Chapter 25: Human Hunting (6)
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Laura had always been taught to protect her pride. Even though her family had fallen, she had become a slave, and all sorts of vulgar acts were forced upon her so that her body would become accustomed to them, her pride was the one thing she never lost. In her opinion, life wasn’t that long anyway.
There was a time when she became lost in thought while taking a stroll through her household’s garden. She could sense that the servants were looking her way as they whispered to one another. Whenever they made eye contact with her, they would sweep their brooms energetically in order to make it seem like they were focused on cleaning, but Laura could tell. She could tell that those gazes contained ridicule.
It has been like this since she was little. She could tell what was on people’s minds through their eyes alone. Regarding the rumor about her being the ‘eccentric esteemed daughter of the Farnese family’ who doesn’t participate in balls or social gatherings, but instead shuts herself in her room and reads books about the art of war, was something that even Laura, who was deaf to the outside world, knew very well. Despite her title as the second heir, the title itself was nothing but a shell.
‘Reputation is an utterly useless thing.’
Laura stared at a blue chrysanthemum that was in the garden. The chrysanthemum swayed slightly due to a breeze.
‘Everything flows.’
A few days ago, a mage that was dispatched to the Academy of Saints Petersburg held a rather intriguing lecture. The title of the lecture was ‘What is the correct way of judging nature with life?’. Ultimately, they criticized that the concept of ‘quiescence’ was wrong. Everything flows. If a human feels as if something within living nature has stopped, then that is simply the human’s misunderstanding.
‘Sense and motion, in other words, how we perceive the speed of things all depends on the rate of our pulse. The faster our pulse is, the faster we perceive the world. For example, a domestic rabbit’s pulse is 4 times faster than that of a cow’s which means that they perceive an hour 4 times faster than them. Since they can act 4 times faster, they have 4 times the experience. Therefore, domestic rabbits have 4 times the experience than cows…… From humans to the various other subspecies and animals, everything flows at their own respective speed within their internal lives even though they exist within the same frame of time. Let us hypothesize that the flow of humankind’s pulse, perception, and mental capacity either slows or hastens immensely! If we combine one’s childhood, prime, and old age and shorten it to a thousandth of its original length, in other words, all of this is downsized into a single month, so our pulse is 1,000 times faster⎯⎯⎯then people could most likely be able to spectate a flying arrow with leisure!’