Prelude to the Eternal Night / The World Is Whatever You Draw a Circle Around

Kallen turned her head, and a mother and son walked past them hand in hand, laughing and talking happily. Her gaze softened slightly.

The evening breeze in this city is very pleasant, like the wind that blows when a bird breaks free from its cage and faces the sun.

"I'm sorry, I can't tell you about this, but the vampires did appear because of me, and I will personally end this farce." Kallen ate the squid in small bites, like a squirrel eating chestnuts, her blue eyes unusually resolute. "Lin, thank you for the meal. I will definitely protect the people of this city from further harm. Please don't worry about it for now; you have nothing to do with this."

After she finished speaking, the scene fell into an awkward silence. Lin leaned against the glass window, covering her eyes with her bangs, while Kallen lowered her head and ate her food in silence.

"Call..."

Lin took a deep breath and opened his mouth...

"Hey! Can you couple stop arguing in front of my shop? Are you trying to replace my mannequin by standing in front of it? Get out of my way!"

"..."

Lin and Kallen stared blankly as the shop owner suddenly rushed out of the clothing store, angrily pointing and cursing at them. Kallen, upon hearing this, frantically waved her hands, "Ah, we're not..."

"Get out of here!"

So Lin and Kallen ran away from the clothing store entrance in a disheveled state, surrounded by strange looks from the crowd.

"Hey, Kallen."

The black-haired man standing next to Kallen suddenly spoke up, "Let me help you."

"You? Help me?"

"Yes, actually I have amnesia."

"Amnesia..."

Upon hearing this word, a strange color flickered in Kallen's eyes.

Lin continued, "I don't know who I was in the past, but I think I was a bad person, and probably a wicked one at that. So I want to do something to atone for my past sins, at least to make myself feel better now before I find out the truth."

"Are you serious?" This time, Kallen didn't object decisively. She seemed to care a lot about Lin's amnesia and asked after hesitating for a moment.

"Of course, unless you believe that what you are doing now is a wrong thing."

"Perhaps we should leave the decision to someone else..." Kallen murmured something Lin didn't hear, then her gaze darkened. "Alright, let's meet on the rooftop of that building before noon tomorrow."

"Learn."

"Oh right... Let's eat something after we meet tomorrow..."

"..."

Chapter Eight: Prelude to Eternal Night

"Where did you go! I thought you really ran away!"

"... Nothing much, I just went out for a late-night snack."

"Eating late-night snacks?! I asked you for help, and you're eating late-night snacks? I haven't even eaten yet."

Himeko pressed her two fists firmly against Lin's temples, drilling hard and causing him unbearable pain.

"Alright, did you find anything?" Himeko casually took a bottle of ice-cold beer from the plastic bag she had brought back and opened it.

"It's still during working hours... Is it okay for you to drink beer?"

Don't worry about these little details~

After saying that, she took a big gulp straight from the bottle and let out a satisfying "ga" as she burped.

It's like he suddenly matured by more than ten years, and the fact that he drinks during work hours is also quite similar...

Very similar...

Lin shook his head, no longer wanting to pay attention to those inexplicable emotions.

"Nothing was found." Lin didn't tell Himeko about the vampire and Kallen. He had promised Kallen before he left that he would keep it a secret from everyone else, so he wouldn't tell Himeko about these things.

Moreover, he didn't really want Himeko to know that the so-called vampires were real, and that the situation was far more serious than she knew.

"Sigh, this is really a headache~"

Himeko's flushed face, flushed from the alcohol, resembled a soft apple under the warm light. She shook the bottle and asked Lin, who was standing there dumbfounded, "Want to have a drink together?"

"... Forget it, I don't like drinking."

The next day, Lin arrived at the rooftop before noon, but he did not see the white-haired girl.

He had promised Himeko would come out to investigate, so he came here today.

He walked to the edge of the rooftop, half-squatted down, and looked down at the brightly lit city with gentle eyes.

He doesn't know why, but he just likes these seemingly ordinary scenes. Whether it's laughter or noise, they are all symbols of people's vitality and life.

Last night, he saw Kallen give him the same look, and that's when he had the idea of helping her. On the one hand, he wanted to investigate whether the vampire incident was related to the twisted world. On the other hand, he was a little worried about this foodie girl he had just met.

I always felt that she was the type who would sacrifice herself for something she held dear, and that such a person would die young.

So Lin told her most of the truth to gain her trust, though there were some parts that weren't entirely true... but Kallen was naive and didn't think about it carefully.

It's twelve o'clock.

The bell rang, but Kallen did not appear as promised. Lin's eyes froze instantly, his gaze shifting from the bustling city to the silent area brewing darkness.

He gazed into the distance, and then, at some point, he climbed over the safety railing and jumped from the rooftop.

"Call--"

The blast of wind made it impossible to open one's eyes and difficult to exhale. The distance between the ground and the sky was rapidly increasing, but Lin remained remarkably calm. He grabbed the flagpole with a small flag hanging on it and, like a gymnast using gravity to accelerate, spun 360 degrees on the flagpole before being thrown off.

Leaping across the distance between tall buildings, Lin swiftly, like a predatory spider, grabbed the edge of the windowsill again in mid-air and then leaped to the next place.

Like a fish in water.

He traversed the steel jungle as if it were flat ground, easily leaping over most of the buildings and quickly arriving at the relatively quiet urban area.

"Clatter."

Landing.

The dust swirled around Lin's clothes. He landed without pausing, then quickly stepped into the shadows, his eyes scanning his surroundings relentlessly, not missing a single clue.

