Adam forced himself to push through the discomfort as he stepped into the district, picking his way carefully with each step.
The ground was layered with human waste—some of it dry, some still wet—and he quickly learned there was a difference.
Once inside the slums, tracking his target became significantly harder. The stench was overwhelming. Trying to sniff out a trace of potion amidst all this filth felt like torture. Adam figured his nose might just give up entirely.
Fortunately, he wasn't completely relying on scent. He'd already memorized several of the stranger's features—especially the moment when the man washed his hands.
In this era, water was considered impure. Most people rarely washed their hands, let alone drank plain water. Those who could afford it drank wine. The poor drank beer or watered-down soup.
There were reasons for this. Public sanitation was practically nonexistent, and most water sources—aside from a few select wells—were barely drinkable. Boiling water wasn't common practice. Drinking untreated water meant gambling with your life.
Once the belief took hold that water was dirty, few people even wanted to wash their hands. Clean hands were a rare sight.
Adam's own habit of regular cleaning was seen as eccentric, even within the Borku family. They didn't say much, but it was obvious they thought it odd.
"I guess I'm just not ruthless enough…" he muttered to himself with a touch of irony. True ruthlessness meant not just being hard on others, but on yourself as well.
Sure, he could smile through the pain and eat communion wafers like it was nothing—to avoid drawing suspicion from the senior clerics—but the thought of walking around smelling like a cesspit still made his skin crawl.
Ironically, the priests and monks of the church were always spotless. They used holy water.
There were different kinds of holy water. The most basic type came from the well beneath the church bell tower. The church bell was one of the few objects in the sanctuary believed to possess supernatural properties, so the water drawn from there carried a faint trace of divine power.
That was the water used for rituals—hand washing, blessings, and so on.
During the man's ritual handwashing, Adam had noticed something odd: a thin splinter and fresh wood shavings beneath his fingernails. Not the kind you'd get just brushing past a wooden surface—they were fresh, deliberate.
Anyone with that much wood debris under their nails was likely either a carpenter or a lumberjack.
Adam leaned toward the latter. The mud on the man's shoes had bits of moss clinging to it—probably from the forest. Of course, it was all still speculation.
He moved through the slums, careful not to fully unleash his heightened sense of smell. Quietly, steadily, he followed the trail deeper toward the edge of the woods.
And then, he heard it.
Not a scent—but a sound.
In the stillness of the night, a guttural, strangled growl drifted from a run-down cabin near the forest's edge. It sounded like a wild animal, desperate to howl, but too afraid to make noise—stifled by terror and trembling with restraint.
As Adam extended his senses, he felt it clearly—whoever was inside was a ticking time bomb, moments from exploding.
As he crept closer, he began to make out the whisper.
"Blooood… blooood…"
Adam frowned.
To his knowledge, werewolves didn't have a fetish for blood. Among all the otherworldly species, the only ones known for that kind of obsession were vampires.
Real vampires—the pureblood kind—were once human sorcerers who had experimented on werewolves and, through forbidden rites, turned themselves into something else entirely.
But whoever was inside that cabin, he clearly wasn't a pureblood vampire.
Some werewolves could spread their condition through bites, creating lesser, impure lycanthropes. Likewise, there were vampires who could create lesser versions of themselves—"blood thralls."
So the creature inside was a vampire—or at least a thrall. But the real question was: how?
"Could a pureblood vampire have come to Roya?" Adam wondered. "Or did this guy get turned elsewhere and run here to hide?"
He didn't share the church's zeal for killing vampires on sight. That kind of thing rarely led to anything good. Adam never did anything without benefit. If there was no gain, he wasn't interested.
Still… if a pureblood vampire was in Roya, it could be a major threat.
A pureblood vampire meant a high-level sorcerer with intimate knowledge of werewolves—and Adam couldn't be sure such a creature wouldn't decide to kidnap him for "research."
"Roya's getting messier by the day," he muttered, frowning.
He approached the cabin silently but didn't go inside. Instead, he entered a deep state of sensory awareness, scanning everything around him.
Inside, the blood thrall was consumed by hunger—an uncontrollable craving for blood. The only thing stronger than that instinct was the primal drive to survive.
Just as Adam suspected, the man inside—Adel—had been terrified out of his mind ever since the local witch doctor was dragged to the stake.
And in his fear, he'd done something incredibly stupid.
Adam didn't interrupt him. Instead, he circled to the side of the cabin and pried open the cellar lock with his claws.
Clamping a hand over his nose, he slipped inside.
Even with his lycan vision, the basement was too dark to see clearly. He followed the faint scent of lamp oil, found a small lantern, and lit it.
The room came into view—and even with his mental prep, Adam flinched.
Wooden beams supported the ceiling. Shelves and cabinets lined the walls, filled with bottles—some empty, others still holding liquid.
No surprise—those were potions.
But they weren't what caught his eye.
There, twisted and rotting, was a corpse.
The smell, the stains, the bindings, the corner piled with human waste—it all painted a grim picture.
Vampires, even blood thralls, didn't go mad under the moon like werewolves. But their hunger for blood was no less dangerous.
In a place like Roya—even in the slums—too many reports of people being attacked for blood would attract church investigators. But a single person disappearing? That was nothing. People went missing here all the time.
So locking someone in a basement, using them as a steady blood supply—that wasn't unheard of for a cautious thrall.
"Driven by fear… and turned to rage," Adam thought solemnly. The corpse was so contorted, it was obvious the victim had endured agony, even in death.
"Lost his mind before he died…" Adam noted the markings on one of the wooden beams—tallies, maybe days or weeks, eventually giving way to mindless scratches and bite marks.
Whoever this was had gone insane long before the end.
Don't romanticize vampires, Adam reminded himself. At the end of the day, they were monsters—some worse than werewolves.
And this blood thrall? He wasn't even a monster. Just trash.
"I really am a piece of shit," Adam thought, disgusted. Not because he was about to punish the thrall—but because he wasn't.
He didn't go back upstairs to deliver justice. He just walked over to one of the cabinets, tapped twice on a hidden panel, and pulled out a journal.
Flipping through a few pages, he tucked it under his arm. Then, using his claw, he carved a message into the wooden cabinet.
After writing the warning he had prepared, he hesitated, then added one more line:
You should bury the body soon. You really don't want to show up at church smelling like a corpse and risk getting sniffed out by the clerics, do you?
With that, Adam snuffed out the lantern, slipped out of the slums, and made his way to a small, clean river.
He set the journal on the bank and dove into the water, scrubbing every inch of himself. Everything about that blood thrall made him sick.
When he emerged, the crescent moon hung high in the sky. Adam fought the urge to howl.
He picked up the journal and vanished into the shadows.