Inhuman

Adam forced himself to endure the discomfort as he entered the district, practically picking his way across the ground.

Though it was all piled-up excrement, there was still a difference between dry and wet.

Once inside the slums, tracking became much harder. The stench was overwhelming. Trying to desperately pick out the faint scent of a potion here made Adam feel as though his nose was about to fail.

Fortunately, Adam was not entirely without clues. He had remembered several of that person's traits, especially when the person had washed his hands.

People of this era considered water unclean. They rarely washed their hands and seldom drank water. Those with means drank wine to replenish themselves; those without drank beer, or else various soups.

There were many reasons for this, one of the main ones being public sanitation.

Aside from a few wells, the water here was not particularly clean. Nor had people of this era developed the habit of boiling water before drinking it. If they truly drank raw water, a serious illness was almost guaranteed.

Once the notion that water was unclean took hold, most people became unwilling even to wash their hands. Under normal circumstances, clean hands were a rare sight.

Although no one in the Boku Family said much about Adam's frequent washing, they still considered it something of an odd habit.

"I can only say I'm still not ruthless enough..." Adam mocked himself a little. True ruthlessness was not merely directed at others; one had to be ruthless toward oneself as well.

He could calmly eat the holy bread to avoid arousing suspicion, enduring the pain so that he would not reveal any flaw from eating it before the head priest. Yet he still could not accept becoming as though he had fallen into a cesspit, his entire body reeking unbearably.

Most church priests, on the other hand, kept themselves clean. They used holy water.

There were several kinds of holy water. The simplest kind was purified water drawn from the well beneath the church Clock Tower. The bells of the Holy Sound Church were perhaps among the few items in the Church connected to the supernatural, so this water carried a faint trace of holy power.

The water worshippers used for rituals such as washing their hands was this kind of holy water.

When that Otherkind worshipper had washed his hands, he had picked a wooden splinter and some wood shavings from beneath his nails. The splinter was fresh, not something that looked as though it had come from brushing against a wooden object.

Generally speaking, someone with that many splinters and shavings beneath their fingernails was either a carpenter or a lumberjack.

Adam leaned toward the latter, because mud streaked with moss clung to the edges of the man's shoes. Of course, all of this was only speculation.

Along the way, Adam did not dare fully unleash his sense of smell. He moved toward the side of the slums nearest the forest, and after silently wandering around several times, he finally found a new clue.

It was not a smell, but a sound.

In the stillness of the night, Adam heard a sound coming from an isolated little wooden house near the forest. It was like a crazed beast wanting to howl at the top of its lungs, yet too frightened to truly make a sound, forced to suppress its emotions until all it could do was growl.

With his senses expanded, Adam felt as though the person inside was a powder keg ready to explode at the slightest spark. As he gradually drew nearer, he finally heard what the man was muttering.

"Blood... blood..." The answer made Adam frown. As far as he knew, werewolves had no particular craving for unusual food. Among most Otherkind, only vampires and their kind had an exceptional fondness for blood.

True vampires were beings created when sorcerers studied werewolves and used a certain ritual to transform themselves.

But there was no need to think about it. The one inside was definitely not a true vampire.

Some werewolves could spread wolf venom through bites, transforming ordinary people into impure-blooded werewolves. Vampires created through werewolf transformation seemed to possess a similar ability, capable of turning ordinary people into impure vampires by some means. They could also be called Blood Slaves.

There was nothing particularly strange about this Otherkind being a vampire. The question was how he had become a Blood Slave.

"Could a true vampire have once appeared in Roa? Or was this person transformed elsewhere and fled to Roa on his own?" Adam could not help thinking.

Adam was not like the people in common rumors, who wanted to kill a vampire the moment they saw one. To Adam, there was no benefit in that. He generally did not do things that brought him no benefit.

But Adam had no choice but to consider what kind of threat it would pose to him if that true vampire was still in Roa.

A true vampire was bound to be a sorcerer, and one who had deeply studied werewolves at that. Adam would not hate vampires for no reason, but he could not guarantee that a vampire would not suddenly decide to capture him for experiments.

"The situation in Roa is getting more and more complicated." Adam frowned, but still decided to proceed according to plan.

He silently arrived before the door, but did not intend to enter. Instead, he entered a perceptive state and began sensing everything around him from every direction.

The Blood Slave inside had fallen into an endless craving for blood. It was his feeding instinct. At that moment, the only thing capable of suppressing that instinct was another instinct: the instinct to survive.

Just as Adam had analyzed, Adel had been scared out of his wits. Ever since the witch doctor had been captured and tied to the stake, he had sunk into profound terror.

Fear had even driven him to do some things that could only be called foolish.

Adam did not disturb the Blood Slave in that state. Instead, he quietly went to one side of the house and used his claws to pry open the cellar lock.

Covering his nose and mouth, Adam gradually descended into the cellar. Though his werewolf form gave him dim vision, the cellar was too dark to see clearly. Following the scent of lamp oil, he lit the oil lamp, and the entire cellar came into view.

Though he had expected it, Adam still felt a slight discomfort at the miserable sight in the basement.

Several wooden posts supported the cellar, and there were wooden cabinets containing bottles, some already empty and others still holding a little liquid.

Unsurprisingly, those were the potions.

But the potions were not what drew the eye most. That was a foul-smelling, twisted, deformed corpse.

From the shackles, ropes, marks carved into the posts, and excrement piled in the corner, it was not difficult to infer what had happened here.

Though vampires and Blood Slaves did not suffer from the werewolves' tendency to go mad under the moon, they had problems of their own—an unhealthy craving for blood.

In Roa, even in the slums, frequent attacks where people were drained of blood would attract the investigation of Church priests. In contrast, one person going missing was unlikely to draw the Church's attention, because disappearances were far too common in the slums.

Imprisoning someone in a cellar as a stable source of blood was not surprising for a cautious Blood Slave.

"Did fear produce an uncontrollable rage?" Adam silently mourned the person's death. From the corpse's twisted state, it was clear that even after death, he had endured unimaginable torment.

"Had he already stopped being lucid before he died?" Adam looked at the wooden post. At first there were some carved marks recording something, but later there were only chaotic bite marks. He concluded that the person imprisoned here had already gone mad before dying.

Do not imagine vampires as being particularly elegant. At their core, they were Otherkind, and at times even more like beasts than werewolves. The Blood Slaves they infected were even worse.

Adam made no effort to hide his disgust for that Blood Slave. He knew perfectly well that he himself was scum, but this Blood Slave was trash that was beneath even scum.

"I really am scum!" Adam once again recognized what he was.

He did not turn around with the intention of delivering death to that humanoid piece of garbage. Instead, he knocked a few times on one of the wooden cabinets and pulled a book from a hidden compartment.

After flipping through it briefly, Adam put it away, extended his claws, and began writing on the cabinet.

After writing out the explanation he had prepared beforehand, Adam hesitated slightly before adding a sentence: Bury the corpse quickly. You probably do not want to go to church reeking of corpse stink and be discovered by the priests while worshipping!

After finishing everything, Adam pinched out the oil lamp with his fingers, left the slums quickly with the book, and arrived at a clean little river. He set the book on the bank and jumped straight into the water to wash himself clean. Everything about that Blood Slave disgusted him.

Looking at the waxing moon hanging high in the sky, Adam resisted the urge to howl, picked up the book, and vanished into the night.