The tolling of the Nightfall Academy bell did not sound like a call to class. It sounded like a dirge.
BONG. BONG.
The heavy, metallic rings reverberated through the artificial twilight of the Dominion, shaking the dust from the gothic rafters.
Yesterday, the vestibule had run red with the blood of human Initiates and rogue Fallen. Today, the consequences were hanging from the walls. Long, black-and-silver memorial banners draped over the academy's stone archways. The corridors, usually buzzing with the arrogant chatter of the vampiric aristocracy, were stifled and paranoid.
As I escorted Lysandra to her morning classes, I took inventory of our surroundings.
Five empty seats in the courtyard pavilion. A dozen missing human Initiates from the carrying-crews. Three times the usual number of heavily armored Gargoyle sentinels perched on the rooftops.
The attack by the Rogue vampires wasn't just a random act of violence; it had punctured the illusion of absolute safety within the academy walls. Rumors spread like a grease fire through the student body. I could hear them whispering as we walked past.
"I heard eight nobles were killed."
"My cousin from the Valerius faction disappeared in the chaos..."
"Are the Crimson Inquisitors going to retaliate?"
But as Lysandra and I walked down the central promenade, the whispers died abruptly. The sea of students—both purebloods and newly-turned fledglings—parted before us, giving us a wide, terrified berth.
Lysandra kept her chin held high, her silver hair flowing behind her, projecting the flawless image of an untouchable royal. But I was standing exactly a half-step behind her. I could see the minute tension in her shoulders.
She had expected respect after dominating Professor Valmont yesterday. She had expected the mockery to end.
Instead, she received absolute silence. They weren't looking at her as a peer; they were looking at her as a live bomb that could detonate at any moment. Which was a completely different, and arguably colder, kind of isolation.
"Fear is like a cheap stain remover, Lucian," Seraphina had told me once, aggressively scrubbing a bloodstain out of a rug. "It gets the job done immediately, but it eats away at the fabric over time. True loyalty takes elbow grease."
We reached the heavy oak doors of the Advanced Arcanum hall.
"I will collect you when the bell rings for the noon reprieve, My Lady," I said, offering a crisp, forty-five-degree bow.
Lysandra hesitated, her hand lingering on the brass doorknob. She glanced back at the empty, terrified hallway, and then down at me.
"Do not wander into the upper districts, Lucian," she ordered softly. "Alaric's pride is bruised, but he is not stupid. He will be looking for a way to separate us."
"I am merely heading to the library, My Lady," I replied smoothly. "There is some dust in our quarters that requires a specific alchemical solvent. I need to reference a botanical text."
It was a lie, of course. But it was a perfectly domestic, utterly believable lie.
She nodded, seemingly reassured by my mundane priorities, and slipped into the classroom.
Once the door clicked shut, my polite smile vanished.
If I couldn't find the people responsible for my sister's kidnapping and my Master's death out in the open, I would find them in the dark.
The Grand Library of Nightfall Academy was less of a building and more of an abyss.
It consisted of seven massive, circular floors that plunged deep into the subterranean bedrock of the catacombs. Floating lanterns of ghostly blue fire drifted lazily through the air, illuminating millions of ancient, leather-bound tomes. Some of the books were literally alive—fluttering like frantic bats against heavy iron chains, their pages snapping at the fingers of unwary students.
Most students used the library casually, lounging on velvet sofas, gossiping, or forcing their human thralls to carry towering stacks of history books.
To them, this was a place of study. To me, it was a weapons pantry. Information was the sharpest knife in the kitchen, and I needed to know exactly where the vital organs were hidden.
I bypassed the bustling upper floors and descended the spiral staircase to the fourth sublevel: «Medical Anomalies & Bloodline Histories.»
The air down here was cold and smelled of dry rot and ozone. I walked past aisles of forbidden experiments, hybrid theories, and vampiric anatomy charts.
What exactly is the Black Blood?
That was the question that had haunted me for two years. The village doctor had called it an incurable plague. The passing Pureblood Princess had recognized it as a marker for supreme 'Vampiric Aptitude' and kidnapped my sister because of it.
I pulled three massive ledgers from the shelves.
«Epidemiology of the Outer Rim.»
«The Sanguine Mutations.»
«Blood-Blights of the Mortal Fringes.»
I found an isolated oak desk in a dark corner, activated my [Aura Scanner] to ensure no one was watching me, and began to read.
