WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 412

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The Culprit Is Among Us

The Progenitor's return kept the Castle of the Full Moon buzzing for days. Old men who had despaired of ever seeing her in their lifetimes wept freely into their handkerchiefs. Curious children drifted near the castle walls hoping to catch even a distant glimpse of her face. There was no trace of the fear humans were supposed to feel toward vampires, no sense of helplessness at being ruled. For the humans here, there was only peace. I wondered if this was how a flock of sheep felt, gazing out beyond the fence.

The vampires rejoiced with genuine elation, but the feelings running underneath were a little different. Those who knew about the Elder's death were quietly afraid of what might follow. And the vampires who hadn't yet been told of the Elder's death, well.

"The Progenitor's..."

"...favorite concubine!"

They stared at me as I passed, hushing themselves and whispering.

So. Stop calling me that. It's not a great thing to hear, as the human in question. I was here as a guest who had done Tyr a kindness, nothing more...

"Hyu!"

Tyr spotted me from the far end of the corridor and came toward me with obvious delight. Her expression was warm and open, and there was something almost giddy in the slight quickening of her steps. The vampires who managed the Progenitor's castle clamped their hands over their mouths in shock at this unfamiliar side of her.

'The Progenitor is smiling at a mere human!'

'In a thousand years she never took a concubine, never even pressed her lips to a human body...! Just how delicious must that blood be!'

No, if she acts like this, I can't exactly deny the concubine thing. A little Progenitor-like dignity, please. Stop being so obvious about liking me.

My silent protest went unheard. Tyr was wearing casual clothes today instead of her usual dress, and she approached me with the same easy familiarity her simple outfit suggested.

"You woke early. Did you sleep well? Nothing uncomfortable?"

"It's so dark in there I couldn't even tell when day came. Sorry for sleeping in... wait. Early?"

"Waking after only a day counts as early. It's not unusual for a vampire to lie down and open their eyes a month later."

"That's a vampire standard. For us, twelve hours of sleep and we start wondering if we're already dead. Twenty-four hours? We just hold the funeral."

"By your standard, we would all be long dead."

"Exactly. Vampires are living proof the standard is correct."

"Heh. Fair enough."

'Does conversation make me feel this way because my heart has come back to life, or is it because it's Hyu...? Perhaps there's no need to tell them apart. All these little tremors in my feelings are something Hyu gave me.'

Reading her thoughts, the concubine label is honestly accurate. It's just a strange word to apply out loud. Makes me sound like a kept man.

"We said we'd look at the documents together today. I was already worried I'd delayed things on your account, you should have woken me."

"How could I wake you when you were sleeping so soundly? The documents can wait. There's no urgency."

"What? It's still a murder. Isn't this pressing?"

"It is the first thing that must be dealt with. But Luscinia has been dead for more than ten years. Rushing won't change anything."

I had to wonder whether this was really something a Progenitor should be saying.

Even back in the Abyss, a certain unhurriedness had always shown through in Tyr's words and manner. She never moved at anything close to a run, and she spoke of a week or a month as though they were the same blink of an eye. I hadn't noticed it much while we were inside the Abyss, but now that I was in the Fog Duchy, I understood.

The entire country was unhurried.

Nothing was ever urgent. Vampires didn't chase time. They lay around, wandered the streets occasionally, tossed blood gold coins to humans, and took their blood. The humans took those coins, the price of blood, and went about their economic lives. They traded at farms and fishing grounds for food, or browsed the goods that traveling merchant caravans brought in. The blood gold coins spent that way eventually circled back to the vampires in one form or another.

Before seeing it myself, I had imagined a living hell. What I actually found in the Fog Duchy was something pastoral, the country of livestock. Like drifting clouds, like growing grass.

With an enormous fence standing between humans and vampires.

"Any evidence would be long gone by now. That's a problem. How do you even conduct an investigation under these conditions?"

"There is evidence. The vampires who remember what happened are still here and very much alive."

"Testimony always needs physical evidence to back it up."

"Physical evidence... as well?"

The slight tilt of Tyr's head gave me an uneasy feeling. Physical evidence, the kind of thing you naturally need when passing judgment, the tangible proof that explains what actually happened. Asking for it seemed obvious.

So why was the judge tilting her head?

"I'm genuinely curious. How were you planning to run the trial?"

