It wasn’t the darkness of the cave. It was deeper—a weight inside my bones, a hollowing of my very being. My limbs were numb. My breath was shallow, ragged. My heart… was barely beating.
I was dying.
Somewhere in the haze, a chime echoed through my skull.
System Alert: WARNING – CRITICAL BLOOD LOSS DETECTED
Vitality Falling Below Safe Threshold. Immediate Action Required.
Another chime. This one sharper. Urgent.
System Notification: Corruption Detected
A high-level foreign essence has entered your bloodstream. A forced conversion is underway.
Transformation Progress: 22%
Symptoms currently suppressed by Searing Vigor. Duration: 0:41 seconds remaining.
I forced a breath, my chest barely rising. Forty-one seconds. That was all I had before the last bit of strength left me, before the Alpha’s corruption took over, before I ceased being myself.
Then the system hit me with the choice.
Emergency Quest: Blood Cleansing Ritual
Your body is failing. The corruption of the Alpha Vampire seeps into your very core. Choose your path.
Option 1: Purge the Blood – Endure excruciating agony to burn out the transformation entirely.
- Effect: Restore health, regain full demonic form.
- Risk: Unstable recovery, long-term damage to Painbound Dominion.
Option 2: Adapt and Resist – Suppress the transformation, keeping only minor vampiric traits.
- Effect: Strengthened physical traits at night, minor blood resistance.
- Risk: Unstable evolution, unknown effects on future abilities.
Option 3: Embrace the Blood – Drink deeply from the fallen Alpha’s remains. Accept the transformation and merge your forms.
- Effect: All Demon-based attributes, skills, and resistances will be erased and restructured.
- Risk: Irreversible. The system cannot predict the outcome.
A tremor ran through my fingers.
My breath hitched. My lungs barely pulled air. My body was too weak to move, my vision barely more than shifting shapes and silhouettes.
Option 1 was death. If I tried to burn it out, I wouldn’t survive the pain.
Option 2 was a gamble. A slow descent into something unknown.
Option 3 was madness.
It wasn’t just accepting the transformation. It was a total erasure of what I was. All of my demonic nature—gone. Every skill point I had invested. Every ability I had trained. Every part of me that had clawed and suffered to survive.
I was about to die.
This was my only chance.
I dragged in a breath—shallow, shaking—and turned my head toward the corpse.
The Alpha’s body was still warm. The wound where I had stabbed her left a jagged, open gash across her gut, her lifeblood pooling thick across the stone floor. The scent of it was everywhere, heavy and cloying.
I wasn’t sure if it was the system’s influence, the Alpha’s lingering will, or my own survival instinct, but my body screamed for it.
I crawled forward.
The warriors didn’t move. They had been silent all this time, watching, frozen, trapped between horror and awe.
I reached the corpse. My hands sunk into the blood.
The system chimed again.
Final Confirmation Required: Are you sure you want to embrace the Alpha’s blood?
Warning: The system cannot predict the effects. Proceeding may result in an unknown evolution. This action is permanent.
Yes.
The moment I let the word form in my mind, I plunged my hands deeper.
The blood was scalding. It shouldn’t have been—it had been cooling for minutes now—but the moment my fingers curled into the pooling liquid, it felt like fire burning through my veins.
I raised my hand to my mouth.
I drank.
The pain was immediate.
Agony unlike anything I had ever known tore through my body.
It wasn’t like wounds. It wasn’t like torture. This wasn’t pain inflicted on me—this was my very essence being unmade.
My skin split. Bones cracked, reknitting. Muscles burned as something new took hold. I gasped—a raw, strangled sound as blood poured from my mouth, as my body rejected itself, breaking down, reshaping.
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A new system chime.
Race Evolution in Progress… ERROR.
Warning: Unknown Hybridization Detected. The system cannot classify your race.
All Demon-based Skills Erased.
Attributes Reset.
Level Rest.
New Pathway Detected. Rebuilding…
Something was wrong.
The change was not clean.
My body twisted, limbs spasming as the demon and vampire aspects warred within me. My bones cracked, reshaped, settled in something that felt wrong and right all at once.
The system tried again.
New Race: ERROR – Classification Failure.
Manual Designation Required.
My vision swam. My mouth was dry, my tongue heavy.
The system waited. It was asking me to define what I was.
Demon? Vampire? No. I was neither.
I forced the words from my throat, raw and broken.
“Painborn.”
A pause. Then—confirmation.
New Race: Painborn Revenant.
The moment the transformation finished, I slumped forward, barely conscious. My screams still reverberated off the cave walls, fading into the cold silence that followed. My body trembled, muscles locking and releasing in uneven spasms. I felt stretched—wrong. Like something had cracked open inside me and hadn’t quite settled back into place.
The cavern spun around me, distant and unfocused. The warriors were gone. I didn’t know when they had left, only that the air felt emptier without their presence. Maybe they had thought I was dead. Maybe they had seen what I was becoming and decided it was best to run.
I was still lying in the Alpha’s blood.
And I was still dying.
A strange sensation coiled inside me—not hunger, not thirst, but something deeper. A void, not empty but waiting. My body had changed, remade itself into something new, but the transformation had taken more than it had given.
