4 CHAPTER 4
Chapter 4
Town of Andris, Outskirts.
It was early morning, and the sun was rising in the sky.
The people in the outskirts were starting to wake up.
Some were setting up their stalls, while others were grabbing their hunting tools and heading into the forest or elsewhere.
There were also those without shelter, who, having nowhere to reside or work to go to, curled up in their thin blankets made of rags, prolonging their sleep to avoid feeling the constant pangs of hunger.
And then, towards the western area of the outskirts, there was a boy moving through the alleys with quick steps, careful not to be followed by anyone.
After disposing of the vampire's body, Reily didn't stay in the area for long. Leaving the vampire's body in the forest would have led to unnecessary trouble.
If the body were to be found by any residents, the city would have alerted the church, and consequently, they would have checked the entire city to look for any other vampires.
The last thing Reily needed now was to end up in their hands, so he decided to get rid of the corpse.
After a while, he reached a bend, beyond which the alley ended.
There was a hut, square-shaped, made of skins and tree branches. It was no more than 2 meters high and about 3 meters wide.
Compared to the house in his past life, this one wasn't much, but given his current living conditions, he couldn't complain.
He quickly entered and closed the doors, which looked like curtains made of scraps of different clothes.
Once inside, he let out a sigh of relief and collapsed to the ground. The events of the previous night still haunted him. He had spent the whole night on alert as he made his way back.
Although he had gotten rid of the vampire, he still had bloodstained clothes.
Magical beasts were more active at night, and the smell of blood would attract some beast, so he hurried back, staying alert.
Now that he was home, he could finally release all the tension he had accumulated.
Once he calmed down, he shifted his gaze to a corner of the hut, where a worn-out blanket lay on the ground.
He moved it.
Under the blanket, the uneven brown ground of the alleyway could be seen.
Reily dug with his hand at a point in the ground, until he encountered a slightly hard surface.
He moved the earth from the surface and saw a small brown wooden lid, no more than 20 square centimeters in size.
The lid had a small rope with a knot tied to one side. He took it and opened the lid, revealing a small space inside with a bag. He took it and closed the lid, putting the earth back as it was before.
"Fiuu, it's still here."
What he held in his hand was his bag containing all the savings he had earned in the last month.
He had scraped together 20 copper coins during this time by selling the remains of the animals he hunted and doing small jobs.
Although it wasn't much, it was enough to buy him at least 10 pieces of bread, and this amount was enough to feed him for at least a week or two depending on how much he ate per day.
He had resisted all this time, avoiding wasting even a single copper coin.
The only thing he covered was a blanket to cover himself at night, as he didn't want to end up dying of hypothermia.
He procured food by hunting in the forest, or in extreme cases "borrowing" it from the stalls without drawing attention to himself.
Although he was afraid of being beaten by the merchants, he didn't want to use his savings if he could help it.
He was extremely determined to gather enough to travel to the capital, where he would take the magic affinity test.
That was his goal, a goal that was no longer possible now.
***
He opened the bag and emptied it, dropping the copper coins to the ground. Once he finished, he held his hand over it and said "storage".
As if by magic, the copper coins disappeared, leaving nothing but the cold ground of the hut.
A flash of excitement flickered in Reily's eyes at this sight.
One of his biggest concerns, ever since he started saving money, was where to hide it.
Carrying it around with him wasn't the best choice as he would end up empty-handed in no time if the other residents of the outskirts noticed.
If not the residents, he might lose them during his hunts in the forest, so he preferred to hide them in the hut, but even that wasn't entirely secure.
Although he had set up his hut in a place far from others' sight, it still wasn't entirely safe, so he procured a container to store the money and buried it, so even if someone tried to rummage through the hut, they wouldn't find anything under his blanket.
Now that he had the system, he didn't need to worry about getting his money stolen.
He opened the system to see if he could see the stored money.
[storage]: space dimensions: 1m^3 .
> copper coins x 20
In the screen that appeared, he could see a series of slots, and in one of them were his copper coins.
"Yes, now let's see if I can take them out"
he thought, and with this thought, he tried to take them out, and immediately the twenty coins appeared on the ground.
He did some more tests and found that he could not move things in or out of the dimensional space at a distance of 1 meter from the object.
He also discovered that he could adjust the quantity of the object's output. For example, he thought of taking out only 2 copper coins, and the next moment, 2 coins appeared in his hand.
Well, now that he had taken care of one problem, he had to think about the main one.
Now that he was a vampire, he knew he had to deal with some problems, one of which was the thirst for blood.
Blood thirst: 7%
At the moment, his blood thirst was calm, but he knew that if he didn't do something, he would end up going crazy like yesterday.
Although he had followed the novel to the end, he still didn't know much about vampires, mainly because the author of the novel never fully explained things.
This was also one of the reasons why this novel had declined in quality over time, losing the popularity it had gained at the beginning.
He knew that a vampire's blood thirst could be quenched by drinking human blood, but he wasn't sure if it was limited only to human blood or if he could consume the blood of other beings like animals.
In the novel, it was said that low-ranking vampires needed to consume human blood at least once every 2-3 days because they were weaker and had less control over their impulses, making them easily influenced by their thirst for blood.
Reily thought that magical beast blood was a valid alternative, so after getting rid of the vampire's corpse, he returned to the forest clearing and took some blood from the blue-horned deer.
He used his small empty water bottle to contain the blood.
He could only experiment to see if it worked, or else he would have to find ways to get human blood.
Reily was tempted to take the deer's horns and sell them as they were good material for making weapons and could be sold for at least a few silver coins, but he immediately dismissed the idea.
It was one thing to sell remains of weak animals like pelts and horns, and another thing to sell materials from magical beasts, especially material from a D-rank magical beast. No one would believe that he had hunted the beast, and they would think he had stolen it, so he decided to keep the deer's horns in his dimensional pocket, in case they could be useful in the future.
He had also inspected the body for the mana-core of the beast, but found nothing.
A D-rank core was something that could help him in the future not only financially but also in terms of strength. Absorbing the magical core could make his core grow faster.
Once he awakened his core, he would need many resources to nurture and grow it, so obtaining this magical core was crucial.
That said, even after searching for a while, he found nothing.
He didn't think that a magical beast had passed by and eaten the magical core because the deer's corpse was still intact, and he doubted that any beast would resist a free meal.
Time was running out, and he couldn't stay here for too long, so after taking the horns and collecting the blood, he left.
The idea of putting the entire beast's body into the dimensional space didn't even cross his mind for a moment, mainly because the beast was twice his size.
His dimensional space was about 1m cube, and he doubted that the body could fit into it.
He then summoned his water bottle from his dimensional space. He looked at it for a moment before opening the cap and taking a quick sip, as if he were taking bitter medicine.
The blood made its way from his mouth to his esophagus, down to his stomach.
The taste of the blood was almost imperceptible. It wasn't good or bad, but Reily could feel his blood thirst calming down a bit.
He drank almost half of what he had before seeing a change in his blood thirst statistic.
[Ding!]
[Your blood thirst has decreased by 1%.]
Blood thirst: 6%
Success!
He was glad that the beast's blood had worked.
It was clear that the effects were small, but it was better than nothing.
At least now he had a solution, albeit temporary, to his problem. If he had brought some magical beast blood with him, it would have been good.
Becoming a vampire hadn't been the best of things, but at least now he had more tools at his disposal to become stronger.
