Chapter 281: The Crimson Womb IV
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The blood red sphere pulsed again. That one pulse was enough to stop the ugliest fear from fully taking root in Sekhmet’s chest, but not enough to calm him.
If the system had warned him this could happen, he would have been afraid and prepared. Instead he had nothing.
A pulsing sphere.
A wife he could not reach.
A Void Land silent enough to hear his own thoughts turn poisonous.
Bat Bat was trying not to look frightened. Trying very hard, in fact. That only made the fear in her more obvious. Bat Bat was naturally loud in emotion. When she became small, it meant something had truly shaken her.
"Master," she whispered again, much more softly than she ever liked to sound, "say something."
Sekhmet forced himself to breathe once.
Then he spoke inwardly because there was no one else worth asking.
"System. What is going on with Lily? Is she alright?"
He did not get an answer at once.
That was bad.
The pause stretched just long enough to feel like an insult added to fear.
Then the system responded.
[Ding! SYSTEM Notification: Target Lily remains alive.
The transformation process is active. Detected outcome diverges from standard true vampire conversion.
Target is transforming into something else.]
[SYSTEM Notification: Earlier analysis of Lily’s bloodline was incomplete.
Insufficient bloodline data prevented prior warning.]
Sekhmet’s jaw tightened.
"Explain properly."
There was another brief pause, but this one felt like calculation, not failure.
Sekhmet’s eyes narrowed hard enough to hurt.
’What do you mean transforming into something?"
For one heartbeat, the system stayed silent, as if rearranging information it should have understood earlier and now deeply regretted not knowing in time.
Then it answered.
[Ding! SYSTEM Notification: Earlier bloodline analysis of Lily was incomplete.
The host did not possess enough verified data to identify the target’s full ancestry before first blood contact.
Current reassessment complete: Target Lily is not undergoing standard true vampire transformation.
Target is undergoing hybrid ascension.]
Sekhmet’s entire body went still.
"Hybrid what?"
The red sphere pulsed again behind his eyes, and for the first time since the light swallowed Lily whole, he felt something colder than fear move through him.
Not panic.
Recognition that the situation had just become stranger than anything he had prepared for.
The system responded again.
[Ding! SYSTEM Notification: Target possesses angel bloodline traits.
Interaction between angel bloodline and host’s true vampire creation process has triggered a rare hybrid metamorphosis.
Hybrid designation: Cruoraphim.]
Sekhmet stared at the blood-red sphere floating in the Void Land and did not breathe for a full second.
"Cruoraphim?"
The word felt ancient even inside his own mind, like something buried in old blood had just lifted its head and spoken its name.
He had never heard it before.
Not from the system. Not from Elena. Not from Seraphiel. Not from any story. And that alone made the silence around him feel heavier.
"Explain properly," he ordered.
Then knowledge came.
Not as a single blunt line. More as structure. As understanding poured through the cold, organized channel of the system into the space where his panic wanted to live.
Lily’s blood had not answered like the blood of Vera and Vela because Lily was not what he thought she was.
Her father’s side might be human. Her life until now might have worn the shape of a noble human girl. Her chaos energy might have passed among mortals without setting off any warning strong enough to force truth into light. But blood was older than appearances. Blood remembered what flesh forgot.
And Lily’s blood remembered something far higher.
Angel.
Not in the soft storybook sense mortals used when they wanted to call someone beautiful and lacked imagination. Not a symbolic angel. Not poetic blood. A real one. Some old strain, real enough that the system had recognized it only at first consumption, when Sekhmet’s fangs broke the veil of ordinary assumption and tasted what her body truly carried.
Angel blood and vampire blood did not simply overwrite one another.
They warred.
They mingled.
They remade.
And when the host survived that collision, the result was not a common true vampire at all.
It was something rarer.
Something unstable, something dangerous, and almost unknown.
The word rose in his mind like something preserved in a buried language.
"Cruoraphim. A blood-seraph."
A hybrid true vampire born from the union of angel lineage and vampiric transformation. Not a fallen angel. Not merely a stronger vampire with pretty wings hidden in the blood. Something stranger than either. A being whose blood would no longer belong cleanly to heaven or hunger, but to the violent marriage of both.
Sekhmet stood frozen while the understanding settled in.
Cruoraphim.
The name itself felt too elegant for the terror it carried.
It explained the blood sphere. The womb shape. The suspended, folded state. Ordinary true vampires transformed through domination of one bloodline over another.
Lily’s body was not being dominated. It was being rewritten by conflict and fusion at once. Her flesh had withdrawn inward into a protected state, not unlike a child in the womb or a beast in metamorphosis, because no ordinary standing form could survive the remaking that was happening inside.
It was not death. It was an incubation.
That realization hit him so hard it nearly became weakness in his knees.
She was alive. Still there. Still becoming...
Sekhmet let out a slow breath he had not realized he was holding.
Bat Bat noticed immediately. "You made a face."
Auri looked at him at once. "What is it?"
Vera and Vela both turned more fully toward him now, their attention tightening.
Sekhmet did not answer them yet.
He continued inward.
"How long?"
The answer came cleaner now that the system had enough to identify the transformation.
[Ding! SYSTEM Notification: The target is stable. Cruoraphim transformation requires an extended gestation phase.
Estimated duration: 12-24 hours.
Recommendation: keep target inside Void Land until emergence is complete.]
"Twelve to twenty-four hours."
Relief vanished into a new shape of problem so quickly it almost made him laugh.
Of course.