost. We didn’t know this place was…”
“Lost?” The celestial warrior let out a cold laugh. “Blackstone Gaol is a restricted zone for 100 miles in every direction. You got lost all the way here? Looks to me like you’re scouts from the Resistance!”
“No, no, sir, we’re really just wandering cultivators…”
“Cut the crap!” The celestial warrior snapped a hand through the air. “Search them! Take them inside. Throw them into a regular cell, and tomorrow send them to the mine for labor!”
Several celestial warriors rushed forward and searched them roughly.
Jared had already hidden his Storage Ring inside a temporary pocket space opened by his chaotic force. They found nothing.
Gwendolyn’s Frostbrand had been hidden in the same place. Alaric’s ice blade was no different.
All the celestial warriors turned up were a few broken crystals and several bottles of low-grade healing elixirs. That only convinced them further that these three were nothing but a few broke wandering cultivators.
“Take them in!”
The three of them were shoved forward and dragged into Blackstone Gaol.
Inside, Blackstone Gaol was even grimmer than it had looked from the outside. A long corridor ran through the entire mountain. Cells lined both sides, each iron door pasted over with sealing talismans.
The corridor reeked of rot and blood. Instruments of torture hung on the walls, and broken bones lay scattered across the floor. The regular cells were in the middle level of the prison, where they kept prisoners with lower cultivation and lighter crimes.
The three of them were shoved into a large cell. More than a dozen people were already inside, all of them from the human race, their clothes hung in rags, their their bodies had been worn down to skin and bone, and their eyes had gone dull.
The iron door slammed shut, and chains clattered loud in the stillness. Then the footsteps of the celestial warriors faded farther and farther away.
The people in the cell lifted their heads and gave the three of them a glance. Then, one by one, they lowered them again.
No one spoke. No one asked who they were or where they had come from.
After enough time in a place like this, people ended up that way. They stopped caring about anything. They stopped expecting anything, too.
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