Chapter 172: The Birth of the Vampire Progenitor and the Advent of MA Energy
"Huh???"
Gulie was completely dumbfounded.
I, a dignified member of the true Dragon Race, am actually being treated as a stalker by a mere human?
Could there be anything more ridiculous in this world?
Seeing that he didn't react, the old man continued to beat the dead horse.
"Your stalking behavior needs to stop right now."
"Didn't you hear me? It seems your so-called higher organism refers to organisms with poor hearing, doesn't it?"
"This truly subverts common sense. One can only say the world is vast, and no wonder is too bizarre."
"Perhaps there really is a culture where having bad ears is considered useful, it's just that I don't know about it."
Gulie couldn't help but protest, "Don't talk nonsense, my hearing is perfectly fine! Besides, I am not a stalker."
The old man sighed, "To think you don't even have this much self-awareness, your brain really does have some issues."
Gulie tried his best to suppress the urge to go on a killing spree, yet the other party continued to test the upper limits of his patience.
Just as he was about to reach his breaking point, the old man's next words made him freeze.
"Since you compare yourself to a supreme existence, then could you please trouble yourself to consider the common sense of the lower humans you despise? Your Excellency."
Only then did Gulie realize something. He had thought the old man didn't know his true identity, which was why he dared to be so arrogant.
As it turned out, that wasn't the case at all.
"Knowing that I belong to the Dragon Race, you still dare to criticize me?"
"Why wouldn't I dare? As long as there's a reason for me to scold someone, I wouldn't care if the King of Heaven himself showed up, I'd still scold him all the same."
Gulie felt that this guy was abnormal.
In the general perception of humanity, Dragons were absolute existences that must never be provoked.
To antagonize a Dragon was the mark of a madman.
Yet the Fodway before his eyes completely lacked such self-awareness.
"Go back first and properly learn the common sense of human society. If you do that, you'll understand why I say these things."
"If you still don't get it through your thick skull, you're hopeless, and you can forget about ever seeing Lady Sariel again."
The stubborn old man was teaching him what common sense was.
It was precisely because of the old man's actions that Gulie seriously accepted his advice, gradually beginning to care about what humans thought and felt.
However, all of this was within the old man's calculations.
Fodway had constantly been contemplating how to resolve the crisis posed by the Dragon Race.
Fighting them was out of the question; they definitely couldn't win.
Therefore, he could only seek a breakthrough in other aspects.
Language is an art, and those words couldn't be truer.
The originally high-and-mighty Gulie was hard-carried by the old man's words to the point where he eventually split from the Dragon Race, becoming a lone stray Dragon just like Sariel. (In the sense of being a lone wolf)
But before the old man's plans could be fully implemented, he was quarantined due to an accident.
One had to know that this old man was the demon king of the financial world. If he wished, he could use his assets to create hundreds of ultra-large-scale humanitarian organizations like the Sariella Society.
The massive amount of funds consumed by the Sariella Society was merely a tiny bit of bank interest that Fodway pulled out at his leisure.
It could be said that he alone could instigate a global financial crisis, causing massive social upheaval.
To say his wealth could rival a nation was an understatement.
Yet it was precisely such an omnipotent figure who was to be isolated and quarantined by the entire world. At that time, the Sariella Society was secretly exposing and reporting a certain criminal organization.
To be precise, it was a composite organization containing many individual syndicates.
Because there was no contact between the separate organizations and they didn't know they were part of the same group, investigating them was exceptionally difficult.
Therefore, the Sariella Society had to ignore conventional procedures and adopt aggressive measures.
However, it was still a bit too late.
This criminal organization was acting as the hands and feet of a certain man.
That's right, it was that damned old elf again.
Potimas had targeted criminal organizations across the globe, gradually taking control of them, while he himself never showed his face.
Those organizations didn't even know what connection they had with Potimas.
But no matter how cautious a fox is, it will eventually show its tail.
Its scope of operation was simply too vast.
In order to ensure that the orphans wouldn't suffer when they grew up and went out into the world, the Sariella Society operated its own vocational training centers.
Most of the children would go there to look for work upon growing up.
Lately, however, the number of children going there had decreased significantly.
It was this minute change, which would normally be overlooked, that Sariel noticed. Sensing that something was amiss, she sent people to investigate.
The results showed that the disappearance of some orphans was the work of organizations manipulated by Potimas; the abducted orphans had become his experimental subjects.
Chimeras like Ariel were born as natural-born experimental subjects, whereas these orphans were artificial ones created after birth.
Success was even harder to achieve compared to the former.
Aside from the abducted children who were rescued before the experiments, practically none survived.
For this reason, the Sariella Society spared no means, sometimes even resorting to direct force by deploying their subordinate armed forces.
At that time, one of Potimas's human experiments involved researching vampires.
Before Sophia's birth, vampires had not appeared for a very long period in history.
In truth, they had all been pulled up by the roots and eradicated.
In the eyes of the Reincarnations, since there were Dragons and Angels, shouldn't there be vampires as well?
It was exactly the opposite.
Precisely because the Dragons were around and the Angel Sariel was present, vampires had become extinct.
