Chapter 1055: That Creature Is a Harmful Creature (10)

Lord Nakamura did not survive the night.

At that point, the fact that he had remained alive this long was miracle enough. No matter how much True Essence Qing poured into him, there was only so much that could be done once his organs had already rotted away.

So by the time Qing entered the prince’s room—now also serving as an intensive sickroom—carrying an even more luxurious ultimate three-meat hodgepodge porridge, it was already too late.

The prince was sitting there in a daze, clutching Lord Nakamura’s hand tightly.

Qing set down the tray and spoke in a gentle voice.

“Oh dear. It seems your devotion must have fallen just a little short. Still, don’t grieve too deeply, Your Highness. Giving something your wholehearted sincerity is no easy thing. Lord Nakamura was neither your parent nor your child, and yet he held on this long, so you truly did try hard enough. Not enough to save his life, of course, but still, this much...”

It sounded like comfort, but it quietly fixed the blame all the same.

This happened because your devotion fell short.

This is your fault.

“I... I really did my best...”

“Doing your best means forgetting food, sleep, and even women, and focusing your entire heart on the patient alone. But still, you did well enough. You kept alive a man who could have died long ago for several more days, didn’t you?”

As if he’d done his best.

He hadn’t.

The prince’s eyes trembled violently.

Qing beamed.

Well, there had to be something gnawing at his conscience.

“You may not have saved him in the end, but isn’t this the sort of thing that can still be made right afterward? Give Lord Nakamura a grand burial. Build him a great shrine to soothe his spirit.”

“Yes. Yes, I should do that.”

“Though it isn’t as if the dead know anything anymore... still, it would have been kinder to let him go peacefully. Instead, he ended up dying in such agony. All that trouble for nothing but suffering on your part, Your Highness.”

The prince’s face twitched at that. He was just opening his mouth to say something—

“The living still have to go on living. This is an elixir porridge I prepared with great care, so please eat it in his place and keep yourself well. Lord Nakamura will surely be happy if you do.”

Qing cut in first and set the tray down.

The prince’s eyes dropped to it.

The moment Qing saw the guilt rise clearly across his face, her smile bloomed even wider.

What, it was delicious enough when you were stealing the patient’s meals, wasn’t it?

Now look how that turned out.

Now you can eat it openly, so that’s good, isn’t it?

But unlike her thoughts, her voice remained soft and warm to the very end.

Qing closed the cabin door behind her and stepped outside.

Then she stood in place and pricked up her ears.

“AAARGH!!!”

A howl of pure, pent-up rage burst from inside.

Qing let out a small snort.

What exactly was he screaming for?

He had no business yelling like that.

He was told to tend the patient, and instead he kept sneaking glances at Gunyeong, then went so far as to steal the patient’s food.

Did he really think he had the right?

And anyway, Qing had already gotten plenty of entertainment out of this. Time to move on to the next thing.

She had scratched and scratched to her heart’s content, and now she felt wonderfully refreshed.

Amazing, really. It wasn’t even her own itch, and yet scratching it had felt this good.

The prince never left the corpse’s side.

When Qing brought dinner in, the morning’s nutritive porridge and the noon elixir porridge were still sitting there untouched, exactly where she had left them.

He had stolen patient food while there was still a patient, but now that the patient was dead, he was stubbornly refusing to eat any of it.

What, had it only just dawned on him how sordid he had been?

So Qing spoke in a voice as kind as kindness itself.

“This is not your fault, Your Highness. You tried as hard as anyone could. Killing is easy, but saving a life is hard. You kept alive someone who could have died at any moment for more than ten days. Lord Nakamura must have passed in peace, grateful for that kindness.”

“But I didn’t give it my all. My devotion fell short. It’s my fault. It’s my fault.”

“No. How could it possibly be Your Highness’s fault? If blame must be assigned, it belongs first to the fiends who did this to Lord Nakamura in the first place, and to those utterly vile traitors who abandoned their lord to save themselves and stabbed their own comrades.”

At that, the prince ground his teeth with a harsh crunch.

