The werewolf, one of the classic nightmares of the Middle Ages, was now a headless corpse. Like a dead dog, it was hooked to a chain and dragged away by the church knights.
The contrast between the fighting power of the heavily armored knights and the beast was strikingly clear.
It sent a chill through Norton, who was hiding in the grass some distance away.
Luckily, after becoming a vampire, he hadn't gotten carried away and rushed back to get revenge on that stupid asshole Mia. Otherwise, he could have been beaten to death without even knowing how.
These church knights were way too monstrous!
Their physical abilities didn't seem to exceed human limits, but they had certainly undergone rigorous training. That was how they could be so strong even while wearing heavy armor.
On top of that, the church knights' combat skills were exceptionally formidable. They had shown no fear of death, taking the initiative to attack without retreating a single step from start to finish!
Damn it, the Holy Lord Church had trained so many monsters. How was he, Norton, supposed to survive in the cracks between them?
The battle he had just witnessed had sobered Norton, who had been secretly delighted to become a vampire.
"The church really does have some skills. They probably have special ways to deal with vampires too. And the way they train their knights is just ridiculous!"
Norton stayed hidden in the grass, watching the church knights disappear into the distance as he thought.
He had walked for the entire afternoon. Since he didn't know the way or have a map, he had wandered around the forest until he got lost.
Because he had to flee, he hadn't dared spend much time examining his mutated body. He had only discovered a few advantages of becoming a vampire.
For one thing, he had grown stronger. He couldn't tell exactly how strong he was now, but it was considerable, though not excessively so. He could easily bear the twenty or thirty kilograms of heavy armor he wore, the same kind the church knights wore. Compared with that werewolf just now, he probably wasn't far behind.
Secondly, his body seemed to be dead. His heart had stopped and no longer beat. He didn't know what powered his body now, but there didn't seem to be any blood left in it, and all his skin had turned a bloodless bluish white. His recovery speed had also increased greatly. Over the course of his walk that afternoon, his scorched body had completely healed.
Finally, his sense of smell, hearing, and perception had improved. He didn't know by how much, but their tendencies were clear: they were those of a vampire.
He had only found his way because he smelled blood.
It was worth mentioning that the smell of blood didn't become sweet like cream or rich like red wine to a vampire. Blood smelled like blood, even to a vampire.
The only thing a little unusual about him was that he could smell blood from an extremely long distance away.
Norton wasn't quite sure how far. He only knew he had walked more than two thousand steps, perhaps around a kilometer.
Smelling blood from a kilometer away really was a racial talent.
Norton looked through the bushes toward the place where the battle had just taken place.
After becoming a vampire, night vision seemed to have become a passive ability.
Yet this passive ability could also be activated deliberately. He called it passive because this night vision was more like breathing: when you weren't paying attention, it was automatic, but when you did pay attention, you could control it manually.
There was no mirror now. Otherwise, Norton would have been able to see that whenever he wanted to see in the dark, a gray membrane slid down over his eyes and covered his eyeballs.
It was a bit like the eye covering a crocodile used to keep water out.
Norton looked through the bushes toward the livestock shed.
This place wasn't a city yet; it was more like a farmer's home. Besides the livestock shed in the distance, there were two wooden houses, one large and one small.
The surrounding area was all farmland, a typical rural scene.
The only difference was that the people here were all white. Besides that, the fields were planted not with grain, but with flowers.
The church's weekly mass required offerings of flowers, so the church had ordered the farmland in and around the city cleared and made all the farmers grow flowers to adorn the city and set off God's holiness.
But for every policy from above, those below had a workaround. Although the farmers had planted flowers in their fields, a closer look revealed a few rye plants or potato seedlings growing among them.
The four church knights dragged the werewolf's corpse farther and farther away, the glow of their torches already reduced to tiny dots.
"Looks like this place is fairly close to the city. Or maybe I never left it?" Norton looked toward the livestock shed.
The family of three farmers by the shed were still wailing. The old man had been kicked to death by the church knight, leaving a girl and a woman kneeling before his body and sobbing uncontrollably.
Luckily, they weren't in the city. Otherwise, the old man's corpse would already have been gone.
Looking at the horrifying scene, Norton sighed deeply. Although he didn't know the old man or his family, he considered himself a man with a conscience. It would be very rude to pounce on the old man and drink his blood at such a sad time.
Besides needing time to adjust, the main thing was that the church knights had only just left. He wondered whether, if he attacked the two remaining members of the family, they would use their methods to locate him and then hunt him down and kill him like the werewolf.
"Forget it. I'll drink cow's blood first." Norton sighed and lay in the bushes, waiting quietly.
He waited for the mother and daughter to carry the old man's body back so he could sneak into the cowshed.
Although blood still smelled bloody to him, he could no longer taste other food.
Norton had tested that in the dense forest that afternoon.
He had climbed a tree and picked two fruits to try. Only someone who had actually eaten wax could understand how tasteless they were.
He could only say they were a little more chewable than shit.
However, Norton also felt that he was a little different from other vampires.
For example, he wasn't afraid of sunlight. He could drink the blood of dead things too-the church knight whose blood he had drunk was dead.
Those two traits were common enough in the movies and novels of his previous life, but here, they already went against the rules by which this place operated: the accounts in the church's scriptures.
According to the Holy Covenant, Kuba had spent his entire life avoiding sunlight to escape death.
From that, vampires should have been afraid of sunlight. At the very least, sunlight could wear away their bodies.
But Norton had walked for an entire afternoon, exposed to sunlight the whole time, without feeling the slightest discomfort.
Of course, it might have been because he was wearing a church knight's steel armor, but there were gaps in the armor, and he could feel the sunlight shining on his face!
Norton figured that either he was special, or there was something wrong with the sunlight-or rather, the sun.
Of the two possibilities, Norton was more inclined to believe the latter.
Ascension depicted God being killed by Kuba, and over the years, the priests had also been living longer and longer.
And the Holy Covenant described the sun as death created by God.
Putting the three together, Norton came up with a theory.
Could it be that because God was dead and no longer supplied it with energy, sunlight had kept growing weaker, until even vampires like him dared to appear openly beneath it?
It was very possible.
Moreover, he could drink the blood of dead things. These two points could fully corroborate each other.
According to the Holy Covenant: [He made Shenyin the lord of gods, master of life's beginnings, and made Jonah the final dusk, ruler of the passing of living beings.]
Jonah did not allow Kuba to eat corpses, so Kuba could not even drink their blood. He could only secretly drink the blood of living beings while they were still alive, and he could not drain them to death. First, Shenyin would not agree; second, once they were drained to death, they would come under Jonah's authority, and Jonah would not let him eat them either.
So, from that, vampires could not drink the blood of dead things.
And Resurrection said: [The messenger laid waste to the earth, and Jonah was imprisoned in the sun.]
Now, as a vampire, he could drink the blood of dead things. Clearly, Jonah could no longer stop him.
That corroborated what Resurrection described: Jonah had been imprisoned!