Blood Queen

The sun blazed overhead, and though it was only late spring, the indoor temperature already felt sweltering.

All the curtains in the small western-style building's living room were tightly drawn shut. Not daring to turn on the air conditioning, beads of sweat appeared on the foreheads of the two young women in the room.

Xia Yan wore a light blue T-shirt on top with dark gray tight-fitting women's jeans below, while Gu Yao donned a white T-shirt paired with denim overalls. Clearly, the clothing taste of this house's original owner's wife and daughter wasn't too ostentatious, and the sizes more or less fit them properly.

The morning meal had finally made Xia Yan and Gu Yao realize something was amiss. After bathing, the two were hungry again and had to eat two whole pots of noodles before feeling satisfied. The little-known fact that food intake would greatly increase after becoming a vampire gave them firsthand experience.

After the meal, both sprawled on the coffee table, staring intently at the map on its surface, continuing their discussion.

"D City is mostly mountainous. Aside from a few main district and county urban areas, most other places are sparsely populated. Now, our first consideration must be leaving the DZ City area."

Xia Yan gestured with her pen between several highways and national roads, her brow slightly furrowed: "According to what you said, the Shadow Arrow Force has already begun deploying inspection and surveillance at major transportation routes, especially the main entry and exit routes in mountainous areas. So we can't take national roads or highways—we must cross the blockade line on foot through the wilderness!"

"Brother, wilderness trekking in mountainous areas—no matter which direction—we won't be able to get out in less than three to five days! We lack too much equipment. Moreover, some things are even harder to obtain in the wilderness..."

Gu Yao's gaze drifted to the living room refrigerator on one side, which contained the last two bags of blood, her expression somewhat tense: "In the middle of the night, I couldn't think too much and only managed to get this blood. I don't know how long it can last. Should I go get some more tonight?"

Xia Yan pondered for a moment, then slowly shook her head: "No good. We can be certain that the township health clinic has already noticed the missing blood—reporting to police is inevitable. It's broad daylight now, and we can't swagger out of here. The surrounding residents all know each other well; strangers coming and going would easily arouse suspicion."

"Then what do we do? National roads won't work, wilderness crossing won't work either! And our exposure probability keeps increasing!"

Gu Yao irritably leaned back against the sofa edge, grabbed her cup and tilted her head back to gulp down cold water, trying to dispel her body's stuffiness. Her backward-leaning posture inevitably stretched out her body's curves.

Staring intently at Gu Yao's current movements and posture, Xia Yan seemed somewhat dazed.

"Brother... what are you looking at?"

Noticing from the corner of her eye that Xia Yan's behavior seemed a bit strange, Gu Yao also looked down at her chest, her face actually warming slightly.

"Female... female... that's right!"

Xia Yan seemed to have been lost in thought all along, completely ignoring Gu Yao's current inquiry, just slowly standing up and pacing back and forth in the living room.

Gu Yao quickly put down her water cup, looking puzzled.

"No one knows we've become like this... As long as we carefully avoid thermal imaging surveillance cameras, what are we still worried about... Hmm, tracking butterflies are very expensive and single-use consumables—they couldn't possibly be used extensively along the entire blockade line."

Xia Yan walked with her head slightly lowered, her left arm crossed over her chest, right elbow resting on her left wrist, forearm pointing up, fingers supporting her chin, her eyes growing brighter and brighter.

"Brother, you mean... no one would recognize what we look like now, so we could completely just take the national road to leave?"

Gu Yao finally understood Xia Yan's muttering and jumped up happily: "Then when we leave tonight, we'll do another job! Get more blood."

Turning around to look at the youthfully excited girl, Xia Yan showed a bitter smile: "Without constant refrigeration, blood can't be preserved long at room temperature. Besides, don't get addicted to stealing."

"We're already vampires, why still care about being thieves..."

Gu Yao muttered quietly with her head down, and Xia Yan was also stunned, then fell silent.

Just as the atmosphere grew heavy, suddenly the sound of a vehicle came from the direction of the small path outside the building, getting closer and closer, as if heading straight for the small western-style house.

Xia Yan's expression changed. She quickly ducked to one side of the floor-to-ceiling window, grabbed the curtain, and slightly opened a gap to peer outside.

A large electric three-wheeled motorcycle with a cargo box, painted with familiar colors and markings—common express delivery. A bearded middle-aged man jumped down from the driver's seat, looked up at the small western-style building before him, and bellowed at the top of his lungs.

"Yang Ping's family, come get your delivery!"

"Nobody home?"

"Did the whole family go out to play?"

After shouting several times without any response from the building's gate, the bearded man habitually spat, turned toward the cargo box, planning to just pile the packages at the door and leave, too lazy to call and notify.

Everyone here was from the same village—package theft almost never happened. As the local express distribution delivery man, he was long accustomed to this.

"Huh?"

The moment the bearded man turned around, he looked back puzzledly, his gaze slowly focusing on the beautiful small building's second-floor floor-to-ceiling window.

Traces of barely perceptible, very unfamiliar pheromones entered the bearded man's perceptual world. From that invisible, somewhat chaotic dispersed information,

"Two blood servants? Hiding in Yang Ping's house? Interesting..."

The bearded man lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, spat again, then turned and got in his vehicle to leave.

In the small building's living room, Xia Yan's expression was somewhat grave, while behind him, Gu Yao had already drawn her dagger and crouched at the corner between the living room and staircase, looking tense.

For some unknown reason, Xia Yan seemed to sense strange waves of aura emanating from Gu Yao not far behind him, impacting his mental perception.

Like invisible waves, undulating unsteadily, chaotic and disorderly, carrying traces of violence. As this mysterious aura permeated the living room, Gu Yao's eyes also seemed to take on a faint red glow.

At the same moment, Xia Yan also felt his body temperature beginning to rise abnormally.

"Xiao Yao, relax!"

Xia Yan suddenly walked to Gu Yao's side and crouched down, his hands gripping her shoulders, his voice lowered.

In his understanding, a vampire's pheromone overflow and dispersal during blood-boiling state would be dozens of times that of normal state! The lower the vampire's level, the harder it was to control their pheromone release.

Blood servant-level vampires in blood-boiling state released pheromones so intensely that tracking butterflies could detect them from several kilometers away!

Ah?! Shaken by Xia Yan's movements, Gu Yao seemed to come to her senses, looking bewildered at the staircase leading to the first floor.

"Brother, what happened to me just now?"

"We inadvertently triggered the vampire blood-boiling state because we were too tense... I can sense your condition! Regulate your breathing, calm your heart rate down!"

Wiping the sweat from the back of his neck and bringing his fingers to his nose, catching a faint strange fragrance, Xia Yan's brow slowly furrowed.

"Oh... Brother, you seem to be the same... I can sense it too."

Gu Yao quickly nodded, also learning from Xia Yan by wiping the fragrant sweat from her neck and bringing it to her nose to smell. "That's not right though, it doesn't seem like something the nose smells."

The two newly-turned vampires both adopted silent mode after this small episode.