In the Nine Provinces World, "eating one's own kind" was an enormous taboo—a line no one dared cross.
No matter where you came from or what you had done before, crossing that line erased everything else. You were an Evil Fiend, beyond any defense.
When judging good and evil, for example, three questions mattered most.
First, did you eat your own kind?
Second, did you kill your own kind of your own accord?
Third, did you enjoy killing and cruelty?
If the answers to the first two were no and the last was yes, you were neither wholly righteous nor wholly evil. If the first was no and the other two were yes, you might still be saved. If all three were yes, you might as well be put down. But if the first was yes, then even if the other two were no, you still generally fell into the "put them down" category...
Eating your own kind made you the most deranged sort of Evil Fiend, beyond saving.
Among such Evil Fiends, the ones people hated most were those who ate humans.
When Demons ate humans, at least they were different kinds. Humans ate livestock and grain, after all. It was hateful, but their interests were opposed, and either side was justified in killing the other. There was nothing more to say.
But humans eating humans... that was not something a simple death could settle.
Great Xia law, for instance, had what it called the Ten Great Evils and Four Great Crimes. The former were not pardoned even when a new emperor ascended the throne and granted a general amnesty. The latter were so grave that death alone was insufficient punishment: the guilty had to be executed by torture, then have their souls imprisoned and tormented after death.
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