I read fast. My 18 Perception allowed me to scan pages at a superhuman rate, filtering out useless academic prose and hunting for keywords.
Nothing. Nothing.
A footnote about a red-blood fever.
Nothing.
The sheer lack of information was staggering. This library held the collective knowledge of a race that had conquered two-thirds of the planet, yet it contained barely a whisper about the Black Blood.
It was too little. Which meant it wasn't an omission. It was a quarantine.
Finally, after an hour of searching, I found a crumbling, dust-covered journal wedged behind a row of encyclopedias. I opened it carefully.
«Old Manuscript»
[...The phenomenon known as the 'Black Blood' is a terminal mortal affliction found only in impoverished human settlements. Due to the extreme density of latent mana clashing with fragile human biology, the host's blood literally oxidizes, turning black. Total organ failure is inevitable. Victims expire within two to three weeks of initial symptoms. Eradication of the corpse is highly recommended to prevent mana-spillage...]
I stared at the page.
Victims expire within two to three weeks.
My grip on the edge of the desk tightened, the wood groaning softly under the pressure.
That was a lie.
My sister had been infected with the Black Blood. She didn't die in three weeks. She lived for two years under the 'care' of the Pureblood who kidnapped her, eventually returning to butcher my Master with strength that rivaled a small army.
If the official medical records stated that Black Blood was a quick, terminal disease, it meant the Academy—or someone highly placed within the Dominion—wanted the world to think those humans were simply dying. It was the perfect cover to erase them from the census.
The official records were lying. The mystery wasn't just a kidnapping; it was a cover-up.
I flipped the page, looking for an author, a cited source, anything.
At the bottom of the text, stamped in faded crimson ink, was a citation.
[ Referencing: Initial Field Studies of Hybridization.]
< Author: Carmilla V. Dracul.>
My blood ran cold.
Carmilla.
Chloe's terrified whisper echoed in my mind. Princess Carmilla. Head of the Crimson Inquisitors. House Vesper. The 'V' on the document likely stood for Vesper, while Dracul must have been her specific branch or maiden lineage.
It was her. The same woman I was hunting.
I stood up, leaving the book on the desk, and began pulling every ledger, every journal, every research paper I could find on blood mutations and hybrid experiments.
I started seeing the pattern.
Carmilla V. Dracul.
C. Von Vesper.
Inquisitor C.
Her name was everywhere. She was the architect behind decades of shadow-research. But the terrifying part wasn't her name.
It was what was missing.
In every single book where her name appeared, the subsequent pages were gone. Not carefully unstitched—violently torn out. Some were burned at the edges. Someone had systematically gone through this massive archive and physically removed the history of the Black Blood experiments.
"Looking for ghosts in the pages, boy?"
[ Passive Skill: Absolute Composure (Max) triggered. ]
I didn't flinch, though my heart rate spiked. My [Aura Scanner] hadn't detected anything.
I slowly turned around.
Standing at the end of the dark aisle was an elderly woman leaning heavily on a wooden cane. She wore the traditional, heavy robes of an Academy Archivist. Her eyes were completely white, clouded over by centuries of blindness.
But that wasn't what was unsettling about her.
She wasn't fully solid. Her feet hovered a fraction of an inch off the ground, and her form flickered faintly, like a candle fighting a draft.
[ Name: Madame Sybil |
Race: Tri-Brid (Elder Vampire / Bound Wraith) |
Potential: Unknown ]
She was a ghost. A spirit tethered to the physical world, likely bound by some necrotic magic. That was why my scanner hadn't picked up a heartbeat.
"I am simply researching some... esoteric history, Madame," I said politely, giving her a respectful nod, even though she was blind.
"Esoteric," Madame Sybil wheezed, her voice sounding like dry leaves scraping across a gravestone. "A polite word for forbidden. Most students avoid that section. They prefer the romances of the First Progenitors, or the martial texts. Only the very desperate or the very foolish look into the Black Blood."
"I have a passion for obscure stains," I replied smoothly. "And how to clean them."
The blind ghost tilted her head, a dry, rattling chuckle escaping her throat.
"You have a strange aura, human. No magic, but you do not smell of fear like the other livestock." She tapped her cane lightly against the stone floor. "You won't find what you're looking for up here. The Inquisitors gutted these shelves a decade ago. All the primary texts were transferred."
"Transferred where?" I asked, keeping my voice perfectly flat.
Sybil raised a translucent, wrinkled finger, pointing straight down at the floor beneath our feet.
