“Five stars? Really?” he asks, looking over the hard-cover book in his hands. Standing before the shelf, his eyes glance over the front of the novel he’s picked up out of passing curiosity. “’My Dead Vampire Heart Beats For You’,” he reads, as if incanting a forgotten language, looking at the book’s title before setting it back into the shelf. His finger runs along row after row of other books there next to it. There are hundreds of them. All of them are the same. They’re dark-covered books with either some sort of apple covered in a vaguely mysterious mist — it’s always an apple, for some reason — or a ridiculously handsome man in a suspiciously tight t-shirt staring at the viewer with an oddly confident gaze, with a strangely gangly long girl desperately clinging to him in the background. “’Midnight, Mid-Bite?’, ‘A Drop of You’?” He reads off odd book titles, shaking his head. “…Who reads this stuff?” The man sighs, shaking his head to himself as he walks down the shelving of the bookstore two rows over.
But then his eyes light up as he picks out the thing he actually came here to the bookstore for.
A newly printed dark-covered book with a hulking, mysterious dark swordsman standing there on its front, biting into an apple and looking at the viewer with a confident gaze, a strangely gangly girl is clinging to him in the background. “Reborn as the Ultimate Swordsman, Volume Two…” he mutters, holding it up in the air and then clutching it against his chest. “— It’s finally here!” exclaims the man to himself with joy in his voice, a deep peace filling his core to the brim. He’s been waiting for this for over a year! The author is a bit of a slacker, so the stories take too long to come out. But he likes the novels, so what choice does he have except to wait for them?
He greedily scans the light novel, taking in as much as he can without actually opening it, so as to not spoil himself by looking at the wrong line too early. This is the highlight of his month, he can’t wait to get home and read this!
— A giggling comes from the side.
Immediately, his eyes shift in well-trained paranoia, quickly looking at the two girls who are standing by the vampire books he had just walked past a minute ago. His first thought is that they’re kind of cute, but he’s not going to tell them that. It would be weird, right?
“Oh my God…” whispers one of them loudly enough to have actually just normally spoken the words out loud instead. She shows the book in her hands to her friend. “— It’s finally here!”
The other one, with a butterfly hair clip, lets out a noise that is somewhere in between a scream, a shriek, and a squeak — a sqrueak — and takes it from her, looking at the cover. “I love him!” says the second girl, holding the book against herself as if she were holding a real person. “He’s so hot. It should have been me he fell in love with, not her,” she sighs, glaring at the girl on the book’s cover a moment later as if she were an actual rival.
“Do you think that in this one they…” starts her friend, whispering now in a real whisper.
The other one with the butterfly hair clip starts laughing, hitting her arm as the two of them walk off. “Oh my God! Stop!” she laughs, hitting her friend on the arm as the two of them walk off, bumping into each other on purpose as they make their way to the register. The other one looks back over her shoulder, glancing directly at the man left behind with his book in his hand, and the other one looks too. They whisper to each other and then start laughing again as they leave around the corner of the shelves.
He hates when they do that — the looking and laughing thing.
Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Are they whispering about him? Why? Or were they looking back in his general direction, and this wasn’t actually about him, but his insecurity made it about him? The man looks down at his book and then shrugs. Back in his school days, he would have assumed for sure that people were making fun of him all day every day. But now as an adult, he just doesn’t even know anymore if people even see him closely enough to notice him as an entity that exists and can be derided.
He just doesn’t really ‘get’ people and their ways.
Standing there with a raised eyebrow, he shakes his head to himself again one more time for good measure as he listens to the noise of them leaving.
Out of morbid curiosity, he goes back to the vampire novels and picks up a copy of the book that they were looking at. He looks at the title and then sets it back down into the shelf, having seen enough.
‘Enfangled’.
----------------------------------------
Today is a good day.
The weather is beautiful, the air is beautiful, and life is beautiful. It’s one of those late spring days when the sunshine isn’t too bright or hot. There is a gentle cooling breeze that feels just right.
