Three minutes later, only the sound system was still making noise in the once-rowdy bar. The vampires had become nothing but piles of foam, and poor Willis was huddled in a corner, trembling as he prayed that this obviously inhuman creature wouldn't turn his attention to him.
The synthetic venom could dissolve vampires, but it couldn't turn them to ash the way silver weapons or sunlight could. During the fight, vampire blood had splattered all over Blade's face, staining his hands and chest red and making him look even more terrifying.
"Get out of here. And next time, have a clearer idea of who you are. Don't be so quick to believe in your own charm—you're not worth a pretty stranger hitting on." Blade opened the door, checked Willis's neck to make sure he hadn't been bitten, then gave him a blunt warning before stepping aside.
Still shaken, Willis's legs and arms were weak, but he scrambled out of the bar anyway. He silently swore that from now on, he'd spend his free time studying. Girlfriends and all that could go to hell.
Watching it all unfold on the screen, Wei Xiuming picked up his communicator and said to Blade, "Brooks, check the southwest corner. The scanner indicates that part of the building isn't solid. There should be a hidden door or something."
"Understood," Blade replied.
He shook the blood from his hands and headed for the southeast corner. When he knocked on the wall, it gave a hollow sound. The wall was much thinner than the others, so he smashed through it with a punch.
Beyond the wall was a spacious room, decorated in a style completely different from the bar. It was spotless, with none of the colorful lights found outside. Cool light shone down from rows of ceiling fixtures, illuminating the pristine space. Apart from several huge cabinets connected by cables, there was nothing else in the room. The obviously high-tech cabinets gave off a steady mechanical hum, their indicator lights flashing nonstop.
A wave of heat blasted through the hole Blade had made. The temperature felt like it was above sixty degrees Celsius—an ordinary person couldn't stay in there for long.
"A supercomputer matrix?" said one of the technicians, who had been recording data at the computer. Having worked with this sort of equipment, he recognized the cabinets at a glance.
A supercomputer set up just one wall away from a bar where vampires hunted? The two things seemed impossible to connect. Anyone with a lick of sense could tell there was something sinister going on.
Wei Xiuming said, "Leave four people to protect the technical staff. The rest of you, load your weapons and follow me to the scene."
With Whistler, a veteran vampire hunter, on their side, the S.H.I.E.L.D.-backed action team had upgraded all its weapons. Unlike Blade and Whistler, who had previously relied on bullets they melted by hand and a small batch of sharpened throwing knives, the team's silver bullets were produced to standard specifications on a dedicated production line provided by the weapons development department.
Each team member was also equipped with a solar lamp, ultraviolet grenades, and a silver dagger. Even the armor plates in their bulletproof vests had an extra layer of silver alloy.
The team leader selected four members to stay behind and protect the technicians, then led the way out.
Whistler, with his hair and beard as white as snow but still sporting an eight-pack, patted one of the team members who'd been assigned to stay behind. "Young man, give me your gun. You won't need it here."
It looked like Whistler wanted to join the others, but the team member couldn't agree to that. Their internal rules wouldn't allow it.
"Give him the gun," Wei Xiuming said.
After receiving the order, the team member checked that the gun was loaded, then handed it to Whistler and gave the old man all the magazines he was carrying.
Meanwhile, in the room with the supercomputer, Blade found two doors. One led to a larger, brightly lit room. Rows of upright glass panels stood inside, each preserving what appeared to be a fragment of an ancient book, protecting it from further damage through oxidation and decay.
The writing on the fragments was unmistakably vampire script. But just as modern English differed from Middle English, vampire writing had changed over the ages. Even vampires who were several hundred years old couldn't claim to understand these ancient texts. Some couldn't recognize a single character.
The other door led to a cramped, hidden room. A fat man who looked to weigh at least eight hundred pounds was sprawled across a custom-made sofa. More than a dozen monitors surrounded him, all controlled by a wireless keyboard resting on his belly.
The fat man was unmistakably a vampire. His lack of exercise from spending years cooped up in this room might explain his size, but feeding him enough to grow this fat must have taken a vast quantity of human blood. It was easy to imagine how many people had died as a result.
"He's here! He's here!" the fat vampire shrieked, but his hands never stopped tapping at the keyboard. "He's going to kill me!"
On the monitor facing the fat vampire, the upper body of a white man appeared. Blade recognized him at once. "Daikan Fiss, the most powerful of the non-pureblood vampires. He treats humans even more cruelly than the purebloods do."
"Daywalker, looks like you found a way to become a monster. Funny enough, so did I." Fis looked perfectly calm on the monitor. "Pearl, tell him."
Pearl, the fat man, said, "Fis, we spent a great deal of time and money on it. Isn't it a little too generous to tell our enemy so easily?"
Fis replied casually, "It doesn't matter. Even if the famous Daywalker knows what it is, he still won't escape you. Besides, the method lost its value the moment it became known."
"The Book of the Blood God. The thing you saw in the other room—a magical scroll said to have been written by Blood God Madola himself." After a few strange laughs, the fat man, Pearl, slowly explained to Blade, "The ancient language has been lost, so even though Fis was lucky enough to obtain the Book of the Blood God, he couldn't decipher it or draw power from it. But human technology opened the door for us. With special software and a supercomputer, we can translate and decipher it bit by bit, and eventually master its power."
Blade watched the characters flickering across the screen as they were compared. He hadn't received a vampire education, so he couldn't understand what the text said. That was the difference between non-pureblood Blood Clan members and pureblood vampires: the former had been turned from humans later in life, and everything they'd encountered before then had belonged to human civilization. Pureblood vampires, on the other hand, learned human culture as well as vampire writing and culture from childhood.
In name, they were all vampires, and ordinary humans couldn't tell the difference. But the gap between them was there from the start.
"Just now, the Book of the Blood God was fully deciphered. I've already sent the text to Fis. Soon, he'll wield the Blood God's power and rule over the Blood Clan. After that, the entire human world will be his."
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