Whose Blood Did She Drink?

In Xuhui South, a towering high-end office building cast its cold white light across the surrounding commercial district, which had long since fallen silent for the night.

The area was dense with office buildings, most of them twenty stories or so, but this particular one — the source of that cold white glow — rose a full forty floors, well over a hundred meters tall.

The top floor remained vacant, no company having moved in yet. The vast space was entirely empty save for a scattering of renovation tools left here and there.

Deep in the night, the building had emptied out. Even the security guard on the first floor was dozing off, oblivious to the strange figure moving through the black-and-white corridors of the surveillance monitors...

The figure moved with startling speed, vanishing from one camera feed only to reappear in the next.

It seemed to be searching for something — a gust of mist-laden wind sweeping upward through the floors.

All the way to the fortieth, where the bare space was wrapped only in tempered glass on the outside.

The ceiling was low — just over three meters — giving the floor a subtly oppressive quality. What little city light filtered in from outside did nothing more than leave faint, ghostly shadows in the darkness, deepening the eerie stillness.

A black coat. A profile carved sharp by cold, pale light. Lips the color of fresh blood. Nie Dong stood before the tempered glass wall and stared in cool silence at the sprawling, glittering city below — so vast and brilliant it made a person feel insignificant.

On any other night, he'd have been at the Northern Club, hunting his next delectable prey. But not tonight.

He had been cast out by his elders, left a discarded Vampire with no clan to return to.

The reason was simple: the Hunters' Alliance had set its sights on them.

Which meant that whether the Hunters' Alliance chose to kill him or not was no longer that family's concern. They were cowards — craven and spineless. They possessed abilities that surpassed both ordinary humans and Mages, yet they still chose to tuck their tails and scrape by in hiding. Nie Dong had long since grown sick of them. Good riddance. At least now no one would be droning those tedious commandments in his ear.

**Whoosh!**

A strange wind swept through the empty floor and struck the back of his head.

A slight smirk tugged at Nie Dong's mouth. Without turning around, he said, "So you've still got some decency left in you. Why not keep up the charade back at the academy? You refused to help me when I asked — so what brings you here now?"

Behind Nie Dong stood the silhouette of a woman — slender and graceful, her long hair loose and disheveled in a way that carried a wild, unruly beauty.

The silhouette drew closer, one slow step at a time, her footfalls barely making a sound...

"Drop dead!" Suddenly the woman let out a shrill, anguished scream.

Her hands blurred and transformed into pale, bone-white claws — five barbed daggers raking savagely for Nie Dong's throat.

**Slash!**

The claws moved like lightning, trailing a cold gleam through the air and carving deep furrows across Nie Dong's neck.

He had never expected her to attack him. He'd managed to dodge on pure instinct the moment that eerie wind surged — thank God, because those claws would have ripped clean through and taken his head completely from his shoulders.

"What the hell is wrong with you — *you*?!" Nie Dong lurched sideways, pressing a hand to his neck as blood seeped through his fingers.

Earlier, when a dagger had pierced Nie Dong's heart, not a single drop of blood had spilled. But now, with his neck torn open, blood poured freely — it was immediately clear that the region where Vampires stored their blood reserves was the shoulder and above: the head and neck.

He had assumed the figure was a woman from his clan. When he turned and found himself staring at a face that was familiar yet somehow utterly changed, shock and disbelief warred across his features.

"Liu… Liu Ru??" He stared at the woman before him — furious beyond words — and it took a long moment to get her name out.

"I'm going to kill you!" Liu Ru screamed the words over and over as though she'd lost all other language, as though nothing existed but this one need — to howl out every drop of the endless rage inside her.

"You've become Blood Clan — impossible. *How* is this possible? Without a Blood Clan member to pass blood to you, the most you could become is some kind of Vampire monstrosity!" Nie Dong said, reeling.

Her face was deathly pale, her lips blood-red, the sharp points of her Blood Fangs bared to open air. The delicate, pretty face that had once been hers was gone — replaced by something fierce, anguished, and furious. The underlying beauty was still there, but consumed by those dark emotions, it was rendered utterly unrecognizable.

It was true — Nie Dong had intended to turn Liu Ru into Blood Clan. He was obsessed with her, and only by making her one of them could she remain his companion forever.

But the Blood Clan ritual had never been completed.

The reason he had killed that policewoman was precisely this: he needed more blood — enough to offer Liu Ru her first taste after the transformation.

The process worked like this: drain an ordinary person's blood, corrupt it through the Blood Diagram, and return it to that person's body. That was only the first step of becoming Blood Clan. The one whose blood had been tainted then had to accept a blood inheritance from a Blood Clan member — they had to drink a Blood Clan member's blood — before they could fully become a Vampire.

When Nie Dong himself had undergone the transformation, he had woken with corrupted blood and then drunk from a middle-aged man, and so he had become a Vampire. The middle-aged man who provided that Blood Clan inheritance was his elder — someone he could never betray.

Nie Dong had planned to be the one to give Liu Ru his blood, making himself her elder and binding her loyalty to him forever. But misfortune had struck during his return from hunting: his clan had cast him out, and by the time he reached the Northern Club, Liu Ru had already been rescued...

*Whose blood did she drink?*

*How had she not become some misshapen monster — how had she become Blood Clan?*

**Rip!**

Nie Dong was still reeling with confusion when Liu Ru launched another ferocious assault.

She clearly hadn't yet learned to wield her new power with any finesse — she was simply tearing at everything with raw Vampire strength.

That strength was staggering. A supporting column in the office building crumbled under a single swipe of her claws.

And Liu Ru was fast. Nie Dong kept shifting positions using his shadow abilities to shake her, but she matched his every move regardless. He couldn't believe it.

A Vampire's strength depended on two things: the Aberrant Blood gained through hunting after the transformation, and — more importantly — the elder who had turned them. Vampires were a matter of bloodline. The stronger the elder, the stronger the progeny.

This Liu Ru had been a Vampire for less than a day, and already her strength and speed surpassed every Blood Clan member of Nie Dong's own generation. *How was that even possible?*

**Crash!**

Liu Ru seized him by the coat and hurled him into the tempered glass wall. Countless cracks spiderwebbed across it on impact.

"Damn it!" Nie Dong hauled himself back to his feet, fury written plainly across his face.

Liu Ru — who was supposed to have become his thrall — had somehow acquired a bloodline stronger than his own. That was something Nie Dong could not tolerate.

But what mattered most was this: Liu Ru was completely beyond his control. *Whose blood had she drunk? And why did the aura she radiated carry something subtly different — something that felt almost, but not quite, like Blood Clan?*