It had been a thousand years since Regis Nightfallen had last seen the stars as their light didn't reach the murky depths of the ocean.

With a sigh, Regis pushed away the sand that buried his body and looked around, but only the cold darkness of the ocean's depths greeted him. Despite the void-like environment, this had been his home for as long as he could remember. However, he did vaguely recall his days as a human child known as Reginald, where he had been fortunate enough to be born as a wealthy noble's son.

But around his fourteenth birthday, his family began to grow sick. It started with his dear mother. Her skin took on a shade whiter than even the powder she rubbed on her face every morning. Some doctors harped on about her makeup containing lead, while others claimed the noble estate had become haunted. A bunch of quacks, the lot of them. As they debated and raved at his mother's bedside, she suddenly became feral and assaulted the men and tried to consume their flesh.

A rather harrowing thing to watch as a young nobleboy, and it was made all the worse by his father being the one to blow her brains out with a musket.

"Son, you should flee from here," Reginald remembered his father saying as he faced away from him.

"Father... why?" Reginald was baffled at his dear father's cold tone, but he soon found his answer as his dad turned around. He looked haunted with sunken eyes and skin so sickly white the large man looked ready to faint any moment.

"Once it's begun, it can't be stopped," His father said as he gazed at a painting hanging on the wall, showing their ancestor all alone on a throne, "Only one of us will survive the transformation."

"Father, what transformation?" Reginald had asked, "You're scaring me..."

The musket in his father's hand fell to the ground at Reginald's feet with a clatter, "The Vampires curse. It will spread through our bloodline like wildfire until only one remains... and that's you, Reginald. Your brothers and sisters all ate each other in the next room. I executed Karl and then came here to finish off your mother. Now, you need to do the same to me." He said while gesturing to the musket at his feet, "Load it up and shoot me."

"What?" Reginald remembered shaking at his father's request.

"Reginald, what stands before you is no longer your dear father but a monster in human skin. A feral and unthinking one. Meanwhile, you, as the last standing member of this house, will transform into an immortal creature of the night, a Vampire."

And he had been right. Reginald had run from the room, leaving the musket behind, and fled out into the night. To his surprise, there had been a raging group of villagers outside demanding his family's eradication. While standing outside on the steps to his family's manor and trying to calm their rage, he bathed in the moonlight and began his transformation. His skin turned pale, his nails extended into claws, and everyone smelled so delicious.

Yet he was still sane, so he turned to flee. Fire-coated arrows had sailed over his head, and swords were thrust through his body to no avail, as he could always heal the pain and push them off. After a week on the run, he decided his life was over as the villagers cornered him on a cliff. He had become a blood-sucking monster; his entire family was dead, and he had nothing left. But with no wish to die at the hands of his former villagers, he took off his shirt, stuffed it with rocks, and lept off a nearby cliff.

He had wanted to die.

The cold ocean wind had rustled through his scarlet hair, and for the briefest moment, as he fell to his death, he felt alive—more alive than he'd ever felt as a human, and at that moment, there had been a tinge of regret to die in such a pathetic way.

However, it was not cold when he hit the ocean's choppy waves. In fact, he could feel nothing. Was he just numb from the shock of death? He embraced the darkness and closed his eyes—unsatisfied with his end but content with his short life.

A while passed, and the feeling of sand under him made him confused.

Finally, he opened his eyes and realized he'd fallen to the bottom of the ocean. Schools of fish swam around him curiously, the moonlight reflecting off their skin in a dazzling rainbow. A wall of coral beside him was covered in fascinating and weird-looking creatures he'd never seen before.

It took a moment, but Reginald—his family-given name—realized that not only did the ocean no longer feel freezing as it had on those fishing trips during the spring months, but his lungs weren't burning for air. So, did he have no need to breathe? Was life down in the ocean possible for a vampire? Away from people and the wrathful sun that scorched his skin?

The next thousand years proved his theory correct. He feasted on the blood of fish for sustenance and then slumbered in the sand until the hunger became too much again. As he feasted on blood, he became more powerful over the centuries, and his body became denser, eventually allowing him to wander around on the ocean floor without needing rocks.

Eventually, he got bored of the coral reef and ventured deeper into the ocean in search of whales or sharks to devour, as those small fish no longer gave him the sustenance he required. To him, they were nothing but appetizers. It hadn't taken a long time for Reginald to discard his life as a human entirely, and in that process, he'd changed his name to Regis as he saw himself as a dignified ruler of the ocean.

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Regis chuckled as he emerged like a hermit crab from the sand on the ocean floor. He stretched his back to relieve the cramps accumulated over a hundred-year nap and glanced around.

"Sand and water," He said aloud, and no bubbles emerged from his mouth as his lungs served no function. "Just as barren as my old man's shabby excuse for a head of hair." Regis then turned to the north... east... west? He had no idea. Ever since leaving the coral area, he had been utterly lost. But there was one familiar sight, a small glowing blob heading towards him.