This was exactly why handing a self-reproachful man someone else to hate instead worked so beautifully.

“Yes. Lady Seomun is right. That bastard Yeongsi... that wretch deserves to be torn apart...!”

“And is Yeongsi the only one? What about those shameless creatures who went back without you? The righteous all died, and only the cowards survived to return. You ought to lay their heads before Lord Nakamura’s spirit to console him.”

“Yes. I should. I’ll cut off every last one of their heads. Not a single one spared!”

“So please, eat now. I understand your grief, but this is exactly when you need to eat well and preserve your strength. You have to force yourself if necessary.”

Qing said that and nudged the tray toward him.

Flames flared in the prince’s eyes.

Then he snatched up the porridge bowl, raised it to his mouth, and began shoveling it in with chopsticks.

Beneath her face veil, Qing’s smile was deeply satisfied.

Well, now.

Fanning the flames works beautifully, doesn’t it?

That’s right. Eat well, build your strength, and then go kill each other.

Maji Island lay about one hundred and twenty li east of the Shanghai headland, and its shape resembled a triangle stretched out into a long point.

Its northern side was mountainous, with Maji Mountain rising high, while the southern side opened onto the shore, where Japanese ships stood lined up one after another. Behind them, low wooden houses sprawled across gentle hills in the shape of a fairly sizable fishing village.

Only the royal palace, at least, had been built to look halfway respectable.

A Japanese-style castle stood there with Maji Mountain at its back.

Beyond the moat rose the walls, and inside them, on a high stone foundation atop a hill, stood a tall four-story keep.

The distinctive tiled roofs of Japan layered across it horizontally, with large triangular additions capping the third story, and above those rose the final upper tier.

Other than that one fairly convincing Japanese castle and several reasonably large manors around the walls, the rest was just the look of a fishing village—ramshackle houses strung out without order.

The general’s snort at the words Kingdom of Ippen came back to Qing all over again.

Now that she had seen the place for herself, it wasn’t a country at all. It was just a fishing village...

Not even a town.

A fishing village, truly.

Compared to this place, even Jagwi County would count as a city.

Hmph. Ten thousand soldiers, my ass. Looking at it now, even if you gathered up every Japanese pirate living here, would they amount to half that?

At best it was exactly what it looked like—a pirate den pretending to be a country—and for some reason that left her feeling vaguely cheated.

The moment an unidentified ship approached, a cluster of people immediately swarmed down toward the shore.

Qing narrowed her eyes and, with superhuman vision from a superhuman body, focused in.

There were six or seven men dressed exactly like Japanese pirate warriors, but most of the rest were shabby, miserable-looking things in rags, carrying spears and the like.

Every last one wore a fierce expression as they glared hard at the incoming ship.

That said, they were not unthreatening.

It was just that every last one of them was so short.

This was, after all, the period when the Japanese were smallest and puniest even by the standards of their own history.

Nearly a thousand years of that country’s Buddhist peculiarities had forbidden them from eating meat, leaving them stunted and undersized.

The pirates of Ippen did ignore that and eat meat anyway, but a deprivation accumulated over a thousand years was not about to disappear in a mere thirty.

So while the welcoming crowd of dwarves surged in—

The ship came to a halt before the dock that this pirate den had the nerve to call a harbor, just a long stretch of planks lashed together out into the sea.

A side bulkhead door swung open, and Water Forces soldiers disguised as porters laid down the boarding plank, their movements a little too stiff with tension.

That was only natural.

At the end of the pier, the gathered dwarves—or rather, the Japanese pirates—were still gripping their weapons and staring with wary expressions.

But only for a moment.

The dwarf prince—no, the pirate prince—appeared, and the expression of the dwarf warrior standing at the very front froze in shock. Then—

THUD!

He dropped to his knees and bowed low.

It was a full prostration, the sort of deep bow the Japanese called dogeza.

The ragged, beggar-looking little Japanese men behind him exchanged hurried glances.

Then, still looking thoroughly bewildered and as if they had no idea what was happening, they bent down and offered the same full bow in unison. They clearly had no clue what the situation was, but had decided to copy it first and ask questions later.

