The sky was gray when Cynthia awoke, and a cold fog filled the endless wilderness like a mantle that never faded, weighing the world down and silencing it.
She made no sound the moment she opened her eyes, only shifted her gaze slowly around to perceive that she was lying in a traveling carriage. The wooden carriage shook more than a little, and the air was a mixture of blood, earth and the scent of aged vines, faintly smelling of decay that did not belong in the modern world.
This was the Otherworld, this was the starting point she had not chosen.
Her body was padded with a thick sack, and her limbs still maintained the basic temperature of a "living organism", but there was some kind of slow-growing strange sensation swimming inside her body - not like pain, not like psychic fluctuations, but more like a yet-to-be-formed fire mixed into her blood.
She didn't know how long she'd been unconscious, or when she'd "woken up", but what was certain was that she was no longer in her original reality.
Her eyes swept through the narrow gap in the carriage, and there was a caravan outside, knights in black and gray cloaks riding on the backs of thin, tall horses, holding the reins, wearing heavy masks on their faces, so that they could not see their expressions.
They were silent, like a procession that existed to fulfill a ritual, without a trace of mundane atmosphere. Beyond the wagons, there was barren, uninhabited dry land, with intermittent broken trees and stone pillars blackened by fire, like the scars of years of war in the ruins of war.
Cynthia was not alarmed, nor did she make any flippant exclamations such as "I've traveled". She remembered the activation of the system, and the last glimpse of the alert box.
That was the last line she saw on her computer screen before crossing over:
[Accessed the target world - Red Moon Blood Coronet]
[Requirements for player to pass: Become a true Blood]
[Failed to load, system reboot in progress ...]
And then it was blank.
No character setup, no racial options, no newbie tutorial.
Like a piece of unprocessed code, she was dumped directly into the world's main line.
Now the system remained silent, the depths of her consciousness empty, except for occasional flashes of fragmentary remnants of information - spells, fragments of maps, vague names of people. All of them were useless. All she could rely on was herself.
A whisper came from the front of the wagon, like a fragment of some language, strangling a few syllables in the depths of her throat. Cynthia couldn't hear it, but she caught one of the words keenly.
"Aberahelm."
Cynthia remembered this name, that was the original game's original setting of the "Holy Land of the Blood", also known as the "God's Dormition" city, possessing the only recognized fiefdom core of the Blood.
As a member of the former development team's temporary technical outsourcing team, I am familiar with many of the redacted content, and the place of "Abyakhim" has only appeared once in the game's data - in the draft of the background setting, it is the place where all purebloods first woke up, and it is also the most difficult to read in the entire world system. It was also the most difficult area to read in the entire world system.
Cynthia slowly sat up and looked down at her hands.
The knuckles were long and slender, the skin was too pale to resemble a living person, the vein lines were dark, and they had a different temperature and texture from what she remembered. She was certain that this was not her original body. This body ... is more like a young girl of tender years, at least it is not the body of Cynthia, a long time suppressed social animal.
The carriage suddenly stopped.
There were a few short passwords from outside, followed by the sound of a series of heavy chains dragging.
Someone approached and the door was opened, a cold wind that smelled of rust poured into the carriage, followed by the voice of the masked knight:
"Get out."
Without hesitation, Cynthia obediently stood up and stepped off the carriage on the muddy ground.
She wasn't sure in what capacity she was being transported to Aberahelm, but judging from the escorting formation and silent caravan, it wasn't an ordinary sinner or slave, at least. Looking up ahead, the fabled sanctuary surfaced behind the distant mist.
The towers were lined with shadows, the lights were thin, and among the shadows were the vague figures of high-ranking Blood Clans patrolling the area. Each tower was like a stone monument sealing knowledge and power, piercing straight into the clouds as if asking for the sky.
Above the gates of the city, the ancient language of "The First Words of the Blood" was engraved in stone.
"All who return are molded by the Father."
Cynthia's heart skipped a beat as she stood in front of the gate and heard these words.
"Father" - In the Blood worldview, there is only one being that can be called "Father".
The Patriarch, Leuphanas.
The first time she heard of this name was in the abandoned version of the project, in the subplot that only existed in the internal documents.
The First Ancestor has no last name, no royal title, and is not called "King" or "Your Majesty", but is referred to as 'Lord' or "Lord First Ancestor. All the members of the Blood Clan call them "Lord" or "Lord Patriarch".
Leuphanas is the son of Cain, the first Blood Nation, and Lilith, the Moon Goddess. He was born as an adult, with black hair and red pupils, without a family name. He is neither a king nor a god, but he is the master of all the origins of the Blood Race.
What's more, in the very early setting of the program, he had attempted to create a "non-primordial blood race" and succeeded in transforming a "human" into a blood race under certain special conditions.
That test subject was only recorded in the document with a vague number, never named.
Cynthia suddenly felt numb. She couldn't immediately confirm her suspicions, but she was almost certain that she hadn't just wandered in at random.
She was the successor to that number, perhaps the host of that fragmented code.
The gates of the city opened.
She was introduced into the city.
The city was not brilliant, but rather looked like an old clan temple that had not been repaired in years, full of pale gray stone pillars and charred cane walls. By the side of the road, there were low-ranking servants of the Blood Clan standing at attention, their expressions stiff, their eyes deliberately avoiding her.
Occasionally, a well-dressed noble passed by, but only gave a sideways glance, and then hurriedly left.
Cynthia walked extremely steadily, with a calm demeanor, as if she was walking the long way to the entrance of a show.
She knew that the more at this kind of time, the more she could not reveal a single crack.
It wasn't until they reached the deepest part of the city, the staircase that led to the council chamber, that the leader stopped.
"Go in."
The voice was low, but it carried no respect or hostility.
Cynthia slowly made her way up the steps. Her heartbeat gradually became one with her feet as she stepped into the space that awaited her.
There was no throne in the hall, only a ring of stone steps with a huge white sacrificial stone in the center.
The man stood in front of the stone.
The first time she saw this "originator", what emerged in Cynthia's heart was not shock, but an indescribable emptiness.
It was not a "strong man" or "king" in the human sense.
He stood still, his black hair hanging down, his pupils like burnt out embers, his pale face with a certain kind of divinity that had nothing to do with gentleness. He wasn't cruel, he wasn't emotional, he wasn't even "looking at her".
He was just "there".
Like a star, like the moonlight before it falls.
He did not ask where she came from, nor did he explain her existence to anyone.
Just slowly raised his hand and pointed it at the center of her forehead.
"Come."
Cynthia hesitated for a moment, but finally did as she was told.
The man's fingertips landed on her brow. There was no ritual, no prophecy, just a very faint incantation that exploded in her consciousness, like a blade of ice splitting the surface of a lake, ripping apart the "human" identity.
The spell was activated.
Before she lost consciousness, she only heard him murmur:
"You are not my son, but you will be my witness."
As the black mist cleared before her eyes, Cynthia's consciousness was as hard as if she had been pulled out of the deep. She hadn't really been unconscious for long, but the imprint of the spell, like a soul flipping, had disassociated time from her physical senses, as if she'd been sinking in the abyss of consciousness for a hundred years.
Cynthia did not wake up in a luxurious bedchamber, nor was she wrapped in soft silk blankets.
She lay on a stone couch surrounded by a confined space constructed of gray and white stone tiles. A faint odor of blood and rust floated in the air, seemingly unnoticeable. Above her head was a tiny bone lamp, its light stagnant as frozen water, barely illuminating her silhouette.
Cynthia sat up, her fingers subconsciously skimming over the center of her forehead. The skin there was cold and unfamiliar to the touch, like a recently healed wound.
There was no blood, no wound, but something cold enough to penetrate deep into her nerves lingered, like the breath of another life that was slowly implanting itself into her being.
The stone chamber had no windows, only a half-open iron door.
Outside the door stood a Blood servant in a long gray corseted tunic. He did not look at her, only speaking faintly as she moved:
"Lord Patriarch is waiting for you."
His voice had no emotion or hostility. It was neutral, rational, and obedient.
Cynthia didn't move immediately, she checked her physical state again in silence. After coming to this world, she hardly ever spoke, and she still understood the truth that more words would lead to more mistakes.
With a completely new social system and race, even if she had been personally involved in some of the design, it was difficult to get a glimpse of the game that was said to have a huge setting.
There was still the movement of breathing in her chest, but the exhaled breath was extremely cold, making it almost impossible to perceive body heat. The skin is pale to the point of near-transparency, with a slight dark purple tinge to the flesh color around the edges of the nails. The heartbeat is very slow, almost five beats a breath - which is far below normal human vital signs.
In her eyes, the ability to catch light was clearly enhanced. Even the faintest light in this stone room allowed her to recognize the direction of every stone pattern.
More crucially, she felt no hunger, no thirst, and not a trace of exhaustion in the normal sense.
--This was the body of a Blood.
It wasn't a First Embrace, it hadn't died, it hadn't been blood-infused, and it hadn't been ritually enchanted.
Cynthia was not a transformed species allowed to exist in any Blood setting.
So by what means had she been transformed?
She called out in a low voice:
"System?"
There was no response.
It was a long time before a very faint line of text alerts flooded her mind:
[Current Status: Transformation in progress]
[Subject's blood source: unknown]
[Blood Injection Record: None]
[Presumed Composition Level: Undefined - Non-Parental Embrace]
[Main Quest: Become a True Blood (Passing Condition)]
Cynthia's fingers tightened slightly as she read it word by word.
To have completed the transformation process without first embrace meant that her blood source was composed in an extremely special way. Or - from the system's point of view, she didn't meet the definition of "blood race" in this world, and shouldn't even "exist" at all.
She shut down the interface and immediately got up.
It was time to go to the audience with Leuphanas.