The deepest recess of the underground armory. The final chamber, where grotesque sculptures worship the darkness.

An eerie presence hangs in the air, which lies as still as death. All is silent, without so much as the sound of wind.

Beneath pitch-black darkness that hides even what lies directly ahead, a girl lies in a luxurious incense-wood coffin, using it as a bed. Her faintly silver hair spread loose, the vampire gazes quietly at me with her hands neatly folded, not making a single sound of breathing.

Lying demurely in her coffin, she spoke with genuine curiosity.

“Will this truly suffice? Must I not expose my heart?”

“You don't need to expose it right now. Instead, hold this.”

I placed a card in her hand. The ace of hearts. Checking its suit, the vampire smiled with pleasure.

“A heart, of all things. Why, is it some sort of charm?”

“No. Say hello. It's going to be your new heart, Trainee Tyrkanzyaka.”

“Hmm?”

She looked at the card again but could find nothing unusual about it. With a dry chuckle, I continued my explanation.

“It's not a real heart, of course. I prepared something with a similar shape for the power of suggestion. Hold it tightly in both hands and bring them to your chest.”

The vampire obeyed without a trace of suspicion.

I used to wish everyone in the world would obey me. But having someone like that right in front of me was incredibly uncomfortable.

I really was better off just getting by with mind reading.

“Now, Trainee Tyrkanzyaka. Close your eyes and breathe out comfortably. Relax your body so your blood flows calmly... Though I suppose you don't need me to tell you that.”

A vampire's blood flowed calmly anyway. I would be better off worrying about myself.

I took a deep breath. Tension, something I hadn't felt in a long time, gripped my body. It was hardly welcome, but I had invited this guest myself. I had no choice but to receive it.

I took my place at the head of the incense-wood coffin, as close to her head as possible. Our faces were close. Even in the pitch-black darkness, her crimson eyes still shone red.

Meeting those eyes, I offered a brief explanation.

“Trainee Tyrkanzyaka. Your heart doesn't beat, but you can move your blood. In effect, you don't need a heart. Regaining it won't make your abilities disappear, either. In a sense, you're wishing for something useless. Do you still want your heart back?”

“... I do.”

“Why?”

“Because I want my heart to be beyond my control.”

In a sense, it was a contradiction. But those words held the vampire's long-pent-up wish.

“Why? When you resent someone, isn't it useful to be able to cut them out of your life without any pain? Ordinary people would covet that ability, and rulers all the more so.”

“Even now, you would test me?”

The vampire spoke with feigned anger.

“I was human once, too. Though I left those days in the past, they still tug at me after countless days and nights. That time, as brief as a spark, is so old that its light has faded. Yet in the end, it was that time that made me who I am. Because my heart would not obey my will, I could change... And after I died, no matter how hard I tried, I could change no longer.”

“I see.”

I had already read all of this, but I answered as though I hadn't.

Moving her blood wasn't her goal. She could already control it at will. If she wanted, she could grind up her original heart and create another exactly like it. She could even make her heart beat simply by squeezing it herself.

Having reached the pinnacle of blood manipulation, she was as good as a creator when it came to her own body...

But that was precisely what the Progenitor Tyrkanzyaka disliked.

Her power to control things could not create something beyond her control. That was why she could only keep looking to others for a way.

“All right. Understood. I'll grant your wish.”

Wishes, like breezes, ordinarily pass by. But sometimes one pools and gathers like this.

With my mind reading, I open the windows of people's hearts without permission, and sometimes a gust like that hits me square in the face.

It had happened again.

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

A faint candle illuminates the darkness.

In a humble library packed with the books of the forgotten, a small candle stands ready for the librarian. Its dim light can barely illuminate a single page before it. This little light distinguishes the books from their keeper, allowing the librarian to remain their custodian.

I lifted the candle. Its flame was frail and dim, as though it might die at any moment. So delicate that a single breeze might extinguish it.

By contrast, the book before me was thick and heavy. Not even an encyclopedia could be this vast. A single volume that seemed to contain an entire collection of epics. To read it all by this little candle, I would need dozens more like it...

But what I was about to do required no librarian.

Looking down at a book let me read only the words written in it. That made it objective, but...

It could not tell me of the chill soaked into the paper, its faint scent, the indentations pressed into it, or what its author had wanted to leave in the margins.

So I decided to stop being a librarian for a little while.

I blew on the candle.

With a puff, the flame vanished in an instant.

And there was darkness in the world.

A moonless night, when even the moon has turned its face away. Not a speck of light exists in the world. Those who fear the darkness hide inside their houses, lying in bed with eyes closed and hands clasped, praying only for it to retreat.

On that pitch-black night, a father and daughter walk along a dark road, pulling a cart.

Those who travel at night are one of two kinds.

Either their business is urgent enough to brave whatever threats lurk in the darkness...

Or they hope the darkness will conceal their sins along with their figures.

These two were the latter.

“Tyr, I'm sorry. For dragging you into this...”

Her father's low voice reaches her. The girl sweeps away the darkness hanging over her face and smiles brightly.

“It's all right. If I think of it as a nighttime stroll, it's actually quite nice. You know I like looking up at the night sky.”

But both the girl and her father knew that smile was for him, not for herself. His face clouded with guilt, her father pulled the cart in silence.

The wooden cart glided smoothly onward. To keep it from making any noise, they had wrapped the wheels in leather and thoroughly oiled the creaking axle.

They intended to conceal even the sounds that might escape.

What terrible sin had they committed to make them move with such caution?

The answer lay inside the cart.

Within the swaying cart, covered by a single blanket...

Lay a corpse buried just last week.

