Chương 158: Number 4021 (Part Two)

The queue continued its slow crawl amid a torrent of insults and threats, until they finally reached the end of the corridor and turned into a massive hall called the Stripping Hall. It was a wide, vaulted room with bare, harsh stone walls that reflected no sound except the echo of groans. At its center stood raised metal platforms on which a group of higher-ranking guards in gleaming black uniforms stood. Their eyes were cold, unblinking, watching the new arrivals from above as though staring at revolting insects.

In the middle of the hall, large circular floor drains had been cut into the concrete.

"Stop!" A deep, booming voice rang through speakers fixed in the corners, making the hall's walls tremble. It was the voice of the prison warden, a massively built man with a hard, square face like a block of granite, showing no sign of any human compassion. He stepped down from his platform with heavy strides and stood before the queue.

"You are now in Blackrock!" the warden bellowed, his voice echoing through the hall.

"There are no civil laws here to intercede for you, no human rights, no lawyers to weep over your condition. I am God in this facility, and my guards are the angels of death. The first step to becoming part of this place is to leave your former filth at the door. Strip everything off!" The prisoners hesitated for one second, and the guards brought their batons down against the floor in a single synchronized strike that produced a terrifying crash.

"I said strip everything off!" the warden roared again, the veins in his neck bulging.

"Everything! The clothes, the shoes, the rings, the memories, the dignity, the hope. I don't want a single thread, not a single thought, connecting you to the outside world!" With trembling hands and fingers stiffened by cold, the prisoners began undoing buttons and tearing off their worn clothing. Dex expended a heroic effort to maintain his balance as he removed his clothes piece by piece, under the cold, mocking stares of the guards.

Standing completely naked in that biting cold, in an open hall before the eyes of these brutal men, was the peak of human humiliation. He felt shame gnawing at his soul and carving deep scars in it, not from the physical nakedness itself, but from the stripping of the self. They had stolen his legal freedom, and now they were taking his identity as a human being to reduce him to nothing more than a body they owned. The guards began moving through the rows of naked prisoners.

They searched them in a degrading, mechanical manner, as though inspecting pieces of diseased livestock before sending them to slaughter. Turning them over, yanking their hair, screaming filthy words in their faces, using baton tips to lift bowed chins. Any prisoner who dared look a guard in the eye received a brutal blow to the stomach that left him coughing blood.

"Now, time for the cleaning!" cried one of the guards from the platform above, turning a massive iron valve connected to high-pressure pipes. Before Dex could process the terrifying meaning of the word, thick water hoses fixed to the walls opened fire, aimed directly at them. It was not warm water for bathing. It was ice water, drawn directly from cooling tanks beneath the mountain. It surged at immense pressure, striking their bare, emaciated bodies like sharp blades, without a single human thought of mercy.

Dex dropped to his knees instantly from the force of it and gasped, trying to recapture the breath that had fled him. He felt the cold penetrate him like poisoned needles through his pores, cutting through his muscles to reach the marrow of his bones, freezing the oxygen in his chest. The prisoners were screaming and slipping across the hard floor while the guards laughed, savoring the sadistic spectacle.

The harsh water aimed for something beyond physical cleanliness, it aimed to wash away every trace of the previous life, to scrub them of the delusion of freedom, to prepare them psychologically and physically for a life of absolute servitude to the state. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. The water finally stopped, leaving them trembling violently on the wet floor like stray dogs in a winter storm.

While Dex was shaking and dragging himself to his knees, a bundle of clothing was thrown on top of him with brutal indifference. It was the grey prison uniform. Its fabric was rough, full of coarse fibers that scratched the skin like sandpaper, and its color was the dead grey, a color that absorbed every particle of joy from the soul and reflected no light.

Dex dressed quickly, trying to stop his body from shaking, and the moment he buttoned the rough shirt, he felt as though his body had been wrapped in a tight shroud before he had even died. Dex the ambitious young man was gone, he had become a ghost made of flesh and blood. Then came the final part, the bloody conclusion of this funerary ritual in his material world.

A hulking guard seized him by the arm with enough force to nearly tear the shoulder from its socket, and dragged him toward a wooden table stained with dried blood. The guard pinned him against the table while another stepped forward carrying a metal instrument connected to an electric heater, its end blazing with a savage orange glow from the blazing tongues of heat that had consumed the metal.

"Don't move, or I'll brand it on your face," the guard bellowed, and without any further warning, drove the blazing stamp down onto Dex's right shoulder. A muffled, tearing scream burst from Dex's throat, swallowed by the noise of the hall. The smell of burning flesh stuffed his nostrils, and he felt as though volcanic lava were being poured directly into his opened veins. When the stamp was lifted and gray smoke rose from his branded skin, his name had been erased from the records of humanity forever.

"From this moment, you are not a human being, you are not anyone's son, you are merely one of this facility's properties. You are Number 4021," said the guard as he shoved him brutally toward a new dark corridor.

"You have no name to be called by, no family to write to, and no future outside these walls. Twenty years, that is your remaining theoretical lifespan here. Learn to spend it in silence, like a rat in its hole." Dex, or Number 4021, walked toward his cell in the solitary block. His steps were unsteady, and the words reverberated in his mind like the slow tolling of a death bell: Twenty years. Twenty full years.

His feverish mind began to drown in terrifying and devastating calculations, how many days would he spend here? Seven thousand three hundred days. How many repulsive meals would he eat? How many nights would he cry in absolute darkness without anyone hearing?

He knew with certainty that he had walked into hell on his own two feet, and that Blackrock was no mere prison for isolating criminals, it was a precision-engineered grinding machine designed to shatter the will and reduce the strong to human rubble that knew nothing but following orders. The psychological battles were tearing him apart from within like savage beasts.

A large part of him wanted to surrender, wanted to refuse this reality and die now, to drive his head into the concrete wall until this earthly suffering ended. But in the deepest point of his broken soul, amid all that rubble and despair, there was another part. A very small part, barely visible, that whispered in his depths in a weak yet stubborn voice, like embers under ash: Stay alive. Just breathe. Wait. A day will come, no matter how long it takes, when you will burn these bars and reduce this prison to ash.

He reached his cell, a narrow space no larger than a few paces. He was hurled inside with violence, and the heavy iron door slammed shut behind him with a final boom that severed all connection he had with the world. Dex sat on the cold stone bed, drew his knees to his trembling chest, and buried his face in his hands. And in the absolute dark of the cell, he felt hot tears pour down his cheeks for the first time in years.

Outside, the moon was illuminating the world with its silver light, but here, there was nothing but the suffocating darkness, and Number 4021 branded into his flesh, and the beginning of the longest and cruelest day of his life. And then, suddenly, Dex gasped with a force as though he had been drowning. In the quiet healing chamber in Falus Forest, Dex's eyelids convulsed violently and his eyes flew open to their fullest.

Cold, heavy sweat began pouring from his brow, his breaths racing as though he had been running for miles. He placed his hand instinctively on his right shoulder, feeling the old scar. Number 4021 had returned to haunt him in his dreams, to remind him of the bitter truth. The truth that confirmed the monster who had defeated Vargas in the world of Ekarthas had not been born from light, or from the blessings of fantastical magic.

He had been born and forged in that dark cell on the planet Earth, from the womb of pain and helplessness and absolute despair in his previous life.