Chapter 95
“I’ve never heard of a job like that before.”
“You wouldn’t have. It’s still a line of work the Emperor is only beginning to take interest in…”
Muttering to himself, he came to a stop in front of a shady-looking merchant. The man grinned widely, showing a broken front tooth. His shabby clothes and hunched back made him look like an old crone, but his voice was unexpectedly smooth, like a boy’s.
Everything about him screamed black marketer.
“Monster blood. How much will you pay for it?”
“Monster blood? I don’t deal in rotten stuff…”
He glanced at the suspicious black bundle slung over Lancart’s shoulder, likely assuming it was a bottle of blood drained from a monster corpse. Lancart just grinned and shook his head.
“No, I’m talking about fresh blood. Blood that’s just been drawn—how much would you pay for that? Give me five minutes and I can bring you some.”
Black market dealers are usually quick on the uptake, but even this one couldn’t grasp the hidden meaning in Lancart’s words. After all, a monster that talked, looked, and acted like a human simply didn’t exist—at least as far as anyone knew.
“Strange way to talk. If you don’t have it right now, you don’t have it. If you’re here to waste my time, move along.”
He sniffed the air. The man reeked of dead monster, but there was no fresh monster blood scent, so he was convinced Lancart was talking nonsense. Still, even as the dealer shooed him away, Lancart stubbornly pressed on.
“How much, then?”
“If you can really bring it, I’ll give you a hundred thousand shillings for a full bottle. But you don’t have any, do you? So, off you go.”
Despite his dismissive attitude, he still managed to keep a tone of politeness. Having gotten the answer he wanted, Lancart shot a triumphant look down at the petite woman by his side—see, I told you so—and strutted off.
Speechless, Sylvia followed him deeper into the alley, all the way to an empty lot.
“See? I was right.”
“He was probably just saying that to get rid of you. You were being a nuisance, so he made something up.”
Even so, she doubted it was entirely a bluff. Clearly, fresh monster blood was worth a staggering amount here.
Sylvia tried to waft away the stale smell of garbage. The odor wasn’t as bad as the severed arm her husband was carrying, but being so new to her, it was hard to ignore.
“So. Are you really going to sell it?”
“Yes. I’ll slice off a bit of flesh, draw the blood, and sell it to him.”
He answered with perfect confidence. Sylvia gave up trying to talk him out of it—there was no point arguing with a man who never listened to anyone but himself. In fact, it might not even be a bad thing if his true identity as a monster was revealed and he was caught by these money-hungry dealers.
“Let’s see, now… where could I find something to hold the blood?”
He didn’t even bother looking for anything special to use. When he fought monsters with a dagger, pretending to be human, the other monsters had transformed their own hands into blades to fight him.
It was proof enough for Sylvia that he wasn’t her human husband, but a cunning monster in disguise.
While she remained silent, he quickly rummaged through the trash and found a relatively clean glass bottle. Then, without hesitation, he transformed his right hand. Startled by his sudden body transformation, Sylvia barely stifled a scream.
“Ugh—!”
Swish—
Drip, drip, drip.
He sliced open the soft flesh inside his arm with ease, catching the flowing blood in the bottle. In moments, he had filled it with a small glass’s worth of fresh blood.
After corking the bottle, he roughly wiped away the stray drops in the sand, then stared at his own wound. Within seconds, as he watched, the cut healed over as if by magic.
He showed off the faint scar to Sylvia, almost as if to boast, then held out his hand for her to follow.
“Wounds without infused demonic energy don’t last long. You saw how quickly I healed, right? If you ever run into a monster, don’t even think—just run. With your body as it is now, you’d be lucky to last three minutes.”
She was now somewhere between monster and human, but she still had no idea how to use demonic energy—meaning even a half-baked, low-level monster could easily overpower her. Odds were she’d never have to face one alone, but Kuinan still felt compelled to warn her seriously.
“Demonic energy… What’s that?”
Humans, after all, had no idea what demonic energy even was.
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