Victoria Universe, Earth, Kingdom of Great Britain, London

Local date: October 28, 1799

The students gathered in the foyer of the magnificent, albeit somewhat gloomy, mansion and waited for their lecturer. Right on time with the chime of the large, ornate grandfather clock, he appeared at the top of the stairs and walked gracefully down the right-hand side of the two cinematic flights of stairs. His elegant walking stick tapped against the marble floor in a precisely even rhythm.

"Now gentlemen... and ladies, let's get going!" As always, the word "ladies" caused him to pause, as if he was always surprised to find women in his class. Maybe he was.

Sir Richard walked confidently ahead into the London fog. Even the damp cobblestones, to which he had been accustomed all his life, did not unsettle his steady steps. Norman and his fellow students, on the other hand, often had to support themselves or catch each other. The path led through streets lined with only a few citizens and illuminated by flickering gas lamps. The minutes flowed sluggishly by, in the distance a night watchman loudly announced the eleventh hour.

The path led further and further through the city at night. The small islands of light from the lanterns became increasingly rare and eventually disappeared completely. The streets, already far too narrow from the main road in the students' opinion, became lightless, narrow alleyways in which two adults could hardly walk past each other without having to turn to the side. Small, crumbling, densely packed houses alternated with large, hastily built blocks of flats. Where the original town planning had left space, another house or at least a wooden shed had been erected a little later. Mortar and once even a roof tile occasionally trickled down onto passers-by. More than once, the group had to hastily retreat when chamber pots were carelessly emptied onto the street from the upper floors. Twice they encountered groups of poorly dressed municipal employees who were using shovels, buckets and wheelbarrows to clear the largest piles of rubbish in order to keep the streets clear.

Jane had already wrinkled her nose immediately after crossing over into the Victorian parallel world and deactivated her sense of smell with a simple necromantic spell. As she walked through London, a general malaise took hold. The students had slowly become accustomed to the somewhat pungent smell of feces dumped on the street, the open sewers and the disgusting stench of rotten fish and brackish seawater that occasionally wafted in from the Thames. Not, however, to the sickeningly sweet, musty smell that grew stronger with every step. Sir Richard noticed the general malaise and began to lecture lightly: "The neighborhoods here are not known for low rents and property prices for nothing. Here we are approaching some of the larger London cemeteries. With the number of residents increasing every year, finding a permanent place to store the numerous bodies has long been a major problem. This increasing laziness is shocking. Even in the upper classes, there are few who can resist the temptation to simply lie down one day and never get up again. Regardless of the burden it places on their family and community. Outrageous."

He stopped as they stepped onto one of the few wider streets and came across a group of men digging a hole in the middle of the road. Right next to them was a rickety hand-drawn wooden cart on which lay a corpse covered with a makeshift horse blanket. Norman at least hoped that it was a corpse, because the Londoners had just taken it out and thrown it carelessly into the pit. A small group of locals had already gathered in front of them, but after a quick glance at the scene, which they were probably used to, they grumbled and turned off into a side street, looking for another way. Sir Richard vigorously shoved the stick on the ground and watched indignantly as one of the workers took a wooden stake and a carpenter's hammer from the cart. He held it to the corpse's chest and took a swing with the hammer. Sir Richard raised his voice: "Further left! Don't you even have a basic knowledge of human anatomy? The heart is three fingers to the left." The worker looked up, annoyed, but changed the position of the stake and drove it deep into the chest with three clumsy blows of the hammer. Then he stood up and helped his two colleagues to fill the pit again.

The Lord of White-Haven nodded, still somewhat dissatisfied, and then waved his pupils on through a side street: "Outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. They could really make the effort to get the body out of the city center before they bury it."

Norman raised his hand to ask a question. At a prompting nod from his lecturer, he asked, "Was that a vampire they just staked?"

"Of course not. No vampire would ever be lazy enough to let a stake be driven into his chest without any resistance. I mean, what does that look like? No, it was just a normal suicide. The church famously refuses to bury suicides on holy ground. The hopelessly superstitious underclass insist on burying them under a busy road with a stake in their heart instead. This is to prevent the corpse from rising again."

Norman couldn't stop himself from asking: "So, is that what they usually do?"

"Of course not. Why would someone who slits his wrists and uses it as an excuse to avoid his obligations get his act together again afterwards?" He looked at Norman like a slightly retarded pupil, tapped his walking stick twice on the ground in a prompting manner and moved on. The student followed hurriedly, "And why was it so important to you then that the stake be driven correctly into the heart?"

"This is a matter of principle! If these uneducated henchmen are going to waste their time with such superstitious garbage, they should at least do it properly."

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Norman stopped and allowed himself to be overtaken until Leonardo passed him. He then followed him and began a quiet conversation that he hoped would not be heard until he reached the front of the convoy: "Tell me, he's not quite normal, is he?"

"If you think he's not a normal person, I suspect that too."

"I rather thought he was a bit... well, crazy."

"Rich and noble people call that eccentric. But I know what you mean. He doesn't have all the stones in the cobblestones."

"Wait a minute, what did you just mean by not a normal person?"

Leonardo didn't get a chance to reply as the group fanned out further ahead at a crossroads and stopped. Sir Richard stood surrounded by a messy semicircle of students in front of a lifeless body lying on the ground. He was already poking the presumed dead man quite roughly with his walking stick: "Up! Hop! A little movement!"

Jane looked at the body, pushed past the nobleman, went to her knees and felt the pulse: "He's dead."

Sir Richard waved her aside with an imperious gesture: "I can see that for myself. Most members of the underclass take the failure of a few minor bodily functions as an excuse to simply lie on their lazy backsides." He poked him hard in the abdomen again. No reaction. "Very well then, I'll borrow your body for a while before it starts rotting away here. We're lucky the temperatures are still so low. Otherwise we would have to search much longer for sufficient fresh material. I am now demonstrating how to attach an artificial matrix of soul energy. The lines in the body were already in use when the target was more active, so this is much easier than animating inanimate matter. Although this is certainly possible, it is much more difficult. To animate something like a statue into a so-called golem, you have to design a completely new soul matrix and burn it into the matter over weeks of work before you can actually animate it. In the case of animal or, better, human bodies, all this is already in place. So all we have to do is the following..." He slowly and somewhat stiffly got to his knees and placed his hand on the chest of the emaciated corpse. Then he spoke aloud a long formula in Latin.

Leo also murmured a formula quietly and took a closer look. Then he inhaled sharply and nudged Norman standing next to him excitedly as he leaned over to him and whispered, "With soul sight, I can see this Élan Vital flowing directly from the lord into the corpse! This is incredible! He looked rather pale so far, but there's more soul energy coming out of him than three full-grown men could contain. It's as if he's carrying some kind of invisible reserve inside him. Yes... I can see it now... There really is energy stored there... Not in the tissue and the outer aura, but... in the bloodstream! This guy is a..." He fell silent, pulled Norman back a little into the crowd and whispered even more quietly: "... the guy's a vampire."

"Are you..."

"Of course I'm sure. We could have guessed that too. Pale, nocturnal, scary."

"And crazy."

"I don't think that's standard for vampires either."

"He acts as if the dead are only left lying around out of sheer laziness."

"Perhaps not such a far-fetched assumption for someone who is undead himself. Totally crazy, sure. But I can understand how he gets there."

Sir Richard took his hand away and took a step back. A tremor went through the body lying on the floor and with awkward and jerky movements, more like it was being pulled up by invisible strings of a clumsy puppeteer, the corpse straightened up. While the other students either stood still or even took a few steps back nervously, Jane walked closer and looked at the slightly swaying zombie with obvious interest: "A very simple but elegant soul matrix... Very energy efficient. The zombie is likely to remain operational for around 120 years with normal activity."

"Zombie? An interesting term for a member of the lower classes..." Sir Richard stroked his chin thoughtfully.

Jane answered him without taking her eyes off the undead man: "A term from my homeland for people set in motion against their will... People who no longer want to move."

"An interesting term that I will remember. I seem to have read this term in the Geographical Society's travel reports before. Something South American if I remember correctly. But what do you think of the recursive stabilization matrix here..."

The two of them continued to talk animatedly about the details of zombie creation. Leonardo, however, couldn't get anything out of the subject. After a while, he turned to Norman, annoyed: "I hope we finish soon. Nobody needs this useless nonsense we're learning here! We've already gone through the basic formulas for the soul matrix, that's enough for the spells I really want to learn. I can use it later to develop something to give computers an independent consciousness. We could really do without playing around with corpses. I'll ask in the office..."

A discreet clearing of the throat directly behind him made him move around. There stood the English lord, looking down at him with a disapproving expression on his face: "Young sir, as you are no longer following my lessons, I assume that you have already understood the theory sufficiently and are now beginning to get bored."

"Well..."

"Not so modest. In your last written work, you demonstrated a profound understanding of the theoretical principles. It now seems to me to be time to test these theories in practice."

"How..."

"You will present me with a functioning soul matrix at the next lesson."

"I don't know..."

"Without this, your presence in my lessons no longer seems necessary. I hope I have made myself clear?"

Leonardo swallowed hard and only managed to croak out a "yes" with difficulty.

The lord looked at him sternly for a while, then turned around again, lectured a little on technical details and then beckoned the whole group to follow him. The zombie staggered after him. After the first passers-by screamed and ran off, the students took him into the middle without further instruction and shielded him from observers.

Norman and Leo dropped back to the very end of the procession. "Well Leo, you'll be off the course sooner than you thought."

"But not the way I wanted. If he kicks me out, I'll never get the courses that build on it approved. That's where you hit a snag with the secretary's office. If they let you out beforehand, okay. But if the lecturer throws you out, that's it. In the worst case, you have to take the course all over again. And I don't think Sir Richard would let me take it again."

"Then just build a zombie. You said it wasn't that hard."

"The theory is simple! The practice, on the other hand... that's something completely different. Do you have any idea how much soul energy it takes to revive a zombie?"

"Sir Richard had no recognizable problems..."

"He's a vampire. He's probably got the drained energy of three or four humans left. Not me. I only have the energy of one human. And I need it pretty badly myself."

"But with healing spells, you also use your own soul energy to heal someone else."

"Yes, but much less. Much less. And even after that, you should definitely take it easy for a few days. There are enough examples of healers who have simply dropped dead after overexerting themselves. The really good healers accumulate a much larger reserve of Élan Vital through special exercises and meditation than other people and even other mages. But even that is a joke compared to what the vampire has just put into the corpse. And it's still pretty fresh. I'm unlikely to find an undecomposed dead animal at the university. Unless I take one of the lab mice..."

"Don't even think about it!"

"That's all right! But what should I take then?"

"I'm sure you'll think of something. After all, you're a genius." Leo nodded immodestly. Out of the corner of his eye, Norman noticed that their teacher had stopped at the front and was looking around to the back. He nudged his comrade and they both quickly rejoined the group.