The Great Road to The Underworld

Anita caught the head that was falling and put it in her lap. Aniket immediately scooched into her lap comfortably and put his feet up the spacious backseat of the car. For a big man like him, this is by no means comfortable. However, he couldn give up on the solace this embrace brought after twenty years.

Guard Lan, on the other hand, had no longer any solace in life. He was standing in his superiors office, listening to all kinds of high minded speeches about life. This was such a strange thing. Raeva had escaped. The notorious art thief who had robbed the cultural heritage of many a powerful government. Yet his superior had not said anything. Instead, he was giving Lan speeches about how to mind his conduct in front of a timekeeper.

Guard Lan was an experienced prison guard. He understood quickly that someone broke Raeva out. His boss didn want to talk about it. Even a nations president might not be able to break someone out of the World Prison. Lan knew what was good for his life. He too didn talk about it.

But poor Raeva who got such VIP treatment pissed his pants when he saw T.K. This matter was as amusing as it was vindicating. Lans mood gradually improved. But he still was not able to digest the fact that Anikets initials actually stand for timekeeper. This was a very obvious clue. Perhaps even many prisoners knew. Guard Lan didn know.

There is an organisation in the world that doesn live in the world at all. It lived in something called the folded space. This was the extent to which humanity knew about Progeny. What is more well known was the fact that Progeny raised people called timekeepers. Timekeepers take a variety of roles in society. Generally, people don know about these roles. They can be called a clandestine agency. However, there are always clues about a timekeepers identity for those who wish to know. So they cannot be called spies.

T.K. was a clue more obvious than others.

Guard Lan lowered his head blankly. T.K was a legend in the guard unit when Lan joined the World Prison over a decade ago. The guards of World Prison are trained like a hardcore military unit. They train in the mornings and analyse the information sent by the prison bots in the afternoon. They spend the rest of the day training the bots to trouble the prisoners.

The World Prison is fully automated, but there are hundreds of things a guard can change to make a prisoners life miserable within the automated system. These procedures are not for fun. They are done to maintain riot control, stealth control and dominance control, even suicide and depression control. Prisoners use force to get their will done. This is nothing but stupidity in the World Prison because broken equipment can starve prisoners to death and a broken shadow control can let shadow storms suffocate prisoners in their sleep. But who said anything about prisoners being smart?

Even the smartest prisoner becomes stupid in the World Prison. It is a cesspool of violence and chaos. The duties of the guard regiment of the World Prison start in the final week of every month. Six days in that week are all distributed missions for changing equipment.

These missions are indeed very scary. Guards can only make an armed response towards prisoners who are escaping. The rest of the time, just as in normal prisons, they can only use batons and stun guns. These things cannot stop a prisoner who is put in the World Prison.

Every month, there are hundreds of injured and maimed guards, and at least a couple of casualties. As a strict and elite military unit that wins the medals in all the military games in various international military meets, the guard regiment is reduced to rubble every month by the fiends they hold.

Unfortunately, the equipment still must be changed. It was at the time when the World Prison was falling apart from the chaos did T.K appear. With various equipment failures, the prison was rank with dirty odours, there was a scarcity of food and the medical robots were all taken apart from the inside. Prisoners and guards were dying by the boatloads, yet no one was willing to listen to reason. These were men and women society decided cannot be reformed. Even if they die or kill in the World Prison, their sentence will not be reduced. Nor will it be increased. Most prisoners hold four to five life sentences on average. It does not matter at all if it was increased.

Even to commit such heinous crimes and enter World Prison, a person cannot be average. All prisoners in the World Prison are cunning, ruthless and smart. They have wide connections and lofty aspirations. But the prison is such a place that such aspirations only breed madness when brewed in the ten by ten for a few years. Sometimes the madness of prisoners breaks out all at once like a massive wave. It is not a riot. A riot can at least be put down with force. It is madness in its purest form. Madness in its purest form is individual, not en masse. Because everyone has a different madness. No two peoples madness is the same. Only, it is happening to everyone. All at the same time.

Lan heard in the legend that its when T.K. appeared. No one knew how old he was. No one knew his nationality or his crime.

His violence subdued all madness.

One would think that in a place filled with violence, more violence would not matter. But it is all a matter of perspective. Even in the World Prison, it is a matter of novelty if a persons skin is peeled off his body as he weeps. If a wok is filled with oil and slowly fries a person sunny side up. While he was alive, of course. There is also the matter of crucifying prisoners to ones door, enacting the thousand cut executions of legend with a pen and a beautiful brush stroke. The matter of throwing people down three floors like sacks of wheat. One on top of the other like a pyramid. No one died, of course. Since they must go on and spread the horror everywhere.

There is a theatricality to violence and this is what T.K was popular for. There were a lot of bigwigs in the prison who wanted order. Criminal gangsters, war prisoners, politicians and the like. The moment T.K awed the prison population like a cine star from hell, they acted immediately and put everything back in order. Of course, they never shook hands with him personally.

As discussed in the beginning, there is a type of criminal that one does not shake with. If he appears in ones path, one gouges out their eyes in order not to provoke him. One does good deeds in life so as not to cross paths with such criminal. Even the most heinous villains of the generation thought the same. They began to do good deeds in prison and sorted out the welfare of the prisoners.

For twenty whole years, everyone in the World Prison tried their best not to catch the eyes of the Hell King. Only the new ones became his bait and his exhibits.

It wasn like no one organised a force to take him down. He was just one man, without even a follower. Lan never understood why no one succeeded. He was injured plenty of times, but nothing major and nothing that didn inspire him to make his next work of art.

Of course, now Lan understood why no one succeeded. The Timekeeper was not a prisoner. He was a jailer! All the prison systems were under his control. He timed every disturbance like an operation and reacted precisely so that no one ever suspected he was operating the prison systems to defend himself.

All day, he spent in the yard, braving the radiation in the Dignified Realm. He read, he exercised, more exercise and more reading until the end of the day. He never issued instructions and never acknowledged anyone. But someone brought his plate on time every day. They brought his water, his towels and if he ever did the terrifying thing of reaching a last page, they scurried among themselves and urgently brought a new law book.

Because, if they didn do all that when he is not looking, he will look for a person. That person will end in hell.

Of course, without dying.