He gets off the bus after helping an older woman get her wheelchair down the ramp. He is used to opening these sorts of ramps out because of some old family history. A small bag of snacks and drinks is in his hand from his midway stop on the way home. He steps out onto the sidewalk and starts walking the last of the distance. A small crowd disperses around in all directions as the bus unloads. This is a popular transit connection location in the city; so many buses meet here and people switch out from one to the other as they go about their hectic travels.
Everything flies out of his grip. While looking obsessively at the still plastic-wrapped book, he stumbles, the world spinning as he bumps into something and falls over to the sidewalk. The book flies out of his hand, a series of dull thuds coming to ear as several things fall at once, including him.
“Sorry! I’m sorry,” mutters the man, shaking out his hand that had caught itself on the pavement as he looks at the person he awkwardly bumped into and then freezes up. “You okay?”
The two of them stare for a confused second.
It’s the one girl of the two from before, from the bookstore. He’s sure of it. She’s the one with the butterfly hair clip.
“Ow… I’m fine. No, I’m sorry,” she says, laughing awkwardly and shaking her hands. “I wasn’t looking where I was going,” she admits, brushing herself off as she confesses to the same crime he himself had committed and only then opens her eyes to really look at him. “AH!” she yells, rather abruptly, pointing straight at his core. Immediately, the man leans back, lifting his hands as it to prove his innocence in some unaccused matter. “You’re the guy! B-Bookstore guy!” she stammers, her face changing.
This is bad. People are stopping and watching. He probably looks like a creep.
“Sorry,” he says again, getting up and offering her a hand to help her, and then wondering if it doesn’t make him look weirder. Thankfully, she takes it and gets back up, finishing dusting herself off without screaming for the police. He doesn’t know if that’s something people do at times like this, but a paranoid voice in the back of his head tells him it might well be.
“No, it’s just…” she starts, laughing and then looking around as she realizes something. “My book!” she cries, looking around the ground as dozens of people walk around the two of them standing there in the middle of the way.
‘Her book’?
HIS BOOK!
The man lets out a terrified gasp as the realization of his lost book hits his mind. Looking around, he sees it, lying there on the side of the street. He runs over through the gap between two parked buses, grabbing it out of the way just before a white box delivery truck ploughs through down the street past the parked buses at full speed. The truck’s horn blares loudly in passing.
— That was dangerous. His book could have been flattened.
He holds the recovered novel against his chest, tucking it back into the plastic shopping bag. He’d better pay more attention while outside. It’s a dangerous world out here.
“Anyway, I’m really sorry again,” she says again, clutching her book against herself and looking at him. Her knuckles, white, clench as she crushes her book with her hands against her chest. “Do… do you like reading?”
He looks back at her, still nervous. “Me?” he asks, confused. “I love books,” he replies, nodding and rubbing the back of his head. “A little too much, I guess,” he relents, looking at the spot where they fell.
She laughs, her feet shifting, and then she looks up at him. “Me too,” replies the random bookstore girl with the butterfly hair clip. “…This is a little weird, but do you want to maybe… go hang out together at the bookstore sometime?” she asks. “I can show you what I like to read — or, like, the library… you know…” she mutters, laughing awkwardly as her finger that had been playing with a strand of her hair pulls it suddenly too tightly.
It’s happening.
Is this a game? She’s messing with him, right? This is some prank. He looks around the area, scanning the busy street for her friend who is about to come out barreled over and laughing at his expression. There’s no way this is for real. He’s seem these sorts of videos on the internet. They’re setting him up.
Every alarm signal in his body blazes, sirens flashing in his head together with a party-popper fired off by a cluster of neurons somewhere in the back of his mind. The man stiffens up as if his skeleton had been reanimated into a state of unlife as nothing happens. No trap is sprung. No camera crews pop out of the corners. His eyes look back at her as she stands there, oddly sweaty.
