Chapter 1028: The World Is a Kaleidoscope (10)

The instant Qing launched herself down and hit the ground, she bent her knees sharply and spread the impact of the landing through her entire body as much as possible. In the next moment she had dropped into a crouch, one knee pressing into her chest.

Then she planted both hands flat on the ground in front of that knee and raised her hips, naturally shifting her center of balance forward, Qing’s whole body tilting ahead.

And then—

Her bent left leg snapped straight with the powerful tension of a drawn bowstring loosed at last, and her body shot forward like an arrow.

A leap closer to flight than to any ordinary jump.

Still flying low with her head pitched forward, Qing’s right foot slammed into the earth again.

The black demonic energy scattering like powdered dust in the wake behind her was a remnant of the demonic art that had once shaken the world.

Qing accelerated even further, but then—

THUD! THUD! THUD!

Over three more strides, she gained still more speed.

With the peerless lightness art that had always stood among the finest under heaven, she stretched into a long-tailed straight line, leaving an afterimage behind her.

Her face was so cold, so icily expressionless, that no one would ever have guessed it was the same face that had been joking around as she entrusted Jayeo to the others only moments ago.

But unlike that frozen expression, what boiled inside her, deep within, was dark and thick and molten, like lava moving in the black.

Why didn’t I see this coming sooner?

Those disgusting Western bastards and their rotten nature—if things went even a little wrong, these sons of bitches were the kind who started by firing cannons. I only had to think a little to know that.

Qing had been ignorant of the history of the Central Plains in this world, and she was not particularly well-versed in world history either, but hadn’t her homeland itself suffered time and again from diplomacy by cannon and warship?

Even aside from that, even with the little world history she did know, she had known full well how cruel Westerners could be. Had she let herself relax just because these were the Dutch and not the British? In the end, when it came to those bastards lumped together as the West, one was the same as the next.

Couldn’t I have stopped this?

The moment that witch and her follower dared to set their filthy feet inside the magistrate’s residence, if I had beaten them to death on the spot and hung their heads from poles—

No. No, that’s not it.

Those bastards would’ve probably liked that even better anyway and poured down cannon fire with a grin. Some excuse about avenging their captain after she was killed.

Right. More than that—much earlier than that—I should have wiped them all out from the very beginning.

The first time I saw those filthy animal bastards’ ships from atop the wall, I should have gone that very night, killed every last one of them, and burned the whole lot down.

Right. That’s what I should have done. I should have.

A color that had never existed there before stained Qing’s eyes.

And yet it was unmistakably a more dangerous color than before.

That was why the world was better off with evil people not existing in it to begin with. The instant you found them, you should have killed them all and wiped them out.

I was the one who was complacent. I saw bright-red evil right in front of me and let it sit because it wasn’t my business, and this is what happened.

Thank God I happened to be on the wall. Thank God I happened to be in just the right place. If I had been staying inside the city instead, if some blind cannonball had fallen out of nowhere, if I hadn’t been able to stop a shot striking from beyond my awareness, if my people had been standing there where it landed—

Then suddenly, a certain image, a memory that had never existed, or else a fragment of some dream, flickered through her mind.

Bodies sprawled pitifully in blood with their limbs twisted and broken. Their faces. Jayeo. Iri. Yoye. And not stopping there, the long line of corpses stretched on—Master, San, Lady Moyong, Sword Rain, the members of the Half-Sword Twin-Blade Society, then Teacher, Her Majesty the Empress, and before she knew it, a hill made entirely of bodies...

Right.

I have to kill them all before that happens.

If good people were to remain good people, if I wasn’t going to let them become people who had once been good, then I had to kill them all. I had to kill everything vile and rotten in this world. Only then could good people live.

Then suddenly, her vision was dyed in strange colors.

Every color sharpened and sharpened until it stood out with impossible clarity, and vivid primary hues spilled and warped across her sight like the visions of someone drugged, a scene so intense it no longer seemed real.

On the ground lay only the corpses of evil men, their crushed, torn, ground-up remains. Above them, kind people ran laughing and smiling in happiness, and beautiful red splashed everywhere with wet slaps, brilliant blood spraying in every direction.

A smile rose at the corners of Qing’s mouth.

And that was the moment.

Suddenly, another world overlaid itself atop that beautiful world and spread across her sight at the same time.