Regis wandered over as he knew his immortal jelly friend wasn't the fastest fellow in all of the ocean, "Ah, Bobby! The divine emperor of the third sea, it's always an utmost pleasure to see you again, good sir. How has it been while I slumbered in the sand like a slothful servant on a Sunday morn?" Despite Bob's impressive title, he was nothing more than an unimpressive jellyfish about the size of Regis's head with intelligence on par with a rock and humor dryer than horse dung during the roasting summer months.

However, despite Bobby's biological inferiority to him, the jelly had been a splendid companion over the years. They had first conversed while trapped within a megalodon's stomach and became lifelong pals when the jellyfish wrapped itself around his head and attempted to sting him.

Something that would usually offend Regis Nightfallen, the self-proclaimed emperor of the boundless ocean floor. But Bob had a unique ability that spared his life. He was a fantastic light source—Regis could see just fine despite the eternal darkness, but Bob's luminescent glow helped attract lunch, so he decided Bob would become his hat, and the two had been inseparable ever since.

Reaching out his hand, the jellyfish wrapped around the gifted palm with glee.

Or at least Regis liked to think it was glee from seeing him and not its fondness for stinging him. After all, the two went way back and had spent centuries bonding.

Jellyfish—or at least Bobby, was immortal and one of the few things that could join him on his lonely life on the ocean floor. Or at least Regis assumed the jellyfish was immortal. It was hard to tell them apart; this could just be another Bobby, but he liked to think it was the same one.

"Ow, Bobby, you scoundrel." Regis joked—the jellyfish's sting hadn't hurt him, but he didn't want to make Bobby feel his affection was being disregarded. "Quite feisty today, aren't we—"

[System Integration Begun]

"Good heavens!" Regis yelped as a ding resounded in his head. He hadn't heard a single sound apart from his own voice for centuries, so the sudden foreign noise and speech made his non-beating heart jump in his chest.

Quickly calming down and regaining his composure, he glared at Bobby and deemed the nefarious jelly the prime suspect, "Since when could you speak?!"

Bobby remained silent.

A while passed, and Regis eventually broke the staring contest he was having with the jelly and ran a hand ending in black claws through his messy scarlet hair.

"Have I finally gone mad?" He spoke into the void of the ocean, and when it didn't answer, he looked upwards, "Maybe I should finally leave this place. I'm getting sick of fish, and it's rancid blood."

The thought of biting into a cow was enough to make him salivate.

[ERROR: Human System Integration Failed]

[You are a Monster]

Regis blinked as the weird voice spoke in his head again.

"Monster?" His eyes narrowed, "I'll have, you know—lady trapped inside my head—I am an upright gentleman refined through the ages like a fine wine..."

[Monster Race Assigned: Primordial Ocean Vampire]

[Class Assigned: World Boss of the Northern Sea]

"Eh?"

[Generating Status Page...]

[Name: Reginald]

[Race: Primordial Ocean Vampire]

[Class: World Boss]

[Level: 9,745]

[You will be considered for promotion to Divinity at level 10,000]

[Generating stats...]

"Silence!" Regis shouted and grabbed his head. The voice sounded awful, and he didn't understand anything it was saying. But worse of all, this devilish woman had called him Reginald of all things!

"My name is Regis. R-e-g-i-s. Understand? Not Reginald. Not Reg or Regi. It's Regis Nightfallen, Eternal Lord of the Deep!"

[Name Change Denied]

"Thou mewling hasty-witted haggard!" Regis stomped his foot, sending a small cloud of sand to swirl around him. "Stop bothering me!"

[...]

And then there was silence once more.

Regis shook his head, "I really am going insane like Auntie Palma did when she got the shakes." He looked at Bobby, still trying to sting his hand, "Do you have a weird lady in your head, my good friend?"

No response.

Regis shrugged and began to run across the ocean floor in search of food to sate the hunger gnawing from the inside. After running at his top speed for a few hours, causing ripples in the ocean that likely would result in massive waves on the surface, he located a weird blue thing encircled by sharks.

They were engaged in a bloody fight that tickled his senses. But the blood was unusual. Other than the usual life force that fueled him and empowered Vampires, something else brimming with power was mixed in. And then he saw one of the sharks shoot a green beam of energy out of its mouth, cutting the other shark in half and making the ocean water boil in its path.

Regis just stood there scratching his head. Since when could sharks attack like that? What the hell had occurred while he was asleep for a few decades? And when he looked a little closer, the sharks were over twice the size of what he remembered.

His eyes then drifted to the weird pulsing blue door that looked awfully out of place down here in the darkness of the ocean.

[Great Dungeon Exit]

"An exit? To where?" Regis wondered as he walked toward the doorway.

Blood streamed toward him and collected into a swirling ball above his opened palm. A neat trick he had learned over the years to gather the blood from slaughtered fish. The surviving shark barreled toward him—but a simple flick silenced its pathetic attempt in an explosion of gore he would rather not describe.

Absorbing the gathered blood and with his hunger sated, Regis decided to try stepping through the glowing blue door. There was a lot of resistance, but to his surprise—it worked.

He stepped onto a beach, but there was one slight issue.

He wasn't alone.

There were scantily dressed people here, and his sudden appearance seemed to freak them out.