Chapter 5: Xia Yan

Song Xuan only met her new roommate Xia Yan the next day. When she came out of the drying room, she saw a woman sitting ramrod straight on the sofa.

Xia Yan's long wavy hair, dyed with dark green streaks and permed at the ends, hung untidily down her back because she had only just awakened and hadn't yet been groomed. Her delicate phoenix eyes were narrowed to a thin, painful slit, her fine brows tightly knit, and her two black-gloved hands were clenched hard over her stomach and her chest.

Although her mouth and nose were hidden behind a glossy black mask, the graceful curves outlined beneath the black latex still revealed how beautiful and refined her features were. A few drops of sweat had already gathered on the bridge of the mask at her nose.

The black-clad woman was wearing only five pieces of gear: the mask, a bra, panties, gloves that covered her forearms, and a pair of high-heeled boots that rose to mid-calf.

Her mask, bra, panties, gloves, and boots were all the same glossy black as the ladies' academy uniform, and except for the upper half of her face above the mask, every part of her jade-white body that wasn't covered by the mask, bra, panties, gloves, or boots was rendered in a translucent black sheer tone.

On top of that, her base restraint system was even harsher than Song Xuan's. The constraint lines on her thigh rings and arm rings were only half as long, a pair of bracelets on her wrists were locked by two restraint cords to the sides of the waist-cinching belt hidden at her waist, and a pair of ankle cuffs at the tops of her high boots were also fixed by a restraint cord about thirty centimeters long.

If this were anywhere outside the Ladies' Academy, that outfit would be almost obscene. But inside the academy, any teacher or student could tell at a glance that this was yet another unruly student who was impossible to manage, because a ladies' uniform in this state could only mean punishment mode had been activated.

Punishment mode was a special setting designed by the Ladies' Academy specifically for women who were lawless, stubborn, and hard to discipline. The standard ladies' uniforms sold on the market did not have it; only the school uniforms made specifically for the academy's students did. Its design prototype came from a confinement suit, and punishment mode basically copied most of that suit's design. In appearance, a school uniform with punishment mode enabled and a real confinement suit looked exactly the same, both visually and to the touch.

Song Xuan had never heard the term confinement suit before, but she had a deep impression of the look of punishment mode in a ladies' uniform, because her mother, Song Mozhu, wore a latex bodysuit like this every day: the exact same black long gloves, the exact same black high boots, and the exact same black bikini-style undergarments and mask.

Her mother, Song Mozhu, was a gorgeous woman who looked to be only in her early thirties.

What left the deepest impression was that pair of almond eyes that looked almost exactly like Song Xuan's.

Her nose bridge was straight, her chin was pointed, and her face was dignified and elegant, the kind of beauty that was both striking and easy to keep looking at. At a bare height of 165 centimeters, with a pair of knee-high boots under her feet featuring 15-centimeter stiletto heels and a 3-centimeter platform, she stood at 177 centimeters when upright, and her already long legs were pushed by the heels into perfect golden proportions.

Beneath the black bikini swimsuit, her body had not a trace of excess flesh, as if all of it had been squeezed up by the latex bodysuit into her chest and hips, leaving her breasts and ass lush and full.

Song Mozhu had once said that she had conceived her daughter at forty-five and was now already a sixty-year-old old woman, but Song Xuan did not believe that nonsense at all. With her mother's looks, figure, and bearing, she simply did not look a day over thirty-five.

Most of the time, Song Mozhu stayed in the basement. She never spent more than eight hours a day outside her room, leaving at 10:00 and always returning to the basement before 18:00. Her body remained in the confinement-suit form all year round. Her arm rings and bracelets were locked by restraint cords to the side straps of her bra and panties, the space between her legs was tightly bound by the cords linking the thigh rings and ankle cuffs, and she never wore any other clothes to cover herself, keeping only that sexy outfit of a black bikini bra and panties, mask, gloves, high boots, and dark transparent latex bodysuit.