The scene turned black and red, as if monochrome, but with no white in it, only a black-red without brightness.

The dark parts were black, and the bright parts were not bright at all, only red, so the entire world seemed sunk into endless darkness, endlessly calm and subdued.

And yet it was a quiet world.

A truly peaceful world.

Of course it was. The birth of a new age always began upon the ashes of the age before it. Only after everything in this barbaric era had burned away into ash could an age of mankind finally begin.

A field of fire for mankind alone.

Thus, passing through beautiful fields and thickets painted in the separate colors of those two worlds, Qing’s vision finally opened onto a sea that shone with no true color of its own—or rather, a pitch-black sea.

And far away across it were the Western sailing ships.

Beyond the tidal flats, half-revealed as if the tide were coming in or receding out, something suddenly coagulated above the water’s surface.

Before long, that coagulation took the shape of legs, and now before Qing there floated two strange bridge-piers upon the sea, stretching in a straight line all the way to those Western sailing ships.

One was a false bridge so blindingly bright and red that its afterimage blurred, made of scarlet flesh, arms, entrails, eyeballs, and brains rotting and crumbling as they tangled together.

The other was formed of pitch-black shadows—charred lumps burned black, the dead who had burned to cinders—clutching one another and gathering themselves into shape as they rose.

—Step on us and go. Even against beasts that have forgotten the duties of being human, trample them with us. Trample every beast in the world.

A whisper steeped in total submission, and yet quietly burning with deep longing, as deadly as the fire still hidden inside charcoal that had already burned away.

Then another whisper breathed into her opposite ear.

—Come to me. To the place where you were meant to stand. To the place of slaughter granted to you.

In the next instant, the sea vanished from Qing’s sight.

What remained was empty void, a bottomless abyss so deep it seemed she could fall forever.

And two bridges leading to the distant far side.

And beyond those bridges—

A vast universe.

At last, there before her eyes, within reach if only she stretched out a hand and moved her legs, was a true utopia.

She crossed the tidal flats as though they were level ground, racing over them until she reached the edge of the cliff—what had once been the sea, but was now nothing more than the lip of a bottomless chasm too deep for any human being to fathom.

Qing did not slow down.

Before her lay two roads.

Two bridges.

And finally, Qing set her foot down.

*****

The United Company, the newest ship of the East India Company fleet.

Up on the deck, all the non-gunner personnel—the navigators, deckhands, cooks, accountants, appraisers, and the rest—had swarmed out in a crowd just to watch the bombardment.

Below deck, the gunners were wrestling with cannonballs and gun smoke in the sweltering, humid Shanghai heat, sweating so hard it poured off them in streams, but that was their problem.

As for the rest, all they had to do was swallow their booze and enjoy the sight of cannonballs raining down on those monkey bastards.

So in broad daylight they stood around grinning, some of them already flushed red from drink, faces glowing as they noisily leaned on the rail and stared at the walls of Shanghai.

Then—

BOOOOM!

The roar of the naval guns. The rocking recoil of the ship. From up on deck, at the very moment of firing, the visible flight of the black cannonballs.

And at the same time, loud whistling, glasses clinking as they shouted toasts, drops of liquor spraying everywhere, and the sailors’ rough, booming laughter.

All of it was lively like a festival.

And so, just as those spectators finished one round of revelry and leaned over the rail again in anticipation of the second wave of bombardment—

That was when it happened.

“Hey, hey, look over there! Something’s coming! What the hell, is that a person? It’s running this way!”

At that, some of the sailors who had come out to watch immediately snatched up the long tubes hanging around their necks and pressed them to their eyes, aiming the far ends toward the shore.

“What the hell, it’s a person—a woman, though? Oho, melkkoe. And damn, those things are really full.”

It was Dutch slang, a derogatory term for a busty woman. Literally, milk cow.

Looking at that, it seemed Easterners and Westerners alike all ended up thinking the same sort of things.

So naturally, everyone’s heads whipped around at once.

A milk cow was charging at them, after all.

“Where, where?”

“Hey, gimme the spyglass. Hurry up, I’m in a rush.”

“That—ain’t that her?”

But the uproar lasted only a moment. Just how fast was that woman? She had already come tearing right up to the coast, and since sailors were chosen for having sharp eyesight to begin with, they could soon make out her form with the naked eye alone.

