Heavenly Demon Holmes: London’s Subjugation

A Kung-Fuist is not dead so long as the martial world has not forgotten him.

-George Eliot-

“What sleep-talking nonsense are you saying? To make my husband into a dead man on your own, when we have not even held a funeral.”

At my question, Her Majesty openly showed her displeasure.

How strange. By my recollection, Prince Albert should have died twenty years ago from now.

“……”

Only then did I grasp the source of my unease.

In this place, unlike the world I lived in, Kung-Fu exists.

Were there not seniors of the martial world, such as Sir Newton and Sir Maxwell, living longer than in the history I had known. Then it would not be strange if Prince Albert were still alive as well.

The problem was that, even though my memories in this world had synchronized, there was scarcely any information about Prince Albert.

‘Since when…… did I begin thinking that Prince Albert had died in this world as well……?’

The private life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort Albert had always drawn the attention of those living in Great Britain.

Prince Albert, who came from Germany, had been disregarded by Parliament due to a lack of connections and the like, despite possessing outstanding Kung-Fu and political ability.

It was well known to anyone sensitive to information that Her Majesty grieved the fact he received poor treatment even after proving himself in many fields, such as by making the Great Exhibition a success.

Therefore, if unlike the history I knew where Prince Albert died in 1861, he had remained alive and well afterward, there was no way I would not have known.

Yet no matter how I searched the memories I held in this world, I could find no trace of Prince Albert engaging in public activities after 1861.

“If you apologize even now, I will take into account that we both immersed ourselves too deeply in the match, and show leniency.”

“I am sorry, Your Majesty.”

For now, I had to survive first.

If I wagged my tongue wrongly here, I might be the one to cross the River Styx, the Sanzu River, in Prince Albert’s place.

That said―

‘……As Your Majesty says, I have no memory of Prince Albert’s funeral.’

If Prince Albert had died, there should have been a state funeral, and the absence of any memory of it suggested there may have been confusion during the process of synchronizing with my self in this world.

Thinking carefully, before my regression, whenever she appeared in public, Her Majesty the Queen wore black.

She had continued to wear mourning clothes in remembrance of Prince Albert’s death.

By contrast, in this world, the colors of the martial robes Her Majesty wore were varied.

It differed far too much from the Queen I had known in my previous life to say she was one crushed by the death of her companion.

By the circumstances, it seemed safe to take as fact that Prince Albert was alive, but if so, why could he not be found in Buckingham.

“May I ask just one thing, Your Majesty.”

“I permit it.”

“Where has Prince Albert been of late? I have not heard any news for a long time.”

“That……”

Her Majesty trailed off.

I could at least guess there were circumstances difficult to speak of.

“It is something you must not yet know.”

“Is that so……”

The word yet suggested that I had not earned the right to hear of Prince Albert’s present situation.

That likely meant that most Britons did not know the truth either.

Given that my self in this world did not know where Prince Albert was or what he was doing, there must have been information control by the Forbidden Palace and Whitehall, the British Government.

However, a hypothesis that could explain why Prince Albert could not act publicly even while alive had already occurred to me long ago.

“It seems Prince Albert is fighting hemophilia, the Basin Disease.”

As if startled by the unexpected word, Her Majesty the Queen blinked a few times and then went still.

“……How do you know that?”

“It is a simple deduction.”

Before explaining to Her Majesty, I reviewed how hemophilia was defined in this world and in the world I originally came from, and how great the difference was.

Hemophilia, the ‘Basin Disease.’

The name was similar, but it was a strange illness with symptoms different from the hemophilia, the ‘Blood-Friend Disease,’ that I occasionally heard of in the world I had lived in.

The name hemophilia that I originally knew came from Greek, meaning to love blood, and it was a name given by physicians who, seeing that the bleeding of hemophiliacs would not stop, mistakenly thought they enjoyed shedding blood.

Because it often manifested in the bloodlines of European royal families where marriage among relatives was common, hemophilia, called The Royal Disease, was known to afflict mainly men.

The characteristic of the illness was that the patient’s blood was slow to clot, so the time it took for bleeding to stop was far longer than for ordinary people.

With few sufferers and no known treatment, countless people were at their wits’ end.

Perhaps the small mercy was that, so long as there was no wound or internal bleeding, the patient could live a relatively ordinary life.

But that was only the story of hemophilia, the Blood-Friend Disease.

The Basin Disease hemophilia of this world was discovered nearly a hundred years earlier than in the world I lived in.

Depending on the person who suffered it, it was a troublesome disease capable of bringing about a national catastrophe.

“Is it the disease in which the body’s acupuncture points become as vulnerable to impact as a bowl, so that they crack or break and the innate essence leaks out.”

“……You know it well.”

It seemed I had finally uncovered Her Majesty’s darkest secret.

“Of course I must know. Is it not the disease borne by the Blood Cultists who were exiled to the Australian Dominion ninety-three years ago and sealed in the Five Elements Rock Prison, Ayers Rock.”

