WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 74

──────

Tyrkanzyaka's Book - Old Testament (Part 1)

The underground armory, at its deepest point. The final chamber, where a hideous relic worshipped darkness.

A grim aura drifted through it, and the air hung still like death. It was so silent that not even the wind could be heard.

Beneath pitch-black darkness where you could not see an inch ahead, a girl lay in a luxurious juniper coffin as if it were a bed. The vampire, her pale silver hair spread loose, had both hands neatly folded as she looked at me in perfect silence, without so much as a breath.

Lying demurely in the coffin, she spoke with pure curiosity.

"Will this really work? Do I not need to expose my heart?"

"You do not need to expose your heart right now. Hold this instead."

I placed a card in her hand. Heart 1. She checked the suit and smiled.

"A heart, of all things. What is this, some kind of charm?"

"No. Say hello. From now on, this will be your new heart, Trainee Tyrkanzyaka."

"Hm?"

She looked at the card again, but found nothing special. I let out a dry laugh and finished explaining.

"Of course it is not a real heart. I prepared a similar shape for suggestion. Hold it tightly with both hands and bring it to your chest."

She followed my instructions without a trace of doubt.

There was a time I thought it would be nice if everyone in the world obeyed me. But when someone like that was actually in front of me, it was deeply uncomfortable.

Living with just mind reading really was better.

"All right. Trainee Tyrkanzyaka. Close your eyes and breathe out slowly. Relax your body so your blood can flow quietly... though I suppose I do not need to tell you that."

A vampire's blood flowed quietly anyway. Better to worry about myself.

I took a deep breath. A tension I had not felt in a long time locked around my whole body. I did not welcome it, but this was a guest I had invited myself, so I had no choice but to accept it.

I took my place at the head of the juniper coffin, closest to her head. Our faces were close. Even in this jet-black dark, her crimson eyes still burned red.

Meeting those eyes, I gave a brief explanation.

"Trainee Tyrkanzyaka. Your heart does not beat, but you can move blood. In practice, that means you do not need a heart. Recovering your heart will not erase your abilities either. In a way, you are wishing for something useless. Even so, do you still want your heart back?"

"...I do."

"Why?"

"Because I want my heart to stop obeying my will."

Contradictory, in a way. But her wish was real, knotted deep inside her.

"Why? If you had the power to cut people off without pain whenever you resented them, would that not be useful? Ordinary people would covet that power, and rulers even more so."

"Are you still trying to test me, even now?"

The vampire sounded angry.

"I, too, was once human. I left that time behind, yet after countless days and nights, it still pulls at me. That spark-short span has grown so old its light has faded, but in the end, it made me who I am now. Because my heart did not move as I wished, I was able to change... but after death, no matter how hard I tried, I could no longer change."

"I see."

I had already read all of this, but I answered as if I did not know.

Her goal was not to move blood. She could already control blood by will, and if she wanted, she could crush the heart she once had and make another in exactly the same shape. She could even make it beat by squeezing it herself.

Having reached the extreme of bloodcraft, when it came to her own body, she was no different from a creator.

The Progenitor Tyrkanzyaka hated that.

Because a power that controlled things could not create anything beyond control, she had no choice but to keep searching for a method in others.

"All right. Request accepted. I will grant your wish."

Wind is meant to pass by, but sometimes wind like this collects and lingers.

I have mind reading, and when I open the windows of people's hearts as I please, that kind of wind sometimes hits me straight in the face.

It got me this time too.

I closed my eyes and sank deep into the darkness within me.

A faint candle lit the dark.

In the shabby library packed with books of the forgotten, there was a tiny candle set aside for the librarian. A dim flame that could barely light a single page. It was a small light that distinguished the books from the one who guarded them, and made a librarian into a caretaker.

I lifted the candle. It was weak and hazy, as if it might go out at any moment. A fragile flame that looked like one gust would snuff it out.

Compared to that, the book before me was thick and heavy. Not even an encyclopedia would be this vast. A single volume that felt like an epic stitched together. To read it all by this tiny candle, I would need dozens more.

But for what I was about to do, I did not need a librarian.

If you only look down, you can read only the letters written on the page. It is objective, yes...

But then you cannot know the chill soaked into the paper, the faint lingering scent, the pressed marks, or what someone wanted to leave in the margins.

So, for a moment, I chose to stop being a librarian.

I blew at the candle flame.

With a soft puff, the flame vanished in an instant.

And darkness remained in the world.

A moonless night when even the moon turned its head away. Not a single speck of light remained. Those who feared the dark hid in their homes, lay in bed, closed both eyes, folded both hands, and prayed only for it to pass.

On that black night, a father and daughter walked down a dim road, pulling a cart.

People who walked at night were one of two kinds.

Either they were in such a hurry they accepted whatever threats lurked in the dark.

Or they hoped the darkness would hide their sin along with their faces.

These two were the latter.

"Tyr, I am sorry. I dragged you into this...."

The father's low voice broke the quiet. The girl brushed the shadow from her face and smiled brightly.

"It's okay. If I think of it as a night walk, I actually like it. You know I love looking up at the night sky."

But both father and daughter knew that smile was for him, not for herself. Guilt clouded his face as he pulled the cart in silence.

The wooden cart moved smooth and quiet. He had wrapped the wheels in leather and heavily oiled the creaking axle, in case any sound slipped out.

He meant to hide even the smallest noise.