“What the hell, why’s she that fast?”

“Some kind of Eastern mystery or something?”

“Looks like she’s got a sword on her...”

“Hey, somebody shoot at that. Gunners?”

“What gun, you idiot? Waste of a bullet. That’s over a mile out. It won’t even reach, and even if it did, it’d just be some iron pellet somebody tossed at her.”

And so all eyes converged on her at once.

The woman ran across the tidal flats as though they were solid level ground, nimble and graceful, and then into the sea—

No.

Onto the sea.

“What the hell is that!”

“A person’s running on the water! On the water!”

“Sweet God above!”

“Shoot, damn it! Shoot her! Right now!”

But that only lasted a moment too.

Ten steps, maybe?

The Eastern woman who had been sprinting over the water as lightly as a skimming stone suddenly—

SPLASH!

She dropped straight into the sea and disappeared.

“Jesus Christ, that scared me. Running on water? Thought I was about to get hauled off to a heresy trial.”

That set it off, and loud laughter broke out everywhere.

Trying to cover how startled they had been, they raised their voices even more and started throwing out jokes filthier than before.

“Guess the sight of the cannons got her all worked up. How desperate for cock do you have to be to run across the water just to throw yourself at some real men?”

“Too bad. If she’d made it all the way here, I might’ve personally blessed her with some holy cock.”

“If she’s got enough devotion to run a full mile over the sea looking for a man, shouldn’t we reward that kind of effort and give it to her?”

But in truth, it was not anything especially unusual.

A sailor’s special talents were swearing and dirty talk, and both came as naturally as breathing, so when—

BOOOOM! BANG! BOOOOM! BANG! BANG!

—the second wave of what was too sloppy to even call a synchronized volley erupted, the sailors merely burst into cheers again, whistling and lifting their cups high.

*****

SPLASH.

Qing sank straight into the sea.

Then, gurgling, a rush of bubbles burst out from around her face and fled upward toward the surface.

Qing flailed.

But even if you weren’t just a master but a master’s grandfather, the instant something plastered itself across your face after you fell into the water, you were obviously going to flail.

Who the hell swam wearing a face veil?

So after a brief spell of thrashing, Qing got her posture under control beneath the water and peeled the face veil off her face with an irritated swipe.

Then she was about to fling it away, but thought better of it. It had been a gift, and besides, she liked it a lot—her beloved face veil, so to speak—so instead she stuffed it deep inside her clothes against her chest.

The seawater stung her eyes sharply.

And thanks to that, Qing’s head cleared all at once.

Of course, it had already cleared before that too.

No, but seriously, what the hell is wrong with the Thousand-Kill Ancient Star and the Heaven-Crushing Demonic Energy? Why are they both so desperate because they can’t tempt one person properly?

I said I’d get to the Mystical Realm on my own, didn’t I? The second I let my guard down for even a moment, those bastards start trying to pull something.

Qing recalled the two bridges floating over that bottomless abyss where the sea had sunk away.

If she had crossed one of them, that would have been it—straight into the Mystical Realm. Well, no, a realm reached by such filthy means would not have truly been the Mystical Realm, but anyway, she would have arrived at some kind of demonic realm on the same level.

Of course, if that had happened, she would have attained the legendary lightness art of running across water and reached those Western barbarian bastards in an instant, so... yeah, that part was a little disappointing.

And yet at the same time, didn’t it make her heart lurch coldly in horror?

If it had not been for the absurdity of the Thousand-Kill Ancient Star and the Heaven-Crushing Demonic Energy both trying to tempt her at once, if not for that hesitation over which of the two bridges she should choose—

Then if there had only been one bridge, she probably would have crossed it as naturally as breathing.

She had been that consumed by rage.

Maybe that friendless star had been waiting for exactly a moment like this, taking advantage of how she had not felt the hunger for slaughter too strongly of late, despite having gone such a long time without killing.

Thinking of it that way, maybe the Heaven-Crushing Demonic Energy had actually done something rather admirable for once.

Because it had barged in trying to swallow the trap the Thousand-Kill Ancient Star laid all for itself, she had been able to come back to her senses.

Right. Thank you for that, Heaven-Crushing Demonic Energy... or mental parasite.

Not that I’m actually grateful, of course...

Qing moved her arms and legs and cut forward through the sea.