"I hear from both parties. Then I single out the suspect and hand down punishment. That is all."

"That's all? That's enough?"

"What more is needed? Would a vampire of the Duchy dare lie to my face?"

"And if they did? Do you have mind reading?"

That quick counter seemed to shake Tyr's confidence a little. She asked in return.

"...Is that not how judgment is reached these days?"

'Has the method of passing sentence changed without my knowing? I have no idea what has stayed the same.'

"It's roughly similar these days, yes. But for a case this important, the investigation feels a little thin."

Military state judges handed down punishments that exceeded the crime, but even they demanded evidence. They might descend without warning on a neighbor's tip, but if they couldn't find what they were looking for, they let it go. If people were dragged away simply for following state orders, no punishment system, however harsh, would stop anyone from just committing crimes openly.

Punishment is the state's claim on the right of revenge. It doesn't prevent things from happening in the first place. Whether you call it justice or rule of law, what matters is the trust that it will actually be carried out. In that sense, the death of an Elder needed to be approached carefully, in a way people could believe in.

"This isn't a quarrel between children, it's the death of a major figure. We should dig as deep as we can for the truth. Hear testimony, but don't take it on faith. Check for contradictions. Then hand down the verdict."

"...Mm."

'I had meant to spend a little time just being with Hyu before turning to business. I thought we might have a year or so of quiet, ordinary days together.'

A year is not a little time. At that rate you'd start worrying about the statute of limitations.

I had agreed to stay, but I had no intention of just passing the time. I said to Tyr, "I offered to help, so let's think this through together."

"Together... yes, let's do that. Let's put our heads together and think... together." A small, pleased sound. "Heh heh."

"Right. Before we look at the documents, I want to hear from you first. Who Luscinia was. Who could have killed him."

"The documents will be in my audience chamber. Let us talk on the way."

Tyr led me forward. Two vampire handmaidens stood in the corridor with their hands pressed over their mouths and their heads bowed, but Tyr passed them the way you pass a painted screen, without a glance.

The Castle of the Full Moon was a vast old fortress, more than ten stories high. The floors were hard enough to make any human worry about their joints, and the ceilings soared far overhead, but neither troubled vampires who could swim through darkness. More to the point, the bricks of this castle had been hardened with human blood when they were first fired. The darkness filling the corridors was not the absence of light but the Progenitor's own power. In a fortress held together by forces in such careful balance, a vampire could find its way blind, like a bat in a cave.

Tyr guided me toward the Progenitor's audience chamber at the very top of the castle. I had half expected to walk, but a crimson carpet rose beneath me and floated gently upward. A relief.

Nice as the comfort is, that color is probably... well.

While the carpet moved, Tyr began to explain.

"Luscinia was a blood arts master. That may be hard to picture on its own, so let me be more specific. He was someone who combined bloodcraft and energy technique to repair and improve the human body."

"Repair and improve? The human body?"

"Yes. He would break muscles and make them regenerate, split bone and reknit it, gradually strengthening the body piece by piece. Beyond that, he used bloodcraft to replicate the effects of energy technique, pioneering the field of blood energy technique and founding that school of practice. A man of extraordinary knowledge across many disciplines. I learned a great deal from him myself, over the years."

"Breaking muscles, splitting bone, would it be fair to compare him to Cabilah-nim?"

"No. They may look similar at a glance, but the two were exact opposites, in ability and in temperament alike."

Tyr thought for a moment about how to explain this.

"Cabilah combined her craft with dark magic and devoted herself to puppetry through domination. To Cabilah, her puppets are her creations, objects of affection and care. And the humans under her protection are not so different from her puppets."

"That's a little unsettling. Thinking of humans as puppets."

"You may find this difficult to accept, but Cabilah is one of the Elders who treats humans most kindly. She doesn't kill humans on a whim, and she listens earnestly to what they want. Her bone soldiers were built to take on dangerous work in place of humans. In the most hazardous workplaces in the Fog Duchy, she puts them to use."

Is that so? Now that I thought about it, she had used bone soldiers to do the cooking during the carriage ride here. Cooking was something done for the living. Cabilah had at least had the consideration to think about human taste.

