The werewolf—one of medieval Europe's classic nightmares—was now nothing but a headless corpse, dragged behind a horse like a dead dog. Church knights had hooked it with steel chains and were pulling it away into the distance.

  The contrast between armored knights and wild beasts couldn't have been clearer.

  Watching from deep in the brush, Norton felt his newly undead blood run cold. Thank God he hadn't charged back to the city in a rage, looking for Father Mia. If he had, he'd be the one getting dragged off right now.

  These Church knights were absolute monsters.

  Their bodies didn't seem superhuman. No, they were something worse: rigorously trained, relentlessly disciplined. They wore full plate armor like it weighed nothing. And their combat instincts? Flawless. No fear. No hesitation. Just relentless aggression from start to finish.

  God damn it. If this was what the Holy Church produced, how the hell was he supposed to survive out here?

  The battle he'd just witnessed had killed any trace of smugness about becoming a vampire.

  "The Church definitely has tricks up its sleeve," he muttered to himself. "Probably specialized anti-vampire tactics too. And these knights... the way they train them is just insane."

  Norton stayed frozen in place, watching the knights disappear into the darkness.

  He'd walked all afternoon. No map, no sense of direction. Just wandered through the forest until he was completely lost.

  And because he'd been running for his life, he hadn't had time to properly examine his new body. He'd only noticed a few things so far:

  One, he was stronger. No idea how much stronger, but definitely beyond human limits. Not dramatically so, but enough. The thirty or forty pounds of Church armor he was wearing? Barely noticeable. Compared to that werewolf, he figured he'd hold his own.

  Two, his body was dead. Heart stopped. No pulse. Something else was driving him now, though he had no idea what. All his blood was gone—his skin had that bloodless, waxy pallor. But his regeneration was incredible. The burn damage from his execution had completely healed during that afternoon walk.

  Three, his senses had sharpened. Hearing, smell, perception—all upgraded. And the upgrade had a clear vampire flavor.

  How did he know? Because the smell of blood had led him here.

  Worth noting: vampire noses didn't turn blood into some romantic fantasy. No cream sweetness, no wine bouquet. Blood just smelled like blood. The only difference was he could smell it from much, much farther away.

  How far? He'd walked maybe two thousand steps. Call it a kilometer. At that distance, he'd caught the scent.

  That was genuinely impressive.

  Norton's gaze pierced through the underbrush toward the farmstead.

  Night vision seemed to come standard with the vampire package. It worked automatically—like breathing, you didn't notice it until you thought about it. And when he did focus, something strange happened. A thin gray membrane slid across his eyes, covering them like a nictitating membrane. Like a crocodile's eye-shield.

  He used it now, studying the scene.

  This wasn't a city. This was someone's farm. A livestock shed in the distance, two wooden houses—one big, one small. Fields all around. Classic rural landscape.

  The one difference: those fields weren't growing food. They were growing flowers.

  The Church demanded fresh flowers for their weekly Masses. So they'd ordered every scrap of arable land around the city converted to flower cultivation. A show of God's holiness.

  But peasants weren't stupid. Look closer at those flower beds, and you'd spot black wheat mixed in. Potato vines hidden among the petals. Survival wasn't negotiable.

  The four knights had dragged the werewolf far enough now that their torches were just pinpricks of light.

  "Which means I'm close to the city," Norton realized. "Maybe I never left its orbit at all."

  He turned his attention back to the farm.

  The peasant family was still wailing over their losses. The old man who'd taken that armored boot to the chest? Dead. His wife and daughter knelt in the mud beside his body, sobbing.

  Lucky for them they weren't in the city. If they were, that corpse would already be stripped bare.

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  Norton watched the scene and felt something twist in his chest. He didn't know these people. But he'd like to think he still had some shred of humanity left.

  Which was why, in this tragic moment, he absolutely would not crawl over and drink the old man's blood.

  First, that felt wrong. He'd need time to adjust to what he'd become.

  Second—and more importantly—the knights had just left. If he attacked these people, would the Church have ways to track him? Would they come back with torches and swords and do to him what they'd just done to that werewolf?

  "Better play it safe," he decided. "Cow blood will have to do."

  He settled deeper into the brush and waited.

  Waited for the mother and daughter to drag the old man's body inside. Waited for the farm to go quiet. Then he'd slip into that shed and find the cow.

  Because here was the thing: blood still smelled like blood to him. But right now, blood was the only thing he could stomach.

  He'd tested this in the forest earlier. Climbed a tree, grabbed some fruit, took a bite.

  Imagine chewing candle wax. Then imagine that wax had less flavor. That was fruit now. Edible in the sense that you could technically swallow it, but not worth the effort.

  So blood it was.

  But Norton had also noticed something strange. He wasn't quite like the vampires described in the Church's books.

  For one, sunlight didn't seem to bother him. At all.

  For another, he could drink blood from dead things. That knight he'd fed on earlier? Definitely dead.

  In any normal vampire story—any Earth legend—that would be standard. But here? Here it contradicted everything the Church taught.

  According to The Covenant, Kuba fled sunlight to escape death itself. That meant vampires should fear the sun. It should weaken them, burn them, destroy them.

  Norton had walked through an entire afternoon of sunlight. Wearing armor, sure, but sunlight still reached his face through the gaps. Nothing happened. No burning. No pain. No discomfort.

  Two possibilities: either he was special, or the sun was.

  He was leaning toward the second option.

  The Ascension described God being killed by Kuba. And over the years, priests had been living longer and longer. The Covenant called the sun God's created death.

  Put those three things together, and a picture emerged.

  What if God's death meant no more energy flowing into the sun? What if the sun was slowly weakening—fading—until even vampires could walk beneath it without fear?

  It fit.

  And then there was the dead-blood thing.

