Chapter 106.1 – Queen
Alicia was forced to live with the mole people for three years.
She had never had such a bitter life. There were no servants, no fine clothes, and no delicious food. They were like a group of dark insects, living underground, relying on the city’s food reserves and strange mushrooms and tree roots to survive.
Other mole people loved to eat monster meat.
William and his wife tried their best to make a trap for trapping the little monsters, peeling off the raw meat and throwing it to them. Alicia never dared to watch that scene – once, she passed by and heard them gnawing on monster meat, and she was so disgusted that she wanted to vomit.
She had never come into contact with people like Mr. and Mrs. William.
The couple was uneducated, could not read a few words, and had never traveled in their lives. Among the mole people, similar ones abounded.
The princess grew up playing and never studied anything seriously, but she knew a lot more than these people. She brought up topics such as the military and the garrison, or horsemanship and flower arranging, about which the rest were dumbfounded; she held a rifle and explained its construction in a clumsy way, which also won her a lot of praise; she often talked about Elton and the anecdotes over there, saying that it was the greatest city in the world.
The mole people adored her very much.
Alicia easily gained respect and love, as if the old days had reappeared. In her heart, she looked down on these people. She thought that she would leave one day.
She asked the couple how they could take care of someone in a coma for 7 months.
At that time, there was no concept of “mole man”. She was infected and looked like a monster, and no one thought she could survive.
The wife, Joy, hesitated and didn’t speak.
Later, William said that they had a daughter before, she died of illness very early, and she liked to wear white skirts very much.
Alicia thought that when she got on the train that day, her night dress was white.
She tried to contact the army.
Everyone told her that the army would hunt the mole people and that the king was a tyrant.
She didn’t believe it. As long as the army could verify her identity, they would definitely bring her back to the royal capital. Her father was still waiting for her.
There were not many cities left in the huge empire. They were isolated here, and occasionally, monsters approached, so they escaped by digging holes in the ground.
In the third year, a military convoy came.
The princess saw the smoke and dust of the convoy from a distance, she got out of the “lair”, stood in the dusk, and waved at them desperately.
“I’m here!” She shouted, “I’m here – come here!”
“Are you crazy?!” William slammed her down behind him and shouted in a low voice, “That’s the army! You’ll get us all killed!”
“I know! I’m looking for them!” Alicia struggled, “You let me go! They will take me home!”
William was old, when she hit him in the abdomen with her elbow, it hurt so much that he couldn’t straighten his waist. The princess broke free from him and continued to shake her arms and shout, “Come here! I am here!”
Just as she wanted to run towards the convoy, she heard a “whoosh!” sound and her ears became hot.
The bullet flew over her head.
The princess froze. William rushed up and held her down again, shouting in her ear: “Hide!”
There were a few more screeching bullets, and Alicia was stiffly dragged back into the “lair” by William.
——For the first time, she clearly realized that the army was no longer her loyal shield.
Now she was the prey.
The army came to retake the city of Yalie, and the princess exposed the existence of the mole people. Later, more and more troops came and regarded the mole people as monsters.
The abyss was restless, there were monsters outside, there were troops in the city, and they had nowhere to escape. The dream of returning to the royal capital with the army was shattered. She saw with her own eyes that the mole people who had been shot fell in a pool of blood.
Yesterday, they were still surrounding her and listening to the story, calling her, “Di Wen!” “Di Wen!” The friends who called her that way died at the muzzle of the Empire. Even so, no one blamed her for exposing the lair. They all felt that she just believed in the Empire and her intentions were not bad.
‘What’s going on?’ Alicia thought, ‘why kill these people?’
Obviously, they were all human beings.
Her head was confused, she wondered if her father had really done something wrong.
William also died at gunpoint. The princess held his hand and experienced for the first time why they called the king a “tyrant.”
During this time of broken dreams, full of self-blame and remorse, it was the mole people who accompanied her and supported her through it.
In the end, the army failed to recover Yalie City.
After they left, the mole people spent another year or two in the lair, ate their last reserve food, and prepared to move to the next abandoned city.
Alicia was familiar with the layout of the city.
She led the mole people to reach one city after another safely, and found reserves of food and firearms. She told them the location of the city, told them where the military would put food, and taught them how to use guns and how to identify the models of war robots.
Reality would often push people to grow up.
She had become able to eat anything, whether it was crawling in the mud, trekking against a sandstorm, or looking for a warehouse in a torrential rain… She dared to give the mole people raw meat, but also dared to peel off the monster’s bloody fur. In order to survive, she did things she didn’t dare to think about before.
The mole people admired her and trusted her more and more.
In their view, Di Wen was omnipotent.
Unknowingly, Alicia became their leader, guiding them with her wisdom to avoid danger again and again.
They had no access to the outside world for many years, and they didn’t know how the war was. They had only seen fallen cities one by one. With selfishness, the princess led the mole people in the direction of Elton.
The road ahead was long.
The more she saw the cruelty, the more she hated her past self.
Arrogant, naïve, and vain.
Nearly ten years later, William’s wife, Joy, was also dying of old age.
She lay on the bed and took the princess’s hand and whispered, “I have – cough, I have a secret.”
“Tell me,” Alicia leaned into her ear.
Over the years, Joy regarded her as her own, found her floral garlands, covered her living place with feathers and straw, making it soft and warm, and hung beautiful decorations she had picked up. Alicia had never experienced maternal love, but she felt warmth in this illiterate and deformed woman.
The gray-haired old woman said, “…I know you are a princess.” She choked up, “I knew from the beginning, your necklace has the royal symbol on it.”
“…” Alicia’s eyes widened, “Then why…?!”
“I stole your necklace.” A line of tears flowed from the old woman’s eyes, “When you were in a coma, an army came and asked, I said you were just a maid and had woken up and didn’t know where the princess had gone.” In the darkness, her tears seemed cloudy, “Why? Maybe it was the white dress you wore that day, so much like my daughter.”
“Alicia, my Alicia,” she said, “You must hate me very much.”
She closed her eyes.
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