Chapter 7: One Who Understands the Three Worlds (7)
Chapter 7: One Who Understands the Three Worlds (7)
"You came again!"
Eugene walked in, waving his hand.
"You keep coming back without getting tired of it."
Grrrrowl.
Before the displeased response could even finish, the girl's empty stomach answered first.
"Still planning to be stubborn? Aren't you hungry?"
"I don't need it."
The time was evening. He had given them food around noon before, but this time he brought it in the evening to maximize their hunger.
By the third delivery, the mother and daughter knew the routine and were already kneeling in front of the bars.
Perhaps they had regained some composure, because their usual bearing was beginning to show. Mother and daughter knelt with disciplined, dignified posture—not like the cowering submission of the weak.
"It seems you usually attend to that young lady the same way, don't you?"
"That is correct, my lord."
The mother, Lara, spoke.
One could gauge a master's standing just by the attitude of those who served them. Even if she was a maid, if she was always attended to with such formality, the girl could not be from a minor house.
"You must be hungry, so go on and eat."
"Thank you, my lord."
The mother, Lara, received the food respectfully.
"Thank you, Sir Knight."
The daughter, Rani, answered with a smile.
"Did I ever say I was a knight?"
"You are not a priest and you appear strong, yet you are merciful, so are you not a knight?"
Simple as it was, the three-step logic was hard to fault.
"It's true that I am a knight."
"My lord, our child is still young..."
"She hasn't done anything wrong. Why are you acting like this?"
He soothed the needlessly nervous mother, Lara, and stepped back.
As he unwrapped the clean leaf packaging, a fragrant yet slightly pungent smell wafted out from within.
"Wow!"
Rani let out a voice of admiration.
"Today it's a special meal."
He had split a freshly baked oval loaf lengthwise and stuffed it with mild goat cheese, vegetables, and roasted rabbit.
The sauce was ketchup—or close enough. He had simmered tomatoes with rock salt, mushrooms, wild honey, and vinegar until the result was tangy and sweet.
"It's so, so delicious, Sir Knight!"
Rani expressed her appreciation with a happy face, but Lara kept her eyes on her mistress's mood and chewed quietly. Yet Lara's face was also very bright.
"That's food I've never seen before. What do you call it?"
The girl asked.
"A hot dog. Though I've adapted it to the circumstances here."
"I've never heard of it."
The girl also seemed quite interested.
"Want to try some? There's some for you too."
"I refuse."
"You really are stubborn."
"It is not stubbornness, it is pride."
"Well, I can see you have formidable willpower."
If Eugene himself had been in that position, he would have gobbled it down whether out of hunger or curiosity.
GRRRRROWL!
Apparently she had become too hungry to be embarrassed by the loud, frequent complaints of her stomach.
"Anyway, I didn't expect much. Instead, I brought something else."
Eugene rose from his chair and stood in front of the iron bars.
"My lord, if you have something for the young lady, please give it to me."
"I understand you're caught in the middle and having a hard time, but I have to deliver this one myself. Step aside."
"Yes."
Lara withdrew with her head bowed.
"You said you'd give it to me directly. Do you have the key?"
The girl asked.
"Of course not. You're a valuable prisoner meant for an important event. Why would they give a mere cleaner the key?"
"Then give it up. No matter what you take out, you cannot shake my resolve. I will not come to you on my own two feet."
The girl was, as always, leaning her back against the wall. She was far from the bars.
"Being caught by the curs of the Orthodox Church is humiliation enough. I will starve to death rather than cling to life on pity."
"If you say that, what does it make those two?"
"Lara and her daughter are excellent servants. It is simply that the duty they must bear is different from mine. I did not insult them."
At those words, mother and daughter bowed their heads deeply and respectfully.
Priest, knight, noble.
Each of them had a firm logical system of their own, and they held not a shred of doubt in what they believed to be right.
"Let's see about that."
Eugene grabbed the two bars directly in front of him. They were thick and set close together.
"What are you trying to..."
The girl's face, which had been consistently cold, was overtaken by shock for the first time.
Creeeak.
The thick iron bar simply bent and pressed against the bar beside it.
Lara, too, cradled her daughter and stared with eyes of disbelief.
Having displayed his monstrous strength, Eugene leaned his upper body into the gap that had been created, looking perfectly unfazed.
Thud!
"Ah. It seems I don't fit."
Even though he had pushed two iron bars apart, his physique was so robust that his torso got stuck.
