Cage

"What is this place?"

Huan Wei was puzzled. It was the first time his feet had stepped on something in that endless void. He lowered his head and looked down at the ground, but he couldn't see anything. It seemed to hover in the middle of the darkness.

This time he could make a sound. The Black Void had not completely suppressed him. Every word echoed over and over again.

He looked around. He hoped to see something, yet the result was disappointing.

Suddenly he heard those voices again. This time they were angry with him. There were even growls in their voices.

"The Corrupt Seal cannot save you!" they shouted at him. "You belong to us with all that you are!"

The young man felt the fear in his heart again. But this time, it was not enough to deter him.

"I belong to no one! How dare you demand ownership of my soul?"

Countless cries rose from all over the Black Void.

"He is resisting!"

"He will resist!"

"He won't come to us!"

"He has no choice!"

"He's ours!"

Huan Wei assumed a fighting stance. When he felt the Corrupt Seal on his left palm, he raised his hand and looked inside. The demon was waiting with its mouth full of fangs wide open.

Huan Wei took one more look into the darkness and then thrust the seal forward. Countless screams rose again from the Black Void.

"The seal!"

"You can't do this to us!"

"We don't belong to you!"

"No, he is weak."

"He can't bear the seal."

"He's just a poor soul."

The Corrupt Seal closed its mouth and disappeared. Huan Wei could do nothing. The voices of the Black Void were even angrier now.

"You're pathetic!"

"That's why your father left you!"

"Your mother is here with us."

"Why don't you come to us!?"

Huan Wei felt as if something had snapped inside him. He began to grit his teeth. The terror of the Black Void was slowly giving way to pure rage.

"Shut up!" he shouted. "I am not a loser! My father already hated me! And my mother is already in the cycle! Are you afraid to face me!? Come and say it in front of me!"

This time laughter was coming from the Black Void. Thousands of laughing voices came from all directions, further inflaming the anger in Huan Wei's soul.

"He thinks his mother is in the cycle."

"He loves his father."

"He's trying to convince himself."

"We would never leave their families in the cycle."

"They'll stay with us forever."

"There is no afterlife for them."

Huan Wei looked for something to attack. But there was nothing in the Black Void. "Shut up!"

The voices stopped for a few seconds. Then Huan Wei felt something moving towards him. It was as if he was surrounded on all sides. The darkness pressed down on him more and more. As breathing became difficult, he opened his eyes when he saw something reaching towards his face.

He swayed as his eyelids slowly opened. His face crumpled from the pain in his back. His eyes were dazzled by the first sunlight he had seen.

He raised his left arm, still covered with black veins, and shielded his eyes. At that moment he heard a few voices.

"Wow, he's not dead."

"He's really awake."

"What if he was affected by the corrupted Qi?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Would he wake up like this?"

The young man tried to understand what was happening. His mind was blank. It was hard to think of anything. He looked towards the people talking. They were several men with metal collars around their necks. They were looking at him in confusion.

"Hey, man, are you okay? Can you understand what I'm saying?" one of them said. The clothes he was wearing looked pretty worn out. There were tears in many places.

The others were not much different from him. They all had dirty faces and were tied to the cage with short chains around their necks.

Huan Wei raised his head and looked at the cage. When did he get into a cage? When he looked outside the cage, he saw a group of about thirty people. Some were on foot and some were riding an animal that Huan Wei had never seen before.

There were many cages. The cages were loaded onto carts pulled by these animals. There were four to five people in each cage. There were four people in the cage Huan Wei was in.

He wanted to stand up, but the collar around his neck would not let him. "Where am I? What's going on?"

"Calm down, man." The prisoner spoke again. He was a young man with a handsome face despite his filthy appearance. He must have been only one or two years older than Huan Wei. " First, tidy up a bit."

"What's with the collars?" Huan Wei asked in a tired voice as he shook his head slightly from side to side.

"What's your name?"

He couldn't think straight. So he answered, "Huan Wei."

"Huan Wei. My name is Lei Lok. This is Ding Enlai and Jiao Bai."

After they nodded, Lei Lok continued. "They found you from some kind of Corrupt Area. I heard them talking, we thought you were going to die because of the state of your arm, you've been unconscious for a few days."

Huan Wei was coming to his senses a little more. He began to understand his situation better. "Where are they taking us?"

Ding Enlai spoke. "Wherever they want. We are slaves to these bastard sons of bitches."

Jiao Bai silenced him. "Be quiet. Do you want a beating?"

"Lie?" Ding Enlai was angry. "You don't know because you came later. I have been their slave for almost two years."

Ding Enlai was a well-built man. He must have been about twenty years old.

Lei Lok calmed them down. "Gather yourselves, boys. This is not the time for this."

When Huan Wei looked at the people leading them, he saw an armed group, including women. They all looked ready for battle. Some of them wore a whip around their waist.

Then his eyes fell on his arm. His thoughts were becoming clearer. He looked at the black veins on his arm. The last thing he remembered was that they reached almost to his head. But they seemed to have receded a little and were now lower than his shoulder. Still, his arm looked terrible.

He tried to move it. It didn't hurt. There was just a strange sensation as if his knuckles were rubbing against each other.

Lei Lok looked at Huan Wei. "Brother, they will come and check on you at the next campsite. Don't stand up to them. Don't go against what they say. It's for your own good."

Ding Enlai leaned his head against the bars of the cage. "Welcome to your new life, Huan Wei. You'll be so tired gathering herbs for these bastards that when it's time to sleep, you won't sleep, you'll pass out." Then he added, "I haven't been out of this forest for two years."

Jiao Bai said, "Yet at least they don't do anything bad when you gather as much as they want."

Huan Wei looked at the bandits once more. "Who are they?"

"They call themselves the Forest Masters." Lei Lok replied. "Actually, they are nothing more than a simple group of bandits. But they have a good system. They enslave captured people like us and make them gather herbs. Then they sell it to the merchants in Broken Mountain Town and have fun with the money. Sometimes they attack caravans or lone cultivators they see in the forest."

Huan Wei looked at the bandit in front. She was a red-haired woman. The others were following her. The animal she rode was even bigger than the ones pulling the carts.

Huan Wei cursed his luck. On his second day walking alone in the forest, he had fallen into the hands of bandits. How was he going to get out of this slave labor?

He raised his hand and looked at his palm. Maybe he could use the mark. The voices in his nightmare had called it the Corrupt Seal. Maybe that was what he should call it? He didn't know what the thing was. But it had helped him even in his nightmares.

Huan Wei remembered the power he felt. The power that had condemned the Iron Boar to a helpless death, and could have gotten him out of here. Yet he was empty-handed. There was no trace of the Corrupted Seal. And his arm didn't look much better because of the black veins.

"You said they found me in a corrupted area?" Lei looked at Lok.

He nodded. "They were excitedly telling each other. Where they found you, there was blood everywhere. They also found a lot of valuables on you. Are you some kind of treasure hunter?"

At that moment, Huan Wei remembered the valuables he had stolen from the altar. He immediately checked them, but of course, not a single piece was left. They had even taken the herbs he had collected and the crystals of the Living Root. The daggers and his broken sword were also gone.

Huan Wei felt a deep anger. Anger against the bandits, against the world, against the whole universe. After all these years, he had the chance to walk his own path, yet the things that happened to him always managed to get worse.

"I only found them in the forest."

Ding Enlai pursed his lips. "You must have been very lucky. They've been feasting on what you found for a while. They still haven't finished."

Huan Wei turned his head and looked at the bandits who had taken all his earnings from him and were enjoying themselves. "Yes, I am a very lucky man."