“We greet Your Highness!”

For some reason, the louder Japanese bastards shouted, the more treacherous their voices sounded.

It came out in a bright, shrill cry that was closer to a screech.

“...”

But though the tops of bowed heads packed the pier from left to right, the prince only stood there in silence with a gloomy expression.

He’d been like this ever since Lord Nakamura died.

Then the Water Forces soldiers lowered a stretcher behind the prince.

One of them leaned toward Qing and whispered:

“Um... Great Hero? Will you truly be all right? If you returned with us even now—”

“No. I’m fine. This is exactly the right moment for you to leave. Pull yourselves together and go quickly, before they come to their senses and try to stop you. If you stay anchored here for no reason, something might happen.”

The ship that had unloaded the prince, the stretcher beside him, and Qing and her companions shut its side door at once and quietly pulled away.

And just like that, the Half-Sword Twin-Blade Society had completed its landing.

A moment later, one of the warriors cautiously rose, kept his head deeply lowered and his gaze fixed on the ground at his own feet, and carefully approached.

The prince looked at him, then soon spoke with a rigid expression.

“Lord Nakamura’s body is here. See that he is treated with due reverence. I will personally oversee the funeral.”

“Yes!”

The warrior answered at once.

Something about that loudly barked yes, delivered in a voice dangerously close to a shriek, was oddly moving.

Wow. I’m really hearing it in the native pronunciation.

“This humble one is deeply moved. It would have been enough for Your Highness to return alive and in such noble form, yet you have even brought back the body of your subordinate...!”

Whether in the Central Plains or Japan, people in front of power all seemed to behave more or less the same.

Well, that was only human nature.

Despite the warrior’s fawning, the prince’s expression remained cold as ice.

“Where is that rat bastard Yeongsi, the one who deserves to be torn to pieces?”

“Eh? You mean Lord Yeongsi?”

“Lord? That bastard is—”

“Just a moment, Your Highness. Please calm your anger for now. There is an order to these things. Shouldn’t you first see your royal father, who must be sick with worry, and let him know safely of your return?”

Qing cut in smoothly.

The warrior stared at her with wary suspicion in his eyes, but Qing paid him no mind.

“And there’s a saying in the Central Plains—stir the grass, and the snake darts into hiding. If you try to seize him right now, he may flee. And who knows what other tricks he may already have played? Wouldn’t it be better to slip into the palace quietly first, then summon the traitors in under royal command? If he refuses to come, he proves with his own actions that he is a traitor. And if he comes, then Your Highness may judge his crimes yourself. But before that, he may try to escape, so Your Highness should issue an order forbidding anyone from leaving by ship.”

Really, if they were going to do it that way, they should have hidden the prince’s face from the moment he set foot on the island, with a mask or at least a veil.

But with things already this chaotic, what good would it do now to order everyone to keep quiet?

If this Yeongsi fellow had even half a brain, he would not sit still and let himself be caught. He would obviously try to survive somehow.

He might attack in an attempt to seize a ship, or flee into the hills, or raise a rebellion in the pirate den.

Whatever he chose, they would all wind up killing each other in the end.

But because someone had already spent quite a while vigorously fanning his thirst for revenge, it struck the prince as a very attractive proposal indeed.

“Yes. Lady Seomun is absolutely right. Lord Sanha, I must meet my royal father in secret, so I require your escort. At the same time, order your men to keep their mouths shut, and seal off every ship on the island. No vessel is to depart without my permission.”

“Understood! But, Your Highness—who are these people?”

“This is Lady Seomun and her party. Lady Seomun is the benefactor who saved my life, and at the same time a physician of miraculous skill. I intend to recommend her to the Imperial Physicians, so I would first like to present her to my royal father in person.”

“Understood!”

Qing suppressed a laugh.

That damned barked yes—every time she heard it, some deep and inexplicable emotion welled up inside her.

And so this was the moment when a murderous fiend, one of the most vicious villains in the world, cast her shadow over Maji Island.