He stepped back and gripped the bars that were now joined in two rows. His hands were as large as his build, so he could easily grasp two at a time.
CREEEEAK!
As he applied force, a total of four iron bars were pushed to the sides.
Ping!
He saw one metal pin fixed in the ceiling pop out and stopped applying force. The space created was already sufficient.
"By the Shinjo."
Watching Eugene enter through the gap, Lara closed her eyes and murmured.
"Do you believe in a god too?"
"Pardon?"
Lara, who had questioned back with a blank face, was startled in alarm.
"Oh, yes! We do believe! But Shinjo is not a god—only a great being comparable to one."
She answered, flustered. She had been respectful before, but her attitude seemed to have been elevated even further.
Rani, held in her mother's arms, looked up with sparkling eyes. As if she were seeing a hero from the myths her grandmother used to tell her.
Eugene stopped before the girl, knelt on one knee, and drew a cup from inside his robe.
"If you're thinking of tempting me with wine, give it up."
"I intend to offer you blood. I thought that might tempt you."
"Are you serious?!"
The girl looked at Eugene with shaken eyes.
"You would give me your blood?"
She grew excited, as if her consistently frigid demeanor until now had been a lie.
"Why? Do you want to drink it?"
"To refuse the blood of a knight as strong and merciful as you is not being proud; it is being stupid."
It seemed the key to moving the noble girl's heart was not giving her food like with Lara and her daughter, but displaying monstrous strength.
"I'm sorry, but I have no intention of doing that."
The girl's face became visibly disappointed.
His teacher had told him that high-ranking vampires could even wield magic through bloodsucking.
Even if she was a dhampir, only half, a noble was still a noble. He had no way of knowing what problems might arise if he gave her his own blood.
"Then whose blood do you intend to give?"
"How about this?"
Eugene pulled a field mouse from inside his clothes. Homi had caught it in a trap, and its plump body promised plenty of blood.
"..."
The girl's face, which had just shown good will, stiffened hard.
"It's not a dead mouse. It's a fresh one, put to sleep with medicine. It's been washed clean, so it won't smell foul either."
"Do you mean to insult me! How dare you thrust a lowly creature that crawls through the gutters at a noble aristocrat!"
Despite starving, she somehow found enough strength to shout.
"Calm down. I'm not trying to give it to you just like this."
Chopping and dressing vegetables into a salad was cooking. Throwing raw vegetables at someone would obviously be insulting.
He had no intention of telling her to simply suck the blood from a field mouse and drink it.
But the furious girl did not answer. The goodwill he had painstakingly built up had apparently vanished in an instant.
Eugene drew a dagger from his chest. It was a ceremonial blade used in the rite of offering a young lamb on monastery feast days.
Slash!
A flash of light streaked through the dark underground.
The mouse's head fell and fresh blood poured out.
"Oh!"
Lara, who had often cut meat in the kitchen, marveled at the clean cross-section.
It might not seem like much, but cleanly bisecting such a small, squishy thing held in one hand was difficult even for a seasoned butcher.
Drip, drip, drip.
The crimson spring filled the cup.
As she watched the twitching feet of the mouse held upside down, the girl's ire rose further.
"The value of cooking lies in ingredients, yes, but skill and sincerity matter even more. Even easily obtained fish or eggs can increase in value tenfold or a hundredfold when touched by a master's hand."
He thought of the omakase craze back in Korea. He had even heard of an elite Chinese dish that required simmering a chicken for nearly a month.
"What nonsense is that? Fish are fish and eggs are eggs. The dignity of a dish is determined by its ingredients!"
The girl spoke viciously.
"Well, perhaps it is, here."
It was a world whose food culture lagged far behind Earth's.
"I'll say it again: I have absolutely no intention of insulting you. It was only because I could capture something alive immediately, something with a lot of blood and small enough to smuggle in, and that was a mouse."
The girl turned her head sharply. This much of an excuse seemed insufficient to quell her fury.
Having finished collecting the blood, Eugene held the cup in both hands. He stirred the legacy of his mother flowing in his veins — the witch's power — to a boil.
-The other side of the world is full of mystery. It is a fearful space unreachable while maintaining human body and mind.
He remembered the words he had heard in his mother's warm embrace as a child.
Ordinary mothers told their young children lullabies or fairy tales, but Eugene's mother was a witch.
She would whisper secret and mysterious knowledge to him.
