The Possessed Man Has Completely Lost His Mind (2)

A week since the possession.

Drawing up an estimate on the gutter I'd fallen into did not take long.

Bottom line: I'd been lucky. I'd dodged the worst of it. From the vantage of a twenty-first-century modern, the inconveniences were hardly limited to one or two—but by the standards of this world's lesser vampires, the kind who go to ash at a glimpse of sunlight, I sat respectably high. The old saying held. If you're going to be a slave, be a slave in a great house.

"Kim. Last week's silver nano-coating samples—where are the toxicity results?"

A vampire team leader passing through the hall had stopped to ask.

"Finished at midnight yesterday. Cell necrosis confirmed held under twelve percent. The report's already filed."

"Good. No fooling around. Get it in on time. The higher-ups are in a foul mood these days."

I snapped my hands together and folded at a full ninety degrees. I did not forget to scrape my soul up from the bottom and smile with it.

"Yes! I'll do my very best!"

"Yes, yes."

Only then did the team leader look satisfied. He swaggered off down the corridor, pleased with himself.

Word was he'd been bitten decades ago, and still he preened like filth, when sunlight would burn him dead the same as me. It grated. Nothing to be done about it. In a vampire society where seniority and age are absolute, you survive by at least pretending to grovel.

A few days of grinding through the job, and I'd finished working out where I was rotting.

Korea, for a start. A neighborhood I knew, at that. I was in Seongun City, the new planned city raised between Seoul and Incheon—a research suburb with the feel of Pangyo from my previous life. It was also where the Pentax Bio Korea Branch stood. I was the lab slave nailed into its basement.

More precisely, a man jammed in the crack between two giant clans!

The institute was a deformed thing, the money and the management playing on entirely different sides. The purse strings belonged to the Argentari, who held the world's finance and pharmaceuticals in one fist—capitalist vampires, and I mean that literally, who had been banking silver since ancient Rome and evolved into a multinational big pharma. The ones wearing the site armband and rampaging across the floor, meanwhile, were the self-proclaimed pureblood nobles of the Patricians. Vampires with old-fart instincts to spare had the upper ranks locked down, and they worked pedigreeless lesser vampires like me while calling us mongrels.

Among the dogs and swine, my lot is a little better.

That was thanks to a biochemistry doctorate from a name-brand university. Left to the original course of things, I would have come in on a special hire and lived out my days as an ordinary human wage-slave. Three years ago, though, some vampire bastard hadn't stopped at biting me. He'd made me kin. He burned to death in the sunlight for breaking the rules, and I was inducted, no appeals, into the world of the crimson moon.

Even those pedigree-counting pureblood fossils had apparently found it a waste to execute a doctoral brain. They chose to wring my head instead. Refined blood packs came out like clockwork, and by day I could sleep in a dorm with the sun shut out. They even paid a salary! Not that I'd ever get the chance to spend it. Better than the street vampires rooting through trash cans to hide from the hunters.

The work itself, though, stank from end to end.

"Kim!"

A sharp voice cut the hallway open behind me. A team leader of the Patrician faction came on, shaking a tablet as if it had personally offended him.

"That anti-lycanthrope synaptic blocker I ordered—why is the formulation still in this state? I told you to push the acetylcholine-receptor binding inhibition to at least ninety-five percent!"

"I'm sorry, Chief. I was recalibrating the catalyst ratio for the binding step. I'll have the corrected figures in before tonight's overtime shift ends!"

"Slow as sludge, for a mongrel... save the pretty talk and file it on time! And have the chelate's silver-adsorption test finished by midnight."

"Yes, I'll see to it at once!"

They dressed it up as a synaptic blocker and all the rest, but in plain speech it was a neurotoxin for killing werewolves. The other work was no different. Strip away the jargon and it was a means of healing the silver bullets hunters loved to fire. They called it a pharmaceutical company. What they actually made was weapons, or medicine for vampires, and nothing else.

I seated the reagent tubes in the centrifuge and hit the switch. While the machine droned through its spin, I quietly opened the little notebook hidden at the corner of the bench, and the scrawl I'd dashed off—an old university habit—came up to meet me.

Most of the people here know only Latin, or only English. Not that reading it would help. I'd written it in a hand like a chicken in a fit, and no one could parse it. Look all they liked: I'd packed the pages with forum memes. They'd never decode a line.

First, check the timeline again.

Calendar in one eye and notebook in the other, I carefully matched the plot of Bloodpepper Chronicle against the present. It was around chapter 100, when the hunter protagonist was only just beginning to make a name. There was still a long stretch of grace before the world went down under nuclear fire.

And above all else—

The True Progenitor young lady is alive!

The blonde True Progenitor girl who had been drawn and quartered in a late-story screwjob was, right about now, probably drinking tea in a castle back in the old country. A line of the novel's dialogue surfaced without warning.

It might be nearly time for her to come to Korea, too. Could I meet her? She was Patrician, yes, but mild by nature, and a comparatively decent person...

I shook my head. This was no time to play fanfiction with feelings that did me no good. The research was jammed in more places than one. Get it together, Kim!

...Shit. This is nowhere near as easy as I thought.

While I carried out the orders from above, I'd been stealing scraps of time for research of my own. The baseless confidence I'd held on the first day of the possession had shriveled fast. Developing a treatment had slammed into an enormous wall from the very start. I'd wrung my head and run the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠numbers for a week, and there was no answer.

Why?

The trouble bolted onto a vampire's body was a double lock with its tail in its mouth, an ouroboros of a snare. Its name was the positive feedback loop. One strengthened the other, a vicious structure in which each endlessly restored each—a hydra's head that grew ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠back however you cut it. Fail to finish both at once, and you were fucked.

