“Sorry to interrupt you, sir, but the noise will alarm people outside.”

“Oh… I almost forgot,” he held his belly, barely able to contain himself. He grabbed the girl’s wrist again and said intimately and cheerfully, “Thank you for the pleasant journey, Diana. We will continue this later.” He then proceeded to kiss the back of her hand gently.

“Yuck—”

She screamed out of disgust, but the cry made him laugh again, as if he had been waiting for it.

He left the tent in the company of the courtier. She yelled a few times until she heard no more responses from outside. She kneeled on the ground, panting and trying to calm herself down. It was exhausting to have to deal with a thick-skinned guy like Shaquille, and it had almost caused her to blow her cover several times. She hoped that he had not noticed.

His attitude was annoying, but as a kidnapper, he seemed too relaxed. Was he naturally brave and ambitious like this, or was he up to something? His actions were too irrational and had raised her suspicion.

After making sure that they would be away for a while, she took off her gloves and bracelets, revealing her deformed and shrunken fingertips with sharpened claws. She climbed to the top of the cage and unlocked the simple lock quickly. They obviously did not expect a member of the royal family to possess such a skill, and the girl herself did not expect that this skill she had learned from the streets to come in handy now.

She slowly lifted the top of the cage and tried to get out of the cage as silently as she could. She came to an edge of the tent and lifted one of its corners to sneak a peek at the view outside.

She looked around. They may still be on the edge of the oasis. The ground was sparsely covered with plants and several spinning wheels, dyes, simply erected factories, and yarns that were being dried could be seen. She pricked up her ears and heard female workers laughing. Judging from their accents, most of them were lizard demihumans and a few were humans. Found also in the vicinity were other small tents and lizard demihumans who were walking around. These lizard demihumans were most likely the courtiers and guards of the Suha family according to the ways they were dressed.

They were probably hiding near some silk factories or wool processing factories.

However, there were blanket-weaving workshops of varying sizes all across the kingdom, so it was difficult to determine where they were. It may not be beneficial to the Juan family if she failed to escape and exposed her identity.

She screamed sharply—the hearing range of humans is wider than that of the lizards. Therefore, Lazer taught her a set of communication methods that would enable her to send off secret signals without lizard demihumans noticing them. Even if her screams were heard by humans, they would have thought of them as meaningless shrieks—she had been doing this and marking signals along the path this whole time.

She did not expect Lazer to appear, nor did she dare to dream that she would be rescued.

But she did want to make a last effort to survive before her imminent death.

She crawled back into the iron cage and quietly locked it again. Then, she sat in a corner and wrapped her arms around her knees, her tail tightly and defensively wrapped around her body. She tried to calm herself down and waited for the opportunity to escape.

—You may be the type that excels when you are put in difficult situations.

She hoped that Lazer was right about this.