Blood and Qi: A Vampire Xianxia LitRPG

Scarsdale, NY – Present day

A man sits alone in a candle lit room. His eyes closed, legs crossed, back straight, hands on thighs, and head bowed. His face is blocky, features sharp and rough, hair dark and unkempt, skin swarthy. He sits so still he seems to draw no breath, though he does. He looks very young, late teens or so, though he is much, much older.

The man opens his eyes. He doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t know when he is, and doesn’t even know his own name. He is used to being confused. It is nothing new to him. He knows fear and anger help nothing and has had a long time to master such emotions, so does not allow himself to feel any. He is now mostly a creature of habit instead of intent. He sits alone in the four-cornered room staring at candles, images of battle and victory flashing through his mind.

He tries to remember more, but memories slip away or stay just out of reach. All he has is flickers of images, impressions, random thoughts and feelings. Becoming a man. Being a warrior. Being a lord. Faint glints of conquest and battle and kingship, of being worshiped and despised, of hunting and being hunted, of facing armies and running from angry mobs, of having good friends and wandering alone, of finding love and searching for magic, of blood and feeding, of the power. The world being the same for so long and then changing, then more change, always enduring and never dying, always living, then only existing. Only existing, then confusion and darkness.

He focuses on a name for himself. He knows he has been called many but can remember none. He remembers a friend. A friend brought him here, wherever here is.

What did he call me? No matter how hard he focuses, no name comes.

Though he has lived a very long time and seems immortal, the human body, as it currently stands, is an imperfect vessel for immortality. As most things go, the waning of his mind happened gradually, then suddenly. Decay outpaced regeneration and grey and white matter declined.

He never had the gift of tongues or a knack for learning new languages, but this is not abnormal. Most people aren’t blessed with the gifts necessary to make learning new languages an easy task. And this man’s first language was simple and direct, making more complex languages hard to comprehend and a struggle to learn.

When the grey matter thinned, the first area impacted was the posterior language cortices. Then the anterior. Word retrieval and production became harder, and eventually almost impossible. Other issues manifested. Confusion was a constant. Faces blurred and could not be distinguished. His world became smaller and smaller. Now it is the size of the candlelit, four-cornered room he occupies.

Some time passes before he is finally able to hold on to a memory. An old one. A memory from before he took the power. The last memory of his family. A time when life was simple and direct, and everything made sense. Only children tracked age and only until man or womanhood at thirteen. He had just turned thirteen the past winter solstice, the start of the new year, when everyone turned a year older.

At thirteen boys became men and could war and marry, though it often took some years to find a good first wife with large dowries for important men. Being the oldest living son of a landholder, a lord, made him an important man. So, at thirteen he was a man, but had not yet taken a wife.

It was almost dusk, and the feasting was finished. All the family and his father’s men and servants would lay down and take sleep on the floor of the one-roomed hold, the only light coming from the firepit in the center of the room. One of his father’s men entered the household and yelled a warning that many, many enemies were approaching. Many, many meaning far more than they could handle. More than two tens, but less than ten tens. His father had little more than ten warriors sworn to him. This was no common raid by neighbors. This enemy was coming to kill and conquer.

As the men quickly equipped for battle, the children and unmarried women were sent to nearby farmer’s huts. All but the children of the lord, as they would be greatly dishonored and abused if discovered, whereas invaders needed servants and wives, and farmers were almost always spared. Kingdoms were small, invaders always came from nearby and shared a similar language and culture – their goals and actions were predictable.

His lord and father ordered him to take the oldest of his brothers, the only brother turning thirteen the next winter’s solstice, along with his two best sworn men, and trek to his neighboring lord’s hold and inform him of the invasion. That lord would inform their king, the king would rally all the lords of the kingdom, repel the invaders, and win back his father’s lands.

He protested and said he would not run like a coward. This enemy would not unman him. His father slapped him for questioning his orders, and said his word was law.

His task wasn’t just to run and inform, but the sacred duty of vengeance. He would not be a true man until he killed ten tens of this enemy, or reclaimed his father’s lands. If he did not achieve either goal he would be cursed as a coward, and would be considered little, and would sire no sons, and no one would speak of him at all after he died.

With dry eyes, he bid farewell to his mother, and his father’s other wives, and his brothers and sisters. His other siblings, if taken along, would put the mission at risk, and burden the sacred task of vengeance he was sworn to, so they had to stay. His father must kill them with his own loving hand, so the enemy could not dishonor and abuse them.

Once his father falls to the enemy, his wives must take their own lives, so they could serve their lord in the afterlife, and share in the rewards their husband would be granted for dying a proper and glorious death in battle, greatly outnumbered.

As he prepared to leave, his mother held him close and said, “Avenge us, Nut, or be cursed and die a coward’s death.”

Nut. Not his real name, but the nickname he had earned. On his first raid he took a mighty blow to the head and stood his feet still. After the raid, when tall feats were being told by the fire, all the men laughed and clapped him on the back for taking such a blow to the head and not buckling. They call him Nut. His head was tough to crack.

The man, still sitting with legs crossed and hands on thighs, still staring at the candles, smiles. He remembers his name. A victory he revels in for a moment. He tries to say his name out loud, but no word to say it comes to mind.

