On the third day, Norton spent the whole day practicing swordplay, but he failed to control his strength and accidentally slashed his own calf.
He found that no blood flowed from the wound at all. Even the flesh inside was pale, as though it had been washed clean, and the sinews within seemed to be gradually disappearing.
After the slash, he felt no pain. His flesh knitted back together on its own within three to five seconds, then returned completely to normal.
Norton fell into thought.
His skin could sense its surroundings, whether temperature or touch. He was even quite certain he could feel pain, because sunlight on his body caused a faint, prickling pain, like being stuck with needles.
Pain was a reflex that alerted living things to injury. His flesh had been split open by a greatsword without hurting, which could only mean one thing: the greatsword had done him no real, substantive harm.
That reminded Norton of the lore about vampires from his previous life. For example, only holy water, silver, the sun, crosses, and fire could truly hurt or even kill a vampire. Vampires were immune to all other physical attacks (immunity meant the attacks could not truly breach their defenses or kill them).
Although the two worlds were different, and Norton had never applied the various rules about vampires from his previous life to himself, he now felt that perhaps he could give them a try.
So, for an entire day, Norton slashed himself with his greatsword, cut off his own fingers, burned his fingers with fire, and carved a cross out of a stick to press against his face...
He tried every method he could think of. Apart from driving a wooden stake through his heart and cutting himself with silver, he tried everything.
In the end, he arrived at a result that delighted him.
His body really did seem impervious to all physical harm, even burns, and his severed fingers could regrow. He had not felt the slightest pain throughout the entire process.
He also tried breaking his own spine, but he did not lose control of either his upper or lower body as a result.
That meant he apparently was no longer a vertebrate, or rather, he no longer needed the system of neurons and electrical signals that controlled the body.
His body seemed entirely capable of acting on its own.
Only when he placed the cross against his forehead did he feel a slight suppression, as though something were pressing against it.
He could not tell whether it was the weight of the wood itself or whether the cross had actually done something.
But in any case, the various discoveries still made him immensely happy.
It meant he was nothing like the fragile werewolf, who had been finished after an iron hook pierced his body.
He, Norton, was tougher and could take more punishment, which also gave him more confidence when facing church knights.
Still, it was better to avoid a head-on clash with the church if he could. The church had existed for so many years and killed so many monsters that they could only hide in the wild. Clearly, it had its own methods.
For instance, the so-called holy water, Bibles, or consecrated crosses.
He might not be able to withstand that kind of magic damage.
So he had better be careful.
Norton decided to go out tomorrow and, at the very least, stay hidden while he investigated the church in the surrounding area.
At the very least, he needed to learn about this world: how much territory the Papal State actually covered, and whether there were other countries without a church where he could live.
Shut away for twenty years, Norton had never had access to any of this information. He was completely in the dark and desperately needed news.
The fourth day.
Norton finally went out.
After wandering around for half an hour, he became afraid of getting lost again. So he decided not to go out today after all, and to first draw a rough map of the surrounding area, lest he venture out and fail to find his way back.
Mapping took too long, so on the fifth and sixth days, he continued wandering around, checking the surrounding sights and trying to find his way back from a distance. Inside the cave, he used stones he had picked up to build a rough terrain map of the area.
And so it continued until the seventh day.
Norton had finished building the terrain map of the area. Standing in the pitch-black cave, he looked with immense satisfaction at the thing he had piled up, which resembled a mound of stones over a grave.
This was the terrain map he had built. Though it looked rather odd and he alone could tell what it was, it had at least added a touch of Norton himself to the cave.
But once traces of his presence had appeared, he realized there seemed to be even more things he had neglected.
For example, he, Norton, future progenitor of vampires and one of the transmigrators, lived in a place that was simply too primitive!
Never mind furniture of any kind; he did not even have a bed frame!
It really brought down his image.
As a bona fide vampire, Norton felt he ought to have a coffin at the very least, right?
There was another important point: he had not drunk blood for several days now, yet he still had not felt even a hint of hunger. That was rather unusual.
Could vampires survive without eating?
Wasn't that way too much of a bug? A perpetual-motion organism?
Norton thought he could test his hunger threshold, and take the opportunity to make himself a coffin to sleep in.
