Chapter 5 Irina Everwinter (1)

“Jin… Jin…”

My mind slowly came online. I felt like wisps of light orbiting around my head, and my hearing was reduced to a sharp radiofrequency.

“Jin… Jin…”

Slowly but surely, I felt my senses returning to me. The first was the sense of hearing. For some time now, I could hear someone calling my name. Though, I couldn’t make out the source of the voice. It sounded like a woman… No, a girl? No, definitely a woman.

“Jin… Jin…”

What came next was my sense of smell, oddly enough. I could acutely pick out the aromas of a few people. Two of them were familiar and warm… The other three seemed sterile and stale. Soon after, I could feel my tongue and the sense of taste coming back to me. For some reason, I felt like I could ‘taste’ the five people in the room as well. It felt weird, but it was truly the case for me now.

“Jin… Jin…”

Touch was the next to come back. My body was under a weight, probably a blanket, and my hands were comfortably rested by my sides. The soft-touch of a mattress quickly permeated my fingertips as motor control came back to my body. I started to feel my environment far better than I ever could in the past.

The warmth of the heater… The chill of the winter… Every single piece of fabric laid upon me… Even the thumps of the voices in the room. Everything seemed so clear to me.

And with that… There was one sense left…

“Jin… Jin… Jin!!!”

“Huarggghhh!!!”

With that final callout, my body jolted awake. My fragile and fatigued physique sat up on the hospital bed like a sprout coming out for Spring. Still groggy and unaware of my surroundings, I rubbed my hand on my eyes, trying my best to wake up.

“JIN!!! You’re finally awake!!!”

“Urgh…”

My mouth subconsciously replied to the loud exclamation by my bed. Now that my senses were rapidly returning, that simple shout by my bed sounded like a banging explosion that clouded my ears.

What the hell?

Why was a shout so deafening? Fuck, I feel like my head is going to explode…

The first thing I saw was an unfamiliar ceiling. My room’s ceiling always had an oval white light to brighten up my nights, but this place seemed far more expansive. In fact, there wasn’t even a light, to begin with. As my vision cleared, I turned my head towards the source of that ringing noise. And needless to say, it was the face of the person I knew better than anyone else.

“Mom… There’s no need to shout like that… I think you ruptured my eardrums…”

“You’re still in the mood to joke around?! Do you have any idea what happened to you?!”

“… What?”

A look of shock and fear flashed through my mother’s gaunt expression. I squinted my eyes, unsure of what the woman was talking about, only to find four other individuals looking at me with a noticeable caution.

First off was my father. He stood right behind my mother, staring down at me with an imposing figure. As someone who had lived with him all my life, I could tell that he was showing me a side that I’d never seen before. Gone was his slouchiness and overall ease. The loveable father that would typically be pushed around my mom and me had turned into a poise of a seasoned soldier who was ready to be deployed for war.

The other three individuals were no different. The doctor who usually treated me and the two nurses in charge of my ward looked at me with a noticeable apprehension. Especially the two nurses. They seemed ready to turn around and bolt out of the room at any given moment.

Yes… They were looking at me as if I were a…

Monster.

“What’s going on?” I asked softly.

“Jin… You really don’t know anything?”

“Know what?”

“… Did something happen last night? Anything unusual? Did someone visit you? Or did you go somewhere?! Please, could you try and recall anything?!”

“Calm down, Elna!” My father stepped in and stopped my mom from going on a rampant asking spree. “Jin just woke up. Let him gather his thoughts first.”

I could see the love and tenderness in my father’s eyes for a brief moment. However, that only lasted for a moment. His fierce expression quickly followed as he pushed my mom behind him and stood right by my bed.

“Jin… Do you feel anything different?”

“Different? Ah, speaking of which…”

As my father mentioned, my brain immediately went into overdrive. I had been so bothered by my mom’s odd words that I didn’t realise the changes that had gone through in my body. The pain that plagued my entire life had all but disappeared. My arms, which had been as skinny as a stick, had begun to build up some muscle. And most notably, I could feel that something was completely different about my senses.

My hearing had improved dramatically. Even when talking to my parents, I could hear the whispers from down the hall. And I was confident that if I focused enough, I could listen in to the nurses’ gossip as if I were right behind them.

My touch, smell and taste were refined as well. I could hear the heartbeats of the five individuals in my room and partake in their thick perfume and cologne as well. No, I could probably take a whiff of their natural body odour if I wanted to. And don’t ask me how, but…

I could somehow get a feeling of how they ‘taste’ like.

And with that, that leaves my most dominant sense.

“Everything’s so clear…”

I looked around the room, completely in awe of my new vision. I never had to wear glasses, and my vision had always been near perfect. Still, my current eyesight was something different altogether. I could see everything with crystal clear resolution, from the simple crease in the nurse’s collar to the subtle crack on the wall.