Nut feels his face. About three days’ growth. Before he opened his eyes earlier, he knew there were two people nearby. One unmoving and smelling of fear and feces close, and one moving freely below. The one below isn’t the friend he thought of earlier. His senses are sharp, and he can hear, see, and smell extremely well, but he cannot smell well enough for that sense to reach the one below. Still, he somehow knows it isn’t his friend. He would guess it is a female by the sounds and movements he can distinguish.

Nut stands and walks to the chamber pot to relieve himself. He notices the odd clothes he is wearing. A buttoned-up short-sleeved, dark grey shirt of a silky material, and baggy and very comfortable pants of the same color and material. No undergarments. The pants are not placketed, and the waist has a fantastical type of elastic fastening. The room has three doors. One door has a symbol he recognizes for food besides it, though how he knows the symbol evades his memory. He enters the door.

Inside is a small room with a man bound and gagged, hanging from the ceiling by hands and feet. The bound man’s soul dark with bad deeds. That is the best way to hang a man to make it easier to extract all the dregs of vital essence, as the stubborn clumps in the hands and feet become far less stubborn. This type of hanging helps those new to the power, which Nut is not. The man being hung like this for him makes Nut feel helpless and incompetent.

The bound man is close to expiring. Though Nut has enough vital essence to last a while, he still sinks in his fangs and drinks deeply of the bound man. Not doing so would be a waste, and the dregs of a man contain the most potent and satisfying of the life essence.

Also in the room are some baskets filled with fruits and some vegetables. Nut sees a small bowl filled with what appears to be dried meat, but darker than it should be. Out of curiosity he tries a piece, and it is far less hard and salty, and far juicier, than salted meat should be. It also has a strange taste he is not familiar with. He places the rest of the piece back in the bowl. He drinks some water and cleans his face and hands in a washbasin.

Nut hears more movement down below and does not like it. Though not hungry, he grabs an apple as he leaves. In the room with candles are two other doors and a wooden chair near a window. Swords and various other arms are placed around the room, but not much else. He goes to the window drawing back the curtain, flinching at the powerful sun. It saps his strength, and he doesn’t like it, but he wants fresh air to clear the stink of death and feces. He raises the window and welcomes the music of nature and sounds of children at play, familiar sounds making him feel less lost.

Nut sits and looks out the window. Small mansions built in a strange style, on very small estates, most with large metal-wheeled machines close by, congesting a street made of an unfamiliar substance. A feeling of dread overcomes Nut, but he squelches it quickly. He searches for the familiar and looks at the many trees and a small group of children. Beautiful, he thinks.

Nut’s gaze pans up and down the street and stops on the queerest sight he has ever seen – a young girl, no older than six or seven, riding on a machine with two wheels and powered by feet, up and down the large and wide paved path leading to a small mansion.

The two-wheeled machine tickles Nut’s memory and doesn’t hold his gaze with confusion and curiosity. It is the little girl. Her soul is one of the darkest he has ever seen. More of a dark marble with lighter swirls. Most adults have a grey mist with dark swirls and splotches, and the occasional whitish swirl or spot. Children usually have clear light-grey souls.

Nut doesn’t think he has seen a soul so dark even on the worst of men possessed of a great evil and capable of inflicting grave deeds in mass.

A child so young has neither the time nor ability for any such things. How is this possible? Nut sits by the window and ponders on this absurdity.

A pressure enters Nut’s head, and next he notices the light outside has changed. His eyes are closed, and he cannot open them. The powerful sun hitting his skin no longer does. It was bright day but now approaches dusk. His power is hardly being sapped and the feeling is diminishing instead of strengthening, so he knows the sun is approaching dusk. He goes to stand but cannot. He is not in control of his own body.

This has never happened to him before. A new phenomenon. Maybe it should cause him fear, but it doesn’t. He waits. He is good at waiting. The sun goes down. He thinks about retreating in on himself. He thinks of trying to remember his name again but doesn’t. He is curious. He strains his senses. Occasionally he can hear a deep rumbling voice at the edge of his perception. Strangely, not his perception of hearing. He hears it at the edge of his mind. When he tries to focus on the voice, it gets further away.

He tries many tricks to make the voice clearer. None work. Sometimes he feels the rumble of the voice in his mind, sometimes in his chest. But never clearly. Just at the edge of his perception.

He sits there, still, unable to move. Once in a while a machine starts to softly vibrate, and cold air enters the room through a vent. He hears few bird or insect sounds, and they are far away and too slow. He hears mostly silence and the sometimes rumble of a distant voice.

Then something. The air changes and is filled with an indescribable tingling, like the air charged with a weird energy before a storm. He feels a different pressure on his head, but far different from the last. Something enters the base of his skull and starts spreading through his body.

He is not too worried. His vital essence isn’t reacting to it, and throughout his long life no disease or poison has been able to harm him for long, if at all. If he was in danger, his power would fight the foreign substance, and his life essence would be draining.

Then pain. Extreme, unfathomable pain. He has felt all types of pain in his long life. All types. There is no pain he hasn’t been subjected to over and over. And all prior pain pales in comparison to what he feels now. Being stuck fast and unable to move he can’t cry out or flail around. The pain is too much for his mind to retreat from. He can only endure, and not by choice. It is pain unimaginable. Too great to bear. Too great to endure.

The pain could’ve lasted a moment or half the night. When it finally ends his mind is too gone and too numb to work at all. If he was at all lucid, he would feel new pressure applied to his head before darkness, mercifully, overtakes him.