I Married a Disabled Prince in Prison

Chapter 77

The trunk was only as thin as her wrist, and before Yan Shuixin could even catch her breath, the trunk couldn't hold the weight and snapped.

She was so scared, her heart almost stopped, and she quickly reached out her foot to brace against a protrusion on the cliff, pressing her body against the rock to reduce the strain on the branches. This prevented them from breaking further.

She was already holding onto the thickest branch of the tree, and it had snapped. Moreover, the bumps on the cliff were very slippery, and she could hardly keep her grip.

Looking down, the sheer cliff seemed bottomless, with no trees or footholds in sight.

Yan Shuixin felt her position was precarious, on the verge of falling to her death.

But the thought of Xiao Yeheng still uncertain at the top of the cliff spurred her on. She told herself she couldn't die, no matter how difficult it was.

Her mind racing, she glanced around and finally spotted a tree about two meters above at an angle, with a trunk thicker than a bowl—there was her chance!

With one hand holding onto the broken branch, she struggled to retrieve a coil of rope from her pocket. She looped one end of the rope around herself under her armpits, then unfurled the long rope. At the other end was a hook. With all her strength, she threw the hooked end toward the thick tree trunk at an angle above her, high enough to clear the trunk, and let it dangle down. With skillful precision, she jerked the rope, hooking onto the dangling part of the rope and forming a knot.

At almost the same time, the branch she was holding onto completely snapped. Once again, she was in free fall, letting out a reflexive scream, "Ah!"

About a hundred meters down, the long rope tied around her armpits went taut, suspending her mid-air from the half of the thick tree trunk, swaying in the wind.

Still shaken, she looked down and realized there were still fifty to sixty meters to the bottom of the cliff.

She couldn't help but feel grateful that she had impulsively grabbed this bundle of rope from the carriage. Because at that moment, she thought, a cliff and, well, a rope might come in handy.

It really did save her life.

The trunk above was thick enough to support her weight, allowing her to catch her breath.

Perhaps the force of her fall had dislodged some loose rocks from the cliff, and two or three rocks larger than fists fell along with a cloud of dust from the cliff face, landing directly on her head.

If she hadn't looked up in time and quickly pushed off with her feet against the cliff, swinging her body outwards with the rope, letting the rocks fall through the gap she created, she would have been crushed.

This was not safe.

Yan Shuixin looked up at the clear sky, unaware of when it had turned dark.

The plateau of the clifftop, towering so high she couldn't see its peak, seemed impossible to ascend.

The only option was to go down.

Surveying the area for a point of leverage, she noticed a protruding rock about five or six meters to her left. She quickly swung the rope over, but after swinging across, she found that she was still fifty centimeters short of reaching the rock. The vertical rope wasn't long enough.

Frustrated, she glanced down at the rope cinched painfully under her armpits. The loop around her body, when unraveled, was longer than fifty centimeters.

She tied a portion of the loose end of the rope around her right wrist, then pulled. The loop around her body unraveled, and she dropped another sixty or seventy centimeters.