  The Covenant made it clear: Shenyin ruled living things, Yona ruled the dead. Kuba couldn't eat corpses because Yona wouldn't allow it. He could only steal blood from the living, and even then, he couldn't kill them. Shenyin wouldn't permit that either.

  So vampires, according to doctrine, could not drink dead blood.

  But Norton could.

  Which meant Yona's grip was slipping.

  And The Revival had already told him why: 【Yona was imprisoned in the sun.】

  The pieces clicked together.

  If Yona was trapped, his authority was compromised. The rules he'd once enforced no longer applied.

  Norton crouched in the darkness, watching the farmhouse door close behind the grieving women, and felt something like wonder stir in his dead chest.

  The world was stranger than any book had suggested.

  And he was going to have to figure it out fast.

  Because somewhere back in that city, Father Mia was still alive.

  And Norton hadn't forgotten.

  Norton sucked in a breath so sharp he nearly choked on it.

  The more he thought about it, the more terrifying it became.

  If his reasoning held—if both pieces of evidence pointed the same way—then God was real. Hell was real. The Creator who'd shaped this world had actually existed.

  And now He was dead. Yona, the original Death God, was imprisoned in the sun. Kuba, the vampire progenitor, had been beheaded.

  Four major powers. Three of them gone.

  A chill crawled up Norton's spine. He kept feeling like something in the bushes behind him was watching. The hair on his neck stood up.

  If he was right, the implications were horrifying.

  First: a creator god existing at all was terrifying enough. Even dead, it meant something had once possessed the power to unmake the world on a whim.

  Second: that god had been all too human. It felt urges. It acted on them. It spawned monsters from its own desires. This wasn't some distant, impersonal cosmic force. This was a being with wants, with moods, with—presumably—a temper.

  This was Homelander. On a cosmic scale. With cosmic power.

  And then there was Shenyin. The Lord of Life. Still alive, supposedly. And the Church had been committing atrocities for centuries without falling. Was he behind that? Did he support them?

  Was Shenyin the Pope?

  It fit. It fit too well. Because gods in this world had human desires.

  This was why Norton felt the walls closing in.

  A god with human emotions—who knew when he'd snap? When he'd decide today was purge day?

  And what if God actually came back? The Revival said His consciousness was recovering in Heaven...

  Norton stopped himself. Forcefully. He could spiral down this hole forever, and it would lead nowhere good.

  He had spent twenty years suppressing himself within that church.Twenty years swallowing every thought, every feeling. He was done. If Shenyin wanted to smite him, let him try. At this point, death would be a vacation.

  Something was wrong with his brain. He knew that. These fugue states where he'd sink into his own head for minutes at a time—that wasn't normal. That was damage.

  "Focus," he told himself. "Don't go schizo. Not now."

  He dragged his attention back to the farm.

  The mother and daughter had stopped crying.

  They'd found knives from somewhere. The girl was butchering the cow, hanging strips of meat on a drying rack outside. The mother was bleeding the old man's corpse, catching the blood in a clay pot. Waste nothing. Not even the blood.

  His enhanced hearing caught their voices, faint and broken.

  "The blood will set into blocks. The meat, if we dry it right, might last six months." The woman's voice cracked. "Six months... what do we do after six months?"

  Norton stared, mouth hanging open.

  "Jesus Christ. You two are hardcore."

  Here he was, feeling guilty about maybe drinking the old man's blood. And these two were literally butchering him.

  He'd known, intellectually, that this happened. The Mass had shown him starving people fighting over breadcrumbs. But seeing it—seeing a daughter slice up her own grandfather, a mother drain her husband's blood like he was livestock—that was different.

  That was humanity reduced to meat.

  Norton hadn't fully transitioned to vampire thinking yet. Drinking from the living would take some psychological adjustment. But the dead? That he could handle.

  People always find ways to justify things to themselves.

  Even as he thought it, part of his brain was already drifting. Already imagining. Setting up blood farms. Raising humans like cattle.

  "That damn Church," he muttered. "If they starve everyone to death, what am I supposed to eat?"

  He hadn't even become some ancient vampire lord yet. But already, instinctively, he was thinking of humans as his personal food reserve.

  It was almost funny. Almost.

  There was a certain... human quality to it, actually. A specific anxiety that ran deep in his bloodline. The fear of running out. Of resources being exhausted. Of something vital being used up with no replacement in sight.

  That fear had been bred into him over generations. And now, as a vampire, it was screaming: What happens when the food is gone?

  Time passed. The women built a fire, started smoking the meat.

  Salt was precious in this era—far too expensive for peasants. Smoking was the only way to preserve meat without it. Shrink it, dry it, make it last.

  The clay pot of blood went inside the house.

  Norton stripped off his armor, leaving it in the brush, and moved.

  Vampires were made for this. Night creatures. He could feel his body responding, muscles and joints moving in perfect silence, each step placed with unconscious precision.

  The fire crackled. The women focused on their work. Neither noticed the naked man slip behind the house and vanish through the door.

  The smell hit him immediately. Blood, thick and rich, filling the small space.

  Even overwhelmed by the scent, his new senses could parse it. Separate it. Trace it to its source.

  And that source made something in him... twitch. A hunger he hadn't felt before. Not quite painful, but insistent. Like an itch behind his ribs.

  The room had no light. Poor people didn't have candles. But Norton saw perfectly.

  There. In the corner. The clay pot.

  He stared at it.

  Part of him recoiled. He'd been normal once. Had a life. Had parents. Drinking human blood went against everything that person had believed.

  But that person was dead.

  Burned on a cross. Stabbed through the heart. Dumped in a mass grave.

  This was what was left.

  Between psychological discomfort and starvation, the choice was obvious.

  Norton lifted the pot.

  And drank.