Even when executives from Four Seasons Heavy Industries, senior government officials, representatives of mercenary groups, or warlord factions came to visit, she received them in that outfit without a trace of embarrassment.

More than once, Song Xuan had hidden in the study next door and watched unfamiliar male visitors struggle to restrain their eyes and expressions because of her mother's outfit. Clearly, Song Mozhu was already completely used to it.

There was always a squad of synthetic female guards at her side, following her step for step. One of them held a chain, and the other end of that chain was fastened to the collar around her neck.

She never left the villa, and at most she would walk in the quiet, empty back garden behind the house, followed by four synthetic guards holding the leash attached to her collar, giving the strange impression that the guards were out walking a dog.

In the end, she always returned to the basement before 18:00.

The door leading to the basement was made from a single heavy slab of metal and required a special key to open. Her mother never allowed Song Xuan into the basement. In fact, Song Xuan could not have entered it even if she had wanted to, because the key was held by those special wardens, and those special female synthetics were an oddity in the household. They accepted no one's orders from the Song family, followed behavior logic that had clearly been preset long ago, and were also highly capable in combat. Song Xuan had never once opened the basement door; the structure of the villa basement remained the greatest mystery of her first half of life, and for a very long time she had lived every day atop that mystery.

Song Mozhu never offered Song Xuan any explanation for her strange clothing or behavior, and the topic had even been made a house rule that was forbidden to discuss. Whenever her daughter asked, she would always clamp her mouth shut. Her aunt and uncle would not say, the household machines had no record of it, and even if someone knew the secret, the synthetics refused to answer.

In fact, what Song Mozhu wore was not a confinement suit in the strict sense. Behind it, however, lay a fate far more tragic than a confinement suit, one that had continued for more than forty years.

In the 1990s, under the joint push of the Feng family, which controlled the East Asian Democratic Republic's judicial system, the House of Ladies, and the Norton Alliance, the government carried out several major reforms of the country's women's prisons.

The first pilot program targeted female inmates in the country's three major cities whose crimes were related to same-sex offenses.

At first, female offenders arrested in the capital, Dongzhou, as well as Xingzhou and Zhuzhou, on charges such as prostitution, solicitation, and illegally filming and selling obscene videos were required, throughout their sentences in women's prison, to continuously wear a special full-body latex bodysuit jointly designed and produced by the House of Ladies and the Ministry of Justice: the confinement suit.

The confinement suit covered one hundred percent of a female prisoner's body and locked onto the neck, chest, arms, wrists, waist, hips, thighs, and ankles through internal high-security electronic locks, remaining sealed until the sentence was completed. The built-in shock plates, breast rings, clitoral locks, vaginal plugs, urethral locks, anal plugs, collar, arm rings, bracelets, chastity belt, womb ball, chastity bra, thigh rings, ankle cuffs, high heels, and even the entire inner surface of the latex bodysuit itself all possessed fully functional and powerful punishment capabilities.

The first confinement suits were made to look like ordinary full-coverage latex bodysuits, either all black or all white. Before putting one on, a female prisoner had to undergo a hair-removal step, and once it was on, the only thing visible from head to toe was a pair of eyes and a small area of the eyelids around them.

After several rounds of improvements, the confinement suit finally took on the appearance of a transparent full-body latex bodysuit, with only small areas over the chest and genitals rendered as black bra-and-panty shapes for modesty. The black gloves, boots, and mask effectively limited a female offender's ability to escape, resist, and communicate with others.

The remaining transparent latex bodysuit was adjusted to make the skin look a few shades darker purely for aesthetic reasons, while at the same time constantly reminding the offender of the shame of her sex crimes.

Later on, the House of Ladies also introduced the concept of liquid latex from the ladies' uniform into the confinement suit, and as a result the female prisoners finally kept their hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes, though the hair on their genitals still had to be removed.

After a five-year pilot run in Dongzhou, Xingzhou, and Zhuzhou, the confinement suit was quickly expanded nationwide, and female sex offenders across the country were required to wear it continuously while serving their sentences.

