Vampires really were blood-drinking creatures, after all.
The first time he consciously tasted blood, its flavor was completely different from what he remembered.
It was a little like sweet-and-sour jelly, but when he tasted it carefully, he could make out a faint stench, like the old-person smell on an elderly person's body.
Clearly, the age of an ingredient really did have a major effect on its taste.
Still, with a ready meal in front of him, Norton had little room to be picky. He stealthily raised the clay jar, then carefully slipped out of the cabin and back to the patch of grass where he had been lying.
He needed to put his armor back on. Otherwise, if he ran into church knights, he would have no means of resisting them at all.
Norton had originally planned to find a dilapidated house to rest in for a while, but now he thought better of it.
When the werewolf hid in the livestock shed and secretly ate the cow, the household had clearly reported nothing to the authorities. Yet the church knights had come anyway, absolutely certain that something was in the shed.
Norton was sure they had a tool that could locate magical creatures. Otherwise, they couldn't have been so certain of their target.
Until he figured that out, he would do his best to stay out of cities. If they located him there, he wouldn't even be able to escape.
Norton felt that this world was becoming more and more dangerous.
The church knights were only one of the dangers. The various monsters described in the church's books were the greatest danger in the wild.
After all, vampires were far from the only monsters in this world.
A corpse lay quietly on a bed made of wooden planks.
Torchlight illuminated the surroundings. It wasn't very bright, but at least it kept the room from being too dark.
A church morgue of this standard was already quite decent. After all, most corpses were dumped in mass graves.
The corpse was horrifying, especially when viewed at night.
His eye socket, pierced by a branch, was a ghastly sight, but even more striking was his neck, which looked as though it had been torn apart by tremendous force.
"Church knights don't have that kind of strength." Father Mia ran his fingers over the torn edges of the corpse's neck, his eyes narrowing and his expression inscrutable. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.
"There was very little blood left at the scene. A severed neck would have spilled far more than that. Norton's corpse was also missing, and the traitor couldn't have dragged a burden like that away with him." Bishop Rosen stood to one side, a hint of greed on his sinister face.
"And there was no church knight's steel armor at the scene. The traitor couldn't have been wearing one set while laboriously dragging another along. So little Norton must have worn that armor away." A greedy look also crossed Father Mia's face as he added this.
"A vampire! How many years has it been since one last appeared? I never expected one to turn up here. This is truly... wonderful!
"Such a perfect creature is simply captivating!" Bishop Rosen looked a little entranced.
That expression on his face, combined with his words, was unsettlingly strange.
But Father Mia ignored it, and even wore a similarly entranced expression.
"Yes, His Holiness the Pope will be delighted. And I imagine our standing will improve as well. But the most urgent task is to find him first."
Father Mia clapped his hands, and two church knights emerged from the shadows at the back of the morgue. They wore steel armor that looked different from the standard armor of ordinary church knights. Their expressions were far less cold than those of ordinary church knights, with a hint of fervor instead.
Servants of Faith were an upgraded version of church knights. In practice, they were church knights selected for their especially steadfast faith and given steel armor symbolizing God, making them enforcers and servants allowed a little access to the inner circle.
"Activate the Holy Knights!"
"Yes!" the two church knights replied respectfully.
Vampires were unclean things. No new ones had appeared in the territory of the Papal State for many years.
As the sun declined day by day, unclean things like them should have been growing more numerous. Other monsters had indeed multiplied explosively, but vampires alone were gradually disappearing.
All of this was thanks to the preservation and spread of the Papal State's faith.
Creatures like vampires, utterly incompatible with God, could not be born from the corpses of believers. As the number of believers grew, the population from which vampires could arise through mutation naturally shrank.
Besides that, the Papal State's requirements for burying corpses also greatly reduced the chances of vampires being born.
The birth of a vampire had always been a rare occurrence. Now that the population that could mutate had shrunk so drastically, it was naturally even harder for one to be born.
According to the church's statistics over the years and its existing records, fewer than a hundred vampires might still be alive.
At present, aside from one vampire corpse kept at church headquarters for research, all other vampires had vanished without a trace. They were presumably either hiding in remote mountain forests, dead somewhere else, or concealed in other countries.
That made Norton's appearance exceedingly precious.
If they caught him, it would be a great achievement.
If they failed, it would be another offense on their record.