To be honest, Lin had some doubts.

The victims of the serial vampire case gave their testimonies, meaning that they were not turned into vampires after being bitten. So why were the vampires he encountered completely different?

Furthermore, Himeko made no discovery of the vampires he encountered who could infect others. Does this mean that... the first infected vampire appeared after his arrival, which was last night?

Regardless, this incident is too strange, and Kallen acts like she can handle it on her own. It's hard for him not to suspect that the current situation is beyond Kallen's control.

Lin didn't rest during the day either, searching everywhere, but still found nothing. Could it be that vampires really only operate at night?

"Bang!"

Gunshot!

Lin heard a gunshot so loud it almost shook the air, and immediately thought of the pistol on Kallen's body that was even more exaggerated than a hand cannon. He turned and rushed toward the direction of the gunshot.

"Stop! I have to get you away from here! Too many people have been hurt because of you!"

"..."

Kallen's voice made Lin quicken his pace again. He crossed an alleyway almost instantly, and soon the sounds of fighting came from not far away.

Sprint!

Lin Meng rushed out of the corner, and before he could catch his breath, a blood-red scythe came straight at him!

"Bass!"

Lin's reflexes reached their peak at that moment. The scythe, churning with bloodlust, slowed its descent, and he himself stopped in his tracks, taking a step back—

"Whoosh—"

The first strike missed, and the opponent immediately turned and fled. Lin had no time to stop him. A blurry shadow remained on his retina before the opponent disappeared around the next corner.

Lin wanted to give chase, but a glimpse out of the corner of his eye made him stop.

The girl with silver-white braids leaned against the wall, clutching her right arm, which had been slashed and was bleeding. Her two pistols lay on the ground. She was panting heavily when she looked up wearily and froze when she saw Lin.

A mist of confusion filled her blue eyes.

Without saying a word, Lin stepped forward and pried open her hand to check the wound.

The injury is quite serious; if it isn't treated quickly, there's a high risk of excessive blood loss.

"I'll take you to the hospital." Lin's judgment made him want to take Kallen to the hospital immediately, but she stopped him.

"No." Kallen pushed Lin away. She covered her deep, bone-revealing wound, stood up from the ground, and swayed violently, almost falling, but she stopped Lin from helping her with her eyes.

"We have to stop her quickly, she's out of control..."

"That person is the instigator? Or rather, the origin of vampires?"

Lin looked in the direction the dark figure had fled.

Kallen's silence confirmed his suspicions. He bent down and picked up the gun from the ground. "I'll go."

"No! Cough cough cough..." Kallen's eyes widened in agitation, and she coughed heavily. "She's lost her mind..."

"She is yours after all..." Lin stopped abruptly halfway through his sentence, as if he had been choked. He stared intently at Kallen's right arm, which she was covering. This action caused Kallen to silently turn her head to the other side.

It wasn't his imagination.

The arm, which was bleeding profusely, stopped bleeding within a minute.

"You are... a vampire."

Lin Liran's gaze fell on the silent girl.

The circled area in Chapter Nine represents the world.

"Sister, are we playing hide-and-seek again today?"

What is the "world"?

A small circle drawn out is the world.

In the past, humans drew a circle around the continents they lived on, and that was the whole world to them.

Later, when humans left their own continents, they drew a circle around the Earth, and the entire Earth became the whole world to them.

Later, humans ventured beyond Earth to explore the vast universe, an endless land with virtually no boundaries. Yet, humans still drew a circle around the limits of their understanding, and thus "world" became "the whole world."

What about my world...?

"Now you can open your eyes and see the world described in those books."

"You are a vampire."

Kallen's extraordinary self-healing ability led Lin to discover the identity he had long suspected.

"..."

Kallen was powerless to refute it, because it was the truth. She didn't have the sharp teeth and claws of a vampire, nor did she have crimson pupils, but she became a "vampire" before anyone else.

"That person is very important to you. She turned you into a vampire, and now she has lost control and is attacking other people everywhere, creating a large number of new vampires." Lin's keen sense of smell and thinking allowed him to deduce the truth in less than a minute.

"She didn't attack too many people." Kallen was the only one who refuted this statement. "Actually, before the day before yesterday, she had already attacked people, but she restrained herself. She drank the blood of some girls without endangering their lives or infecting them. But the night before yesterday, after she drank the blood of a woman, that woman was transformed into that kind of thing."

"..."

"She hasn't attacked anyone these past two days. The two you met were actually secondary infections of that transformed woman." Kallen's guilt was palpable. "I wanted to take her away, but I never expected this to happen. We don't even know the specific reason why transformed vampires appeared. Maybe the bacterial type Honkai Beast inside her went out of control..."

"Bacterial type Honkai Beast?"

Lin heard a familiar word, and his expression became somewhat unnatural.

"Do you know about Honkai? Actually, those tiny creatures that infect people and cause them to have a vampiric urge are bacterial Honkai Beast, and their lives are connected to hers."

Honkai Beast...

The truth of the matter came to light, and after Lin learned that the so-called vampires were actually the work of the Honkai, he had some subtle feelings.

"I brought her here, and I should take her away, but I can't just leave now." Kallen concealed the heartache in her eyes. Her hands, now fully healed, gripped the two guns as she looked in the direction the shadowy figure had gone. "I will take responsibility and kill her."

Kallen is right; the current situation is no longer something that can be easily resolved.

The "original vampire" has created new vampires that are spreading throughout the city. The number of infected people is currently unknown, and she herself has completely lost control. Now, the choice is either to find a way to control her and restore the infected people, or... kill her.