As a vampire, how could he not have a coffin of his own?
As for taking revenge on the church? Going out to observe the church's movements?
Maybe he would wait a little longer. He was in no hurry anyway.
The eighth day.
Norton picked up his greatsword and went out to chop down trees.
It was worth mentioning that even in a forest close to the city, monsters could still be found.
While chopping down a tree, he heard a cry unlike anything he had ever heard before.
When he looked up, he saw a terrifying giant bird flying overhead!
Damn it, the thing could hardly even be called a bird. It had a human face and was about the size of the griffins depicted in his previous life, but its limbs resembled those of a gigantic eagle.
It was probably the Human-Faced Bird he had read about in the church's books.
The creature held a dead cow in its talons as it flew toward the depths of the forest.
Norton was so frightened he hardly dared breathe, but for some reason, the terrifying Human-Faced Bird still locked onto him.
It immediately dropped the cow from its talons and swooped down at Norton.
Luckily, Norton had been chopping trees not far from the pool. He jumped straight into the water; otherwise, the terrifying Human-Faced Bird would probably have carried him off and made him into an egg tart.
The tenth day.
The Human-Faced Bird's presence kept Norton from daring to go out. He hid in the dark cave, afraid to make a sound.
For now, the cave was the only place where he was safest.
Yet God seemed to be deliberately working against him. Just two days after Norton had begun hiding silently in the cave, he heard an unusual sound coming through the mountain rock.
It sounded like the tapping of a woodpecker locating insects inside a tree hollow. Only this time, the sound was locating a cave rather than a hollow in a tree.
Some terrifying thing seemed to be using the frequency of the vibrations outside the cave to determine whether anything alive was inside.
"This is terrifying! This is no place for a person to live! If I'd known, I would have been better off staying in the city!" Norton's face turned green with fright.
Terrified, he slipped into the water to evade the frequency of the vibrations, lest the creature tapping outside the cave pinpoint his presence.
Fortunately, the tapping lasted only a few hours.
The thirty-eighth day.
After hiding in the cave for a full month, Norton finally tried going outside again.
He had no choice. Even if he wanted to sleep, he couldn't. People said vampires could sleep for thousands of years at a time to hibernate, but Norton discovered that he had no such ability to shut down and hibernate.
After sleeping once, he found it hard to feel sleepy again for a whole week. Spending his days unable to sleep, simply killing time in the pitch-black cave, was even more frightening than being imprisoned in the church.
It was so boring it could practically drive a person mad! At least there had been things to do every day in the church. In this pitch-black cave, he had nothing to do but fiddle with the stones he had picked up to build his map.
Norton had managed to endure until now largely thanks to the mental fortitude he had developed during those twenty years of imprisonment.
But by now, he truly could not stand it any longer.
Norton carefully put on his steel armor and took up his greatsword. Using the weight of the armor to stay submerged, he observed the surroundings through the pool, so he would not be completely defenseless if an ambush lay in wait.
It was worth mentioning that he still had not felt hungry. Besides that, compared to a month ago, he could feel that his body had grown a little.
It was slight, but it was no illusion.
Could it be that vampires did not actually need to drink blood, and could gradually grow stronger with the passage of time alone?
Norton remembered that some works from his previous life had depicted vampires that way. Vampires grew on their own as time passed, so some old vampires would hibernate for a hundred years at a stretch.
But he couldn't hibernate!
Even so, this eased some of the urgency Norton felt about wanting to grow stronger by drinking blood.
If he could grow without drinking blood, did that mean drinking blood was just a vampire's oral fixation, like in The Witcher?
Norton could not be sure. He could only experiment to determine what caused him to grow.
After confirming that the giant bird was nowhere outside the pool, Norton finally emerged from the water again.
A faint scent of decay in the air caught his attention. It seemed to be very close, giving him a bad feeling.
Norton climbed the tallest tree nearest the pool and looked toward the source of the bloody smell.
The terrifying giant bird that had tried to hunt him a month ago had now become half a corpse, already beginning to rot, hanging from a distant tree trunk!
Fuck!
Norton was stunned. He now felt that the forest did not seem like a good place for him at all. He would be better off living in the city!