Regarding the existence of vampires, there was another misconception.
It had always been assumed that vampires became vampires because of a skill title.
In reality, it was also exactly the opposite; someone like Sophia was born a vampire, and the skills were added later.
Strictly speaking, vampires were actually a type of magical lifeform.
An artificial race brought into existence through the power of magic.
As long as one knew the magic to turn someone into a vampire, anyone could become one.
The reason the Dragon Race and Sariel exterminated vampires was due to their highly destructive nature and their ability to multiply with a simple bite; leaving them unchecked would lead to disaster.
Thus, vampires were thoroughly wiped out, becoming mythical creatures in fairy tales.
But no one could have ever imagined that the exceptionally gifted Potimas would actually develop vampire magic entirely on his own.
In order to attain immortality, he targeted the magic that humans viewed as mysterious and that the Dragon Race took for granted.
He discovered that magic was not omnipotent either; it was a technology governed by laws.
If he could decipher the laws of magic, he would be able to use it even without Dragon genetics.
To decode magic and ultimately achieve eternal life, he needed more experimental animals.
Vampires were part of his research to develop magic that could evolve humans, but the result was a complete failure. He originally intended to dispose of those failed products, but the Sariella Society intervened.
Having someone else handle those failed products for him saved trouble, so he didn't need to waste any more energy paying attention to them.
Although vampires could achieve evolution, they had far too many drawbacks—fearing sunlight, garlic, silver, and whatnot.
Such things were nothing but failed products in Potimas's eyes.
Furthermore, most of the transformed thralls would lose their sanity, becoming monsters that bit people everywhere.
However, there was indeed one exception, and that was Fodway.
One of the soldiers returning from the cleanup operation was unfortunately bitten. There was a time interval between being bitten and the manifestation of symptoms.
As luck would have it, the soldier manifested symptoms while reporting the situation to the old man, taking a direct bite out of the old man in front of him.
Miraculously, the old man didn't lose his mind after being bitten.
It was unclear whether it was because he lost too much blood at the time, or because the old man was unconscious and hovering on the line between life and death, but he actually managed to pull through.
When he first woke up, he found himself tied to the bed and protested loudly, telling the doctors to untie him immediately.
How this old man maintained his sanity remained unknown; it was estimated that his unyielding personality overcame the curse.
Nevertheless, he was ultimately placed under house arrest and isolated.
With the vampire old man under house arrest, Gulie, fearing he would be bored out of his mind, frequently went to play chess with him.
Ever since being criticized by the old man during their first meeting, the unyielding Gulie desperately studied human common sense.
The crucial issue was that Gulie's initial objective was to make contact with Sariel.
Instead, he was driven away by the old man, and subsequently ended up going on regular "dates" with that same old man.
Yeah, it was incredibly absurd.
To exact revenge on the old man, Gulie relied on the fact that a Dragon's mental calculation capacity was vastly superior to a human brain, slaughtering his way across the chessboard.
The old man had a great mindset and never took back a move.
Life is like a game of chess; if you make a wrong move, taking it back is useless.
When humans make mistakes, it's terrifying, but humans always make mistakes. To avoid repeating the same mistakes, they establish a vast number of rules that can be ignored at any time.
Human history is a history of making mistakes. It is only by absorbing these lessons that they have reached where they are today, yet mistakes still happen.
In the old man's view, language was humanity's greatest invention.
Human history was also a history of sophistry.
Because absolutely powerful Dragons existed, humans did not rely on brute force.
How to ensnare the opponent using verbal skill was the key.
That was precisely why he had become so sharp-tongued.
"The calculation capability of the Dragon Race is indeed astonishing, but when it comes to cunning, you fall short of humans."
"No matter how great a Dragon is, they are not perfect. Dragons lack the craftiness of humans because they don't need it."
"Yet this is precisely the arrogance of the Dragon Race—despising humans as lower organisms only to capsize because of their craftiness."
"Just like how you, Gulie, were persuaded by me, voluntarily lowering yourself to the human playing field and falling into a hard battle."
"Humans are treacherous, but even more foolish. Humans constantly make mistakes, becoming more cunning after each mistake, and then making mistakes that cause even greater harm."
Although Gulie studied human perspectives, he was still far from truly understanding the meaning behind the old man's words.
"Despite all that you've said, I can still defeat you."
Perhaps having regained his confidence on the chessboard, Gulie gradually began to grow smug.
The old man merely smiled, silently packing up the chessboard.
During this period when the two were learning from each other, an even greater upheaval was triggered in the outside world. Potimas, who was wanted by the world, published "The Fundamentals of MA Energy Application" and "MA Energy Collection Devices" while on the run.
All at once, the academic community was thrown into an uproar.
At the exact same time, inside a certain orphanage.
A young Ariel strained to prop her body up, watching the various news broadcasts on the television.
Deep down, she felt a faint sense of foreboding.
However, Ariel, who possessed an extremely poor physical constitution, was completely powerless against this and could only pray silently.
It was also from this day onward that the world gradually became deformed and increasingly chaotic.
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