Book 17: Chapter 38
The city should be lively the next day, right? Unfortunately, people weren’t gathered for something nice. It wasn’t something worth celebrating. It was an interrogation, or rather, an execution. The church and royal family tortured the assassin together. The assassin was only able to survive until today for this moment; otherwise, he’d have been tortured to death long ago. However, he wasn’t going to be executed with one swing. He was going to enjoy a torture session in the process.
The execution was held in the plaza where everyone gathered to witness a beheading execution. Mr. Lu Xun led countless executions. Watching an execution was a type of ignorant numbness. Meaning people used the life of another to kill time in their boring lives. Nevertheless, my stance was different, literally. I didn’t watch from below but from above.
Yesterday, the messenger from the church came to invite us to watch the execution. The man was caught red-handed, which was why there was no need to question him. He could’ve been killed on the spot. There was no need to worry about him being wrongly accused. Of course, the royal family just needed a scapegoat; it didn’t necessarily need to strictly be the true culprit. To the old church, however, executing the man from the new church was meaningful. Thus, they hung a board resembling a water droplet as a means of ridiculing the new church.
The new church killed a member of the old church, so the old church was understandably furious about it. There were two possibilities in the execution. One, they could appease the angry masses. Alternatively, they could turn it into full-on warfare. As for what the result would be, that’d depend on how cruel they were.
An appropriate level of cruelty would appease the enraged masses, while excessive cruelty would infuriate the members of the new church. I didn’t know if the church was well-trained at conducting such endeavours, but, if they didn’t use their brains and acted purely on their anger, they’d overdo it. Nonetheless, I was already sitting on the platform up high, watching what was happening below.
The execution platform was a makeshift wooden platform made from. The yellow wood made me feel a little dizzy. In the centre was a sharp iron awl. To the side was a fire stove with wood burning bright red.
“Are they planning to burn him with the fire, a method that I’m familiar with? That’d be too simple, wouldn’t it? Using an execution method that everyone has seen before will produce very little results,” I wondered.
To be frank, I couldn’t explain the method. In my mind, only the innocent and just who were oppressed were executed via incineration. I, therefore, sympathised with the murderer. But on top of the shawl was a rack. I didn’t know what it was for. Maybe they were intending to use an execution tool as a cable pulley?
It wasn’t summer yet, but the sky felt very much so comparable to summer. There were no clouds in the sky while the sunrays were hot. We had a piece of cloth overhead to keep the sun out. The hot breeze down below annoyed me when it blew in my face despite us having iced fruit and wine next to us. I sort of missed the cool temperature in the North. The burning fire down below also made me feel as though I was being grilled.