( A sweeper's POV )
" If you want to save her, you have about 30 seconds, if I were you I'd act fast" the sweeper reminded Max who was jolted out of his stupor.
Max did not trust the weird sweeper, however ,he had no option but to trust him at present. The person he was meant to save was quite literally dying in front of him.
" How do I save her? I have no potions on me, nor can I perform healing magic ". Max asked, a slight urgency in his voice.
" Well she is a vampire, offer her your blood to heal her ". The sweeper suggested, still as casual as ever.
Max winced at the idea, however, he bravely sliced open his own palm and started to drip the blood into Asiva's foaming mouth.
Instantly, Asiva stirred as human blood entered her mouth and her primal instincts took over her as she reflexively bit Max's dripping arm.
" Agh ". Max felt a thunderbolt run over his entire body when Asiva bit into him, his mind starting to numb as his heart started to pump blood faster.
Max's vision doubled, and he felt his muscles turn to jelly as he saw the sweeper walk towards him with a sinister smile on his face.
Max tried to struggle to his feet, however his sluggish body would not respond, and Asiva had sunk her teeth too deeply into his hand for him to wriggle free with his weakened strength as all that Max could do at this moment was to think ' