Chapter 1029: The World Is a Kaleidoscope (11)

Qing did not know how to swim.

Because she had never properly learned.

But she could still move through the water.

Once someone became a true master, there was usually nothing left to fear in the first place, and water was not all that dangerous once the fear of water itself had vanished.

Superhuman physical ability included a sense of balance, and if you added the monstrous output of all four limbs on top of that, plus the even greater force made possible by the operation of True Qi because she was a master?

Physically, and in terms of fluid dynamics, Qing possessed an absurdly large weakness for fast swimming—a terribly inefficient body structure.

But overwhelming power solved everything.

If she just worked her arms and legs quickly enough, she could still slice through the current and surge straight ahead.

Whenever she ran out of breath, she would rise once, take a single breath, dive again, and keep surging forward. And if anyone asked why she kept diving, it was because people who did not really know how to swim could usually only manage diving in the first place.

How much time passed like that?

At last—THUNK!

Qing’s hard steel-like crown slammed straight into something solid.

*****

On the upper deck of the United Company.

The sailors were still clustered together in a noisy crowd, watching the bombardment, and the ship’s cook was naturally one of the people engrossed in the show.

Honestly, it was a little strange.

At this hour, with lunch approaching, a cook ought to have been in the galley.

So why was the man up on deck watching the shelling?

But the cook was utterly shameless about it.

Why should someone of a cook’s stature personally be standing there holding a ladle and ruining his dignity?

Once a man had enough seniority—once he had enough time under his belt—those filthy little chores were supposed to be handled by the underlings on their own, and after all the teaching he had already done, surely the assistant cook could take the brats and manage just fine.

East or West, senior workers slacking off on the job was exactly the same.

Maybe it was simply part of human nature.

But the cook should have stayed in the galley.

If he had, he would not have found himself in the awkward and thoroughly unglorious position of becoming the first casualty.

GRAB.

Something suddenly clamped down on his ankle, and the cook shrieked in shock.

“Gah! Wh-what, what is it!? What the hell is that!?”

Half-crazed with panic, the cook looked down at his feet.

There, hanging from the side of the deck, was a woman.

Soaking wet, droplets of water dripping from the fine line of her chin, a pale-skinned beauty lifted her face and met his eyes directly.

Back in Qing’s homeland, the standard for a Western beauty had been sharply lifted eyes, a blade-like nose bridge, dark-red but deeply hollowed cheeks—features so strong and aggressive people would call it the sort of face that “looked dangerous.”

But in truth, that kind of “woman with a brutally strong face” would not become fashionable until three hundred years later.

Before that, East and West had not really differed much in what they considered beautiful.

Qing, still meeting his gaze, smiled brightly.

A breathtaking beauty!

And these sailors were men who were always starving for women, so it was only natural that the cook—who had just recoiled in terror—would stare down at Qing for a moment with a blank, dazed look.

But only for a moment.

Still smiling gently, Qing clenched her fist.

A transcendent human body, and grip strength amplified through Minor Water Demonic Art and the Black-Slaughter Witch Palm.

Something like a human ankle was pitifully soft.

CRUNCH.

Inside her hand, she felt the hard framework shatter, bone fragments jabbing sharply into her palm, then only for an instant, because those pieces broke into even smaller ones, timidly scraping between her fingers as they slipped through.

Yes.

This.

This was it.

She had held back for a long time.

Right?

A strange color entered Qing’s smile.

“[AAAAAAAGH! MY FOOT! MY FOOT!!]”

The cook collapsed and rolled on the deck, shrieking and sobbing.

Well, of course.

Once the ankle had been crushed to pulp and the foot below it had practically come apart, anyone would react more or less the same way.

That desperate scream pulled everyone’s attention at once.

There was the cook sprawled on the deck.

And there was also something shooting forward at astonishing speed, as though something long had suddenly been pulled taut and released.

Wrapped around the great blade it carried was a halo of light visible even in broad daylight.

That gleaming trail drew a long tail behind it as it charged straight for the center of the deck.

The sailors froze for a moment at the utterly incomprehensible sight.

Then the great blade wrapped in light plunged into the center of the deck—entered to the right of the mainmast and came out to the left.

It was an impossible scene, one the eye could witness and still fail to understand.

What was a mainmast?

It was the thick, sturdy mast at the center of the three masts of a sailing ship, the very core of the vessel, a massive pillar seven feet across.

And now that mainmast—compressed from circular layers of spruce hard as cast iron—was being sliced through in one stroke as though it were some soft fruit.

CRAAACK...!

The pillar was seven zhang thick, so even Qing’s oversized Moonlit Night had not fully cut through it.

The narrow bit left connecting it failed to bear the tremendous weight and began to burst apart.

The mainmast slowly tilted.

“[Uh...]” “[Dear God.]”

Confronted with something they had never even imagined, the sailors could only mutter one stupid thing each in unison.

In the middle of that, Qing snapped her head around.

BOOM!

The hard wood of the deck burst apart again, spraying splinters, and Qing’s body became a thick straight line once more as she hurled herself onward.

“[She’s going for the mizzenmast, the mizzenmast!]” “[Damn it, st-stop her! Stop her!]” “[A mermaid, it’s a mermaid!]” “[Shoot, shoot her!]”

But that too lasted only an instant.

BANG, BANG-BANG, BANG!

As the mainmast collapsed, the ropes attached to it snapped with gunpowder-like reports.

Then, under that overwhelming tension, they lashed out in whatever direction they pleased.

SNAP! CRACK!

The ropes, suddenly exceeding the speed of sound, tore through the air with shrieking blasts and swept across the deck in all directions.

A horrific whipping that shattered human bones and tore fistfuls of flesh away.

Unlucky sailors were flung through the air spraying blood, while barrels on deck exploded into fragments, turning into buckshot that made someone else scream.

In the middle of all that, Qing cut down the mizzenmast and threw herself in the opposite direction.

Behind her came the creaking groan of a mast tipping over.

Qing sprang up high.

Beneath her, the main deck—already a complete disaster even though things had not truly begun in earnest yet—flashed by in a blur.

The wounded and the unwounded alike had all buried their heads and thrown themselves flat at the commotion.

Pathetic.

Qing sneered coldly.

Trash at this level, these miserable bastards, had dared fire cannons?

Did they have any idea what the consequences would be?

Had they really thought they would be safe just because they happened to be standing on some flimsy little ship?

The sailors might have thought it unfair.

If they had been warned of battle ahead of time and mentally prepared for it, that would be one thing.

But when this had happened out of nowhere—while they were only out to watch those monkeys get showered with cannon fire, drink, cheer, and enjoy themselves—then even someone who was not a sailor would have struggled to get their head on straight.

And above all else—

They really had thought they would be safe.

In the history of Qing’s homeland too, had not a Dutch East India Company fleet of thirteen ships, led by the flagship Golden Lion, once bombarded the lands of the Central Plains?

The idea had been that if they did this, the people of the Central Plains would get scared, open the gates at once, and hand over trade rights.

But the result had been that the enraged Son of Heaven had sent three hundred warships.

The Dutch admiral at the time had not been some legendary commander, so in a fight of three hundred ships against thirteen, he got thrashed like a dog and fled to Taiwan.

Then the Son of Heaven had added another hundred ships to those three hundred, encircled Taiwan with four hundred warships, and slowly strangled them to death with complete thoroughness.

So mocking these idiots—these halfwits cackling while firing their cannons without the slightest clue how they themselves would end—might well be called too cruel.

Calling a normal person a cripple was just an ordinary insult.

But calling an actual cripple a cripple—

That was going too far.

The only difference was that in Qing’s homeland, true retaliation only began once the Son of Heaven became enraged.

But here, in this primitive, ancient, counterfeit Central Plains, the rage of a single peerless master was enough to make retaliation possible.

After finally cutting down all three masts, Qing turned with a radiant smile.

A disturbance on this scale would make the other ships realize something had gone wrong here.

For now, they would at least panic and stop the bombardment.

She could have gone under the water and punched through the hull to sink it.

But Qing knew nothing about sailing ships, and she knew very well that she knew nothing.

She had no idea how large a hole would need to be torn in the bottom of a ship to sink it.

Maybe there was some structure she did not know about that would let it hold.

