The question of her own humanity aside, there was still the fact that she had a dead body sitting in the middle of her bedroom. Oh, and now her fingerprints were all over the knife, and she had no wounds to show for it, great work Val.

Valerie dropped the knife and clutched at her head as she mentally chastised herself, before going back to thinking of what she could do to get out of this. Even if she was fully able bodied, it still would be a problem.

It’s not as if she could just pop down to the shops and buy a bottle of ’Body-be-gone!’ acid to melt it away. After so many people replicated it from some old drug show, that stuff was monitored now and not exactly available at her local shops.

Burning her with magic was certainly an option. If she could control the burn and incinerate her, it would take care of the body. But it would leave her open to a lot more issues later down the line, especially when the Monarchs came knocking looking for their agent.

But right now, it was seeming like the best, and only, idea.

’Turn her.’

An idea whispered into Valerie’s head, in a voice that wasn’t quite her own. For a brief moment, the colour melted from her eyes as they turned pure white, and a few images flashed into her head. Memories of her meeting with the Duke, memories that she had lost and couldn’t remember for the life of her until now.

But within seconds, her eyes regained their natural colour, which was now a mixture of her usual green and the vampiric crimson, as Valerie clutched at her head in pain. A thousand red hot needles stabbed into her mind, threatening to tear her skull open and free her brain from its fleshy prison.

Whatever that was, whatever the voice belonged to. Her mind could barely handle it right now, leaving Valerie with only a few fragmented memories and a hazy recollection of what she had to do. But at least it was an idea.

She glanced at the body again with a touch of apprehension, before sighing deeply and starting to crawl over to it. Her movements were clumsy, as she was worried about putting too much pressure on her legs and wasn’t used to using them in this body, but she made it over to Bai Yin’s corpse again.

Valerie apologised in her mind, before starting to strip the corpse. Removing her top and placing it neatly to the side, before rolling the body over so it was face down.

Pulling the knife over to her, Valerie closed her eyes and focused deeply on the fragmented memories, before starting to carve.

The knife glided through the corpses flesh like it was butter, meeting very little resistence from how well sharpened and maintained it was. A part of Valerie wanted to throw up as she dessocrated the corpse, but that was just because she felt like that was what she was supposed to do in situations like this.

In reality, the rest of her, felt nothing. Her feelings were stirred as much as they were when she carved through a steak. Which is to say she didn’t care in the slightest, except for how well the cuts actually came out.

That sociopathic coldness disturbed her slightly, as she wondered what other parts of her humanity had left her, but she didn’t allow herself to dwell on it and instead focused on her work.

It took her a while to carve it to what she remembered being in the Duke’s coffin. Time that she was painfully aware meant that she would be defenceless in Dawd, but there was no way she could just leave this here.

Once it was done, the real difficult part began, Forming the Refined Blood Root. It was a process that Valerie did not know, understand and could only recall what it felt like. But that was going to have to do.

She cut each of her fingers on the knife, not concerned about the sanitation of such a thing, before closing her eyes and concentrating. She followed the memories of how she felt, tracing them like breadcrumbs left by the strange secondary personality that had performed it all previously.

After a few minutes of silent concentration, in which Valerie remained completely still and barely even breathed, something finally began to happen. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Beads of blood pooled at the tips of her fingers and started to lift into the air, forming wobbly and unsure tendrils that slowly extended out. Their movement was tedious and painfully slow, speaking to Valerie’s inexperience with every wobble and misshapen tendril, but even if they didn’t look pretty or move fast, they stilled moved forwards.

They curled through the air in a slightly drunken path, before starting to congregate in the centre of Valerie’s palm and then gradually pulled itself together into a trembling, uneven sphere. The tendrils movement had to pause for a minute every now and then, to allow for the sphere of blood to shrink and compress back to the size of a marble, before the tendrils of blood restarted and added more to the sphere.

It was a tedious and methodical process, constantly stopping and starting, that took nearly four entire hours. But finally, at the end of those hours, Valerie slumped back and panted heavily, as she looked at her palm with a crooked smile of pride on her face.

Resting in her chalk white palm was a blood red crystal that resembled a poorly formed marble that could be somewhat classed as a sphere. It was nothing compared to the perfection she had created for the Duke, and it had taken her over ten times the amount of time. But now it was here, and that’s all that mattered.

With trembling arms, Valerie slotted it into the middle of the carving she had created on Bai Yin’s bare back, before collapsing to the side as the marble began to melt and fill the carved lines of the magic circle with the Refined Blood Root.