Norton was a man who was exceedingly easy to satisfy. Twenty years of sheltered life in the Church had left him intensely curious about everything around him and eager to explore, though that desire to explore had gone unstimulated for so long that he had to rediscover it himself.
Even so, his life in the bell tower was enough to satisfy him.
A Vampire's terrifying ability to endure hunger left Norton with almost no material needs, so naturally, he had no need to find money. Aside from going out to hunt every ten days or half a month to satisfy his need to grow stronger, Norton had almost no problems.
Speaking of hunting, he had to mention something Father Mia had said before.
[To eradicate Vampires completely, the Church has decided to starve all the poor until they are thin and anemic, with insufficient blood. That way, Vampires will be unable to obtain enough food and will starve to death, achieving the goal of wiping them out.]
At the time, Norton had thought the Church's plan was utterly idiotic.
But now that he had become a Vampire, he had discovered that the damned method actually worked!
How much blood could those starving, skin-and-bones paupers have? Their terrible living conditions left them not only with little blood, but blood of extremely poor quality. Compared to them, even drinking a deer's blood was a substantial nourishment!
Only the fat, well-fed nobles and officials, or members of the Church, were fit to serve as blood food.
"Squeak, squeak, squeak..." Two bats hanging upside down from the edge of the bell tower were doing something naughty. Before long, Norton's little family would probably welcome new members.
Norton reached out and hung a Werewolf hide, stripped off in one piece, from the ceiling of the bell tower.
It was what he had brought back from hunting this month.
Just as he had expected, that damned Werewolf pack was still hunting him. Though there were far fewer of them, he could tell by their scent that they were the same pack from the mountains near Holy Lord City.
"You actually followed me this far! What is it about me that you want so badly?" Norton reached out and smoothed the hide so it wouldn't wrinkle as it dried.
His gaze settled on the Werewolf hide before him, still bearing the smell of blood, and grew somewhat grave.
Being surrounded and attacked by the wolf pack last time had already left him utterly baffled. When he discovered that there were still traces of those Werewolves outside Lino City, his confusion weighed even more heavily on his heart.
No beast would track a scrawny prey for a thousand miles to hunt it, especially when they had no shortage of food.
Norton was also quite sure he had no grudge against those Werewolves. After all, they had lived in the mass graves around Holy Lord City, while he had lived high up on a cliff.
What other reason could there be for those Werewolves to keep pursuing him so relentlessly over a thousand miles?
Norton thought it still had to do with his identity as a Vampire, or rather, there had to be something about Vampires that attracted those Werewolves.
"Vampires really are getting more and more mysterious." Norton increasingly felt that Kuba was a damned idiot of a progenitor.
It was one thing for him to have no inherited memories.
Kuba wasn't the only Vampire in the world, so why hadn't he, a progenitor, managed to gather a Vampire community all these years?
The one hanging on the cross was God Caesar, not Kuba, the Vampire progenitor!
Norton finished hanging the wolf hide, then changed into the tattered, full-body outfit he usually wore. He used its broad brim to conceal his scarlet eyes, then climbed down the stairs of the bell tower.
His life was very regular now.
Every day at dawn, after the people on the streets had finished throwing out the piss and shit accumulated overnight, he would climb down from the bell tower. He would pick the cleaner roads as best he could, listen to passersby talking, and feel the vitality of the crowds.
During this process, Norton could feel his normal humanity gradually returning. The illusion that his mind was being healed made him very happy.
Besides that, he used the conversations of passersby to sketch out a rough picture of the Papal State and even the world as a whole. After all, he knew far too little about this world and urgently needed more information.
Generally, he wandered around in the morning. By the afternoon, he would edge closer to Lino City's church and quietly observe its staffing, defenses, number of Church knights, weak points, shift changes, and so on.
By the distinct scent of each person, he could determine the approximate number of people in Lino City's church, even if those missionaries and Church knights never showed their faces.
His observations covered every angle. Norton felt he needed to understand what made the Vampire species special, and the Church had undoubtedly studied Vampires more deeply than anyone else in this world.
So he wondered whether he could find an opportunity to enter Lino City's church and find some books about Vampires.
Of course, he couldn't simply barge in.
He needed to plan carefully. Otherwise, if he rushed into the Church and was burned to death by God's cross, he would be done for!
Norton hadn't forgotten the scenes in Vampire movies he had once watched, where Vampires were burned to ashes by silver and sunlight.
Thanks to Lino City's system of controls, more wealthy people were able to travel and broaden their horizons, which also brought a greater flow of information to Lino City and to Norton.
The place where information flowed best was the little tavern Norton frequented.
Order two bowls of beer and a plate of Robin beans, and one could pick up fresh news of the Papal State at the little tavern on the border between Lino City's slums and its wealthy district. Though that fresh news most likely concerned events from months ago, it was still a way to obtain information.
Of course, Norton couldn't afford to order drinks. He didn't even enter the tavern, instead pretending to be a beggar and leaning against the wall outside, where his extraordinary hearing allowed him to take in all the conversations inside.
What a bargain!
"Sigh, it looks like the new pope is all but decided. Things might get a little tough for us now. I heard that man is a bit..."
"Do you have a death wish? Talking about that here!"
"Right, right. Heh heh, come on, drink up!"
"Ah, you have no idea, brother. I went to the Boya Empire on business sometime in the last two years. Our living standards can't compare to theirs at all! The scale of their cities, their grandeur, the living conditions, the... Oh, I don't know how those Boyans built it all. If only our Church were even a tenth as enlightened as them, then we..."
This man had clearly drunk too much, to dare speak so recklessly about the Church.
Norton had already seen someone nearby get up and sneak off toward the Church, probably to inform on him.
Sure enough, it wasn't long before Norton saw two Church knights enter the tavern.
Amid cries of alarm and pleas for mercy, the two Church knights forcibly dragged a man who had wet his pants out of the tavern in less than a minute.
The Boya Empire. Norton had heard the empire's name a few times recently.
From what the people of Lino City said, the Boya Empire seemed to be very powerful, and its system of governance was relatively enlightened. At the very least, it was much more enlightened than the Holy Lord Empire, otherwise known as the Papal State.
As for exactly where it was or what it was like, Norton didn't know.
He was more concerned about the earlier topic.
It seemed there was going to be a new pope.
He had heard plenty about the change of pope lately, and so many people were discussing it that his hearing could pick up a few indistinct words even when they whispered. That had given him some understanding of the matter.
More than five months ago, the old pope's apostolic see had fallen vacant.
All eight of the Papal State's archbishops in purple had traveled to the Holy See to elect a pope, and more than five months had passed by now.
Of course, the main reason it had taken so long was that the journey was too far.
Considering that each of the eight archbishops had at least three provinces under his jurisdiction, the Papal State was absurdly large. Naturally, that meant the journey took much longer.
However, the Holy See stood at the center of the Papal State, with the others gathered around it like stars around the moon. So, judging by the travel and election time, the pope's position would probably be settled within another month at most.
As the saying went, a new official would make sweeping changes, and this new pope was no easy man to deal with. The people of the Papal State would probably face even greater hardship then.
Once their livelihoods were ruined, order would surely become more chaotic than it was now. Once order grew chaotic, oversight would surely become stricter, and once oversight grew stricter, Norton's little life would surely be harder than it was now.
So although Norton considered himself no citizen of the Papal State, he was still quite concerned about the papal election.
It really was a case of the eunuch worrying more than the emperor.