The Laboratory Assistant (5)
"...This should be far enough. Thank you for escorting me."
Seowoo realized in his hazy state that he had finally reached the dorm and spoke to the attendants.
Despite their lack of eyes, they still felt a revulsion at allowing people inside the dorm.
After all, humans were also animals in their territory, and Suyeon might sense their presence and approach...
There was no reason not to take precautions.
"..."
"..."
Fortunately, the two attendants nodded a few times and quietly left without questioning him.
Seowoo could only enter the dorm after confirming that they had vanished from sight.
"Quickly... quickly..."
His face was deathly pale and his lips were parched, throbbing with pain.
The desperation that seeped from his urgency was directed straight at the fridge.
"Haup...!"
Already drenched in sweat, he roughly unbuttoned his shirt.
With a clinking sound, several buttons rolled across the floor.
Despite the pain that chilled his bones, he paused for a moment as if pondering something, then slapped his own cheeks with both hands.
Slap!
Seowoo gripped his fading consciousness and flung open the fridge.
A faint fishy scent drifted over.
From the fridge filled with capsules, samples, and blood packs, he skillfully picked out one capsule that had been stored earlier.
A blood pack mixed with human experimental subject and lower vampire blood in a 9:1 ratio.
Although the concentration was light, the effect was definite, as it was primarily the material used for the serum in mutation experiments.
A dry lump went down his throat.
"...Please."
With a plea filled with desperation, Seowoo gulped down the blood pack, ignoring Lucia's warning.
Gulp.
Gulp.
Every time his Adam's apple moved up and down, the thick swallow moistened his esophagus.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds passed.
"Ugh! Uuugh...!"
A rebound surged up at once.
Pain constricting his chest and scorching his entire body like fire raced through him.
Ingestion of vampire blood was a cautionary note and taboo that humans in Nectar heard endlessly.
The great medicine caused organ necrosis and bleeding from the seven orifices the moment it broke down into nutrients in the body.
Their blood was an extreme poison distributed among the humans in Nectar as a means of suicide.
If the experimental subjects who had passed through Seowoo's hands had seen him now, they would have cursed him as a murderer.
He might have been blamed for dying so easily.
If he had been a normal human.
"Hau..."
Pain subsided as he crossed the boundary of death.
At the same time, the wounds that chilled to the bone healed magically in an instant.
The color returned to his lips, and the waste in his body was excreted like sweat.
His red-tinted vision and noticeably lengthened fangs added a foreign sensation in his mouth.
Seowoo's appearance was unmistakably that of a vampire.
"...Has it become a bit faster than last time?"
In Seowoo's self-mutter, there was a familiarity as if he had done this for the first time.
The same appearance as the beings he hated and despised.
Did having the same power mean it was just luck?
No.
He didn't think so.
He could leap dozens of meters at once, recover from all wounds instantly, and easily crush a rock with his grip.
To human eyes, he was just a monster that craved blood.
But he wouldn't deny that it helped his survival.
Hoping he wouldn't need to use his power as much as possible, he lay down on the bed.
"Just 5 minutes. Just lie down for 5 minutes..."
After suffering hard all day, Seowoo fell into a deep sleep with his body and mind exhausted.
***
Why did so many humans brought to Nectar die, excluding experimental subjects?
Disobeying orders?
Pranks disguised as accidental accidents?
Suicide?
None of those. It was 'experiment input'.
On the surface, it was a very simple task of placing the vampire's serum on the experimental subject.
And the brutal truth behind it.
Being splashed with blood next to the experimental subject who died from side effects.
Becoming prey for the rampaging experimental subject.
Among various reasons, Seowoo was the former.
By the time of the first year.
The day when the experimental subject who showed unusually rapid side effects like yesterday exploded at a speed that made expectations laugh, getting blood on him.
"Hah...! Hah...!"
He barely covered his nose and mouth, but the blood that splashed roughly everywhere squeezed between his lips.
Was it because he was so startled?
The almost simultaneous swallowing of saliva mixed with blood that had a unique metallic taste.
"Spit! Ptoo! Please! Please...!"
Seowoo only spat saliva repeatedly along with retching, without thinking about the gaze from beyond the lab partition.
Even then, Lucia, who was in charge of the small intestine, didn't specifically stop him while seeing him struggling to survive.
Compassion? Or caprice?
If it was her personality that he knew, she would have ordered him to be thrown away without any emotion in front of his eyes.
But, strangely, no change occurred in Seowoo.
"Was it a misunderstanding...?"
Sweat dripped from his thoroughly soaked hair.
At this point, more than ten minutes had passed, and there were no signs of mutation.
Creak.
The door of the lab opened, and Lucia appeared.
"Has the fuss ended?"
A sense of contempt seeped from the way she treated Seowoo.
