Chapter 1027: The World Is a Kaleidoscope (9)

Since Lady Joanna had shut herself up in the captain’s cabin, the sailors only thought, The witch is doing witch things again, maybe she got some new whim, and let it pass.

But from the first mate’s perspective, the fleet commander’s condition was so severe it could not have been worse.

All day long, in that pitch-black captain’s cabin with no lamp lit, in that world of complete darkness, she just clutched a blanket and muttered as she searched for her lord.

And in the Eastern summer, when the heat and humidity were truly a hell of their own, so stifling it choked the breath, what could Joanna possibly look like, wrapped up under a blanket like that?

The instant the cabin door opened, the stale reek that hit them mixed with the stench wafting from the waste bucket, enough to make anyone start retching on the spot.

If anyone so much as lit a lamp, she would recoil in terror and instantly scream in a shrill voice to put it out, panicking so badly that anyone seeing her would think she had a burned ghost clinging to her, or else, witch that she was, that the memory of the stake had risen fresh in her mind.

And then, even when they brought her food, she shrank back from the fork and knife in total horror, gasping in fright, to the point that it looked as if someone had once carved her to pieces with a fork and knife.

However, this too would pass.

Her true nature was already an open secret among all who needed to know it, and even so, she was a woman capable enough to sit as commander of the fleet.

Eventually, she would shake it all off and rise again, and as if none of this had ever happened, she would show that superb competence once more.

The problem was simply that that time was not now.

And so, for now, it was his turn to make a decision in the fleet commander’s stead.

Should he rain cannonballs down on those Eastern monkeys and make them pay for daring to obstruct the home office’s business?

In truth, it was hardly even a decision.

They won’t open up? Then shoot them. Simple.

If Qing had been there, and if there had been people who followed the sort of universal conscience common in Qing’s homeland, they would never have understood.

People who claimed they wanted to trade were going to pour down cannon fire? Did that make any sense? No matter how barbaric the Middle Ages might be, was it really common sense to force trade open by bombarding people with cannonballs?

And yet.

If they refused trade, wasn’t firing cannonballs the most natural thing in the world?

Astonishingly enough, to the Westerners of this age, it was exactly that. Perfectly ordinary common sense.

And in Qing’s homeland world, was it really any different?

Because the Westerners of Qing’s homeland regarded this barbaric method of trade as a romantic, manly, glorious past, and took immense pride in that history.

Charging in, swindling the innocent natives, then firing cannons when they were found out, massacring the locals, looting everything clean, and coming home laden with spoils—these were the people who dressed up the whole business as the Age of Exploration and admired it.

Age of Exploration, my ass. It deserved to be called the Great Age of Piracy, or else the Great Age of Slaughter, one of the most shameful eras in Western history.

In any case, in this age, deciding to bombard a city was nothing that even required deliberation. It was merely one more universal procedure.

If the history of Qing’s homeland was any guide, it would stay that way for about another three hundred years, and afterward they would even dress it up with splendid names like gunboat trade and gunboat diplomacy, trade by cannon and diplomacy by warship.

So then?

“The first mate relays the order in the fleet commander’s stead. Open all gunports. Run out the guns. Wait until every ship is ready.”

“You heard him, boys! Time to let those monkey bastards have it nice and proper! What are you standing around for! Move!”

“Open all gunports! Run out the guns! You bastards! Are you still sitting there with those stinking asses planted down! You ought to fire harder and louder than those weak little piss-streams of yours!”

“That’s not something a deck officer ought to be saying, sir! I saw it myself last time! Even firing without powder, it’d still go farther than your piss-stream, sir!”

“Wahahaha! The deck officer got one right in the teeth!”

“What’s this, brat! The little bastard’s got some bite in him after all!”

The filthy but cheerful sort of jokes unique to sailors rang through the ship. Laughter, shouting, running, hauling, pushing cannon, the whole vessel boiling over in loud, heated clamor.

Not one of them showed the slightest discomfort at the act of bombarding a city, and if Qing had seen it, she would have lamented that there wasn’t a single human being among them.

