The darkness that engulfed Zhang Heng faded like the tide.
Before he opened his eyes, he heard deafening cheers and screams. The sound was coming from the top of his head, and mixed within it were the roaring of beasts. These beasts seemed to be just one meter away from him.
Even Zhang Heng, who had always been calm, was taken aback.
What did it mean by being one meter away from the ferocious beasts? A beast like a lion and a tiger could kill him with a single pounce. If he was anticipating them, he might be able to dodge the attack. However, he did not know their exact location right now, and the countdown was about to end in five seconds. Zhang Heng’s eyes still needed to adjust to the brightness around him. A delay of even a second would significantly increase Zhang Heng’s mortality rate.
If the situation was what he imagined, then there was a high chance he would die at the beginning of this quest. Logically speaking, since he had just accepted an ordinary survival quest, he should not be placed in such a dangerous scenario right at the start.
In the next second, Zhang Heng resumed his vision.
The first thing he saw was the lion in front of him. The cheering had agitated it further, and it stood up, growling menacingly at him. It looked as though it would attack once the cage was opened. He was safe for now since the lion was still locked inside the cage.
Zhang Heng breathed a sigh of relief when he saw this. After that, he found himself standing in a dark and smelly room. Those cheers continued to come from above him, and there was another person beside him, holding a ceramic bowl full of raw meat, looking at the lion in the cage in fear.
Judging by the man’s outfit, he should be a slave. Wearing a short-sleeved long robe and a pair of slippers, Zhang Heng found that he, too, was dressed in the same attire. Before he even had the chance to greet the man, another man with a whip came in, lashing it while yelling at the top of his lungs.
Zhang Heng was glad that he had spent considerable time learning other languages during the Black Sail quest. One of them happened to be Latin, the lingua franca of ancient Rome.
After more than a thousand years, the language would have morphed through time, and huge differences in terms of pronunciation and accent would have occurred. The ancient Romans, for instance, pronounced ‘a’ and ‘e’ separately, and when they pronounced ‘c,’ it sounded a lot like ‘k.’ Besides, their speech had a lot of rising and falling in cadence.
Zhang Heng felt as though he was listening to a dialect he had never heard before. Having had to guess what the person was talking about, it seemed he was asking them why they were not done with feeding Quinta.
Needless to say, Quinta was the name of the lion in the cage before him. Immediately, Zhang Heng took the bowl of meat from his partner and poured it into the cage.
Quinta finally stopped growling after getting its fill of meat.
However, the overseer was still dissatisfied with them. He yelled again and was prepared to lash his whip. The man beside Zhang Heng immediately lowered his head and ran out of the place in a hurry. Zhang Heng quickly followed behind him. Once they were away from the overseer, Zhang Heng took the initiative to ask the man a question. “Hey, what is your name?”
The other party did not seem to understand, so Zhang Heng repeated the question again.
“You know how to speak Latin?” This time, the man finally understood Zhang Heng’s question. With a surprised look on his face, he answered, “I’m Varo, how about you?”
“My name is Zhang Heng.”
Zhang Heng gave a simple introduction but paused at the end. “Please slow down when you speak. My Latin is not very good.”
“Okay, okay… it’s nice to meet you, Zhang Heng. No, I should say that it is unfortunate to meet you here.” Varo put on a sad smile.
“Are we in an arena now?”
“Yes. To be more precise, we are now in the arena’s underground.”
“No wonder I could hear all that noise. What are they cheering about?”
“Don’t you know? They are executing the death row prisoners. I used to be among that audience, cheering together with the others.” Varo looked sad as he reminisced about the past. “…but now…”
“Do the Romans execute death row prisoners in the arena?” Zhang Heng asked.
“Yes, it is a tradition of theirs. They’ll let the wild beasts loose and devour them. Those unfortunate enough would be brought here. By the way, let’s talk as we walk. Partita wants us to clean up the mess. He will whip us again if the gladiator performance is delayed.”
Zhang Heng noticed how Varo’s eyes trembled in fear when he mentioned the gladiator performance. This wasn’t the time to ask him about it, though. Zhang Heng still followed him closely, and the two quickly walked through the tunnel with oil lamps and arrived at the ground.
This arena they were in wasn’t that large. Clearly, this was not the famous colosseum in Rome.
There were still several terraces of seats, however, and could contain at least seven thousand spectators. Almost all the seats were occupied. This was where the cheers and screams came from. The audience chanted in a repetitive staccato, “Kill him! Kill him!!!”
Everyone’s faces were filled with excitement as though they were witnessing a grandiose stage play.
And one of the two protagonists’ throats was bitten off by the beast. The leopard then sliced his stomach with its paws and began tearing up his internal organs. The blood gushing out of his body gathered into a stream. His face was disfigured. His nose and eyes could barely be seen anymore, while his skull began to expose itself to the audience.
Although the other death-row prisoner is still alive, fear had overtaken him. He was paralyzed on the other side of the arena. It seemed like he had lived a good life before he became a death-row prisoner. All the fat on his body was jiggling nonstop. He watched in horror as the cheetah was devouring another death-row inmate. The arena deliberately starved the cheetah for some time to increase the cheetah’s aggressiveness. It could further increase the performance’s entertainment value.
Although the audience in the stands had just witnessed a person’s death, they still seemed dissatisfied. The fat man on the other side of the arena was still alive. So they began to urge the trainers to make the leopard kill him. The two trainers then used a long pole to poke the leopard, interrupting its dinner and forcing it to attack the other prisoner.
The fat man wanted to get up and run for his life when he saw the feline coming for him. However, his legs had become so weak that he failed to get up even after two attempts. His antics caused the audience to burst out in mocking laughter.
Finally, the fat man stood up. Unfortunately for him, the leopard was getting closer. With no hesitation, he around and started to run. Clearly, he could never outrun the leopard. The fat man’s escape had triggered the leopard’s hunting instinct, and before anyone could react, it pounced on the fat man mercilessly.
By that time, Zhang Heng felt that it was pointless watching the leopard make another kill.