At the very least, he had never seen anything this terrifying in twenty years at the church.
Seeing the strange bird's corpse reminded him of the terrifying tapping sound.
Recalling where the tapping had come from, Norton carefully climbed a low earthen slope.
Then, at the spot corresponding to the cave's ceiling, he saw a number of long, narrow, deep holes in the ground.
The holes had clearly been deliberately bored, and judging by their shape, the creature was very likely to have a beak like a woodpecker's, over three meters long.
Norton was in no mood to make a coffin. Dejected, he returned to his cave.
He had thought that becoming a vampire would make him invincible, only to find that he was still at the very bottom of the pyramid.
How did the church keep the city so intact? Could God really be protecting humanity?
But whatever the case, for the first time Norton felt that he would be better off living in the city.
Though he still could not show himself openly and would have to stay on guard against the church at all times, at least he knew who his opponent was and how to avoid the church. Unlike in the forest now, where he sometimes had no idea when danger might appear.
The fortieth day.
After hiding in the cave for another two days, Norton finally went out again.
He felt he needed to seal the cave entrance to keep anything outside from coming in and attacking him.
Besides that, he would make a coffin. He was a vampire, after all, and ought to have some sense of ceremony.
The forty-first day.
It rained. Norton dragged the timber into the cave and hollowed out a coffin inside.
The forty-second day.
The rain still had not stopped, but the water level in the connected little pool seemed to have risen a little.
Afraid that the rainwater would flood his cave, Norton went outside and dug a channel beside the pool. Once the water reached a certain level, it would drain away, keeping the water in the connected pool inside from rising further.
The forty-seventh day.
After many days of hard work, Norton had finally finished making his coffin and gathered all the stones needed to block the cave entrance.
But he still did not feel hungry.
This struck him as very strange, so he decided to continue making other furniture and see how long he could endure hunger.
The forty-eighth day.
Norton used his greatsword to cut some branches, then made two chairs from the branches and vines.
This was the first time Norton had owned a chair in the twenty years since he transmigrated.
So he successfully took off in one of them, reminiscing about the past and easing his nerves.
The fiftieth day.
Norton still was not hungry, and the flights were still running.
He was puzzled as to why he had so much energy. By rights, blood should have had the lowest nutritional content.
Vampire bats, for instance, had to drink blood nonstop throughout the night to sustain themselves. He could not possibly keep going for an entire month on a single clay pot of blood!
Could vampires really be perpetual creatures, as he had thought?
The furniture in the cave was beginning to look the part.
There were the chairs he had made, a wooden coffin, a slightly crooked wooden table, and a wooden crate for storing things.
There were also boards to block the entrance at the front, a stone calendar for keeping track of time, and a completely hand-polished stone goblet.
And a cloak-like garment woven from leaves and vines.
In Norton's opinion, the thing was incredibly cool. He could use it as a mattress when lying in his coffin and wear it as a cape when he went out. He thought it could not have been cooler.
Norton was very pleased with the fruits of his efforts over this period, and had also become somewhat enchanted with this life of wilderness survival.
The fifty-first day.
An uninvited guest arrived outside the cave.
It was a little bat, and probably a vampire bat at that.
He did not know how the little fellow had found this place. Was it because vampires and vampire bats were a perfect match?
Norton wanted to clear the little fellow out. Bat droppings stank too much, and if there were more of them in the future, he did not dare imagine what his cave would smell like.
But before Norton could act, the vampire bat flew onto his shoulder and stuck out its bloodied tongue at him.
"..."
Lending blood to one another was a reciprocal behavior among vampire bats. Because blood had so little nutritional content, a vampire bat that went forty-eight hours without drinking blood would no longer have the strength to hunt and would starve to death. So vampire bats lent blood to hungry members of their kind, and this behavior was more common among relatives and "friends."
So why was this vampire bat lending him blood?
Could it be that he, Norton, was considered one of their kind on a physiological level? Even one with whom it had a close relationship?
Norton's original intention to drive the little fellow away began to waver.
After thinking it over, he decided to let the little thing stay for now and see whether anything developed between them.
What if it turned into a little loli with demon wings... What if he, Norton, awakened the ability to control bats?