But to Westerners, bombardment was a perfectly natural trade procedure, and when something was so natural, no one felt the slightest prick of conscience over it.

The only difference from the history of Qing’s homeland was the existence of large-caliber cannons that should not have existed in this era in the first place.

On the lowest deck of the sailing ships, the gunners loading the enormous cannonballs—weighing a full twenty-four geun—were already drenched in sweat in the heat, soaked through as if they had just climbed out of the water.

Someone with a sufficiently broad view might have been able to form a hypothesis.

In the Central Plains, individuals could attain superhuman martial power through effort and luck, yet no vast empire possessed any practical means of truly controlling such superhumans, and so in the end they had no choice but to look the other way and coexist in the form of so-called noninterference between officials and martial artists.

But in smaller countries, comparatively speaking, might they not have had to suppress such superhumans desperately in order to maintain their rule?

And if society could only be maintained by suppressing those superhumans—those people defined as wielders of evil, monstrous power in defiance of God’s will—then naturally they would have had to develop, with equal desperation, the tools and means to suppress them.

Of course, in this age, there was no one with enough insight to understand and reflect on the differences between East and West to that extent.

“From the gunners ready on the line, three rounds. Commence bombardment.”

“Three rounds! Commence bombardment!”

Thirty gun muzzles thrust their heads out from the opened gunports along the flanks of each colossal sailing ship, and there were thirteen such ships. The eyes of the gunners clinging to all three hundred ninety cannons glistened with a strange hunger.

And then, hundreds of gun muzzles belched fire in ragged disorder.

*****

It sounded like countless bolts of lightning crashing down from ten thousand places at once. The distance kept it from being truly deafening or overwhelming, but human beings were creatures that instinctively gauged the distance of a sound and, from that, imagined its original volume.

That was why cannon fire, by its very nature alone, became a kind of shock, a kind of terror.

The cannonballs flew through the sky.

Huge lumps of iron launched at the greatest elevation, black dots rising into the blue sky. Seen from afar, they created the illusion of floating up lightly, almost lazily.

But those black dots tracing grand arcs soon turned into overwhelming violence as they dropped toward the earth.

Qing shoved Jayeo behind her and immediately narrowed her eyes, fixing them on the incoming cannonballs.

Qing’s body had surpassed human limits, and so had her sight. With vision equally beyond the human, she examined every one of those countless flying masses of iron in detail.

WHIIISH, WHIIIIIIISH!

As the cannonballs drew near all at once, slicing through the wind, the air itself screamed as though being torn apart.

But the cannonballs’ trajectories reached their apex and then dropped again, and they were much closer than Qing had expected, yet much farther away as well.

Close in a straight line, far in the vertical.

They passed high, far above Qing’s head, then vanished out of sight behind her.

Then, in the next instant—

THUD, CRAAASH, BOOOOM!

A heavy burst of impacts roared out behind her back, followed by a hideous chorus of screams.

The cannonballs were falling.

Onto the broad avenues crowded with people.

Into shadowy back alleys.

Into noodle shops and taverns opening early for the lunch trade.

Onto tightly packed private homes.

Onto mansions with inner courtyards.

Onto the paupers sleeping rough beside the canals.

Some unlucky bastard’s head burst apart and flew off, while someone who had lost their family in an instant simply collapsed in place, blinking, unable even to scream.

And if you survived only because it was merely an arm or a leg that got blown away, could that really be called keeping your life? But it was human nature that one’s own pain felt greater than another’s death, and so those who had not died screamed all the more desperately in agony, because they had lived.

The city was absolute hell, people tangling together as they ran, shoved, and crashed into one another amid shrieks and screams.

They did not know where safety was. No—precisely because they did not know where safety was, they were all rushing in every direction at once, colliding and knotting together.

Sometimes cannonballs punched straight through walls and smashed the main support pillars. Those pillars bore the weight of the roof, and once they snapped, the houses let out cracking groans and collapsed. In this hot, damp region where the walls were thin, the neighboring homes caved in one after another in cascading succession.