“……”

Her Majesty said nothing.

And naturally so, for across Great Britain and the European Murim, there was no one who did not know the end that awaited a hemophilia sufferer.

“A hemophilia sufferer instinctively comes to crave the blood of living others, in order to replenish the innate essence leaking from the Elixir Field and blood paths that have become like a shattered vessel. Am I wrong?”

“……”

More than ninety years ago, the reason the masters of The League of Gentlemen and the Royal Combat Society secretly sealed the Blood Cultists was simple.

The Blood Cultists were not public enemies from the beginning.

No, they were not even a religious group in the first place.

But because they had to drink the blood of others to survive, at some point they could no longer suppress the blood-drinking impulse, Hemo-Philia, and began hunting humans, and at last were designated a cult.

In the end, in 1788, the European Murim Union carried out a great Enclosure Movement and decided to hunt down the Blood Cultists and seal them.

The reason they were not killed was simple.

It was because many Blood Cultists, like hemophiliacs of the other world, had direct or indirect ties to European royal bloodlines.

Of course, it was also because they were monsters who, so long as fresh blood was supplied, could act even with limbs severed, and thus could not be easily killed.

Uluru, a single immense mass of sandstone, that is, the Five Elements Rock Prison, was a place where vast natural essence and earth power churned, so great that it was called the dragon vein of the Australian continent and the Qi Sea Point of the earth.

The greatest masters of Great Britain bored holes into that enormous rock and sealed the Blood Cultists, and laid down the largest formation in the world so they could never come out again.

The greatest duty inherited by the Governor of the South Australia colony was to guard the seal of this formation, and the key to unsealing it was likewise kept by Sir William Morgan, who currently held the governorship.

Thus, European Murim believed it had escaped the threat of the Blood Cult.

“Have you confined him? Prince Albert.”

Her Majesty remained silent, but I took it as affirmation.

“Were there not those of Your Majesty’s blood among the Blood Cultists sealed in the past. Was not Prince Albert Your Majesty’s first cousin? If Prince Albert, who was healthy, suddenly ceased public activity, I thought the symptoms of hemophilia may have manifested.”

“Hah……”

A hemophilia sufferer, and one said to be stronger than Her Majesty by the measure of 1861, remaining on British soil.

If Prince Albert were released.

If the Basin Disease he suffered was so severe that he could not suppress the blood-drinking impulse.

I did not dare imagine what would happen.

“Moreover, it troubled me that Discharged Medical Maiden demanded from a royal attendant the second of the Factor VIII, the Medicamentum Communionem, known as a specific remedy for hemophilia, and received the ingredients without issue.”

“Why the Medicamentum Communionem?”

“If it were the seventh or eighth, those legendary pills thick with rumor, it would be one thing, but since you had large quantities of the comparatively obtainable Factor VIII pills, from one through four, I thought the attendant readily handed over the Medicamentum Communionem.”

As if struck at the core, Her Majesty’s brow twitched slightly.

“The fact that the second pill, the Medicamentum Communionem, is kept in the third Wonder Drug Storage may mean that perhaps the fifth or sixth pills exist in the Forbidden Palace as well.”

The reason many masters, including Sir Newton, hid their survival from the martial world and lived as though dead was simple.

In the past, a rumor once spread through European Murim that if one gathered all the Factor VIII and consumed them properly, one could enjoy immortality.

They claimed that the reason the great masters of the martial world lived long was because they had made or found and consumed some of the Factor VIII.

As a result, countless people, Murim and common alike, wandered the land chasing empty rumors in search of the Factor VIII, and it even brought about a temporary decline in industry.

It was not as though this phenomenon contributed nothing at all to the development of the martial world.

Visible results appeared, such as the discovery that the theory of alchemy, persecuted as the learning of swindlers and nearly extinguished, could be applied to pill refining, and the two fields were fused.

However, those in high places did not look kindly on the sight of people swayed by absurd talk, abandoning their livelihoods to make or seek legendary pills whose very existence could not be confirmed.

Thus, each nation’s government arrested those who pursued research on the rare Factor VIII, from the fifth through the eighth, and punished them strictly by law.

That masters who achieved high realms and longevity hid their survival was also to quell the Factor VIII frenzy.

In such a situation, if it became known that Her Majesty the Queen had secretly secured many of the Factor VIII pills of numbers forbidden by law, what would happen.

An excuse such as that the Factor VIII were gathered solely to treat the Prince Consort suffering from hemophilia would not pass.

The dreadful blood calamities caused by the Blood Cultists in the past were still deeply engraved in people’s minds.

If it became known that Her Majesty was leaving Prince Albert, who suffered hemophilia, as he was, a riot would surely occur.

“I have no intention of speaking of Your Majesty’s secret outside. But now that I know the Prince Consort is a hemophilia sufferer, I must know how Your Majesty is isolating Prince Albert.”

Her Majesty the Queen endured my gaze in silence for a long while, then nodded.

“……One month.”

“……?”

“In one month, I intend to go see Albert. You will come along as well.”