I needed something to fill the space it left behind.
I lowered my head, pressing my lips to the pool of thick, still-warm blood.
And I drank.
It wasn’t desperation. It wasn’t survival. It was instinct—twisted, unnatural, and repulsive. Every drop burned down my throat like a sickness I had chosen to swallow, yet I couldn’t stop.
The moment the blood touched my tongue, my body reacted. It wasn’t nourishment—not like food, not like healing. It was completion. A missing piece slotting into place.
I drank until there was nothing left.
Even when the pool ran dry, I licked the stone, dragging in every last trace. Not because I craved it. Not because I needed it.
Because it felt right.
Each drop did something. My limbs steadied. The rawness of my transformation dulled, the fractured feeling in my bones beginning to settle. The cavern snapped into clarity—every jagged edge of rock, every fleck of dried blood.
And then—something else. A presence. Weak, trembling. Still here.
My head turned, slow, deliberate.
In the farthest reaches of the cave, barely visible against the stone, they huddled.
The children. The last remnants of the Alpha’s bloodline.
They had watched me drink their mother dry. Watched as I pressed my mouth to the dirt to take what little remained. Now, they watched me stand.
I had come here to eliminate all threats. The last of the vampires were right there, waiting to die. But something was different. Not hesitation. Not mercy. Something else.
They weren’t crying. They weren’t begging. They weren’t even running. They were staring. Not at a killer. Not at a demon. At me.
I stepped forward, and most of them flinched, pressing themselves against the cold stone walls of the cave, small bodies curling inward as if they could shrink away from what was coming. But one did not move. The smallest, barely more than a wisp of a child, stood in place, looking up at me with wide, unblinking eyes. Their tiny chest rose and fell with slow, measured breaths, and though their voice was barely above a whisper, it reached me clearly.
“Mother?”
The word settled over me, colder than the damp air of the cave.
For an instant, I wasn’t in the cave at all. I was back in the village. Chloe stood before me, grinning, her hands clutching a wooden sword too big for her fingers. She believed in me, trusted that I could keep her safe. But trust was fragile. The thing standing before me now—small, fragile, and waiting—wasn’t Chloe. It could never be.
A flicker of something passed through me, something deeper than thought. This child was not innocent. None of them were. I felt it—an undercurrent of rage, raw and festering, buried deep inside their small frames. It wasn’t the fear of prey. It was hatred, pure and simple, waiting for the chance to grow into something worse. If I left them alive, I would be planting the seeds of a future massacre.
I saw it in my mind as clearly as if it had already happened. A new Alpha rising from the ashes of this den, stronger, colder, untouched by mercy. The village burning. The people I had fought to protect slaughtered. Chloe’s body discarded like waste, her blood drained by the very creatures standing before me now.
There was no hesitation after that.
I moved.
The first fell without a sound, my fingers curling around their thin throat, twisting until I heard the snap of bone. I dropped them before the body had fully gone limp. The others screamed. I cut them down before the sound could fully rise. A blur of movement—one tried to run. I caught their arm and crushed it in my grip, the bones splintering like dry twigs. They collapsed, wailing, but I was already moving. My boot came down on their ribs, shattering them inward, ending the cry before it could become a word.
A system chime rang in my ears, but I barely heard it.
Another scrambled backward, their pale skin streaked with tears, their mouth opening as if to plead. I didn’t let them. My tail lashed out, slamming into their ribs. They hit the ground hard, gasping, but I was already there. My hands closed around their skull, fingers pressing in until the bone cracked beneath my grip. Their body twitched, then went still.
Another chime.
The last one—the smallest, the one who had spoken—remained standing.
They hadn’t run. They hadn’t screamed. Even as their kin fell around them, their expression didn’t change. Their tiny hands lifted, reaching toward me, fingers stretching for my wrist.
I didn’t let them touch me.
I drove my fist through their chest.
Their body jerked, blood spilling over my arm. They looked up at me, lips parting as if to speak, but nothing came out. Their fingers twitched once before they collapsed.
Silence filled the cave, thick and suffocating.
System Notification: You have slain [Vampire level 1] x5
Ding! Level Up.
Ding! Level Up.
A pulse surged through me, raw and potent, sending a shudder through my limbs. My body settled, the last remnants of weakness from the transformation fading.
System Notification: You have gained 1 Skill Point.
A final chime. This one felt different. Heavier. Like a judgment passed down.
System Notification: You have earned the Title: Childkiller.
The weight of the words pressed into my mind like a brand searing flesh. I stared at the bodies around me. Small. Fragile. The cave reeked of death, and none of it was mine.
Eliminate all threats.
It was done.
The bodies lay still, small and broken, the cave thick with the stench of blood and death. The silence pressed in, suffocating, heavier than the weight of my own exhaustion. I had done what was necessary, what no one else could, what no one else would.
I sank to the ground, my breath uneven, my hands trembling in front of me, still slick with warmth that wasn’t mine. It wasn’t pain, wasn’t weakness, wasn’t hesitation—but something deeper, something twisting in my chest, something I couldn’t name.
Is this what it feels like to be a hero?
Did Sylas make the correct choice?