The kerosene lamp was lit, its dim yellow light flickering faintly. It did a poor job of lighting the room, but it was better than nothing.
Norton had just settled onto his bed when someone knocked on the door.
Knock, knock, knock!
"Cleric Norton, Father Mia sent me to bring you something." A muffled male voice came from outside the door.
Norton opened the door to find a missionary in a white robe standing outside, holding a stack of battered books in his arms.
When Norton opened the door, the missionary expressionlessly shoved the five books into his arms, then left without so much as a word.
That was normal enough. Most of the missionaries here had something wrong with them. After all, they had been confined since childhood; it would have been stranger if they had no mental problems.
The church also forbade clerics and missionaries from having too much contact with one another, and even checked their rooms at night. In the past twenty years, he could count on one hand the words he had exchanged with the clerics he had grown up alongside. The confinement was driving him mad.
Norton carefully carried the books back into his room and placed them on the wooden table.
Looking at the books on the table, Norton felt two streams of tears slowly roll from the corners of his eyes, but his face remained expressionless.
The confinement here had reached a deranged extreme. For the past twenty years, the only books they had been allowed to read were three religious texts.
"The Bible," "the Baptism," and "the Garden of Eden."
The five books on the table were the only new information he had been able to encounter in those twenty years.
The emotion of curiosity slowly stirred back to life from its deathly stillness. Though it had lain dormant for so long, it still made his heart flutter, sending a rare, faint tremor through emotions that had long been dormant, yet one that was far too intense for him.
The tears at the corners of Norton's eyes were almost beyond his control, but his face remained expressionless.
Norton sat on the bed, feeling his heart pound. No longer able to suppress his longing, he picked up the books on the table and carefully examined them.
The books here were not made of paper, cloth, or bamboo slips. They were made of some unknown material, soft and as thin as a cicada's wing.
Holding it for a long time would rub a little grease out of it, and setting it alight over a kerosene lamp would release a faint roasted smell like burning meat.
Much as he hated to admit it, considering the absurdity and darkness of the so-called era of the Papal State, Norton thought it was very likely made of human skin.
Norton picked up the first book.
"Mass."
It explained the precautions to take during Mass.
According to the book, Mass involved Norton taking some bread to the believers' gathering place-the slums-and distributing it as a good deed. After giving it all out, he would follow the larger group to a place called the "temple," receive Father Mia's blessing, offer his most loyal faith to God "Caesar," undergo baptism with the temple's holy water, and finally put on a missionary's robes to become a true missionary.
There were not many steps. Most importantly, he could finally go outside. Just reading the words in the book made Norton feel excited.
The second book was called "the Holy Covenant."
This one was a little different.
Norton frowned deeply. The more he read, the more he doubted himself.
"The Holy Covenant" was a typical book much like the Bible, describing certain events involving God "Caesar."
By comparison, though, everything described in "the Bible" concerned God's greatness and contributions.
For example: Caesar opened his eyes, and chaos became clarity. God said, "Let there be space and time," and the universe appeared. God said, "Let there be life," and all things were born. All things were born unable to reproduce, without life or death, and without order-the laws governing nature-so God created the Garden of Eden...
But everything written in "the Holy Covenant" was negative about God.
The book was thin and contained little text, but it all amounted to a negative portrayal, especially with all sorts of monster rumors mixed in.
For example: God created the Garden of Eden. At first, order was in disarray. Snakes mated with elephants and produced "Yindan" (a kind of monster); horses mated with chickens and produced "Epoch" (a kind of monster). Mating stirred God's heart, and thus humanity was born. God mated with a woman and produced "Shenyin" (the first supreme god in "the Bible"); God mated with a man and produced "Jonah" (the primordial god of death who ruled hell in "the Bible"); God mated with a corpse and produced "Kuba" (the progenitor of vampires in "the Garden of Eden")...
Just look at what this book said. Caesar had actually succumbed to mortal desires and produced a whole bunch of little monsters.
Norton had originally thought the priest and the little boy were far too strange, but now it seemed Father Mia was worthy of being a priest after all. He had indeed received God's teachings.
So there was an explanation for it all. When the upper beam was crooked, the lower beams went askew.
Norton turned the page. The contents of the next page were a little mystical.
[All things reproduced, but none died, and the Garden of Eden grew ever larger. Thus God created death and hung it high in the sky. He made Shenyin the lord of gods, governing the beginning of life, and made Jonah the final dusk, governing the passing of living things. Kuba alone was displeased, and God exiled him.
To escape death, Kuba hid from the sunlight for all eternity.]
That was the end of "the Holy Covenant." What it described was rather interesting.
Of course, the main thing was that it highlighted two points: "vampires," and death equaling sunlight.
Norton put the book on the table. Although twenty years had passed, he could still recall quite a bit from his previous life. In particular, seeing a term like "vampire" brought to mind the rumors about them from that life.
He had loved dark things like that back then, so he had searched for a great deal of information about vampires and read quite a lot.
First of all, one thing needed to be made clear: vampires had never appeared in the Bible of his previous life. As for the supposed vampire progenitor Cain, a company had simply reworked him based on Cain's fate in the Bible, and that version had become widely circulated.
So the vampires of his previous life were, in the end, fabricated creatures.
But this place was completely different. Both the church's official text "the Garden of Eden" and the "Holy Covenant" he had just read contained actual descriptions of vampires.
"The Holy Covenant" recorded the reason vampires were born: God had mated with a corpse. The main text of "the Garden of Eden" also described vampires' habits and explained the term.
According to "the Garden of Eden," Kuba hid from sunlight all day to avoid death, so he slept by day and came out at night. But without sunlight, he could not farm (another version of the Bible said that he would not eat living things that absorbed sunlight-plants-for fear of death), so he had to adopt another way of life and survive by hunting.
But Shenyin governed living things and would not allow him to kill other creatures for food. Jonah governed the dead and would not allow him to eat corpses. So he could only sneak drinks of blood from living creatures at night while animals slept, without killing them, to ensure his own survival. Thus he came to be called the blood progenitor, or a vampire.
"The Garden of Eden" clearly described the term "vampire." Norton did not know whether that was to make things easier for the church or because such creatures really existed.
Norton knew nothing about the outside world, so he did not even dare deny the possibility that vampires really existed in this world.
For now, he could only believe it and keep it in mind, lest he go outside and discover that gods and vampires-or monsters-really did exist here, only to be carried off by a vampire or something of the sort.
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(Little Norton had been driven silly by his confinement at first. He will gradually change later on, eventually becoming a terrifying progenitor of vampires.)