Sand hung back and watched the muscular Vampire who had appeared out of nowhere. It had taken the man mere moments to incapacitate and subdue them. A Core Spirit was equivalent to a Tier 5 beast and when Sand tried to imagine himself, even in his heyday, achieving the same feat… he failed. Even though lightning restrained the undead, it had to pack a great deal of power to punch so easily through the Hellhound’s icy attack and subsequently paralyze its massive body. It was a clear indication that the man’s Dungeon was much stronger than the one he had in his previous life.

Their knowledge, that power... He wanted it.

Drawing the lingering electricity out of the Hellhound’s body, the man - apparently Lirael's uncle - straightened up and instructed her to withdraw the Spirit into her Dungeon, assuring her that a day or two of rest would be sufficient for it to recover. Summoning her Gate, Lirael obeyed and with a plaintive whine, the massive body of the canine spirit vanished from its spot on the desert.

A complicated feeling rose within Sand's chest as he mentally compared the man to a similarly proportioned human sailor and found them indistinguishable by appearance. Lirael with her albinism, porcelain skin and ethereal beauty had an alien feel to her. It was easy to imagine her as a member of some exotic race. But this man, with his rough, weather-beaten skin and worn canvas clothes had a sense of reality to him that drove the impression home: The line dividing Vampires and men was a thin one.

“And who might this be?” the man asked, gesturing at Sand.

“Uncle, I found him in one of those Gladiatorial Arenas of the Orcs when I made a stop for supplies. They had identified his talent poorly and undervalued him. I picked up a bargain by taking him off their hands.” Turning to Sand, she introduced, “This is my uncle, Ezekiel Enzeal. He is a Dungeon Mage.”

Stepping up hastily, Sand bowed deeply to him. “This one is fortunate to serve the Mistress as her Champion, my Lord.”

Ezekiel's eyebrow rose as he commended, “A polite one, isn’t he? And well worded.” He turned to Lirael. “I get that he is a top-ranked talent, but I don’t understand how he is your Thrall, let alone your Champion when he has kept his wits about him. Haven’t you bitten him yet?”

“Oh, that. Uncle, you won’t believe what happened…” began Lirael before launching into a detailed recounting of all of his specialties and contributions. With each new article, Ezekiel’s bushy brows rose higher and higher in surprise.

All the while Sand kept his head down to hide his clenched teeth as he felt the tingle of the man’s Domain washing over him and inspecting him thoroughly. By the time Lirael had finished, his back was soaked in cold sweat.

He was afraid that his Time Reversal shard would be exposed. Although it seemed like only he could sense it as even Lirael with her bond to him couldn't-- something which wasn’t that surprising considering the shard was effectively in a separate space-- he wouldn't put anything past a Dungeon Mage. What if he had some strange shard for reconnoitering Dungeons? Sand was extremely clear that exposure meant the end of the line for him.

Finally, that tingling feeling vanished and a pair of steel-soled boots appeared in his line of sight. Two rough hands grabbed his shoulders and raised him from his bow, straightening his spine. “Look me in the eyes, boy,” he heard the man say, the thunderous rumble of his voice vibrating his body.

Raising his head, Sand obeyed, locking gazes with Ezekiel's violet eyes shot through with sparks of purple electricity.

“My niece has selected you as her Champion. That is a great honour and a greater responsibility. There will be many cases where you will have to represent her interests; fight her battles for her when tradition demands that she not act personally. You are her representative and each one of your actions, your successes and your failures will reflect back on her.”

His tone grew grim. “If it was up to me, I’d erase your consciousness and spend the proper number of years moulding you into the perfect Thrall. But since she insists upon preserving you, all I have to say is: Don’t make me regret it.”

He let go of Sand’s shoulders before clapping him once on his back, hard, nearly sending him stumbling face-first into the ground. Turning around, he walked away towards the direction of the Mire Desert Area, leaving a few words hanging in the air. “Serve her well and benefits beyond your wildest dreams await. We Enzeal are fair in our administration of rewards and punishments.”

Shooting an apologetic glance at Sand, Lirael hurried to catch up to him.

As he trailed behind them, Sand thought back to the two years he had spent in Lirael’s Dungeon. He had learnt a lot under her tutelage. And the more he learnt, the harder he found it became to hold on to his views.

In his previous life he hadn’t had much to do with Vampires except for a single chance encounter with a Thrall. Everything he had heard about them was rumour and hearsay. Even when Lirael had come visiting to Gehenna along with her beau in his previous life, they hadn’t made a public appearance. All the visual impression people had of them was Lirael summoning her Bloodskull Gate within the Arena and letting the victorious Gladiator enter it. After that, once the Red Wedding had passed and the stories of her dalliance with a human had spread, the members of the Human Emancipation Movement had placed her on a pedestal, idolizing her and turning her into a mascot.

Sand had always believed that the imagery they used to represent her was humanized to make it relatable rather than accurate. In his opinion, any race that could create a race as ugly and deformed as the Orcs had to be monstrous themselves. Images of distended stomachs, elongated arms, and hunched backs would flash in his mind whenever he tried to picture them. His friend and confidant, Book, his only other source of information beyond the Association of Freedom Fighters, had only found a few oblique references to Vampires in the books he had read in the library of the Orc Chief before Sand had freed him. He hadn’t been able to shed much light upon the topic.