It couldn't be helped because from her perspective, it looked like he was alone in his misunderstanding and flailing.
It was the fourth time he was doing this, when the reaction should come out in a few seconds to a minute.
"Ah...! That... I'm sorry..."
While relief came, no small amount of shame spread across his face.
Unable to meet eyes, his face like a ripe red bean couldn't hide his helplessness.
"You look like a rat that fell into water today. Push the remaining schedule to tomorrow and go home."
"...Thank you."
Lucia, frowning her brows because of the body odor, opened her mouth.
Seowoo just wanted to escape this situation right away.
Even at this point, he had no doubt about what would happen next.
Before he arrived at the dorm.
"Cough! Kuck...! Why suddenly...!"
At the moment he tried to take off his outer clothes to wash his body, convulsions covered his whole body.
His muscles swelled grotesquely as if they would burst at any moment, like a mutated subject that failed the experiment, and he bled from all his facial features.
"Kuuugh... Kuck...!"
Seowoo collapsed on the floor of the dorm, retching the surging blood.
His nosebleed-filled nostrils intermittently bubbled due to breathing, and his blood-stained eyes flowed with thin blood mixed with tears.
How could he survive?
How could he not die?
Ironically, these thoughts were erased from his mind at the moment pain flooded in.
The last moments of countless experimental subjects that flashed like a stroboscope.
The desolate gaze they sent from the end of life came to mind.
Empty and futile.
The despair of not being able to catch them despite wanting to live was only now finally understandable.
"Kuk... Kuk..."
His hand reached up desperately to touch it, as if seeing a hallucination.
But it couldn't even rise much and fell limply.
Seowoo's heart squeezed out its last hard breath and took a rest after 25 years.
The stopped pulse or unfocused eyes inevitably told that he had already died from the world.
Instead of freedom, survival.
Instead of rebellion, resignation.
Unlike his appearance in Nectar, Yoon Seowoo, born as a destitute orphan, had a tenacious part in survival that could be called pathological.
Because he was alone, he had to become toxic.
Because he was alone, he had to become strong.
He remembers the pain of the past days.
"Hey, Seowoo has no parents."
"I will apologize on his behalf. Since he's an orphan without parents, he couldn't learn properly..."
"Hey, you bastard! Bring your dad! What? He's not there? Then bring your mom! Mom doesn't exist either? Tsk, that's why kids raised without parents."
He doesn't forget the days he lived tormented by various humiliations and contempt.
Sometimes he stole tears in the school bathroom.
Some days, the homeroom teacher instead of apologizing for the fist he swung when he couldn't endure the humiliation.
On some days, he ran away with rebellious spirit and faced the police in a three-way confrontation.
His personality, honed and worn down, became sharper with each passing year.
But like Helen Keller waiting and patiently taught by Anne Sullivan.
The orphanage director who silently watched by his side corrected his deviant personality with great effort.
Only one thing.
Excluding the flower of 'survival' and 'success' born from contempt, oppression, and humiliation.
The life of being eliminated in competition meant death.
An impala whose neck was torn by a lion's fangs.
A caterpillar that doesn't hesitate to cannibalize its own kind for survival.
The president of a loan shark company that sucks human blood with absurd usury in the blind spot of the law.
This was a realm of instinct that didn't even require teaching, and the truth of the world beyond the species of life.
And 'success' was legitimate violence that could be swung in society.
The given environment.
Talent or innate ability was not needed.
What was needed was only a firm will.
"...Cough! Kelok! Kelok!"
Seowoo's eyes, which had lost vitality, opened wide.
With his pupils shrinking instantly, rough breath burst out.
The world that had lost light in the bright light filling the darkened vision regained its original colors.
The last memory was always himself writhing in pain from side effects and dying suddenly.
But what was this appearance now?
Perhaps because his brain activity had stopped for a moment.
Seowoo belatedly realized that his grotesquely swollen body had returned to normal.
His whole body was covered with fresh bruises as if beaten with a club, but his skin immediately regained its original color before his eyes.
"This is... Ugh!"
After muttering to himself, he bit his cheek.
The faint metallic taste lingered for a moment.
Before he could touch the wound with his tongue, the tingling sensation disappeared.
And the subtle foreign sensation in his mouth.
"Could it be...?"
Seowoo immediately ran to the sink, and he couldn't help but be startled.
After all, his appearance wasn't reflected in the mirror.
Hastily, he took out the Demonic Mirror for vampires from the drawer and checked his appearance in it.
His appearance reflected without fail.
Unlike a normal mirror, the Demonic Mirror didn't reflect human appearances but was a kind of artifact that reflected only vampires.
He didn't know that the Demonic Mirror he carried around to please the superiors would help.
But one thing was clear from this.
"Shit."
He had become the only successful experiment in Nectar.