A ship this huge did not seem like it would fail to deal with one tiny hole.

And even if it could not endure it, a ship this large would still take time to sink.

Stopping the bombardment first was urgent, so was she supposed to leisurely wonder whether the holes in the bottom would work, whether they would not, whether she should make more?

No.

First she would create a huge enough disturbance to stop the shelling.

After that, she could enjoy herself.

Most of all, would drowning not be far too common, far too merciful, a death for bastards like these?

The finest ending for an evil man was long illness and long life.

He ought to live a long time and suffer for it.

After finally cutting down all three masts, Qing calmly returned Moonlit Night to its sheath.

There was a saying about not using an ox-cleaving blade to kill a chicken, but for bastards like these, even a blade was luxury.

Bare hands were more than enough.

Yes.

And the feeling in the hands would be better too.

The corners of Qing’s mouth split so wide they nearly touched her ears.

Qing leaped down.

With both fists clenched, only her index fingers extended straight, she plunged into the sailors who were only just beginning to come back to their senses and scramble to their feet.

Her finger sank straight into the belly flesh of some nameless sailor.

The inside of a human body was hot, burning hot.

The pressure of the abdomen clamped tight around her finger, and the sensation running along the entire length of it felt so good that for an instant the backs of her knees turned cold and almost buckled.

Qing curled her finger and tore it back out.

Entrails came with it, caught on her hooked index finger.

Then she pressed down hard with the tip of her thumb—

the sticky, slippery feel of the intestines clinging in ridges,

and then the tough gut crushed apart.

How could anyone possibly explain the thrill of tearing apart living entrails?

And this was the thrill of cutting off life itself.

In this quasi-medieval, primitive ancient world, if your intestines were torn apart, then in the end you simply died.

There was no real way to live through that.

Instead, you stayed alive for a long, long time in agony, with crystal-clear awareness as the heat rose in your body and the rotting guts stabbed pain into you, dying in your right mind, crying for death while not wanting to die, and then dying like that.

Just imagining it made her feel like she needed to use the bathroom...

Qing’s reverent appreciation lasted a long time, but the death sentence itself—that jab and tear, that finger digging out and crushing intestines—had happened in an instant.

The nameless sailor only felt a sudden jab punch into his side, and for a moment he merely jumped in surprise and pain.

But then he had the rare privilege of seeing his own intestines with his own eyes as they spilled out, and in gratitude for that extraordinary experience, he could only collapse with a scream he had never once made in his entire life.

Leaving that sweet cry of thanks behind her, Qing jabbed again with her right hand, then again with her left.

For some reason she suddenly felt like shouting a technique name.

Something like Finger Pistol.

But that probably was not the sort of thing she should do.

“[AAAAH! YOU DEVIL!]”

Only then did the sailors come charging in, each raising a sailor’s blade.

Apparently the West had no technique for wrapping aura around a sword.

Or maybe anyone capable of doing that simply had no interest in suffering on board a ship.

Either way, every one of them was nothing more than a chunk of metal being swung around by brute force.

Qing tilted her head.

Why, had there not been something like that?

In the West too, swords that shone with light—

aura?

Was it called aura?

Hadn’t there been something like that?

Well, this was easier for her anyway.

Qing lightly caught one blade with a smack and yanked.

The man attached to it came stumbling in, and she whipped the shin with the tip of her foot.

SNAP.

The shin broke like dry kindling, bending forward at an impossible angle, while from the sharp broken end of the bone dangling in the calf muscle, clear marrow dripped in little drops.

She snatched blades.

If even that felt annoying, she just blocked them with the back of her hand or her forearm.

Then she extended a finger and pulled someone’s guts out.

Sometimes she simply grabbed a wrist or forearm and crushed it.

She kept advancing, casually tossing aside everyone who charged her, like an adult dealing with children.

No—even an adult dealing with children could not have advanced this easily.

And so the deck filled with shrieking abuse, screams and cries, gasps of horror, terrified howls, pleas to be spared, devil, witch, monster, and more and more and more.

All kinds of voices.

But every single one of them was a cry steeped in sheer terror.

And their numbers, and their volume, only kept growing.