I Was Just Enjoying the Discipline - Chapter 4

‘Maybe I should tell them a little about how things work here…’

This was the lair of the demon Eligos. It swarmed with sinister-looking demons, but they wouldn’t kill the prisoners outright.

Because they had brought them here for one purpose: to harvest the life essence that would eventually be offered to Eligos. A corpse had no life essence to give. Which meant, at the very least, they weren’t going to die.

Of course, they would have their life essence extracted. At regular intervals, they would be taken to rooms scarcely wider than coffins, where Eligos’s carefully devised methods, both countless and cruel, would leave them crying out in overwhelming pleasure.

But the demons knew precisely where to draw the line. They would never push a human body so far that the heart gave out, the mind broke, or the body ceased to function. If they did, there would be no life essence left to harvest.

Nor would they starve their captives. The demons would feed them well and provide soft, comfortable beds to sleep in. As long as they obeyed every order, they could expect a life that was, by all appearances, surprisingly comfortable.

Eat the meals they were given. Offer up their life essence. Rest. Sleep. Repeat that cycle for about a year, and the Empire’s Holy Knights. who had spent years tracking the demons’ stronghold. would finally arrive to rescue them.

Until then, all they had to do was endure.

Sophia could have told the villagers, sunk as they were in despair, grief, and resignation, all of that.

In fact, ever since she’d been thrown into the cell, she’d gone back and forth over whether to say it. More than once, her lips had parted, only for the words to die before they were spoken.

In the end, she kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t convinced anyone would believe her.

You say we only have to survive for one year? How can you possibly know that? If anyone asked, Sophia would have no answer she could give.

‘If I tell them this is the world of a novel I read, they’ll just think I’ve lost my mind.’

Or worse, they might decide she was working for the demons.

Either way, she couldn’t picture the conversation ending well. So she chose silence and had kept to herself ever since. But the longer she did, the more unbearable it became.

The one who weighed on her mind most was Lavina.

‘I thought she’d stop crying sooner or later and accept the situation, whether she wanted to or not. But she just keeps crying. She won’t stop.’

Lavina’s quiet, restrained sobs gnawed at Sophia’s nerves. More precisely, they kept pricking at her conscience. There was something about the sound that seemed to ask, Can you really listen to someone cry like this and feel nothing? It was as though heaven itself were rebuking her.

“...Sigh.”

Turning toward the wall, Sophia finally let out the long breath she’d been swallowing back all this time. Her chest felt unbearably heavy, as though a stone had been lodged beneath her breastbone.

‘It’s not like stepping in would accomplish anything. I’d only make myself look suspicious. Besides, it’s not as if the story ends in tragedy. If they can just endure for one year, the captain of the Holy Knights will come to rescue everyone, fall in love with Lavina, marry her, and she’ll get her happy ending.’

This, Sophia decided, was the best thing she could do: Keep her head down. Avoid interfering with the original story as much as possible. Stay out of the way.

No sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. She would simply spend the next year indulging her rather unusual tastes, receiving the kind of “training” no one could experience anywhere else, happily offering up her life essence all the while. Then, when the Holy Knights stormed the fortress, she’d pocket as many jewels and valuables as she could carry before escaping with everyone else.

‘Yeah, I have to survive too.’

She had been thrown into this unfamiliar world without warning, reincarnated as nothing more than an insignificant extra who barely appeared in the story.

It wasn’t as though she’d landed in the body of some wealthy noble with money and status. All she had was a dilapidated house on the verge of collapse. No family. No one to rely on.

If she wanted to make a living, she’d need money. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single useful skill she could honestly claim to possess. Since fate had already dumped her here, she figured she might as well squeeze the demons for everything they were worth and spend the rest of her life in comfort.

‘You can be happy too if you just endure for one year. There’ll be a few hardships along the way, but nothing you can’t survive. You made it through them in the original story. I know it feels like your whole world has ended right now, but this will pass. Your future husband is Eric, the captain of the Holy Knights. He’s an incredible man. So just hang on a little longer.’

With those words, Sophia spoke silently to the weeping Lavina before closing her eyes. It was as if neither Lavina’s tears nor the villagers’ despair had anything to do with her.

Then, without warning, a thought occurred to her. It had never crossed her mind before, yet it was absolutely critical to her plan.

‘Wait…How do they assign the prison cells here again?’