Chapter 280: The Crimson Womb III
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Not hunger exactly. It was recognition. Her body had begun to understand that it had just been given something not meant for ordinary flesh.
Vera’s eyes darkened with old memory.
Vela’s fingers flexed once at her side.
Auri stepped half a pace forward without realizing it, then stopped herself.
Bat Bat looked scandalized and fascinated and deeply jealous all at once. "I still think this is unfair to me."
Sekhmet ignored her. He looked only at Lily.
"Can you stand?"
She nodded at once. Then frowned. "Yes. I think."
"Do not think. Tell me."
Lily took one slow breath, grounding herself. The blood inside her felt hot now. Hot enough that her skin almost tingled.
"Yes," she said more clearly. "I can stand."
"Good." He replied.
Sekhmet lifted one hand and touched the side of her face briefly, measuring the heat there. Rising already.
The time had come.
He closed his eyes for one fraction of a heartbeat and spoke inwardly.
"System. Turn Lily into my third true vampire."
The answer came at once.
[Ding! SYSTEM Notification: The host command accepted.
Vampire Creation sequence initiated.
Target: Lily.
Classification: Third True Vampire.
Transformation in progress.]
The effect was instant. Red light exploded outward. Not from the sky. But from Lily.
From her blood. Her skin. Her bones. Her soul where his blood had just entered and begun remaking old laws.
The light rose around her in a sudden pillar, so bright and violent that Bat Bat shrieked and shot backward, Auri threw up an arm across her face, and even Vera and Vela stiffened from old memories.
Then the shockwave came. Not outward into Null. Not across domains. Inside the Void Land.
The whole hidden realm felt it.
The red force spread in a ring from Lily’s body, racing over the dark ground like a pulse through a living heart. It struck the horizon of the Void Land and did not pass beyond. Instead it curled, folded, and reverberated through the hidden world itself, trapped by the boundaries of the secret realm.
The sky above flashed red once. Then again. Then steadied into darkness bearing the echo of what had happened.
Sofia and Natasha felt it at once.
Even sealed, even weakened, even reduced, their blood reacted violently to the wave.
Sofia’s eyes widened.
Natasha actually rose to her feet in one sharp motion before the seal and her own caution dragged her still again.
Both women turned toward the source of the light. For a moment neither spoke.
Then Natasha said, low and furious and unwillingly impressed, "The boy found a way. I am..."
Sofia’s face remained unreadable for one heartbeat longer.
Then she laughed once. Softly. Bitterly. Not because anything was funny. Because the answer was elegant.
"The Empty Land," she said. "This land of nothingness."
Natasha’s gaze remained fixed toward the crimson pillar. "So the wave stays here."
"Yes."
"That means no one outside feels it."
"Yes."
For the first time since her capture, Natasha sounded almost thoughtful instead of purely hateful. "That will save him for a while."
Sofia folded her hands loosely in her lap, though her blood was still unsettled from the shock. "Long enough to matter. He can grow stronger before someone finds him."
Natasha looked at her. "You sound impressed."
Sofia’s mouth curved faintly. "I sound accurate."
Then, after a pause, she added, "Thinking outside the bloodline rituals of our kind was the only way to keep the creation hidden after what we told him."
Natasha let out a harsh little breath. "He learns too quickly. I must say the boy has potential."
"Yes," Sofia said. "That is exactly why he is dangerous."
Back at the center of the transformation, the red light did not fade the way it had with the twins.
That was the first wrong thing.
Vera saw it before anyone else because memory made comparison instinctive.
With her own turning, the shockwave had come, the light had risen, the body had arched under the breaking and remaking of blood, and then the transformation had shaped itself around flesh directly.
With Lily, it did not happen. The red pillar tightened. It was compressed. And Lily’s body— Changed in different ways.
Auri gasped.
Bat Bat forgot jealousy and simply stared.
Lily’s form folded inward as if the light itself had become a womb of blood. Her limbs disappeared into the crimson glow. Her shape shrank, contracted, curved inward, becoming not a standing woman in transformation but a floating sphere of living red light, with the faintest outline inside it of a body curled like a child before birth.
Sekhmet went completely still. "No. Something is wrong. This did not happen with Vera and Vela."
This was different. Maybe a wrong decision or something stranger.
The blood sphere hovered above the ground, pulsing softly in the dark, and inside it Lily’s silhouette remained curled in upon itself, suspended in crimson like something unborn.
Bat Bat’s tiny voice came out smaller than he had ever heard it.
"Sekhmet... Master, is she dead?"
That alone showed how wrong the moment had become.
Bat Bat was never small in spirit. Never quiet in panic. Even fear usually came out of her as complaint first, outrage second, and drama third. But now her voice had lost all of that. It came out thin and uncertain, like a child asking a question she already feared had a terrible answer.