Back in Claudia too, Cabilah was the only one who paid individual attention to each of the thunder practitioners as she killed them. You might ask what was kind about that, but compared to Lungken, who charged after strong opponents without caring who was underfoot, or Valdamir, who had treated them purely as tactical assets, Cabilah was at least the most human about it. Which was probably why she left the least impression.

Turning that memory over, a thought struck me and I asked.

"Wait. You said the late Luscinia-ssi was Cabilah-ssi's opposite. If Cabilah-ssi is the kindest Elder, then the late Luscinia-ssi was...?"

"You've guessed correctly. Luscinia was the Elder who treated humans most harshly. In the pursuit of blood energy technique, he had no hesitation in cutting humans open alive, and he broke bones and muscle under the name of 'improvement.'"

"Hm. I probably shouldn't say this, but I'm relieved it was that particular Elder who died. Otherwise I might have ended up dissected too."

"Who would dare do such a thing to my honored guest when their own life would be forfeit? At any rate, Luscinia drew considerable resentment even among vampires. He killed so many humans that blood ran short."

"Every story I dig up is worse than the last..."

The irony of his true blood being passed down to the Healer Sage was not lost on me. Then again, maybe having that as a counterexample was exactly what drove her to focus so hard on keeping people alive.

"His bloodline carries the ability to use the body in unusual ways through blood energy technique. Like Ain Jazra, whom you saw before, using his own cloak as wings to glide, or twisting the bones and muscles of his legs to leap high into the air. If something seems to be using the body strangely, it likely comes from Luscinia's bloodline. Keep that in mind."

"I'm not sure what counts as strange anymore. I've met a vampire who split open her own chest to show me her heart."

"There were special circumstances for that. And because of it, the two of us came to be connected."

Tyr gave me a mildly reproving look and continued.

"Still, no matter how many enemies he made, an Elder is an Elder. Luscinia's power was enough to shake heaven and earth, and his regeneration had no equal. Neither vampire nor human could have even thought of laying a hand on him."

"And yet someone did."

"...Yes."

"Since it happened, speculating about whether it was possible is beside the point. All right. Someone killed an Elder. That means whoever did it had the means to kill an Elder. Tyr, what methods exist for killing an immortal Elder?"

Even Tyr needed a long moment to consider this. The crimson carpet bore us all the way to the entrance of her audience chamber before she finally spoke.

"Even an immortal Elder can reach permanent death if their very existence is worn away. For instance, though I doubt this is what happened, if someone subdued an Elder and threw them deep into the Sea of Leviathans, their body would scatter across the waters and vanish forever."

"That makes sense. Saltwater touches the body, blood seeps out, and sea-beasts come swarming from every direction drawn by the scent. The sea itself is like one enormous creature. Being swallowed by it... you'd be completely dissolved and beyond all recovery."

"Or if the body were torn to shreds and left under ferocious sunlight for about a week, the damage would become irreversible."

"Sunlight transforms all things, after all. Exposed and sun-dried like that, even an Elder would be in serious danger."

Vampires were immortal, not invincible. The sun, garlic, running water, there were reasons vampires disliked each of those things. At sufficient intensity, they could threaten a vampire's very existence.

But even so.

"Neither of those is the actual cause of death, though."

Tyr made a small impressed sound and looked at me with undisguised anticipation.

"Remarkable. What makes you say that?"

"Because a vampire who inherited his true blood appeared."

Luscinia had died, but a new Elder who had inherited his true blood had emerged. Lir Nightingale. Not yet, but in the regressor's future, the Elder who would be called the Healer Sage. Lir handled bloodcraft with the assurance of someone who could genuinely call herself an Elder.

That she had inherited the true blood was beyond question. And if so..."True blood being passed down means it wasn't the sea or sunlight that killed him. Someone attacked the Elder, brought him down, and then took his true blood with bloodcraft superior to his own. That's the only reading that fits."

A dramatic chord in my head. The culprit was a vampire. This was the blood-soaked truth I had arrived at.

The King of Humanity, Hughes, could produce deductions of this quality from a handful of clues this thin. Tyr was genuinely impressed.

'Truly, it is Hyu. I thought even the King of Humanity would struggle to grasp matters of the vampire world. My expectations were overturned in the best way.... Perhaps Hyu will actually uncover the truth of what happened to Luscinia.'

...Right, I read that with mind reading, so please don't put too much faith in me.

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