Among them, the smaller-caliber guns were firing iron shot that had been heated red-hot in flame, meant specifically to ignite wooden buildings, and so smoke began rising from all over the city.

Today had been no different from yesterday. Even if no one consciously stopped to think tomorrow would be the same, they had believed it would be, naturally, obviously.

And in the instant that ordinary life collapsed, the sound of that day breaking apart, all those noises, sank into Qing’s unusually keen ears.

Qing’s heart dropped coldly.

She desperately wanted to turn and see the devastation behind her, but she could not afford to do that now.

Not every trajectory was passing overhead.

That, of course, was only natural.

The guns on sailing ships were not uniform. The lower decks held heavier guns, while the higher decks were equipped with lighter ones, and their power and range varied enormously.

Besides, naval guns fired from the sea rocked the ship with recoil, and unlike in Qing’s homeland there was no such thing as precise synchronized salvos, so even if most of the trajectories were broadly similar, there were plenty of shots among them that strayed.

Some of them slammed into the city wall.

Some fell short of it.

Some skimmed past close by.

And so, in that short span of time that felt unbearably long, Qing stood tall with Jayeo hidden behind her, glaring at the cannonballs, until at last she calmed the flow of True Qi she had drawn up to its limit.

But the sight of the cannons retreating back all at once between the gunports, hiding their muzzles again—

These sons of bitches are reloading to fire again, aren’t they?

At the center of Qing’s blue eyes, an ominous color flickered.

“Iri, take Jayeo and get to cover—no, wait. Can you stay pressed tight behind the wall? Yoye too. I’m counting on you.”

Come to think of it, the safest place was right behind the wall. Judging by the way the shots were striking it, there was no way they could break through it.

“Yes. Understood.”

Gongsun Yoye answered with a grim expression.

But Seol Iri shook her head.

“No. I’m going with you. You’re going there, aren’t you? Again. By yourself. Like this.”

“Now hold on, that’s not it at all. Other than the moms, who else is there I can trust with Jayeo and not worry? If some weirdo tries anything in the middle of all this, one of you needs to fight while the other grabs Jayeo and runs. If there were even one more person here, I would’ve told you to come with me.”

“But—”

“I mean it, okay?”

In the old days, I would’ve just slung Jayeo on my back and run. I never would’ve left her with scrubs like these—mm, okay, maybe not scrubs. Semi-masters.

Seriously, if there’d just been one more person here... hang on, though?

“Hmm. Now that I think about it... even if there had been one more person, taking Iri with me would still be kinda eh. If I’m going off to fight, wouldn’t Yoye be the better pick?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Anyway, I’m counting on you.”

Qing snickered and ruffled Jayeo’s hair.

“Jayeo, listen to your moms and stay put, okay? Daddy’s gonna go beat the shit out of those filthy bast— mm, go teach them a lesson and come back, okay?”

Qing had cleaned up her wording midway through, deciding that saying beat them to death was probably not ideal for a child’s emotional development, but somehow filthy bastards had been acceptable?

Still, if you couldn’t call filthy bastards filthy bastards, then what were you supposed to call them?

“Okay. Go beat them up and come back.”

Maybe because Qing’s manner was as casual as if she were only stepping out for a walk, Jayeo merely nodded, not looking particularly anxious.

That, in its own way, was a little disappointing.

Shouldn’t there have been some kind of reaction? Like telling her not to go, or looking scared and clutching tight at her with those tiny adorable hands, something like that?

But then again, that was only natural. The one calling herself her father had always been running all over the place in the first place.

And besides, to Jayeo, Qing was the invincible strongest person under heaven. If Qing said she would go beat them up and come back, then she would go beat them up and come back.

Though Jayeo did kind of want to watch the beating happen. She only kept that disappointment to herself because it felt like something she probably should not say out loud.

Like father, like daughter. The great Thousand-Kill Ancient Star and the little Thousand-Kill Ancient Star, handmade edition, were the spitting image of each other.

And so, Qing lightly vaulted down over the outer side of the wall.