Honing in, I could even ‘zoom’ in on my targets, examining every nook and cranny of the room in HD perfection.

It was absolutely bizarre.

But the most incredible thing wasn’t my senses…

“I feel… So full of energy!”

I had never felt this refreshed throughout the years that I was down with this mysterious disease! A distinct power pulsing through my veins, and I couldn’t tell what it was. The soreness in my body was absolutely gone, and my muscles seemed more defined than ever before.

It felt as if…

I was completely reborn!

“Mom! Dad! What happened to me?! Am I cured?”

“T-That…”

Contrary to my absolute joy, my mom looked downcast and torn. The same could be said about the others in the room. I could tell from the rate of their heartbeats. You didn’t need to be a genius to read the room and guess that something was terribly off.

Fortunately, I wasn’t going to be left hanging for long. Sighing, my father turned to me and spoke the words that would change my life forever.

“Jin… My son… You have turned into a Vampire.”

???

My father gave me a full explanation of what had transpired.

It had been an uneventful night in the hospital before. There weren’t any signs of trespassing or any signs of an attack. So, the nurses in charge didn’t think that anything was wrong. That was until they opened my door to wake me for my routine checkup.

However, when they opened the doors, they realised that something was terribly wrong. There were remnants of magic being used in my room. Apparently, the magic currents were so dense that a weaker nurse could not take the strain and fainted on the spot.

Shocked by the revelation, the nurses called the best physician, who happened to be a magician, to tend to the situation. After a cursory inspection and moving my sleeping self to another room, they realised the changes to my human self.

Notably… I wasn’t human anymore.

My heart was beating at a slower rate, much slower than any human body could ever tolerate. My body had gone through the aforementioned transformations where a noticeable growth could be observed. And most importantly…

I was subconsciously generating magic, something I could have never done in my previous condition.

And the moment the doctor saw my fangs…

My parents didn’t need a lengthy examination to determine that, though. From their long experience as Hunters and elites who fought side-by-side with Vampires during their heyday, they could instantly tell that I had become something absurd.

What they didn’t know was how I became a Vampire. They knew that sometime in the middle of the night, a Vampire slipped through the hospital’s security and made its way into my room. Then, it performed some ritual to transform me into a Vampire and just as mysteriously as it came… It vanished.

Why the Vampire changed me, what was its goal and how it accomplished all that was still a mystery.

And due to that fact, it complicates the matters that were about to follow.

As a human hospital, there was no way the management would tolerate a Vampire staying in its ranks. Not that they had any qualms about housing a Vampire, particularly a transformed one like me. The problem was that the hospital wasn’t equipped to tend to my needs.

Treatment was one thing, but since I’ve turned, I will require a supply of blood bags, seeing that Vampires could only feast on blood. Furthermore, there would be concerns by other patients if a Vampire was to stay in their facility near other weak and feeble humans.

So to prevent all of those issues, I had been moved to a makeshift cabin adjacent to the hospital, where I would stay temporarily until my parents could figure out what the hell had happened. At the very least, they would track down the Vampire that made me this way.

What happened after, I wasn’t sure.

Everything was happening so fast, and I didn’t know what to make of it.

I sat on the lounge chair and glanced out at the winter forest that lay before me. A metal cup was filled to the brim with a chilled red liquid by my side. I looked down at the cup and couldn’t help but gulp.

I… really was a Vampire.

Perhaps it was due to the suddenness of the event I wasn’t able to compute everything that happened. It was only after I was left alone in this cabin and after my parents left that I could finally take some time to think to myself.

The hospital was kind enough to offer me a few bags of expired blood while this mess was being sorted out but honestly… They shouldn’t have done that.

The moment I tasted that packet of blood… I felt my entire being rejecting that atrocious liquid.

Was it because it had expired? Or was it because I was a human just hours ago? I couldn’t go past the first sip.

Fortunately, I wasn’t hungry just yet. I may have read plenty of books, but I know very little about a Vampire’s biology. A significant reason why was because facts about this race varied extremely. Some scholars believe that all Vampires need to feast on the blood of their victims once a day. Others claim that they were fine even if they had a glass of blood a month.

And it didn’t help that the Vampires were such an elusive bunch. They rarely shared their races’ data with outsiders, and even if they did, there was no hard evidence to back up any of their claims.

So who knows? Maybe I’ll be tempted to drink that dreadful liquid in a few hours?

Not that I’m looking forward to that, though…

“Urgh… Let’s not think about that now!”

I shifted my head away from the disgusting metal cup and focused my attention on the vast expanse of a forest that I was moved to. Due to my unique circumstances, the hospital had banned any patients from wandering close to my cabin. And honestly, that was a godsend for me.

Why?

“Let’s test my new body out!”