Chapter 1025: The World Is a Kaleidoscope (7)

A banquet, by definition, was an event where many people gathered for the sake of celebration or fellowship and enjoyed food and drink together.

However, all three of those conditions had to be met for it to truly be called a banquet. If even one was missing, it became some other kind of event entirely.

If there was no commemorative purpose, and many people merely gathered to enjoy food and drink together, then that became a company dinner.

If many people gathered for a commemorative purpose, but no food or alcohol was provided, that was a ceremony.

If food and drink were enjoyed for the sake of celebration, but only a small number of people gathered, then that ought to be called nothing more than a social gathering or an after-party.

However, even in these strict standards for what counted as a banquet, exceptions did exist.

There was one very special kind of banquet that had neither any commemorative purpose nor any enjoyment of food and drink, and yet was still called a banquet even though a large number of people merely gathered together to do something extremely suspicious.

A sabbat! A witch’s banquet!

That is to say, a banquet of witches, hosted by a witch herself.

Then just how special was a witch’s banquet, that it still counted as a banquet even without fulfilling the conditions of one?

Well, special it certainly was. Very special.

What took place at a witch’s banquet varied according to the disposition of the witch hosting it, but if one were to summarize it, it went something like this:

-Making works out of blood and entrails, and avant-garde artistic acts of a similar sort. Among such things, there was a marked preference for pentagons and stars, and for crosses with a longer upper bar.

-Group use of psychoactive drugs. Psychoactive drugs, in other words, were also called narcotics.

-One-on-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many depraved sexual exchanges. These usually included unrestricted levels of deviant desire.

-All manner of sadistic acts, including murder and torture, as well as human sacrifice.

-Animal abuse and unlicensed slaughter.

-Eating the raw corpses of animals, including humans, without heating them first.

Roughly speaking, an event where one, or more than one, or all of the above took place was what a witch’s banquet was!

In other words, the conclusion could only be that a witch’s banquet was a monstrously filthy and foul gathering, seasoned with obscenity, and plainly an illegal assembly of degenerates.

The participants knew that too, which was why it was common for them to conceal their identities behind masks.

And through this sabbat, so the saying went, the witch hosted the banquet to delight the master she served, and in return was granted transcendent power.

And thus, to speak of last night.

The banquet held last night aboard the flagship of the East India Company’s Eastern Fleet, the Golden Lion, had been precisely such a sabbat, a witch’s banquet.

What acts had taken place at that banquet last night could not be described separately, because doing so carried the grave risk of lowering the average of Westerners by an extremely serious margin.

At any rate, last night, the witch’s banquet had appeared to be proceeding very successfully.

In the banquet hall thick with the stench of burning hallucinogenic mushrooms, enough to make one’s nose feel like it was collapsing, Lady Joanna stood at the center of a pentagram drawn in blood and an inscribed star, watching the outrageously foul acts unfolding all around her, watching the beastlike state of the participants, drunk to the gills on hallucinogenic honey, and engraved that scene into her eyes.

And so, with the emotions of the participants heightened to a very serious degree, Lady Joanna felt that the one she served was extremely pleased.

Then, in a rush of spiritual exaltation, her eyes rolled back, and, astonishingly, she fainted while still standing!

Thus stood Joanna, arms spread wide, showing nothing but bloodshot whites, trembling and jerking and flailing like an absolute lunatic.

And that was when it happened.

Suddenly, something went wrong.

“KIIIIAAAHHH!!!” / “KIIIIAAAHHH!!” / “KIIIIAAAHHH!!!” / “KIIIIAAAHHH!!!” / “KIIIIAAAHHH!!!”

It was not a mere scream. It was the terror a person on the verge of death let out in unbearable dread before that pitiless sentence. It was the wail of a pitiful soul that had gone beyond even the stage of such extreme pain that no scream could emerge, and could confirm its own existence only through screaming. It was as though the gates of hell had opened in her mouth and the voices of sinners suffering eternally in the abyss were pouring straight out, turning her mouth into the maw of a literal inferno. And also, something, something-something, something about declaration and striking at the core, well, whatever it was, it was that kind of unbelievably incredible scream.

It was also such a horrifying scream that even those who heard it found their skin crawling, enough that brains soaked in narcotics snapped awake all at once.