-To fear it but not flee from it, to revere it but keep your distance. If you do so, the world will repay you with its mysteries. That is why we can have a freer and deeper vision than the narrow-minded servants of god.
But would Eugene's mother have known?
That her son was a soul who had passed through the deepest reaches of that fearful, mysterious place.
A great witch who had even cured leprosy.
A saint said to have directly communed with god.
A legendary mage from myth who summoned an oasis in the desert.
That he was one who had observed the other side of the world more clearly than any of them.
Eugene recalled the image of the abbot blessing water to transform it into holy water.
He now imitated that act. But instead of devotion to a god, he infused it with a different will.
"In nomine. Patris."
A single short phrase changed everything in this space.
The girl who had turned her head away in mortification stared at Eugene, her eyes widening.
"Et Filii. Et Spiritus."
Every time his lips moved, the stench of the underground dungeon was chased away. Like petty spirits before the radiance of the divine.
"Sancti. Yemenn."
The cold noble girl had shown a startled face three times today.
First, in awe of Eugene's supernatural power.
Next, from rage at him producing a field mouse.
"In nomine. Infernum."
Now, from the rapture of the fragrance wafting from the cup.
"Et amissa animabus."
The cup held in the praying Eugene's hands.
The blood within it was being imbued with an indescribable power.
It was not like the grace of god displayed by renowned bishops.
It was far denser, darker, and sweeter than that.
Wriggle.
A worm the size of a pinky nail crawled out from the cup.
Wriggle, wriggle.
A second and a third worm crawled out and dropped to the floor. The parasites contained in the mouse's blood had been swept up by the dark blessing.
A demonic energy possessed the tiny parasites, and they were reborn as demon beasts.
As if awed by Eugene reciting the dark sacrament, the worms fled into the sewage-dripping drain.
They had no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no anus. For they were creatures that should not exist in the first place.
Left alone, they would be unable to harm the world and simply starve to death.
Gulp.
The girl could not take her eyes off the cup Eugene held.
Purified by the dark benediction, it tempted the girl like the blood of a god. Its fragrance was so intoxicating it seemed to steep her nose, lungs, brain, and even her soul as it passed.
"Take it while it's fresh."
Eugene held out the cup.
'May I accept such a precious thing?'
She did not even think to receive it with her filthy hands; instead, the girl simply leaned her face forward.
"Haaah."
Her parched lips parted to reveal snow-white fangs. A long, red tongue extended between them.
It was an excessively bewitching figure for a girl in her late teens. A dhampir was a dhampir, after all.
Drip.
As Eugene delicately tilted the cup, a single drop fell onto the tip of the girl's tongue.
Her hollow eyes quivered and her nostrils flared cutely. Her small, grimy bare feet curled up tightly.
As Eugene extended the cup until it touched her chest, she accepted it as if it were a holy relic.
Gulp, gulp.
She drank as if she could not afford to spill a single drop. Including the sleeping draught it contained.
The gaze that had once scorned it as the blood of vermin was long gone.
"A success."
Looking beside him, he saw the mother and daughter were already asleep, leaning on each other amicably.
Clatter!
From behind him, he heard the sound of a cup dropping as well.
'They did say that to vampires and dhampirs, blood has an intoxicating effect like alcohol.'
The girl who had been sitting propped up with a dazed face closed her eyes and slowly toppled to the side.
Originally, hunger brought sleep easily. Starving as she was, tasting the sleeping draught and the supreme blood had knocked her consciousness out in an instant.
He touched a few bricks leading to the secret passage, and soon a small entrance appeared.
"Good."
Smiling with satisfaction, Eugene entered.
Meanwhile, Homi discovered something strange atop an oak tree.
She could see something wriggling and squirming on the eastern horizon of the village.
Rustle!
Homi immediately climbed down from the tree.
In this era, the moment one left civilization, they faced countless dangers. From mundane things like wild dogs or wolves to monsters of all sizes, bandits, deserters, and rogue knights.
Even merchants commanding mercenaries refrained from nighttime travel; there was no way an ordinary person would wander around at night.
Homi instantly recalled the dhampir prisoners Eugene had told her about.
Following the warning of her instincts, she ran to the hut.
She grabbed the sword Eugene had left behind, the money she had saved up, the hemostatic agent and bandages, and the emergency kit containing a painkiller powder.
There was much she wanted to take, but for now, rushing to her master's side was the priority.
Homi climbed the oak tree again and observed. Now she could somewhat clearly see those approaching the village.
A well-armed band of cavalry was riding toward the village.