"The Restricted Archive. Sub-level Seven," she whispered. "Where the dead go to be forgotten, and the living are not allowed to tread."
She turned, floating silently down the aisle, dissolving into the shadows of the bookshelves until she was completely gone.
Sub-level Seven.
I looked back at the messy pile of books on my desk. Before leaving, I picked up a mundane, misfiled requisition ledger from the 1800s. I shook it gently by the spine.
A single, folded piece of parchment fell out, fluttering to the floor. It must have been used as a bookmark by a careless scholar decades ago, overlooked by the Inquisitors when they purged the library.
I picked it up. Half of it was burned away, the edges charred black, but the center text was miraculously legible.
[ INQUISITOR RESEARCH DIVISION - REQUISITION REPORT ]
[ Subject Classification: Black Blood Variant (Human/Mutant)]
[Subject ID: 404-Omega Compatibility Rate: 97.4%]
[ Notes: Subject survived the initial marrow-grafting. The Black Blood acts not as a poison, but as an aggressive primer for demonic mana. Lethality is bypassed if the subject is fed Pureblood vitae prior to total organ failure.]
[ Recommended Transfer: House Dracul Deep-Research Division Supervisor: Carmilla V. Dracul ]
My breath stopped in my throat.
Compatibility Rate: 97.4%. Marrow-grafting. Lab subjects.
For two years, the cold, burning engine of vengeance had pushed me forward. I had assumed the Pureblood took my sister to make her a powerful thrall. A soldier. I assumed my sister had been brainwashed, turned into a monster, and sent to kill Seraphina.
But reading this half-burned scrap of paper, a new, entirely different emotion flooded my chest. It bypassed my [Absolute Composure]. It cracked my perfectly crafted domestic armor.
Fear.
Cold, suffocating, visceral fear.
My little sister hadn't just died. And she hadn't just been turned into a vampire.
She was an experiment. A lab rat for Princess Carmilla. The Black Blood wasn't a disease; it was a primer. They were building something.
I carefully folded the burned paper and slid it into my inner pocket. The anger that had sustained me for two years suddenly felt wholly inadequate. Anger was for punishing a murderer. What I was looking at wasn't a murder. It was an industrial slaughterhouse.
I left the desk. I didn't go back up to the surface.
I descended the spiral staircase. Past the fifth floor. Past the sixth floor.
The air grew heavy, thick with the suffocating pressure of ancient warding magic. The ghostly blue lanterns faded, replaced by complete, oppressive darkness.
At the very bottom of the library, at the end of a long, claustrophobic stone corridor, I found it.
A massive, double-sided door forged from black iron. It was covered edge-to-edge in glowing, blood-red runes. Thick, heavy chains wrapped around the handles, locked with a seal bearing the Thorned Rose of the Crimson Inquisitors.
Carved into the stone above the frame were the words:
{RESTRICTED ARCHIVE AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY}
I stepped up to the door. I could feel the necrotic magic humming off the iron, threatening to flay the skin from my bones if I touched it without the proper mana signature.
A sudden, sharp chime echoed in my skull. A blue holographic window materialized in the darkness right in front of the door.
[ SYSTEM ALERT: QUEST TRIGGERED ]
Hidden Quest: The Truth of the Black Blood
Objective: Bypass the wards and access the Restricted Archive (Sub-level Seven).
Reward: ???
Failure Penalty: The truth of your bloodline is lost forever.
I stared at the blue text, the glow reflecting in my eyes.
I couldn't brute-force this door. Not with my base human stats, and probably not even if I channeled Lysandra's S-Class power. This required a key. It required clearance.
It required me to get much, much closer to the people who ran this Academy.
"I will find you," I whispered to the cold iron door, the promise settling deep into my marrow.
I turned my back on the Restricted Archive and began the long walk back up the stairs, my mind rapidly re-calculating my entire infiltration strategy. Protecting Lysandra was no longer just a convenient cover; she was my only ticket to the upper echelons of House Vesper. I needed her on the throne, so I could steal the keys to the basement.
As I disappeared up the stairwell, leaving the black door in silence, a shadow detached itself from a nearby pillar.
The figure stood in the gloom, watching the spot where I had just been standing. Red eyes glinted in the absolute dark.
A soft, amused chuckle echoed through the empty corridor.
"Interesting," a woman's voice purred, smooth as silk and sharp as glass. "Someone is finally asking the right questions."