This is real.
— But he’s really not sure he believes it.
“Sure!” he replies nonetheless, a little too loudly, as if he had dropped his body’s volume slider somewhere too a moment ago. “I’d like that a lot,” he agrees, lowering his tone. She smiles. That’s weird. Why is she smiling at him? “— Bookstore girl.”
The bookstore girl laughs into her hand, and she smiles more, shifting her weight and looking away from a second to the ground. This is bad. Why is she smiling more and being so emotive? He doesn’t know what to do with this. He’s just used to people either vaguely frowning at him or just keeping a blank expression and posture.
The two of them stand there apart from each other. She’s keeping that expression, and he’s just rubbing the back of his head, not sure what to do about it.
Is he blowing it? He feels like he’s blowing it. He’s acting lame, just standing here quietly. This feels awkward. What do cool guys do in situations like this? He’s making it weird. He’s just standing here. Why is he just standing here? He has to keep it moving, or she’ll think he’s a wacko. ABORT! ABORT!
What would the coolest man he knows do?
— His eyes shift down to the top edge of the black book in his shopping bag.
Of course!
Playing it cool, he nods to her and points with one finger. “I’ll see you there,” says the man, keeping a rigid demeanor as he vanishes into the crowd back to the way home, his mind racing, but confident that he made a smooth escape.
Did he… did he pull it off? Did he do it?
He talked to a girl, an actual one, in person with his words, noises, and stuff. He got a date.
— IT’S HAPPENING!
The man pumps his fist to himself, hissing a slight ‘yes’, beneath his breath as he leaves, feeling like the ultimate swordsman.
----------------------------------------
It is not happening.
It is ten minutes later.
“— I FORGOT TO ASK HER FOR HER NUMBER!” screams the man to God, having fallen down onto his knees, his hands clenched into fists as he yells arched back toward the blue sky above the world. The cry of his torment flows from his soul toward the heavens above.
The ache of his sudden realization courses through his chest like the slice of a knife eviscerating him from top to bottom. He had been riding the fresh high of his cosmic victory all the way down the road back home for the last half of an hour, until he just realized his crucial mistake as he started going over the details of his future rendezvous.
He falls over forward, his palms resting against the hot sidewalk as a self-inflicted punishment for his utter foolishness. What the hell is wrong with him? He had it! It was right there. He had a real date lined up, with a real girl, in the real world, and he blew it!
His shaking eyes stare at the ground, the memory of his actions replaying over and over in his mind a thousand times.
…No… no… he can still salvage this.
The new scheme runs through his thoughts.
He’ll just go back to the bookstore again, every day, forever. One day, she’ll show up there again, and he’ll ‘accidentally’ bump into her there and pretend it was just happenstance and fortune that crossed their paths a third time. He’ll play off today’s weirdness as him just… being mysteriously busy and cool.
— Yeah.
That’s a perfect plan. Nothing can go wrong with it. He’ll just say something like ‘Third time’s the charm’, when they see each other again. He’ll have this whole mess cleaned up.
Catching his breath, he slowly rises back up from his slump and digs into his bag, crossing the street. He needs something to distract himself with before he tears his hair out. The man pulls out the book, lowering his head to look at the cover, instead of paying attention to the street he’s crossing.
Suddenly, a loud honking makes him jump and scramble to the side.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
The brakes of a large truck screech wildly, bringing it to a sudden halt that leaves a black smear of rubber over the asphalt. “GET OUT OF THE ROAD!” yells the truck driver out of the window, shaking a fist at him from the raised cabin of the vehicle that had stopped just in time.
“Sorry, sorry!” calls the awkward guy, quickly crossing the street and clutching his drumming chest as he catches his breath.
This is the second time today he’s gotten close to traffic. What an overstimulating few hours these have been. He can’t wait to get back home to his quiet, reclusive apartment. It’s dark and peaceful there.
The truck leaves and he looks back down at his new book.
— At the jacked, somewhat androgynous, suspiciously young man in an undersized t-shirt staring straight back into his eyes with a knowing look, a dripping piece of fruit in one hand — it’s an apple — and a desperately pale girl clinging to his other arm.
…No…
“Enfangled,” reads the lone man aloud in a shaking voice as terror reclaims him.
They must have switched books by mistake — the bookstore butterfly hair clip girl and him — when they ran into each other at the bus stop. But that means…
“No…” he mutters, clutching his head in desperation as the horrifying realization hits him.
— That means she has his imported super nerdy, lame, swordsman book with extremely questionable character interactions that don’t feel like what real people would do at all in those situations, questionable scenes of unnecessarily gratuitous nudity, and deeply questionable relationship dynamics that you could never tell anyone in real life about without looking like a creep — clearly a girl repellent in every manner possible. He drops the vampire book, which surely has none of these things in it. She’s going to see what he reads and realize what a dweeb he is. She’s going to see it and then his entire convoluted scheme of meeting her again a third time back at the bookstore will be meaningless.
It’s over. He’s cooked.
He screams dramatically, the last act of his body on this world being one of despair.
A blood clot in his brain gets stuck there that very second, because of his life-long high blood pressure that has come to a peak this very instant.
He has a brain aneurysm and falls over dead on the spot.
As he crumples over into a lifeless heap, his head strikes not the concrete sidewalk, but rather the trashy vampire book that had fallen out of his hands. His vision begins to fade into complete darkness.
A new white box truck barrels over the sidewalk — the third one today — the driver losing control of the heavy machine. It violently crashes into a lamppost that the man with the book would have had to walk past on his way home, sheet metal and bolts flying in all directions. It’s a good thing that the awkward bookstore creature didn’t keep walking, or this truck probably would have crushed him this time.
Better luck next time.
As for what’s left of him now that his body has failed and fallen to the ground — his soul — it departs from his mortal shell and drifts off into a place further away than one might expect it to.
However, it’s dark and reclusive there, at least. So that’s nice.
----------------------------------------
It is not nice.
It’s way too dark here.
He’s dead, but he’s also not really dead-dead. He has no body, but he’s aware of existing.
The sort-of-dead man floats in a place that doesn’t have concepts of a ground or sky, nor does his sight manage to pick up any such thing as a horizon in the distance. It’s like he’s floating in an abyss, surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of little pinpricks of light of many colors — like stars. They come in many hues, but most of them are very far away from where he is. They shift and move, pulsating. Sometimes one will shoot down toward some unseen gravitation from the darkness below. Other times, one will appear, simply fading into existence from the emptiness — much like he himself has.
They’re souls.
He’s a soul.
He died. He was just going home and then he just…
He floats there in silence for a long time, trying to comprehend everything that has happened at once. Is this the afterlife? What is this place?
“Hello!” he calls out, seeing one of the other souls like himself floating nearby, drifting in some unseen current. The other person, who looks more like a yarn doll spun from glowing threads than a human or a creature, doesn’t look his way and simply drifts off in the tide that doesn’t pull at him. “Wait!” he calls after the shape, but receives no response as it, that other body, is taken somewhere by the unseen hand of fate. All of them — the souls — go, pulled by some riptide, but it’s like he himself is too heavy to be moved by it.
He’s sinking.
He’s drifting down deeper and deeper into this… well, this blackwater. He’s too heavy. The man tries to swim, but his odd body doesn’t really give to such an action, and instead he just fades further and further into the murk.
As he sinks, he looks around himself, watching while the other souls come and go in many directions and many paces. All of them become further and further away by the moment until, after a time, he is alone in an inky blackness so deep and dense that he can’t even be sure of his own existence anymore.
Why is he so heavy? Is this some metaphor? Some convoluted aspect of his soul, like how in ancient mythology, one would be weighed against a feather to determine their fate after death?
Was he a bad person? Is that what this is? He’s sinking into hell, isn’t he?
The dead man struggles, kicking and swimming as hard as he can, but it’s so dark and there’s nothing around him that he has no sense of movement or proprioception.
— Something dislodges, though, from all of his struggling.
The lost, disembodied soul looks down at itself with an odd sense of disgust as it sees a protrusion sticking out of its own self, like a massive splinter lodged into his guts.
Reaching down, he grabs hold of something rigid that has lodged itself into his core. Pieces of the yarn of his doll-like essence have tried to regrow over it, but it’s all become a big disjointed, revolting mess that makes him queasy to look at. He yanks on it, pulling the thing free from his body, the rectangle.
— The book.
The paper is falling apart because of the water all around him, but even in this infinite abyss, he feels the embroidery of the lettering, of the artwork, and a glint of heaven’s distant light shines down through mockingly for only a single teasing second to let him see what has accompanied him into the afterlife.
‘Enfangled’.
The man stares at it.
The book stares back.
— Very odd.
And then something suddenly appears next to him, floating in the darkness — a window. It looks almost like a computer’s screen — a monitor. It’s glossy and flat, like a pane of physical glass that has manifested itself out of nothing at all. It’s floating in the water next to him. Words appear on it, together with a myriad of arcane symbols and sigils he can’t make heads or tails of.
~ [Reincarnation Process Complete] ~
Your time of self-reflection and healing within the Well of Souls is finished.
After forty-nine days of contemplation here within the Bardo, your spirit has come to be ready to return to a world.
Note: Given your deeply burning passion for the subject matter — going so far as to bring a physical object with you all the way into death — we have collectively decided that you are a fitting candidate to be reborn as this era’s Vampire Lord. You will be equipped with the tools necessary to fulfill your task.
Please proceed to stay there as such, until you re-die.
We hope this development is to your liking.
However, if it is not, please do not worry! Given that this decision is final, there is no need for you to become frustrated, as it cannot be changed. Good luck!
‘Reincarnated’? ‘Vampire’? …Wait.
WAIT!
“I DON’T LIKE THIS!” he yells, pointing at the book in his grasp. “YOU GOT THE WRONG IDEA!” shouts the soul to God or whoever is communicating with him. “This isn’t my book!” he explains, tapping the soggy cover feverishly. Everything around him in the darkness begins to glow. He can see a light forming in the distance; it’s very bright. He doesn’t like the look of the man on the cover when he touches his shirt, so the dead man strategically pokes elsewhere to make it not weird. “It belonged to someone else! There’s a mistake!”
He looks down at the soggy novel. How did this even get here?!
[This is an automated message. Please do not reply]
REINCARNATION UNDERWAY!
THREE-TWO-ONE!
Something tears him away and what was once a man and then a disembodied soul now swirls down through the abyss to become something else entirely. Pulled by the riptide that has stolen him, he is brought to a new place that is very, very far away from what he once knew as his home.
Loose, soggy pages float after him, together with an oddly seductive picture of a man holding an apple. If anybody had the eyes to see it in a place and time such as this one, they might have sworn that the handsome man printed on the cover of that book just winked at them in passing.
But then the book vanishes too, surging after the departed soul.
----------------------------------------
He wakes up, sitting in another dark place — but this one is real again, physical. Cold, blue stonework surrounds him, the shadowy corners filled with cobwebs.
He’s alive again.
Feeling a stagnation around him, his back laid against something firm, he presses his arms out and a door only inches from his face swings open wide on an old hinge — an angled door. The heavy lid of a sarcophagus slides open. There is a crunching of glass as the lid hits an already broken mirror sitting just next to it.
He looks out into what appears to be a stone chamber. Before he can examine this new place more closely, another glossy window full of text appears in front of him.
[New Unique Class: Vampire Lord]
Vampires are strange, powerful, and mysteriously horrifying hunters that stalk the dark nights, moving no differently than the shadows that children see skulking about toward the crevices below their beds. With deeply unnatural grace and strength, vampires, which rise above the primitive base undead state, hunt the living with an unnaturally cunning intellect that surpasses any mortal’s ability to out think them. Much like their primary prey — the living — their core desire is simply to feed and to replicate.
Vampires can only be active during the night. Direct sunlight will harm them more than any blade or spell.
Unlike traditional undead, such as skeletons or zombies, which are held together by external magical forces, vampires must actively drain the blood of the living; so as to use the passive magical energy of their prey’s body to sustain themselves from the inside out. Failure to do so will result in starvation and a true death, from which there is no resurrection. As such, they prefer to feed on those who have potent magic over those who do not, given that such blood is richer and will sustain their unlife for longer periods.
Above and beyond the many base classifications of the many shapes of vampiris sanguis across the world sits one dominant power on a black throne — the Vampire Lord.
----------------------------------------
Whereas vampires, regardless of state, are advanced undead monsters unto their own right, the Vampire Lord is the final stage of evolution possible for the ever-changing undead monsters. A Vampire Lord distinguishes itself from the rest of its ilk not only because of its world-shattering powers that it has gained over thousands of years of feeding in reclusive darkness but also because of its affinity toward the domination of the lesser. Having killed countless numbers of people to reach its long-spanning age, a Vampire Lord has no feelings or emotions left in regard to the living, which it sees no differently than the insects filling its dank lair.
Vampire Lords’ hearts, being black and loveless, do not fear death any longer and so, they begin to leave their old dens of hiding in order to establish powerful warrens — dungeons — so as to lay claim to what they believe is rightly theirs — everything.
Vampire Lord dungeons are exceptionally rare, ranking closely to those of the Demon-King’s dungeons of forgotten eras, but employing a much different form of dark magic that favors the undead and obscure magics over demonic terrors.
Whereas Demon-Kings wish for the destruction of the world, Vampire Lords want only one thing — the same thing they’ve always hungered for whether as a mortal or as a changed creature — the warm, wet heart-blood of the passionately living taken from throbbing necks, intermingling with them, in endless, bountiful supply, forever.
— Because, just like its base, primitive kin, the more a Vampire Lord drinks, the stronger it becomes.
Vampire Lords are the only monster in recorded history capable of breaking the universal level cap of one-hundred maximum levels allowed, making stopping them a critical priority for humanity’s survival, because eventually, it will be too late to put an end to them before they fulfill ancient prophecy and bring about the night that never ends.
*★✧+- [LEVEL UP!] -+✧★* You are now level 100/100!
You have gained {57} additional new active and toggle abilities. [Select Here to View]
You have gained {84} additional new passives. [Select Here to View]
All STATS raised!
[The Star Taker] Passive Ability
• Your Maximum Level Cap has now been unlocked. You are now level 100/999!
◦ For every new level you gain, a star vanishes from the sky, making the night ever so much darker little by little — perhaps even they are hiding from you in fear.
[Perfect Prime] Passive Ability
• Having fed on the beautiful and powerful for generations, you have absorbed their best qualities through their blood. Your face, body, and features have changed and surpassed those of any living person to an absurd degree, making you beyond beautiful to the eyes of those around you. As such, it is easier to win their trust for your deceptive schemes.
[Midnight Monster] Active Ability
• Actively change your shape to that of a beast of the night, gaining its qualities and strengths for the duration of your transformation.
[Click Here to Read More]
~ [New Quest!] ~ The Night That Never Ends
Your endless thirst must finally be satiated. After thousands of years of suffering, you are ready to bring it all to an end.
Reawaken your sleeping castle dungeon and grow stronger by drinking the blood of countless victims.
When you are ready, bring about the Night That Never Ends with a forbidden ritual, banishing the sun away with an evil spell in order to herald in a new era of endless darkness and gnashing teeth that will fully consume the world of the living forever and ever more.