Bodies that have lost their lives find rest in Mother Earth's embrace.

Disturbing that rest was therefore considered a profoundly wicked act.

If even that was so evil, what of mutilating a corpse one had dug up? It was beyond words. Only a death that served as an example to all awaited—stoning, or burning at the stake.

Yet there are always those who commit sins.

“Tyr. Look. These are the paths the blood follows.”

Her father stripped the corpse with a knife. He worked in a way unlike the handling of meat, which made it all the more horrific and revolting.

He peeled it back layer by layer, from skin to muscle. Beneath the hide that wrapped the body without a gap lay a sticky membrane. Only after cutting that membrane with a knife and tearing it apart could the real work begin.

When he forcibly pulled away the bones with fascia still attached, the organs, pooled with dead blood, greeted them. These were rotten or spoiled and could not be handled carelessly. Carefully cutting them free and removing them, or pushing them aside, he ventured deeper into the body.

Then the heart and blood vessels lay exposed.

Lifting a blood vessel with a long rod, her father spoke.

“This is the heart. The source of our bodies, and the place that produces clean blood. All blood begins here. When the heart beats, the blood sets off and travels throughout the body. Blood leaving the heart runs on the inside, and blood returning from its journey around the body runs on the outside. That is how it circulates through the body in one great loop.”

She had heard this dozens of times, but her father always made a point of repeating it whenever he examined a new corpse.

The girl could have recited his words from memory then and there, but instead of pointing that out, she merely nodded.

“But I still don't quite understand what happens in between... It seems the incoming blood pools in the organs for a while before leaving, but it's difficult to confirm in a body that's already dead. I need your help, Tyr.”

“All right.”

The girl extended her hand without the slightest sign of reluctance. Then something astonishing happened.

Crimson blood began to well up from within.

The blood had hidden deep inside the body in the face of that unprecedented event called death. At the girl's summons, the hardened blood woke from its sleep and slowly began to move.

Drawing it upward, the girl asked her father a question.

“Should I push it in this way?”

“Please do. Thank you, as always, Tyr.”

Unlike other children her age who played in the dirt, the girl had spent her time digging up graves and delving into corpses with her father, a healer. She had gained a strange power.

The ability to control blood.

At most, it had only been enough to stop a scrape from bleeding, but it was precisely what her father had longed for.

Her father, who had been reluctant to involve his daughter in his crimes, no longer refused her help after that day. He couldn't. Her ability was that extraordinary, and that useful.

Of course, the girl helped him without showing the slightest reluctance.

“I just need to send the blood along this path, like this, right?”

“Yes. Push the blood in, and I'll see whether it pools in the organs.”

Her father had been a fairly capable healer, but one particular day marked the beginning of his steady improvement. Word of his remarkable skill spread so far that even people from neighboring villages found their way to him through acquaintances.

In no time, he became the pride of the village, and the villagers took quiet pride in him.

“... Your mother died because her lungs filled with blood. To be precise, the passages that should have carried the blood out were damaged. This outer covering had holes in it, like loosely woven hemp cloth...”

Whenever the villagers introduced her father, they never failed to mention that his skills had improved by leaps and bounds after he lost his wife to a tragic illness.

The sad death of a wife with a chronic illness, and the healer who awakened to his talents afterward. What a simple, beautiful story.

“Tyr, if we gain the ability to find damaged blood passages and heal them... We can conquer disease.”

But the girl, who had watched her father from closer than anyone else, knew.

That awakening had been built atop a mountain of corpses.

“We can rid the world... of the disease that killed your mother.”

As her father spoke, a strange madness mingled with yearning in his eyes.

Her father was a healer.

It would be a stretch to call him a physician. In those days, people lived by adapting to whatever work came their way rather than choosing work to suit a profession. Every village had one or two people who filled a complicated assortment of roles.

Tyr's father was one such person. The seventh son of a noble but not particularly wealthy family, all he had inherited were handsome looks, a refined way with words, and a few books' worth of knowledge. For surviving in a harsh world, their usefulness ranked in precisely that order.

During his travels, he caught the eye of a woman in a village. They grew fond of each other, married, and settled down there.

He taught the children, worked as a healer, and volunteered to negotiate whenever trouble arose in the village. It did not take him long to become part of the community.

But his wife had a long-standing illness. After giving birth, she only grew sicker. The knowledge he had gleaned from a few books was nowhere near enough to save her. The time of sorrow drew ever closer, never receding.

Then, one cold, snowy night, the girl's mother spattered red blood across the drifts of snow. The fierce wind concealed her father's anguished cries.

That was when her father began laying hands on corpses.

At first, he acted without the girl's knowledge. But after the death of her mother, who had worked tirelessly to keep the household running, the girl naturally took over those duties. She soon noticed her father's transgressions.

Naturally, she was afraid of him at first. The sight of him dissecting and dismantling corpses was difficult to accept, even for family.

But she could not abandon her father, her only remaining family, so she gritted her teeth and stayed by his side. And at some point, she began to help him.

Was it because she was still young, or because she had learned under such a father? That was when it began.

The girl's thinking slowly started to change.

Apart from his bizarre practice of dissecting corpses, her father was an admirable man. He tended to the injured and healed them, earning the respect of many.

He had handled more corpses than anyone else, yet he had never killed a soul. If anything, he saved his patients.

Digging up corpses was a grave crime. One could hardly protest being branded the spawn of a devil for it.

But if it could save people...

A body already dead would only be torn apart by beasts, or eaten away by insects and mold. If her father could use it to save someone who was dying...

Who could fault him?

It was around then that the girl learned to control blood.

And she became more than her father's helper. She became his equal partner.