Qin Ming had just completed the fusion of his powers when someone conveniently delivered a generous gift straight to his face. Naturally, this put him in a very good mood.
Grinning, he stowed away the legendary-level key and turned to glance at the three people behind him.
To his surprise, Zhao Honghua was looking at him warily, keeping a cautious distance.
Seeing her holding a sword in her left hand and a talisman in her right, every muscle in her body tightly wound, Qin Ming couldn't help but pause. Once he registered what was going on, his brows furrowed.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You've turned into a vampire?"
"I just saved your life, you know."
"Since ancient times, good and evil have never coexisted!"
"You sure you can take on all three of us?"
"...But power itself knows no good or evil!"
Staring at Qin Ming, Zhao Honghua recalled the terrifying strength he had just displayed. She abruptly sheathed her peachwood sword across her back with a flick of her hand.
As the Eastern saying goes, 'a wise man submits to circumstances.' Now that a great enemy was looming, getting into internal conflicts was definitely a bad idea.
Besides! Vampires were Western monsters—what did they have to do with Eastern Taoist exorcists? If anyone should be fighting him, it ought to be a Western exorcist!
If she ended up fighting over this and later ran into a Western exorcist who accused her of stealing their job and disrupting the market, what then?
Having quickly found enough excuses to convince herself, Zhao Honghua smiled again.
She never wanted to fight Qin Ming in the first place. Her earlier defensive stance was just an occupational reflex. She walked up to him and gave him a careful once-over.
"What a powerful dark aura. Don't tell me… you've become a Vampire Count, like Dracula?"
At her question, Qin Ming let out a cold snort and gave a dramatic flick of his cloak.
"Count? What a joke! That kind of rank dares compare itself to me? I am a noble Vampire Marquis!"
"Uh… vampires don't usually call themselves vampires, you know. They consider it an insult. They refer to themselves as the Blood Clan."
"Oh. Then I am a noble Blood Clan Marquis!"
"Duke, Marquis, Count, Viscount, Baron… Wait—Marquis? That can't be right! Didn't the vampire clans stop having marquises ages ago? Where did you come from?"
Realizing something was off, Zhao Honghua suddenly cried out and gave Qin Ming a strange look.
But Qin Ming just continued to savor the feeling of his new powers, shaking his head smugly, completely unbothered.
"Because I'm extraordinarily gifted, obviously."
"Extraordinarily gifted? This isn't something that can be explained by talent alone."
Watching Qin Ming, who had absolutely no idea how serious this was, Zhao Honghua's gaze grew even more peculiar.
The Blood Clan—also known as the Western vampire race—had a very unique method of passing on their legacy.
Their inheritance process was known as the First Embrace. To put it simply, they bite you, but instead of sucking your blood, they inject their own essence blood into your body, putting you into a deathlike state.
Once your body successfully fuses with the new blood and is fully assimilated, you awaken as a new vampire.
The more essence blood injected, and the stronger your original power, the higher the level of vampire you become.
But no matter how powerful you are, or how much essence blood you're given, your bloodline level can never surpass that of your First Embracer.
Even an outrageously talented genius can at most break through the limits and reach the same level as their sire.
Most often, they're still one or even several ranks lower.
That is to say, the Blood Clan's inheritance structure was pyramid-shaped—elders would create subordinates, and those subordinates would always be of lower rank than their creators.
Then those subordinates would go on to create even newer subordinates, whose rank would be even lower than theirs.
Layer after layer, it continued this way until eventually, at the very bottom, there were the so-called "blood slaves"—the lowest level of vampires who couldn't even condense a blood core, and were not even acknowledged as true kin by many other vampires.
What's more, for vampires, giving someone a First Embrace was extremely taxing on their body. It was kind of like how humans... do certain strenuous activities.
If you wanted to create a subordinate only one level below your own, the amount of essence blood you'd need to inject would be equivalent to doing that strenuous activity a hundred times in a day.
If you didn't drop dead on the spot, it meant you had an incredibly resilient body—and maybe a pretty tough fate, too.
In the world of Midnight Slaughter, the most powerful vampire on record was only at the Count level. But now Qin Ming had somehow emerged with a Marquis-level bloodline.
What did that mean? It meant that if he wanted to, he could go around creating a whole crew of Count-level subordinates.
Then imagine him leading this squad and suddenly declaring himself the true heir of the Blood Clan, claiming that all vampires actually originated in the East.
At that point, the rest of the vampires probably wouldn't even be able to refute it! After all, they only had two or three Blood Clan Counts total—while this side had a whole bunch! And, most importantly, they had a Marquis above them all!
That would basically make the rest of them look like cheap knockoffs!
At the moment, Qin Ming still had no idea what it meant to have a bloodline one level higher than everyone else in the Blood Clan. He was too busy enjoying the changes in his body, a bright smile stretched across his face.
By manipulating his blood, he could change his height at will.
One second he was a little kid, just a few years old; the next second he was a nearly three-meter-tall giant.
While shifting forms, Qin Ming suddenly twisted his head around and gave Kasamoto Eiri a sinister, wicked grin.
It scared Kasamoto so badly she trembled from head to toe and hastily dragged Angel over to shield herself.
[ID: 441985]
[Strength: 28]
[Constitution: 38]
[Agility: 36]
[Spirit: 21]
[Innate Skill: Junk King]
[Skills: K-Type Gene Arm (A-rank), Celestial Glide (A-rank), Qi Wave (A-rank), Iron Body (S-rank), Flesh Absorption (S-rank)]
[Bloodline: Mutated Vampire Marquis Bloodline (S-rank)]
[Bio: An adventurer skilled in blood manipulation, but possibly suffering from severe thrombosis.]
Bloodline fully upgraded! And he had forcibly integrated it with the two existing S-rank powers in his body through combat, achieving a perfect three-way balance!
At this moment, Qin Ming's body no longer had any vital points in the traditional sense—his entire physical form had become a body made purely of blood.
As long as you didn't rip out his balls, he wouldn't die. And as long as he had access to blood, he could rapidly regenerate from any injury.
That was the good news.
The bad news was—now that Qin Ming had become a member of the Blood Clan, he was officially classified as a dark creature.
Which meant his body now carried attributes and could be targeted by certain special powers.
For example: Zhao Honghua's peachwood sword. Made from lightning-struck wood, it was a weapon of pure yang energy—extremely effective against him.
When Qin Ming grabbed it, his hand actually started to smoke. If not for the toughness granted by his Iron Body skill, his hand might've melted on the spot.
And that wasn't even a weapon specifically designed to counter him. If he were to go up against the Blood Clan's legendary nemesis—aka the powers of the Church—he might get hit with critical strikes on every single blow!
Of course! According to the law of mutual destruction—if Qin Ming used his new powers to smash church personnel, he'd probably land critical hits every time too!
The two sides were a textbook example of love-hate entanglement—hurting and countering each other in perfect balance!
(End of Chapter)