Chapter 1428 (Patreon)

“Is it just me, or does the new Vampire look weird?” I asked, after inspecting our latest creation a little more closely. While Lia’s physical body had changed a little during the initial transformation into a Vampire, I had no idea how much of that change had been due to her previous condition as a Shattered. Her eyes had probably changed the most, though given that the biggest difference between a human and a Shattered was the eyes, that wasn’t a major surprise. Well, if you could call the fiery pits of a Shattered's eyes, they were filled with flames after all, and they didn't really need them to perceive the world. So, calling these flames their eyes was a bit of a stretch.

“And it's still changing,” she agreed, pointing to a few spots, mostly around the mouth and jaw, where the body of the freshly created Vampire kept shifting. Not violently, but rapidly. Well, rapidly for a physical change driven by biology, where an inch of growth over two months is extremely rapid. Here, the change was maybe a millimetre a minute, so rapid, but also not.

The primary change we could see from the outside was that the face became a little wider, but not because the cheeks were swelling up. If anything, it looked as if the flesh of the vampire’s cheeks was slimming, maybe being redistributed or something, but the bones beneath the flesh were shifting outwards. Especially the jaw was widening, likely undergoing the greatest change we could observe so far. 

“Curious,” I mused, gently opening the vampire’s mouth a little, so I could observe the internal changes. As the jaw opened, the teeth shifted with it, some moving further up, as if adding additional incisors. However, the most severe change was in the canine teeth. While Lia’s teeth were larger than normal and she could extend them to some degree, this one's teeth took it a step further. Or maybe a giant leap further, they were growing rapidly and already matching hers, with no sign of stopping. In fact, it looked like some of the shifts in the creature’s jaw were designed to accommodate a set of massive fangs, so it could close its mouth fully. 

“Hey, look,” Lia suddenly interrupted my study of the creature’s jaw and gestured to one of its hands. Or rather, to the fingers and the fingernails in particular, because those were changing, too.

“Feel this,” Lia asked me, taking my hand and guiding it to the finger she was still holding, making me rub and squeeze the digit. It took me a moment to realise what she meant, but as soon as I used my Blood Magic, slightly limited as it was when working on a creature without a beating heart, I realised what she meant. The Vampire’s nails were undergoing a massive change. Right now, they looked just like fingernails, thin, protective plates of keratin, nothing special. But if I was reading the current trajectory correctly, they would soon become elongated, anchor to the bone and essentially grow over the creature’s fingertip, almost like a sheath. Only, instead of serving to protect something beneath the sheath, these nails would be weapons, maybe even lethal ones; it depended on their use. But after a moment of thought, I felt it was more likely these nails would serve to grip and hold prey, maybe help climb, not to rend and tear. They could likely be used like that, but I didn’t think it would be their primary purpose. 

“That’s completely new, isn’t it?” I asked Lia, curious if she had come across something like this before. 

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Say, what does this one’s soul look like? You said part of it moved on, but part of it was captured and, I guess, moved back when the prison shattered? So, what does it look like now?”

“Good question,” I replied, a small grin on my face. Then, I shifted my sight so I could peer past that particular curtain and find out. And what I saw made me blink for a moment, a little surprised and more than slightly horrified. 

“Well, that’s really new,” I admitted. “You remember how I described your Soul?”

“You said it was broken, Shattered, but turning me into a Vampire pulled it back together, but it’s held only due to the bindings you initially wove into my being. Which is why you can’t undo those bindings, not that I mind too much, if I’m being honest,” she replied, giving me a quick, reassuring grin when I flinched at the reminder of my mistake. Well, not a mistake, as the bindings worked exactly as they were supposed to. The issue was that Lia’s place in my heart and mind had changed.

“This one is, well, it’s not really similar, but it kinda is,” I waffled, trying to find the right words. “It’s like this one has one shard, where you have numerous shards, glued together into the shape of a whole Soul. The one jagged shard he has is fairly large, maybe a good quarter of the original if I had to guess, but it’s obviously not enough. No idea how that’s going to play out once the thing wakes up,” I explained, getting an interested look from Lia. 

“We could wait and find out,” she suggested, and I readily nodded. “But maybe we should take our other test subject elsewhere, so we can continue with that one later. Not like he’s going anywhere.” 

“True, give me a moment,” I agreed, quickly placing a temporary marker down. Then I took hold of the unchanged, still-sleeping guy and pulled us both into the Shadows, back to my Tower. Luckily, I had multiple cells prepared here, and no one was missing the guy. At least not yet. 

“Any change?” I asked Lia when I returned, maybe five minutes later, after making sure our newest acquisition was safe and couldn’t come to any harm, whether self-inflicted or due to carelessness. 

“Some,” Lia gestured, and I couldn’t stop my eyes from going wide. The vampire’s face had changed completely into something decidedly inhumane. Its cheeks were stretched taut to cover an impossibly wide jaw, something more at home on a bulldog or something similar, and the mouth was almost as wide as the entire face. The teeth, too, had transformed into something bestial, more at home in the mouth of some prehistoric monster, maybe some sea-creature. It looked, quite frankly, rather disturbing, especially as the teeth matched the claws on its hands and feet. 

“Wow,” I whispered in disbelief. “Now, I really want to know what’s going to happen with this one,” I admitted.

“We should take cover and observe,” I decided after studying the creature a minute longer, and Lia nodded. 

Together, we rapidly made our way over to the cliff these people had been digging into, climbing up with ease before taking up position in a nearby tree. We were now far enough from the vampire to be safely out of range, especially as I used my magic to erase all traces of our passage. 

“Let’s see what’s going to happen,” Lia suggested with a grin, and I decided to take a few extra precautions, adding a layer of concealment or two and making sure we could disappear into the shadows at a moment’s notice. Just in case this was a Revenant situation. 

Without further ado, I reached out and dispelled the magic keeping the Vampire asleep. Then it became a waiting game, as the magic had only kept it unconscious; I had no idea how long it would take for it to wake up. Or what mental state it would be in when it did.

Luckily, we didn’t have to wait long, only about five minutes. Then, the creature started to twitch, first its limbs, then its jaws, the tongue darting out to taste the air in a decidedly reptilian fashion, something I knew I occasionally did myself. Moments later, the creature rolled over before rising to its feet, but not into a bipedal stance as I would have expected, but into something decidedly less human. The thing was now standing on the balls of its feet, the toes curling upwards to keep the claws off the ground, while the arms acted as additional legs, only that here, the knuckles had contact with the ground to protect the claws.

For a second or two, the creature’s head scanned back and forth before it suddenly stopped, its gaze fixed on the direction of the human’s camp. 

Then, it burst into movement, the gait awkward at first, but smoothing out rapidly, covering ground far faster than I would have thought possible for a gait this strange and a creature that weak. 

But reality proved me wrong in more than one way; the Vampire was obviously stronger than I had thought at first glance. It would be interesting to see how much stronger, and the creature’s former comrades had the unlucky job of serving as test dummies.