The night was as black as ink amid the mountains.
A coal-fired train dragged its heavy body forward in a winding path.
Steam from the boiler was torn apart by the mountain wind and vanished in an instant into the starless night sky.
The wheels rolled over the joints in the rails, producing a dull and rhythmic sound.
Swaying kerosene lamps cast mottled light and shadow across the carriage walls.
The congealed bloodstains flickered between light and dark with the dancing of the flames.
This carriage held only a small half of its seats filled.
During the day they had still been noisy and clamorous, but now they sat silently in their respective places, holding the postures of their final moments in life.
The expressions left on their faces were a mixture of terror and despair, frozen into an unsettling mask.
In this moving morgue, only one figure crouched in the corner, head lowered as he gnawed on something, occasionally accompanied by the crisp crack of bones.
This was the fifteenth day of John’s escape.
John Cornwall had once been a good man.
At least that was what he himself believed, even though the words of lawyers were usually not worth much trust.
His youth had come to an abrupt end at the age of twenty-three, but the story needed to begin from an earlier time.
Humber University School of Law was the most respectable institution in Yorkshire, selecting fewer than thirty places each year from among thousands of applicants.
John Cornwall had entered with the top score and graduated with the top score as well.
His mentor had proudly said he was “a man born to stand in the courtroom.”
Indeed he was.
At twenty-two he had won a case for a widow oppressed by a mining company.
That case had given him a modest reputation in Yorkshire’s legal circles.
He loved the law.
The law was the embodiment of order, the final bastion of reason against chaos.
He firmly believed that everyone ought to receive a fair trial.
Then fate proved one thing: it never cared what you believed in.
It had been a rainy night typical of Yorkshire.
The streetlamps blurred into clusters of dim yellow light in the mist.
John was returning from working overtime at the firm, taking the path he had walked a hundred times before.
But this time he had been unable to walk past it.
That thing had dived from the church steeple without making any sound.
Its enormous wingspan blotted out the remaining sliver of sky above his head.
John had not even had time to see its full form clearly.
He had only seen a pair of red eyes burning in the darkness, and a mouth filled with sharp fangs.
What happened afterward he could not remember clearly.
He only remembered the pain, and that strange sense of calm after massive blood loss.
He felt as if he were falling into a very deep, very deep place, surrounded by eternal darkness and silence.
This was probably what death felt like.
Yet death had lasted only a very short time.
After draining his blood, that monster had poured its own blood into his body.
Those dark liquids had flowed back up along the torn wounds like living snakes boring into his blood vessels, exploding in every capillary and rewriting his cells one by one.
John Cornwall died.
Then a new John Cornwall opened his eyes.
When he awoke he was lying on a white hospital bed.
The light coming through the window had been reduced by the heavy blackout curtains to a single pale slit.
The room was large, but the furniture was sparse: one bed, one bedside table, one chair, and one mirror fixed to the wall with bolts.
Everything was white, so white it made the heart uneasy.
A middle-aged man in a white coat sat on the chair and told him in a tone so gentle it was almost hypocritical that, due to his “special constitution,” he must “receive long-term treatment” in this “specialized sanatorium.”
John had studied law.
His sensitivity to language far exceeded that of ordinary people.
He understood that “special constitution” meant vampire, “specialized sanatorium” meant prison cell, and “receive long-term treatment” meant life imprisonment without parole.
That amiable doctor had never used those words from beginning to end, but John had heard them with perfect clarity.
Three times a day, a stooped old nurse would punctually deliver a specially prepared nutrient solution.
It was a deep red liquid in a medical blood bag, giving off a faint scent of rust.
John only later learned that it was discarded plasma that had been stored too long in the blood bank, mixed with anticoagulants and unknown sedatives.
After the meal, two burly guards would add three chains to the door.
His parents had come once.
On the day they came, a black-clad man with a serious expression had accompanied them the entire time, standing silently in the corner of the reception room.
His mother’s eyes were red from crying.
His father held his hand, his lips moving for a long time without being able to say anything.
That was the last time he saw them.
After that, every birthday, officials in exquisite black uniforms would appear in his room carrying a small cake.
The cake was usually chocolate-flavored, with candles corresponding to his age stuck on top.
First twenty-four, then twenty-five, then thirty, forty, fifty.
The candles grew more and more numerous, and the cake seemed increasingly crowded.
The insides of those officials’ uniforms were all embroidered with the same badge: the pattern of a three-headed dog.
This emblem was known to everyone in the dark side of the Northern Continent.
The Cerberus Bureau was a special law enforcement agency dedicated to handling supernatural affairs.
Its name was taken from the gatekeeper dog of Hell, and the implication could not have been clearer.
With his years of legal training, John quickly figured out these people’s true identities and intentions.
They had not come to celebrate his birthday, but to assess his mental state.
They were vampires like him, but they possessed officially authorized fangs and claws, maintaining the fragile order of the United Kingdom in the darkness, while he was merely an anomaly existing in this world without permission.
John knew very clearly that once he showed any tendency toward losing control in a certain assessment, those smiling black-clad people would sign the report and then, without the slightest hesitation, carry out the final judgment.
Such imprisonment lasted for a full thirty-one years.
Thirty-one years.
Enough time for an infant to grow into an adult, enough for a sapling to grow into a towering tree, enough for the human world to change its face entirely.
John had watched eleven thousand three hundred and fifteen sunrises in this white room, although he could only see a single line of pale sky light through the gap in the blackout curtains.
He loathed this sanatorium, loathed the lifeless, icy liquid in the blood bags, loathed those regular visitors who looked him over with gazes of pity.
But what he could least endure was the mirror.
That mirror fixed to the wall with bolts faithfully recorded one fact: his face remained forever at twenty-three.
No wrinkles, no white hair, even the hairline remained completely unmoved.
For thirty-one years, he had not aged a single day.
And his parents?
If they were still alive, they should already be elderly people in their twilight years.
But the greater possibility was that they already lay in the graveyard of some church in Yorkshire.
The legal provisions he had spent half a lifetime studying had probably been revised countless times.
The classmates and colleagues he knew had probably each found their own families and careers, while he was still in this white room, day after day facing the pale walls and the guards who likewise would never grow old.
Time for vampires was not a river, but a stagnant pool.
The turning point appeared on the day of his fifty-fourth birthday.
This year no one brought a cake.
This was the first time in thirty-one years.
John sat on the edge of the bed and waited for an entire day.
From early morning until dusk, from dusk until late night.
No one came.
The corridor was abnormally quiet; even the old nurse’s shuffling footsteps could not be heard.
He could not clearly say what he was waiting for.
Those cakes did not taste good, but thirty-one years of repetition had already engraved this ritual into the remaining rhythm of his life, just as the tides relied on the moon and migratory birds relied on the monsoon.
They had finally stopped even pretending, John thought.
He lowered his head and looked at his left hand.
Then he bit off his own little finger.
Pain exploded in an instant, but was almost simultaneously covered by another sensation.
The moment the flowing fresh blood slid across the tip of his tongue, every cell in John’s body trembled.
That taste—sweet, warm, full of vitality—was worlds apart from those lifeless, icy liquids in the blood bags.
It was like a traveler who had trudged through the desert for thirty-one years finally drinking the first mouthful of clear water.
John closed his eyes and allowed this sinful sense of satisfaction to spread through his body.
He did not know how long he had remained in that posture—perhaps a few minutes, perhaps several hours.
When he opened his eyes again, he discovered that something extra had appeared on the bedside table.
A black box.
The box was very small, about the size of a cigarette case, made of some unknown metal.
Its surface was carved with intricate patterns, the lines as fine as hair, yet under the weak light it emitted a dim, almost living luster.
He did not remember when this box had appeared.
John cautiously opened the box.
The hinges made an extremely faint sound.
The interior was lined with black velvet, and in the center rested a slender glass tube.
The tube was filled with a deep black liquid—not the deep red of blood, but a pure black that almost swallowed light.
The liquid flowed slowly under the moonlight seeping in through the iron window, as if it had its own breath and pulse.
Beside the glass tube was neatly placed a folded note.
John unfolded it.
On it was written in handwriting so neat it was almost deliberate:
Fate is never stingy in giving those who suffer two paths.
Either slowly rot away in the cage, or transform into the beast that tears apart the chains of fate.
This is the key for you to return to freedom.
John’s hand unconsciously clenched the edge of the note, his nails digging deeply into the flesh of his palm.
He stared at that strange potion, and complex interwoven emotions surged in his heart—fear of the unknown, longing for freedom, anger at being abandoned, and a barely perceptible vigilance from professional instinct.
This was too deliberate.
No one would send such a gift for no reason.
The chains on his body made a slight metallic friction sound because of his movement, as if mocking his hesitation.
“I ought to enjoy the right to receive a fair trial,” he said toward the empty room.
No one answered him, just as no one had answered him for the past thirty-one years.
He grasped that test tube.
The black liquid gently swayed under the temperature of his palm.
Through the glass wall, he could almost feel it beating.
John pierced the needle into his own vein and pushed down the syringe.
He sank into sleep for a day and a night.
The dreams were chaotic and long, as if someone had compressed a lifetime of nightmares into a continuous twenty-four-hour screening.
He dreamed of the streets of Yorkshire, dreamed of that bat, dreamed of the white room and the icy liquid in the blood bags.
Finally he dreamed that he was standing on a boundless wilderness.
The moon was absurdly large, almost occupying half the sky, and silvery-white light covered the entire earth.
He awoke in that moonlight.
He looked up at the bright moon outside the iron window and felt that the entire world was beneath his feet.
It was not a metaphor.
He truly sensed the pulse of every inch of land under his feet, heard the rustling sound of a field mouse burrowing into its hole several miles away, and smelled the information carried by every molecule in the air.
Every one of his nerves was like a precision instrument that had been recalibrated.
The world unfolded in his perception with unprecedented clarity.
He raised his left hand.
The little finger that had been bitten off yesterday was growing there completely intact, the nail clean and neat, without even a single scar.
John moved his fingers a little.
His fingertip brushed across the bars of the iron window.
The hard alloy emitted a teeth-grating groan under his touch.
He had not even used force; he had merely touched it.
He understood something.
That night, under the cover of the moonlight, he slipped into the old nurse’s room.
The old nurse did not notice his arrival.
In fact, with John’s current speed, probably no one in the entire sanatorium could notice his arrival.
The old nurse sat under the lamp flipping through a book.
His reading glasses had slid down to the tip of his nose, and he was humming some ancient little tune indistinctly.
John knew this old man.
For thirty-one years, this stooped old nurse had appeared punctually three times a day in front of his door, bending down to push the meal tray in through the food slot at the bottom of the door.
He never spoke, but occasionally he would add an extra biscuit.
At this moment he stood behind the old man, smelling the blood flowing in the other’s veins that carried the scent of tobacco and cheap whiskey.
His fangs had already slid out from his gums uncontrollably.
The voice of reason told him he should stop.
But that voice was very small, so small it seemed to come from behind a thick wall, while the scent of blood filled every corner of his consciousness like a rising tide.
He pounced.
His sharp fangs pierced the old nurse’s throat, and warm blood surged into his mouth.
The blood of a living person.
Fresh, scalding, full of vitality.
Compared to those cold substitutes in the blood bags, this was like suddenly throwing a color-blind person into a kaleidoscope.
John Cornwall, the proud genius who had graduated first in the School of Law at Humber University, the lawyer who had once believed in justice and reason, completely lost himself in the pleasure belonging to the beast on that moonlit night.
He left the sanatorium.
High walls could not confine an awakened vampire.
When he vaulted over the enclosing wall he did not even need to use his hands or feet.
He simply gave a light leap and jumped over that concrete barrier that had imprisoned him for thirty-one years.