So, when Sand had gotten his first glimpse of Lirael, he had been surprised at her beauty and how human she had appeared. And now that he had learnt a lot more about them, he knew that the only difference between a Vampire and a human was their pair of elongated fangs, venom sacs and their predisposition towards consuming blood. He had learnt that just as the Orcs were a hybrid of humans and swine and the Nagas a mix of humans and snakes, the Vampires too were an amalgam of bats and humans.

In fact, according to Lirael, the experiment by High Lord Enzeal that had resulted in the creation of the Orcs and the Nagas was an attempt at understanding and emulating the origin of the Vampire race. In the Mundane Era, she had gone on to explain, there were only humans in the world. It was only with the Splintering of the Core and the advent of the Arcane Era that the Elder Races were born.

With the shards spreading all over the world and Dust permeating the air, sea and land, the entire biosphere was altered by the introduction of this new force of nature called magic. Mundane animals turned into Magical Beasts and the humans who were baptized by magic began to develop extraordinary capabilities at random. These capabilities weren’t always benign, though. More often than not, those touched by magic wouldn’t be long for the world – either going crazy and turning into murderous monsters or getting sick and withering away.

Only a very small fraction of the populace gained capabilities that were simultaneously non-lethal and useful enough to give them an edge in the dangerous new world they had found themselves in. And even smaller was the percentage of people who could pass their beneficial traits on to the next generation. Over the years as the newly formed Beasts and the humans-turned-monsters extracted their pound of flesh from humanity, their population reduced at an alarming rate, only leaving behind the strongest, most resourceful and the most magically gifted of the bunch. These were the Elder Races. The Vampires, the Rakshasas, the Golems, and the Titans to name but a few.

Even within the Elder Races, there was a segregation of species. The Vampires, for instance, were divided into five different sub-races or families, each one in charge of one of the five Vampire Kingdoms. The Rakshasas had their tribes and the Golems their elemental classes. But all of them had some racial traits in common binding them together into one ethnic group.

In the case of the Vampires it was an enhanced disease resistance based upon their consumption of blood. The way it worked was that the bodies of all living creatures produced substances to combat the disease when they were sick. Once they recovered, a little bit of the substances would remain in the blood as a ‘memory’ of that particular illness and the best way to combat it. So, the next time the creature was infected by the same disease, their bodies would be prompt to respond, making them resistant or even immune to it.

The Vampires had the ability to adopt the resistances or immunities of their victim for themselves. They even had a sort of sixth sense that told them how useful the blood they were consuming was depending on how ‘tasty’ it seemed. In the chaotic era after the Splintering, when new diseases were a dime a dozen and plague was a bigger killer than Beasts, this special capability served them extremely well. The venom sacs were just there to paralyze their victim while they fed.

It was only after the method of mana generation, shard usage, and Dungeon creation was discovered by observing and emulating Beasts that things began to look up for the pure humans. Still, with the natural advantages the Elder Races had and the social capital they had accumulated since the Splintering, they stood firmly at the apex of the societal pyramid. The heartless tread of time had relegated humans to an inferior position.

They were the originators of the sentient races, true, but they had also become obsolete.

That night, lying down on the open ground of the Dungeon and looking up at the dimly glowing scarlet clouds that floated across the sky, he had re-evaluated his ideals. It hadn’t taken him long to realize that the entire concept of humans being an obsolete race was itself steeped in obsoletion. That might have been the case in the period after the Splintering and before magical cultivation became mainstream. In that time, the Elder Races with their special traits might have been superior, but afterwards, when humans were found to be equally capable of magic, this line of thinking became invalid.

If not for the propaganda of those with vested interests, humanity should have returned to the forefront of the world stage. Now that he thought about it, wasn’t it the same for the Orcs and the Nagas? Were they inherently inferior to the Vampires or the Rakshasas? Sand thought not. But as the people in power had deemed it so and propagated the idea widely, repeated rumour had been accepted as fact.

Also, the origin of the mutations that had given rise to the Elder Races was the Core, more accurately, the shards that had splintered off it. Thus, once a human integrated with a shard, how was he or she different from a Vampire or an Orc? There were even Transformation Class shards that could alter the physical appearance of their users with effects like granting extra limbs or wings. If someone so wished, they could alter their appearance to match that of a Naga regardless of their initial race. The only difference being that their changes weren’t hereditary and wouldn’t be passed on to the next generation.

Lying there, watching the Dungeon sky lighten into a pastel pink and realizing that he had spent an entire night without sleep, he had arrived at a new conclusion: All races under the sky were inherently equal. It was their culture and customs that defined who they really were.

The Orcs were easy to hate. Their inhuman countenance and the way they treated their human slaves, all of it was a reason for Sand to detest them and want to overthrow their rule. The Vampires he had yet to put a label on, and the rest of the races he knew next to nothing about.

There and then, he had set a new goal for himself: He would still emancipate the human race, but he would do so on a global scale. And he would do it permanently.

He had no illusions about being a team-player, he knew that giving speeches and swaying public opinion wasn’t something achievable with his abysmal charisma and cynical nature. Then, what could a single human do to change the world, to convey and realize his ideals of a prosperous human race?

He didn't know. Despite the two lifetimes he had lived, he found that his ambitions were disproportionate to his capabilities. He realized, that for someone who had travelled through time, he knew too little of the world.

In the end, it all boiled down to the same two things. He needed knowledge and he needed power. It always did.

Fortunately, his current circumstances with the Vampires was uniquely suited to gaining both. He was a cuckoo; an egg in another's nest hatching with their efforts. And once he was ready to spread his wings, the world would be his oyster.