"You should have said so earlier."

Li Ang felt the aura of a powerful enemy rapidly approaching from behind. All four of his spider-claw arms swept backward, suppressing the pursuer with a barrage of attacks.

Meanwhile, his other four pale arms shattered the glass French windows. He repeated his earlier tactic, swinging himself high into the air.

This time, he aimed for the nineteenth floor, directly above Caesar's bedroom.

Li Ang swung the Poisonous Short Blade in his hand, smashing it down on the glass of the nineteenth-floor window.

The blade, infused with Ripple energy, easily shattered the glass.

Amid the shower of flying glass shards, Li Ang grabbed Caesar and tumbled into the room.

It was a young girl's bedroom, with a two-story layout. It was extremely spacious, decorated with the utmost luxury, and filled with girl's things like toys and dolls.

The only unusual thing was in the corner of the room's living area.

On either side of a giant LCD TV were twenty neatly arranged vertical glass display cases.

Each display case contained a mortal corpse that had been cut and reconstructed.

They had been pieced together from various parts, like rag dolls, with dense stitches covering their hands and ankles.

Thin wires extended from the bottom of the display cases, piercing through their arms and legs to hold them in place.

Their faces, devoid of any expression, were fixed with stiff smiles using sculpting glue, silently smiling toward the sofa.

Eileen Raphael was one of these dolls.

The girl who smiled so brightly in the photographs was now dressed in a white tutu, posed on her toes like a ballerina.

She was displayed in a graceful dance pose inside the display case, her gentle smile seemingly greeting Catherine Raphael, who had suddenly barged in.

Below her display case was a plaque that read: "Sixteenth Birthday Gift for Alice from her Clumsy Brother."

Li Ang fell silent.

Caesar Tzimisce, who was being dragged by the collar, was sobbing and crying, "Please, please..."

"..."

Li Ang silently swung the Poisonous Short Blade, slicing off both of Caesar's arms.

Blood flowed everywhere, soaking into the pale yellow hand-woven wool carpet on the marble floor.

"Don't you hurt my brother!"

A girl's childish voice came from upstairs. A vampire girl of about fifteen or sixteen, wearing a bright red puffy dress, jumped down from the second floor, baring her sharp fangs at Li Ang in a threatening manner.

She was quite beautiful, with a face that bore a vague resemblance to Caesar.

Her fearful expression revealed a hint of determination, and her crimson eyes clearly showed concern and worry for Caesar Tzimisce.

"Let him go!"

The vampire girl's clear voice echoed in the bedroom.

Her pupils suddenly dilated, and a formless mental disturbance struck directly at Li Ang.

Unfortunately, the vampire's charm skill was useless against Li Ang, who possessed cat eyes and whose life essence was gradually departing from humanity.

A look of despair flashed across Caesar's pale, handsome face. He mustered his last bit of strength and shouted, "Alice, run! You're no match for her..."

Before he could finish speaking, Li Ang activated the hallucinatory effect of his cat eyes, freezing the girl in place. He lunged forward, and the Poisonous Short Blade in his hand drew a crescent moon.

The vampire girl felt a dizzying sensation. The last thing she saw was the back of her own body standing blankly on the ground.

"..."

Caesar Tzimisce, who had lost all four of his limbs, stared blankly at his sister's body as it slumped to the ground, her eyes losing all their light.

"You silly girl... Why were you still hiding here? Why... didn't you run..."

He no longer cared about the excruciating pain in his body, no longer cared that Li Ang was cutting open his neck with a knife, no longer cared that his trachea was being drowned in blood.

Li Ang listened to the system notifications in his ear and turned his head.

Elias Tzimisce was floating outside the French window on the nineteenth floor.

He looked at his dead nephew and niece in the room, his lips first curving into a slight smile, then immediately transforming into a grief that reached the depths of his soul.

"Die!"

The vampire earl screamed, unleashing a torrent of blood energy that extended into two crimson wings that stretched over twenty meters behind him, slamming shut toward Li Ang's floor.

The blast-resistant glass was as fragile as paper in the face of the blood energy wings, and the steel beams were merely decorative, corroding and melting into black slag.

Just one second before the crimson wings struck Li Ang, his figure vanished. Only a simple ied (improvised explosive device) remained, quietly placed where his feet had been.

Beep beep beep.

The countdown ended, and the ied exploded in the crimson wings, destroying the entire room along with the glass display cases in the corner.

————

Hours later, the dark world was in complete turmoil. An unknown mysterious person raided the Tzimisce family's stronghold in Frankfurt,

killing the son and daughter of the current head of the Tzimisce family in front of a vampire earl, completely wiping out the family's bloodline.

Vampires do not reproduce easily, and every member of the family is precious, especially direct descendants who have inherited the ancestral blood.

The Tzimisce family awakened several marquises overnight in an attempt to discover the other party's identity through sacrificial rituals, but to no avail.

Just as the current head of the family, who had lost two children, was completely driven mad and attempted to use everything he had to activate the Tzimisce family's sacred artifact to curse the murderer,

the ancient, genius elder who had saved the vampires with his own strength awoke from his slumber and stopped him.

All the restless forces in the dark world never expected

that the Tzimisce family, who had lost two precious direct bloodlines, would unexpectedly cease all preparations for war,

and instead, obediently cleaned up the Lexler Building, eliminating the impact of this incident on the human world.

Everyone was speculating,

what exactly was Akado Tzimisce, the uncrowned king of the contemporary vampires, thinking...

————

"Clean up all traces, understand?!"

A thin and mean-looking vampire nobleman stood in the nineteenth-floor room filled with burn marks, loudly berating the ghoul guards who were carrying out the cleaning work.

He stepped over the black, ashy floor, tugged at his white gloves, and carefully picked up a half arm that had been blown to pieces from the ground.

"This is... Young Master Caesar's."

The vampire nobleman sighed and gently placed the arm on a white towel on top of a golden trolley next to him, continuing to pick up the broken bones on the ground.

No one noticed that on the cross-section of the half arm, there was a very faint, mottled green glow belonging to the Poisonous Short Blade...

"Ah-choo!"

The vampire nobleman squatting on the ground sneezed for no reason. He rubbed his nose with his wrist, complaining in his heart that there was too much dust here.

"My nose is so itchy."