Press the biological mutation down with pharmacology, and the sorcery stayed behind to twist the cells all over again. Strip the sorcery away, and the monster the body had become wrote the sorcerous curse back in at the level of the genes. The outrageous homeostasis and regeneration peculiar to vampires only made the headache worse.

So it wasn't only idiots living in this world.

I repented my arrogance down to the bone. Thinking back, there had been others in this novel who threw themselves at lifting the curse. Alchemists, Vatican priests, the secret organs of states, vampire sorcerers of the occult schools. Not everyone had said yes to this blood-reeking world of the crimson moon.

They had all cried out the same thing.

They charged in, and the inescapable problem of resistance blew up in their faces. The dose climbed and climbed while the effect nosedived, until the body rejected the drug and they ended as lumps of charcoal under the sun.

I couldn't smash this forced binding on the spot. I had nothing but scientific knowledge. Of magic or sorcery, I knew only what was in the setting bible. This institute researched vampires and werebeasts above all, so there were people on the sorcery side—but they were another department, and I had no particular acquaintance with them. How was I supposed to pitch them this plan?

But.

There's a gap!

Everything else I would have to crack together with the sorcery, but taste alone was the exception. This one, at least, I could weaken by ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠going around the curse. The analysis said vampire genes forcibly switched off the taste sensors on the tongue and seized the nerves of the brain so they answered to nothing but the smell of blood. Which meant that even without lifting the curse on the soul, if I only bored a bypass through the tongue, the taste of food could come back.

Of course I couldn't give up blood entirely. That belonged to the curse. Even so, bringing the pleasure of eating back to life was worth something, wasn't it?

"All right! Let's go!"

I started the stolen-time research again.

There was hope!

"Ah, shit...."

Two days after I changed course, a different problem blew up.

"Haa... to verify this, I'd need a molecular-combination algorithm...."

Our institute had a genuinely superb modern AI, Gamma Band. Protein-structure analysis, prediction, recombination—technology far too flashy for a company staffed by vampire boomers. But perhaps the API bill had stung, because a high-performance compute clearance was opened only a crack, and only barely, to a mongrel senior researcher of no account like me.

I also couldn't march up to a superior and announce, cold, that I needed an analysis authorized so I could taste kimchi stew. A thick-skulled vampire aged for decades would slap a disciplinary action on me the moment he heard it.

"No clearance, no taste, and dead from the waist down...."

Ah, what a miserable world.

I knocked my forehead against the desk. Tap, tap.

The lab door banged open, and a musty chill poured in. The team leader.

"Shift change. All of you, back up your data and wrap it up!"

Vampires don't know fatigue. Keep the sun off them and they only need to sleep once every two or three days. The old-fart vampires abused that fact with real talent. Let them get bored and they flopped over asleep in the basement dark, while mongrels like me drew fourteen hours a day on a two-shift wheel.

Fourteen hours. Did these bastards think a day had twenty-eight in it? Feudalists, the lot of them, who'd thrown the fifty-two-hour week and the night differential to the dogs.

Brother Marx. Brother Engels. Help me!

Crying inwardly for socialism, I pushed through the break-room door. At the corner table beside the vending machine, a familiar middle-aged man caught my eye.

What's he doing?

A genial Korean man in his early fifties was at some strange cookery. He tore a blood pouch out of the refrigerator, poured it into a tumbler, then produced a green soda water, dumped it in with a glug, and stirred. Dark crimson and carbonation folded together, and red foam came seething up.

"...Senior Park?"

"Ah, Senior Researcher Kim? You startled me! You might say a word before you come walking up."

Principal Researcher Park Jinseok. My senior.

Bitten five years back and turned into a mongrel vampire, wasn't he.

Korean, same as me, and easygoing enough that we'd always understood each other reasonably well, as I remembered. But what in the world was he doing?

"Why are you mixing soda water into blood? It doesn't even taste like anything."

Principal Researcher Park coughed, a little sheepish, and took a sip from the tumbler.

"Taste, no. Still, you get the fizz popping on the tongue. Care for a try? Tastes like beer. Honest."

"Pardon?"

Quite the palate. He was offering it with a smile, so I could hardly refuse outright, and I drank. The moment a mouthful went down—

"Oh."

Unexpectedly decent. The tingle across my tongue laid on a new sort of pleasure.

"Well? Not bad, is it?"

"More drinkable than I expected?"

Senior Park seemed delighted by the reaction and laughed, soft and warm.

"We can't feel taste, but carbonation is pain all the way through, isn't it? So it isn't taste, but something like taste comes across. Have it this way now and then and it's quite all right. Ah! Will you try this one as well?"

Without any warning, a black bottle came leaping out of the refrigerator.

"Spicy chicken sauce?"

"Capsaicin's a pain sense too, I hear! Drink!"

"Just a—whoa!"

A whole new world. There'd been a method like this?

"How long have you been drinking it this way?"

"Let me see. About three years ago?"

Senior Park's face darkened a little.

"Do it like this and it feels like my human days. I even get to thinking of the draft beer I used to drink after work. Just putting a mood on... ah, don't you mind it. Only a private feeling."

The old man smiled again, as if to ask since when he'd been gloomy. He knew that once a foot was set in this world, it did not come back out.

I turned the subject.

"Speaking of which, did you run the full fourteen again today?"

"Don't get me started. Drink a little blood and you don't tire, so they run us like machines. They've made up their minds to wring every last drop!"

"I'm telling you, someone ought to march this straight to the Ministry of Employment and Labor. Honestly, these medieval bloodsuckers probably don't even know what the Labor Standards Act is."

At my grumbling, Principal Researcher Park broke into a chuckle.

"Hahaha! Too right! We ought ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to stick it to them!"

"Heh heh."

Ah. Only now did something in my chest ease.