Auri stepped forward without meaning to, her whole body tightening as she stared up at the blood-red sphere.
"What is happening to her?"
The question tore through the silence and made it worse, because there was no immediate answer waiting behind it.
Vera’s face had gone pale under the red light.
The glow from the sphere touched her features and made the fear there sharper, not softer. She had gone through the turning herself. She knew what it should look like. She knew the order of it. The blood. The light. The pain. The shockwave. The body is changing. The first waking breath as something no longer mortal. That was how it had happened for her. That was how it had happened for Vela.
Not like this.
Vela’s eyes were fixed on the sphere with real alarm now.
No teasing. No dry comments. No confidence. Only the hard, naked attention of someone watching something happen that should not be happening at all.
The crimson sphere hovered in the air before them, pulsing softly, rhythmically, almost like a second heart had been born in the middle of the Void Land.
Sekhmet did not answer. He could not. Because he did not know what had just happened.
And that truth hit harder than any battle wound he had taken in recent days.
He stood there with his entire body locked around stillness, staring at the sphere as his mind raced fast enough to hurt. He had expected pain. Heat. A scream perhaps. He had expected Lily’s body to collapse and rise again, changed, stronger, hungry, alive in a new and terrifying way. He had expected what happened with Vera and Vela, because that was the only model he had. It was what his system had led him to believe would happen.
But this... This was wrong. Or something stranger. Or both.
The transformation was supposed to be over by now.
The shockwave had already happened.
It had gone through the Void Land exactly as the system promised, trapped inside the hidden realm, unable to leak into Null and noticed by every blood sovereign’s attention back toward him. That part had worked. The light had risen. The force had spread. The sealed half-gods had felt it. The Void Land had contained it.
After that, Lily should have become a vampire.
That was the order. That was what happened to the twins. The twins became vampires after the shockwave.
Now nothing made sense to him.
His eyes remained locked on the red sphere, but his thoughts were tearing through memory and logic both. He saw Vera’s turning again in his mind. The way her body had arched under the blood. The violent red glow. The moment after where her shape remained her own, just sharpened, changed, reborn through hunger and pain. Vela had been the same. Different reactions, different screams, different eyes when they opened again — but still the same pattern.
Lily had not followed that pattern.
Instead her whole body had folded inward and become something like a child in the womb, wrapped in blood and light, suspended in the air like creation had stopped halfway to ask a question no one there could answer.
Sekhmet’s hand tightened unconsciously at his side.
For one terrible moment, an ugly thought flashed through him with enough force to make his chest seize.
"Did I kill her?"
He crushed it immediately.
No. No system warning. No death notification. No bond collapse. Nothing had told him she was gone.
But the fact that he had to think about the question at all made the fear in him spike even harder.
Bat Bat hovered lower now, close enough to hide behind his shoulder if things turned truly bad, but still forcing herself to stare at the sphere because running from it would somehow make the answer worse.
"Master..." she whispered again, and this time even the title sounded frightened.
Auri took another half step forward before forcing herself still. Her hands had clenched into fists at her sides, not from aggression, but helplessness.
"She is still in there," Auri said, as if saying it aloud might make it true enough to hold on to. "She has to be. Right?"
Vera finally found her voice, though it was unsteady in a way Sekhmet had never heard before.
"This did not happen to us."
Vela answered without taking her eyes off the sphere. "No."
"That is obvious," Vera said sharply, then immediately seemed to regret the edge in her own voice because fear had put it there, not anger.
The sphere pulsed again.
Once. Deep red. Then softer.
The faint outline of Lily’s curled body remained visible inside it, unmoving, as if suspended in blood made sacred and wrong all at once.
Sekhmet’s breathing had become too controlled.
That was how fear looked on him when it became serious enough to stop being visible as panic and started becoming something colder. He did not move because if he moved too quickly now, he might shatter whatever fragile process was still happening in front of him. Or maybe that was only an excuse. Maybe the truth was uglier.
Maybe he was afraid that if he touched the sphere and nothing happened, then the silence afterward would finish him.
The cut on his hand had already almost vanished. The Void Land sky remained black beyond the red glow. Farther back, Sofia and Natasha were too distant to be seen clearly from here, but he could feel the direction of them, feel the hidden witness of sealed predators watching the outcome of his desperate cleverness.
And none of it mattered.
Not if Lily did not emerge.
Not if the transformation had gone wrong.
Not if whatever had just happened was something the system had not warned him about because even it had not expected the blood inside her to answer his blood in this shape.
Now nothing made sense to him. And that frightened him more than anything else that had happened for the last few days.