Something had gone wrong.

Even apart from the horror of the scream itself, dozens of screams were erupting at the same time from a single throat, joining together into a shrieking chorus.

There was no way anyone present could fail to realize that something was terribly wrong.

And was that all?

As the host of the banquet, Lady Joanna, who had always maintained her dignity in the center of that hall that looked like the end of human dignity itself, was now rolling across the floor.

Smearing every last one of the painstakingly drawn blood letters all over her own clothes, rolling left and right, right-right-right, left-left-left-left, like an utterly insane bitch—rolling and flailing all over the place.

But because she was rolling around without a care even for the candles that had been lit for atmosphere, and also for illumination within the shipboard inner chamber that had been perfectly blacked out—

“Gah, she caught fire!” “The captain’s burning!” “Put it out! Put it out!” “WAAAH! The burning captain!” “Hellfire, it’s hellfire!!!”

Unfortunately, according to the sailors’ long tradition, the way to put out a fire was simple: stomp on it. Fire went out if you stepped on it.

So the sailors who rushed over at once began trampling and beating Lady Joanna senseless in their efforts to subdue the flames.

Of course, among them there were also sailors who, in somewhat clearer states of mind, sought to deal with the fire more efficiently.

If there was fire, then pouring water on it should help. Thinking so, a sailor grabbed whatever was at hand and started dumping it out—but a sailor’s drinking supply was either water or strong liquor, that powerful spirit Westerners called rum, basically a kind of disinfectant poison.

FWOOOSH!

The flames transferred instantly to the stream of strong liquor being poured, leaping in a burst all the way to the ceiling in a violent blaze.

Panicking completely, the sailors became even more frantic and stamped harder with their feet, while those even more desperate came running with all kinds of waste buckets and splashed them everywhere, drenching her with entrails and blood, and then with even more disgusting byproducts of life than that.

Thanks to that, the fire attached to Joanna was put out before she was beaten to death by the sailors’ kicking, but by then her state looked worse than death.

Even amid all this, Joanna’s screaming did not stop.

Or perhaps precisely because of all this, Joanna’s screaming did not stop.

*****

And so, after last night’s uproar had passed.

Curled up on the bed in the captain’s cabin, wrapped in a blanket despite the sweltering summer heat of Shanghai, Joanna trembled all over.

When the first mate, who also served as accountant, brought in lunch, he saw the state she was in and made a worried face.

“Captain, are you feeling any better?”

“What, what in God’s name was that horrible thing! That wasn’t a person. °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° It wasn’t human. What in the world was that...!”

“Whoa, whoa. Calm down.”

“Do I look like I can calm down!? Look at me! Th-this, that thing did this to me!”

Joanna’s condition was quite horrific.

More of her body was covered in bandages than left uncovered, and even the exposed portions were full of swollen bruises in vivid blues, reds, and purples.

“Calm down. That happened because the crew were putting out the fire. You know how it is—if there’s a fire aboard ship, they stomp it out and beat it down with brooms or blankets. Everyone was out of their minds, that’s all.”

“No, no it isn’t. This is all because of what I suffered in that thing’s dream. I, I...”

The light vanished from Joanna’s eyes.

“I died. Dozens of times, hundreds of times, thousands of times, I died and died again, pierced, crushed, broken, torn apart, burned, cut to pieces, and it just kept going, kept going, no matter how much I begged and pleaded, that thing just smiled like that, with that pure malice, that thing, it wasn’t human, it wasn’t even a person...”

At that, SMACK! The first mate clapped sharply right in front of the captain’s nose, cutting off her muttering.

“Pull yourself together. That happened in a dream, didn’t it? The reason you’re a total wreck right now is because those idiot sailors caused a commotion while putting out the fire. Not because you suffered some bizarre outrage in an Eastern monkey’s dream.”

“No! That’s not it! You don’t understand, that thing, that thing, what in the world, what in the world was it...?”

At that, the first mate shrugged.

“You’re asking me? So then what exactly is that bitch, if she’s not human? What, some kind of devil? Hmm, an Eastern devil?”

“Damn it, devils... at least devils are rational beings. They clearly want something. At least you can talk to them, at least contracts work, everything follows the contract, but that thing...”

“Why, a witch I know once said her master desired human suffering. Good heavens, that sabbat was ghastly. Isn’t that monkey the same type?”

“No, it’s different, different. That thing wanted nothing. It was just... like tearing apart a bug. It wasn’t doing it for anything. It was just because I happened to be there. It wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest if it had been someone else instead, and if I’d died it would’ve thrown me aside without a shred of regret, but I, I couldn’t die...”

Focus vanished from the captain’s eyes again.

The first mate clapped sharply once more.

“So, then, negotiation will be impossible?”

“I... I can’t do it, I can’t...”

The first mate let out a long sigh.

Lady Joanna had been a very capable merchant before she was ever a witch conducting wicked rites.

But after getting beaten half to death by her own sailors, it seemed beyond doubt that her mind had truly snapped.

Thanks to the fearsome vitality unique to witches, despite the muscles all over her body having burst, despite not a single bone remaining whole, despite even having been burned, she had already recovered to some degree.

But it appeared her mind had broken completely.

Well, was that not the usual fate of witches, after all?

Even when they were not formally executed through trial, their endings generally consisted of losing their minds by their own hand and collapsing into ruin.

“So. Further dialogue is impossible. That is the captain’s official position.”

The first mate spoke like that, though not the slightest trace of regret could be found on his face.

“In that case, it can’t be helped. It would have been nice if we could have resolved this through conversation. Truly unfortunate. I suppose I’ll have to send word to those friends from the Far East we met the other day.”

The official trade procedure of the East India Company.

First, try talking.

Second, if they do not listen, fire cannonballs.

Third. If they still do not listen, fire more cannonballs.

Fourth, if they still do not listen? Converse with guns.

You might well ask what kind of trade procedure that was, what kind of human refuse scum would fire cannons and massacre people with guns just because their trade had been refused.

However, astonishingly enough, to Westerners this was perfectly normal trade!

Please sell us your goods. What, you refuse?

Now then, think about it again. Ah, would you kindly look over here?

Your city used to be here. Now it isn’t.

We are this frightening.

If you will simply grant us trade rights, then no further bloodshed will occur.

What? You still refuse?

Your citizens used to be here. Now they aren’t. There must have been tens of thousands of them, but this is all your fault, and we devout and faithful believers bear no blame whatsoever. Well, heathens were headed to hell anyway. A few believers were mixed in there too, but they would’ve gone to heaven, so that’s fine.

Ah, and over here are the tombs of your king’s ancestors, the graves of former kings, are they? Of course, they’re gone now. We dug up every last one of them. For the advancement of mankind, naturally. We’re going to display them in our museum.

So? Still not going to trade? Still refusing?

Oh, and over there, that must be your royal palace?

It was the same in Qing’s homeland. At almost exactly this period, the merchant fleet of the Dutch East India Company that had come to the Central Plains eventually won trade rights through official trade procedure step four, a scorched-earth campaign.

But Qing did not know that.

Then again, the history of the Central Plains was hardly useful. Even the people of the Central Plains themselves had regarded their own history as worthless old junk and burned it all away.

If even the people of the Central Plains had burned their own history, then for anyone else to study that history would be nothing more than an utterly useless waste of effort.

No matter how mistaken a choice Qing might have made, no matter how foolishly she might once have chosen the liberal arts, she still had not been stupid enough to study the history of the Central Plains!

So even if Qing did not know this, that was only natural, and no one had any right to criticize her for it...

At any rate, did history repeat itself?

Of course, that remained to be seen.

Because the Central Plains of Qing’s home world had in truth been rather—no, very much—a soft target.

A line of incompetent emperors contrasted against powerful centralization, corrupt provincial administration as a result, endless rebellions, and so on—a giant current with nothing but bulk to it, that original Central Plains.

But this imitation knockoff Central Plains was different.

Did it not have Murim? Had not even the emperors, forever threatened by power for that reason, been unable to grow lazy? Was it not a Central Plains that, after some lunatic swordsman went on a rampage, had poured every ounce of effort into strengthening its military as well?

And above all else.

Shanghai contained the incarnation of chaos, chaos itself, a human disaster of disruption so thorough that it would not have been strange if she had changed her family name and become Disruption Qing instead.