"Hiss!"
Norton lay in the grass and drew a sharp breath.
He hadn't realized it until he thought about it, and the thought gave him a fright!
If both things were really as he thought and proved each other true, wouldn't that mean God and Hell really did exist here?
And God, who created the world, was already dead, while Jonah, the primordial god of death, had also been imprisoned in the sun!
Oh, right, Kuba, the progenitor of vampires, had been slain too.
Didn't that mean three of the four greatest chief gods had died in one fell swoop?
A chill suddenly ran down Norton's spine. He kept feeling as though something behind the bushes was watching him, making his skin crawl.
If things really were as he thought, that was terrifying.
First of all, the fact that the creator god really existed was enough to drive everyone to despair. Even if the creator god was dead, it still meant that something here really did possess the power to obliterate the world with ease.
Second, this creator god was a little too human. It was drawn to desire and gave birth to all kinds of monsters, which undoubtedly meant he had thoughts and emotions of his own. It also meant God wasn't an emotionless heavenly dao machine, standing high above and looking down upon the world.
He was Homelander, easily swayed by emotion and possessed of boundless power!
That was right. Wasn't this the classic Homelander template? And a supercharged version at that.
Besides that, Shenyin, the god who governed living creatures, was still alive. The church had committed so many evils over the years yet remained standing. Could Shenyin be supporting it from behind the scenes?
Or was Shenyin the pope?
Very possible! Because the gods here had human desires!
That was why Norton was afraid.
Who knew when a god with human desires might suddenly go crazy?
And what if God came back to life? His consciousness had already awakened in Heaven, after all...
Norton didn't dare think any further. The more he thought about it, the more oppressive this place felt.
He had already spent twenty years under that kind of pressure. Even if he died and had a grave put up for him on the spot, he didn't want to put any more psychological pressure on himself!
Damn it, the worst that could happen was Shenyin finding him and wiping him out with one finger. In any case, he really didn't want to stay here for another moment!
Norton felt there was something wrong with his brain. Every now and then, he would unwittingly become absorbed in his own thoughts.
"This isn't good. I've got some serious mental problems. I'd better not end up with schizophrenia!"
Norton finally pulled himself out of his thoughts and looked toward the livestock shed, hoping to see whether he had a chance to drink the cow's blood.
But when he looked, he saw that the mother and daughter, who had been crying just moments ago, had somehow found a small knife and were butchering the corpses of the old man and the cow.
The girl was cutting up the cow's carcass with the knife and hanging the meat she cut off on a drying pole outside the house. The woman, meanwhile, was draining the old man's blood into a clay pot. It looked like she didn't want to waste even the blood!
With his greatly enhanced hearing, Norton could even faintly make out their conversation.
"We can leave the blood to set into clots, and if we air-dry the meat, it'll last us half a year. Boo-hoo-hoo... How are we going to get by after that?"
The woman's voice, still tinged with grief, reached Norton's ears and left him dumbstruck.
"Holy shit, you two are really ruthless!"
I wasn't even planning to eat the old man. I figured a couple of mouthfuls of cow's blood would do, but you two are even more extreme than me!
In years of great famine, people ate one another. Although he had already learned this during Mass, when the mother and daughter held the old man's corpse with his head over the clay pot and cut open his neck to drain his blood, the sight of a person being treated like livestock was still inevitably sorrowful.
Although Norton had yet to move past the way a normal person thought and might need to prepare himself mentally before drinking blood straight from a living person, he was far less averse to drinking a dead person's blood.
After all, people always liked downward compatibility.
That said, he had actually already begun imagining himself keeping humans in captivity to cultivate food for himself in the future.
"This damned church really deserves to die! If they starve everyone to death, what am I going to eat then?"
Although Hajinuo had not yet become the so-called progenitor of vampires, he had already begun to regard these humans as his own reserve food supply.
And the greatest flaw of the sons and daughters of China was their severe fear of shortages, whether a fear of insufficient firepower or insufficient food. In short, whenever something could not be continuously replenished and developed, it would trigger a fear hidden deep in their hearts: What am I going to do if this runs out?
It was practically written into their genes as genetic code!
Time slowly passed. The woman and the girl built a fire and smoked the meat over it.
In this era, salt was also a high-end commodity. They naturally couldn't use large amounts of it to cure the meat, so they could only smoke it to draw out the moisture, bringing it to a point where it could be air-dried.
The woman carried the clay pot of blood into the wooden house where they lived. Norton removed his steel armor in the grass, then stealthily circled around.
Vampires truly were creatures of the night. They could make full use of the bones and muscles in their bodies to greatly reduce the noise they made when moving.
The firewood crackled as it burned. The mother and daughter, focused on smoking the meat, never noticed a naked man passing not far behind them, making his way to the back of the house and then quietly slipping inside.
The smell of blood filled Norton's nose, exceptionally strong.
But even though it was overwhelmingly strong, he could still easily identify its source by scent.
The strong smell of blood also made Norton feel a little hungry and thirsty without realizing it, even leaving him so restless that he wanted to scratch at his ears and cheeks.
There was no firelight in the wooden house. Poor households in this era didn't even have candles.
Even so, Norton could still see very clearly and spotted the clay pot in the corner at a glance.
Norton frowned slightly. Truth be told, he was deeply averse to doing this. After all, he had been nothing more than a normal person before.
But if he didn't drink, he couldn't survive.
There was naturally no comparison between satisfying his personal psychological aversion and starving to death.
So Norton chose to drink.
And to drink in great gulps!