What kind of terrible crime had they committed, to move this carefully?

The answer lay in the cart.

Inside the rocking cart, under a single blanket,

lay a corpse they had buried last week.

A body that had lost life found rest in Mother Earth's embrace.

So disturbing that rest was seen as a deeply wicked act.

If even that was true, then what of defiling a dug-up corpse? It went without saying. Only an exemplary death awaited you, like stoning or burning at the stake.

But sin is always committed by someone.

"Tyr. Look. This is the path blood takes."

The father skinned the corpse with a knife. Unlike butchering meat, and all the more horrifying and revolting for it.

He peeled it layer by layer, from skin to muscle. Once the skin that tightly wrapped the body was stripped away, a sticky membrane followed. The real beginning came only after cutting that membrane and tearing it apart by hand.

When he forced apart bones clung with fascia, organs pooled with dead blood greeted them. Those were rotted or spoiled, so they could not be handled carelessly. He cut them away carefully, removed them outside, or pushed them aside, and went deeper into the body.

Then the exposed heart, and the blood vessels.

Lifting a vessel with a long rod, the father said,

"This is the heart. The source of our bodies, and where blood is made clean. All blood begins here. When the heart beats, blood sets out and circles the whole body. Blood leaving the heart runs on the inside, and blood returning after circling the body runs on the outside. That is how the body circulates in one great loop."

She had heard this dozens of times, but her father emphasized it every time he opened a new corpse.

The girl could have recited every word on the spot, but she only nodded instead.

"But I still do not understand the middle process... It seems the incoming blood pools in the organs for a moment before draining out, but that is hard to confirm on a body that is already dead. I need your help, Tyr."

"Okay."

Without a hint of disgust, the girl held out her hand. Then something astonishing happened.

Bright red blood began to rise from inside.

The blood that had hidden deep in the body at the moment of death. Hardened blood answered the girl's call, woke from sleep, and slowly began to move.

As she drew the blood upward, she asked her father,

"Should I push it in this way?"

"Please do. Thank you, as always, Tyr."

Unlike children her age who played in dirt, this girl dug through graves and corpses beside her healer father, and gained a strange power.

The ability to control blood.

At best, it could only stop bleeding from a scraped wound, but it was exactly what her father had long wished for.

Her father had hated involving his daughter in his crimes, but from that day on, he no longer refused her help. He could not. Her ability was that special, and that useful.

Of course, the girl helped her father without showing any reluctance.

"If I let the blood flow along this path, like this, right?"

"Yes. Push it in, and I will check whether blood pools in the organs."

Her father, already a capable healer, became one who improved more and more from that day onward. His reputation spread so widely that people from neighboring villages came quietly to seek him out.

In no time, he became the pride of the village, and the villagers were quietly proud of him too.

"...Your mother died because her lungs filled with blood. To be exact, the pathway that should have drained blood from there was damaged. That shell had holes throughout it, like loose hemp cloth...."

Whenever villagers introduced her father, they never failed to mention how, after losing his wife to a tragic illness, his skill had risen by leaps and bounds.

A wife with a chronic illness, a sorrowful death, then a healer awakened afterward. How easy and beautiful that story sounded.

"Tyr, if we gain the ability to find injured blood pathways and heal them... we can conquer disease."

But the girl, who had watched her father more closely than anyone, knew.

That awakening had been built on a mountain of corpses.

"We can wipe out the disease that killed your mother... from this world."

In the father's eyes as he said it, strange madness and yearning were mixed together.

Her father was a healer.

Calling him a physician did not quite fit. In those days, people did not define work by profession first; they lived according to whatever work came to them, and every village had one or two people in mixed roles.

Tyr's father was one of those people. He was the seventh son of a noble line, though not a wealthy one. All he inherited was decent looks, polished speech, and knowledge worth a few books. In the harsh world, those were useful in exactly that order.

He wandered, met eyes with a woman in some village, grew close to her, married her, and settled there.

He was a teacher for the children, a healer, and when anything happened in the village, he stepped forward to negotiate. It did not take long for him to blend in.

But the woman had a long-standing chronic illness. After she gave birth, it only worsened. The knowledge from a few books was not enough to save her. The time of grief only drew nearer, never farther away.

One night, under cold falling snow, the girl's mother scattered red blood across the piled white ground. The fierce wind swallowed the father's cry of sorrow.

That was when it began. The father began laying hands on corpses.

At first, he acted in secret from the girl. But after the mother, who had held the household together with fierce determination, passed away, the girl naturally took over those duties and quickly noticed his deviation.

Naturally, she feared him at first too. No matter how close family was, seeing someone dissect and dismantle corpses was hard to accept.

But she could not abandon her father, her only family, so she endured it and stayed by his side. At some point, she began helping him.

Was it because she was still young, or because she learned under that kind of father? From then on,

the girl's thoughts began to change little by little.

Her father, aside from committing the grotesque act of dissecting corpses, was an exceptionally good adult. He cared for the injured, healed them, and was respected by many.

He handled more corpses than anyone, yet he had never killed anyone himself. If anything, he saved patients.

Digging up corpses was a grave crime. Being branded a servant of demons would be only fair.

But if it could save people.

A body already dead, one beasts would tear apart anyway, or insects and mold would consume. If her father used that body to save someone dying,

who could condemn him?

Around that time, the girl came to handle blood.

And she went beyond being her father's helper, becoming his equal colleague.

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried