Areum Yun glanced around the room she had entered. On the floor was a thick rug, and cushions were strewn about around. There was a tapestry draped over the black brick walls, which were adorned with hundreds of candles. Moonlight poured in through a high window. The room was decorated in an Eastern style, unlike the layout she had seen to this point in the Western style building.

She noticed that the rug was stained black in places. She bent down and rubbed at the spots with her fingers, and powder came out of the stiff fabric. The faint scent of iron wafted throughout the room. It was the same scent coming from her school uniform—the smell of blood.

Only then did she start to properly grasp what lie before her in the room.

Less of the rug was its original color than that which had been stained—to the extent that it could be mistaken as having a black and white pattern. The center was darkest, with other spots nevertheless deep violet. That is to say, the discolorations were all blood stains. She rose, falteringly, from where she was on the rug. Even if she had prepared herself to enter it, once she actually found herself in this room reeking of blood, she couldn’t help but be overcome with fear.

Areum’s back brushed up against the door as she backpedaled away. Her legs gave out, and she sank to the floor biting her lip. She thought back to the car accident.

It had been an ordinary day just like any other. She was at the crosswalk that led to the hill up to her school on her way for winter break self-study. The light must have changed from red to green while she was checking her phone for a second. By the time she had noticed the change, the green light was flashing, so she rushed to cross. All of a sudden, intense pain was radiating throughout her body accompanying two shocks: the screams of people around her, and her blurring vision. She knew that she was dying—struck in an accident mere steps away from her destination.

Areum thought that it would have been fine if that were how her life had ended. Even if she had never been able to live out her dreams and her family members were devastated, still, she thought it would have been nice to have closed her eyes at the moment of the accident and to have died just like that. The problem was that her life had not ended then and there.

The door made a creaking sound as it opened behind her. Air of a different current grazed past her back.

“What are you doing?”

A man’s voice rang out above her. Areum instinctively glanced behind her. A man of tall stature was gazing down at her. He was glimmering in the light of the candles. His hair was extraordinarily black. Despite the orange light of the candlelight cast upon it, it was almost excessively black. It was an unadulterated hue impossible to attain without dye of some sort.

What stood out to her next were his eyes. They were crimson and hazy, as if a translucent film veiled them, staring down at her blankly. No traces of human warmth or amusement could be found in them. Areum understood it was he who would decide whether she lived or died; he who would be her angel of death or her savior.

Areum felt like laughing at herself if she only could. Despite knowing all too well what her life would become if he were to keep her alive, she wanted to live. She had to discard her dignity and prideless obsessions. Yet even if it were a servile life she would be living, she still wanted to be alive.

To put it plainly, she had died and been revived. Her death was certain, but having been given a chance to live, she wanted to keep on living. Whatever the man’s intentions were in keeping her alive, being alive in itself was sufficient for her.

Once the slave auction had ended, Areum’s hands and feet were bound with cloth and her mouth was gagged before she was thrown into a horse-drawn carriage. The man who had acquired her from the slave dealer sat alone on the seat, and spoke to Areum, collapsed on the floor.

[Once we arrive at the manor, you will meet Lord Millard. Don’t get cheeky now, just be absolutely obedient. If the Lord is not pleased with you, you’ll leave the manor as a corpse, but if you win his favor, you can at least hold onto your life. Whether the Lord’s favor will be to your benefit or detriment, we will have to wait and see. But in any case, wouldn’t you prefer to stay alive?]

The man had made clear what she needed to do to stay alive: win the favor of the Lord.

Areum had no misconceptions about her position. She had become painfully aware of it over the past two days she had spent in a cage. Cells like those used for livestock went on seemingly infinitely in the building’s dark interior. Behind those bars were pitiful faces locked in hopelessness, each crying or praying as they waited in utter anguish for the next day’s auction. In such a hellish pandemonium as this—with no specified place to relieve your bladder or bowels, given pig slop and told it was food, hearing people call you slaves and products—anyone would come to know their circumstance, no matter how much they loathed it.

How unlucky Areum was to have been cast into this strange world at the moment that car crashed into her. She had become neither a saint nor a princess, not even the daughter of a small aristocratic family—no, instead she was captured with clubs and a net and moved to the slave dealer’s warehouse. Faced with this unintended irrationality, all she could sigh about was the question of “How on earth did this all happen?” and all she could rage about was, “Why, oh why, did it have to happen to me?”

Within her cell, Areum became painfully aware that she would be auctioned off as a slave. Each time a whip snapped on the prison bars, each time the guards snickered, and each time she heard a scream ringing out from some far corner of the warehouse, she became more aware of her fate. Still, she questioned whether she would make it out of there alive. Usually, a young woman of her age would have been felt up by each of the guards. But for some reason, not only had she avoided such loathsome feeling up, but she had been placed in a cell all by herself.

And she was right; she had been sold into slavery. When some nobleman has won the auction, the authority over her fate was ceded to someone else. She became something treated no differently than livestock, and once all her freedom had been ceded to her master, she would be treated as less than human. Neither her life nor her death would be decided by her.

That would likely have been her final protest—when she was being taken off the stage following her sale and handover, the reality of what she had clearly perceived washed over her with despair all of a sudden, and twisted her body and attempted to flee. Of course, this proved to be a commotion all for nothing, thanks to which she was bound limb to limb and transported like a piece of luggage.

As Areum was being loaded into the horse-drawn carriage in a literally ‘sub-human’ manner, she quivered in fear. She didn’t want to die. Maybe even more so because she had already died once. Because she had already experienced such moments of futile regret, she wanted even more to stay alive. No matter what it took, even if it meant humiliation. The preservation of life was human’s most fundamental desire.

Areum quit her squirming and looked at the man. Not only was he the only one in the carriage with her—though he spoke in a somewhat sarcastic tone, he had told her something helpful. She stared doggedly at the man as he gazed out the window until he turned to her.

[Is there something you’d like to say.]

Areum nodded, and after a bit of consideration, the man undid the gag in her mouth. She panted and then asked,

[Who is the Lord of the manor?]

The most important thing to a slave is their master. For, of course, it is the master who holds a slave’s life and death in his hands.

[It is the Duke Millard Travis.]

Areum frowned. Hearing his name only made her think that this place was far removed from her world. Use of the term “Duke” further solidified that sense of removal.

As if to survey the aftermath of saying that name, the man did not take his eyes off Areum’s face. Finally, the man gave her a piece of advice.

[If you go in with that face, I’ll see you out here again as a corpse.]

He must be somebody who kills people just for frowning.

[…What sort of things should I be cautious of?]

[Haven’t I already told you? You need to be obedient. Generally, he feeds two or three times, so there’s no reason for you to die right away.]

[“Feeds?”]

She was annoyed at herself for constantly asking questions, but she couldn’t help but ask. What could Duke’s meals have to do with her life? While her mind whirred thinking about whether she had been captured by a cannibal or if feeding was a vulgar slang for having his way with her, the man looked back at her and scowled, as if to say, “do I really need to spell it out for you?”

[Bloodsucking, that is. That wasn’t his purpose in purchasing you, but it seems like you must pray that you are to the master’s tastes.]

The carriage stopped after the man said that much. Having disembarked from the carriage first, the man once again looked at her and seemed to consider something, then undid the knots binding her hands and feet.

[Well, remember this. If you want to live, you must do as you’re told. I hope she doesn’t push too much work on you today. Solenn!]

When he shouted and called to a maid standing by, she appeared. She seemed to be around 30 with a cold look on her face. His last words to Areum before he entered the manor were to follow the maid. The maid named Solenn took off on a path different than that of the man. Though Areum was curious what would happen if she remained standing there absentmindedly, it was a silly thought, and she meekly followed behind the woman.

While she followed Solenn, Areum continued to ask questions. “Where is this place?” “What’s going to happen to me?” Those were questions she asked any and everyone since she had arrived in this place. Of course, no one answered in an ordinary way. The woman gave no answer whatsoever. Maybe she was lucky that the woman didn’t turn and cuss her out. It certainly seemed lucky when compared to the guards who had told her to shut her trap and shouted curses at her while beating on her cell bars with their clubs.

But it was something else that Areum truly wanted to ask.

“Is the Duke a vampire?”

The man had said that the master of the house took his meals through bloodsucking. Only one thing comes to mind when someone says the words “feeds on blood.” Come to think of it, the auctioneer at the slave auction had said that very word: vampire.

[This next girl is a vampire! Take a look at her black hair. Not an ounce of dye was used—this is all-natural color. And look at her clothes! Soaked in blood. When we captured her, it was very fresh and red indeed. We must have gotten her just after she fed. A terrible sight. I’m quite interested in seeing what daring sir will be taking her home with him. Shall we start the bidding?]

From the instant the bidding started, her price soared with no end in sight.

Areum, who had thought the auctioneer’s words were just remarks for selling her, assumed that he had used the word “vampire” as a way of alluding to her appearance. But after hearing what the man in the carriage had said, it seemed to Areum that vampires truly did exist in this world. If that were true, perhaps the people at the slave market had actually believed Areum to be a vampire. Ultimately, it seems that the master of the house, a vampire himself, had bought a girl who had been “advertised as a vampire.”

Even up until Areum entered the room that Solenn had opened the door into, she couldn’t be certain about what she was thinking. She was closer to wishing it was all a false delusion. For vampires were simply a thing of folk legends to begin with.

But the scent of blood she smelled in that room answered the question she had been too scared to ask Solenn. Despite no torture devices being present there, the room was splattered in blood to the degree that it would be pointless even replacing its furnishings. Then, there was this man who had just entered. Areum realized that this person before her was the Duke Millard Travis whom she had heard of in the carriage—the vampire himself.

The man’s red eyes fell on her in an instant and sized her up.

“I asked you what it is that you’re doing down there.”

The man asked her again. Areum couldn’t really understand what he was saying. “What am I doing here? Am I acting strange?” she thought. Narrowly averting her gaze, he glanced over her figure collapsed on the ground and mumbled a guess.

“Can you not speak…?”

Then he grabbed Areum’s wrist and stood her upright. Her legs gave away, unable to support her. So, he dragged her towards the rug. The texture of the rug, dry after being soaked in blood, grazed her bare legs. Her hair stood on edge. The man, who had moved her from the stone floor to the rug, soon took a seat of his own and picked up a pillow that was rolling near him. His arms resting on a rather large pillow, the man stared at Areum with an indifferent gaze.

Areum’s body grew stiff like a deer in headlights. She wished that he would stop looking at her. His red eyes only reminded her of how she herself was covered in blood. It felt as though her whole body were squeezed in, and her breathing grew irregular. Physiological terror was eating away at her.

The proposition that “this man is a vampire” seared itself into her mind, and she completed every thought that came with it.

This man is a vampire, so he will view humans as livestock.

This man is a vampire, so he will consider the slaves that he has acquired as his meals.

This man is a vampire, so if she is not to his liking, he will kill her without a second thought.

“I’m going to die? No, I don’t want to die. Somehow, I’ll win his favor, that way I can…” Areum once again fortified her will to live and forced her stiffened head to move.

“I… I can speak.”

Areum opened her lips and stuttered. Her throat was hoarse, making it no easy task to enunciate. The man made a slightly satisfied face after hearing her speak. His eyebrows relaxed and lowered slightly, and his lips flattened. Even just his lips, which had been subtly crooked, straightening out made his entire face look far less threatening.

“Thank goodness. I have been thinking over how to get a response out of you.”

For a second Areum imagined him saying that if she couldn’t speak, he’d have her write out her responses by cutting her finger and making her write them out in blood. Areum was so startled by her own imagination that she recoiled and shuddered. Her unfavorable circumstances were causing her mind to think up the most terrible things.

“So, are you a vampire?”

The very question that Areum had wanted to ask was being asked of her by the man. He asked it in a tone that she hadn’t anticipated. The silence between each and every syllable felt almost arrogant.

“No, I’m not.”

“That’s strange. I only bought you because they said you were a vampire.”

He took his elbows off the pillow and leaned his body towards Areum, then grabbed her hair, a fistful of her tousled black locks in his hand. “Ouch,” came a moan from between Areum’s lips.

“Even with your black hair and your clothes plastered in blood? You must have feasted quite tactlessly. You deny being a vampire, despite so obviously looking like one?”

He let go of her hair and this time grabbed her chin. He pressed on her cheeks forcefully to wedge open her mouth. After carefully studying its contents, he spoke as though perplexed.

“Your canines are dull.”

After sticking his finger into her mouth and running it over the surface of her canines, the man then quickly reached into his own mouth and felt his own fangs, to compare the two.

“You wouldn’t be able to tear flesh with those.”

The inside of Areum’s cheek ached like it was about to tear as it pressed against her molars. He was applying enough pressure to make her worry her jaw might be crushed in his hand. Reflective tears welled in the corners of Areum’s eyes. In order to relieve herself of the pain she attempted to pull the man’s hand off of her. Though she used both her hands and all her might, the man continued to hold Areum’s mouth open as he felt his own fangs, as though he hadn’t felt her protests at all.

“Are you honestly not a vampire?” he asked.

“Imm nawt.”

Only upon hearing her struggle to speak did he take his hand away. As he looked at Areum, hand on the ground and bent over coughing, he had a twinkle of disappointment in his eyes. He pulled another long pillow towards him and rested on it, sighing as he sat as though nearly laying on his side.

“So, you’re saying that I spent 130,000 gold on a human.”

He closed his mouth after speaking this time. In fact, he closed his eyes as well. As though he had something to ruminate over. If he had held a smoking pipe in his mouth, would have looked just like a painting.

Areum could tell just by the man’s way of speaking that the 130,000 gold he had spent for her was no measly sum. Had he spent such a large amount in order to meet another of his kind only to be met with the immense disappointment of having bought only an ordinary human? Was that the reason for him being lost in thought with his eyes closed? What if he kills me in a fit of anger… Trembling with fear, Areum nervously gnawed at her lip.

After a period so long as to think he had been asleep, the man opened his eyes. In no time at all the regret over the 130,000 gold had disappeared from his face and he was expressionless.

“Come closer.”

“I’m sorry?”

Areum, have responded in spite of herself, merely stared at the man without a word before crawling towards him on his knees. Where she had been a meter away from, she was now less than half.

“Closer.”

Though she thought she was sufficiently close, she didn’t seem to have any other choice but to go closer. Areum dawdlingly scooted herself forward a few more times when the man scowled and snatched up her left arm. With the arm she had been leaning her weight on pulled out from beneath her, she fell flat on her face, smacking her nose on the floor. She was pulled away without even a chance to rub her stinging nose. Then she caught a glimpse of his mouth growing closer and closer to her arm.

But before she could say a word, his teeth were already sunken into her flesh.