The Guardian gods-Chapter 676
Still, the trait remained a double-edged sword. Few could truly command it, and fewer still could emerge from the depths of bloodlust unscarred by it.
Meanwhile, humanity suffered under centuries of vampire dominion. They lived in fear, subjugated, harvested, and broken. Yet within that fear festered envy and longing. To the weak and desperate, vampirism appeared not as a curse but as deliverance. Many humans begged to be turned, believing that immortality would free them from their chains.
But the truth was crueler. Those turned out of resentment carried their bitterness into undeath. The moment they tasted blood, all that hatred erupted outward. They turned upon those who once tormented them, only to fall into the same cycle of cruelty and dominance. The oppressed became oppressors, their humanity twisted into something far darker.
The vampire court had once been a nest of discord, a place where ambition and arrogance clashed endlessly. The First Generation ruled through fear, and the Second through impulse. Alliances shifted with the moon, decrees were ignored, and blood was spilled in the name of pride. Chaos reigned beneath the venee
r of nobility.
But Ethan changed that. His intervention shattered years of disarray.
The Second Generation, after completing their rigorous training and demonstrating mastery over their Frenzy, were each assigned to a human settlement. These towns were no longer hunting grounds but territories of stewardship. The vampires were made guardians, shepherds of the human lives that sustained them.
Their task was clear: to oversee the welfare, growth, and stability of the humans under their care. The prosperity of a town became a direct reflection of its overseeing vampire’s strength and discipline. If a community faltered, if starvation, rebellion, or despair took root, it was not seen as human failure, but vampire negligence.
And failure came with punishment. Ethan’s punishments were not merely physical, they were humiliating, soul-wounding lessons. A vampire who abused their power or indulged in excess could find themselves stripped of rank, bound by blood oath, or even cast into the Misty Forest among the exiled First Generation.
Most severe of all was Ethan’s decree forbidding private feeding or mental domination of humans. To influence or enthrall a human mind was a violation of the new law, a return to the old ways he sought to erase. Blood was to be drawn only through sanctioned exchanges, under supervision and mutual understanding.
The decree was met with outrage at first. To many vampires, the right to dominate was their birthright, the essence of what they were. Yet Ethan’s authority left no room for defiance. Even the proudest bowed before his will, for they had seen what defiance brought.
Ethan had many reasons for the path he chose. At first, his actions had been driven by instinct and conviction, a personal belief in what needed to be done. But after his most recent conversation with Roth, Ethan understood fully that his decisions had been not only necessary but inevitable.
Roth’s words had stripped away any lingering doubt. The Second Generation, though they appeared to be the perfect evolution of their kind, free of the First Generation’s weakness to sunlight and endowed with greater adaptability, were in truth, a dead branch on the bloodline. They could live, fight, and rule, but they could not create or rather allowed to create.
The continuation of the vampiric race depended solely on the First Generation and Ethan himself. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺
The First Generation were born of Ethan’s own bite, his divine essence mingled with mortality, transforming those he touched into beings of immense power but bound by sunlight’s curse. The Second Generation, on the other hand, were born not from the bite but from the union between a First Generation vampire and a human woman. It was through this mingling that the Second Generation came to be, a more stable hybrid, mortal enough to walk in daylight, yet immortal enough to carry the thirst.
Roth, in his ambition and pride, had once sought to accelerate this process, to replace the First Generation entirely with their supposedly "perfected" offspring. In his obsession, he overlooked a truth that he learned after a few decades back: the bite of a First Generation vampire upon a human produced nothing but a hollow imitation.
These beings, sometimes called the False Turned, were neither divine nor truly undead. They lacked the sacred spark that flowed from Ethan’s original gift. They were vampires only in hunger, cursed with the thirst for blood but devoid of the strength, grace, or will of their progenitors. Worse still, the bond of creation bound them completely, their minds enslaved to the will of the one who bit them. They became little more than puppets, shadows of humanity, and reflections of their master’s will.
Roth himself had once created many of these False Turned in his experiments. But when he saw what they truly were, soulless, submissive, devoid of divine heritage, he was filled with disgust. He ordered their extermination and forbade the practice outright, branding it an abomination. The creation of such beings was seen as a stain upon the divine legacy that his bite had first bestowed.
It was then that Ethan understood to abandon the First Generation entirely was to risk extinction, not by death, but by dilution.
And so, his decree for the First to withdraw into the Misty Forest and preserve their strength was not only an act of exile. It was an instinctive act of preservation, a safeguard to ensure that the true blood of their kind, the divine heritage born from Roth’s own bite, would never fade from the world.
As for the Second Generation, once hailed as the future of their race, they proved to be an unstable and unpredictable lineage. What was thought to be the next step in vampiric evolution became a dangerous variable that could not be ignored.
When two Second Generation vampires conceived a child, the result was uncertain. At times, the offspring would indeed be another Second Generation, strong, adaptable, and capable of surviving sunlight. But there was always a risk, a terrible one: the birth of a human vampire, a being without divine blood found their veins.
Unlike the False Turned created through the First Generation’s bite, these beings were not bound by servitude. They retained their free will, their minds unenslaved. Yet their existence was deeply unsettling to the vampiric order. They were anomalies, to the elders, their very existence was heresy, a perversion of divine blood.
Thus, their births were shrouded in secrecy. Such children were quietly taken away, erased from record, and never seen again. Only a handful within the higher courts knew the truth. To the rest of vampire society, the subject was forbidden, spoken of only in whispers, if at all. It became one of the darkest secrets of their kind, buried beneath centuries of silence.
The danger was even greater when a Second Generation vampire lay with a normal human. The likelihood of producing one of these hybrid "human vampires" grew exponentially. As a result, the relationships, pregnancies, and bloodlines of the Second Generation were closely monitored. Entire factions within the court existed solely to oversee and control such unions, ensuring that no abomination of blood ever saw the light of day.
And yet, there was one exception. When a First Generation and a Second Generation mated, the child was always born a true vampire with divine heritage intact, untainted by instability or mortal weakness. These offspring were regarded as blessings, embodiments of perfect balance between the old and new bloodlines.
It was through this fragile union between the generations that Ethan and Roth saw a glimmer of hope, the possibility of preserving the divine blood while allowing evolution to continue.
For now, the Vampiric civilization was on the right path. The reforms and transformations that had taken place over the past years were finally bearing fruit, bringing a sense of stability and pride among Ethan’s people. It was because of these very changes that Ethan now had the confidence to host the upcoming grand competition. At least now, their civilization was more presentable.
Still, a lingering concern gnawed at Ethan’s mind: the godlings. Their prideful and often volatile nature clashed sharply with the Vampiric temperament. Where Vampires valued decorum, and quiet superiority, the godlings were brash, radiant, and unrestrained. Ethan knew that if he did not prepare his people properly, a single misstep or provocation could spark disastrous conflict. He needed to ensure that, no matter how tense the air became, no blade would be drawn. It was best to come up with creative trash talk.
Weeks passed swiftly as the other races of godlings made their preparations for the journey to the southern continent. During this time, the artifact, the sacred object tied to the competition’s origin, was entrusted to Ethan for safekeeping and ceremonial preparation.
When all preparations were at last complete, the long-awaited journey began. Across the continents, the human settlements gathered to witness what few mortals ever had the chance to see, the convergence of godlings in great numbers. To behold even one of them was considered an event of a lifetime; to see dozens traveling together was an omen of history in the making.