Statistics gathered over several years showed that, compared with other female prisoners, inmates wearing confinement suits in women's prisons had their compliance with guards increase by 75,578,080,000 percent, their participation in brawls drop by 99.8 percent, the probability of conflicts with wardens drop by 99.7 percent, the probability of escape drop by 43 percent, the probability of a successful escape drop by 100 percent, and the recidivism rate for sex crimes after release drop by 93 percent.

Such dramatic results quickly convinced the members of parliament. With the successful development of the standard confinement suit, a durable model that could be reused by multiple people for hundreds of years greatly reduced equipment costs.

The confinement suit was then rolled out completely to every women's prison nationwide. Every female prisoner, regardless of what crime she had committed, whether her sentence was one month or ten years or a hundred years or a thousand years or ten thousand years, and whether she was serving time in a women's prison, under house arrest, or on parole, was forbidden to take off the confinement suit before the sentence ended.

Today, in both the East Asian Democratic Republic and its occupied territories, every women's prison has fully adopted the confinement-suit system. Among the world's last five major countries-East Asia, Oceania, the New Soviet Union, the United States, and Japan-it has the lowest female crime rate, and in recent years Japan and Oceania have also been preparing to cooperate with the House of Ladies to introduce the confinement suit into their own countries.

As the ultimate means of suppressing female criminals, the confinement suit could of course not be copied over in full and simply applied to the female students of the Ladies' Academy.

After careful design, the punishment mode of the ladies' uniform was indeed more than five times harsher than the non-punishment mode, but it was still only one-twentieth as severe on average as the confinement suit. Even in punishment mode, the ladies' uniform still preserved enough human rights and dignity for the female students.

Female prisoners wearing confinement suits, by contrast, were often barely even considered human. Prison guards in women's prisons generally called them bitches or swine.

In addition, many confinement-suit features aimed at female prisoners were appropriately removed. For example, the masks on the confinement suits worn during a sentence had no shapeshifting or invisibility functions. Once the mask was on, the mouth plug disappeared and was sealed into the female prisoner's mouth, preventing her from making any sound. For the prisoners, the mouth plugs had only two states: large and even larger in punishment mode. As a result, whether serving time in a women's prison, under house arrest, or on parole, they had to eat a specially prepared nutritional liquid with a deliberately awful flavor.

This nutritional liquid came packaged in a special feeding device, and an empty feeder could only be refilled through special equipment provided by women's prisons across the country. So even female prisoners on parole, after returning home, could still only eat the dark concoctions formulated by the women's prison for inmates, and they had to have them refilled on schedule by prison staff.

More importantly, the confinement suit for female prisoners had no upper limit on punishment. As long as there were still unexecuted punishments in the queue, the punishment of the confinement suit would not stop. It could even accidentally cause the prisoner to violate more rules while already being punished, triggering a vicious cycle in which more and more punishments were added to the suit's queue.

To avoid students suffering from overpunishment in their uniforms, the ladies' uniform imposed limits on its punishment queue. In addition to capping the longest continuous punishment at no more than thirty minutes and the maximum punishment intensity at no more than the intensity of childbirth, the queue could hold at most three punishment entries. Any additional punishment programs overflowed and were not recorded.

Looking at Xia Yan sitting on the sofa with her outfit seemingly exposed, her eyes slightly narrowed and her brows knitted tightly, Song Xuan felt a chill crawl up her back. She herself had once been deeply schooled in how brutal the ladies' academy's punishment mode could be.

She remembered clearly how rebellious she had been when she first entered the academy, not only desperate to destroy the ladies' academy uniform that had bound her tightly to her body for six years without ever being removed, but also deliberately talking back to teachers and violating every kind of rule in the academy. When the school counselor's repeated interventions failed, the head of discipline for the academy's junior division had no choice but to agree to activate punishment mode on Song Xuan's uniform.

Poster: Edited by Kissing Tears at 2024_02_06 11:41:49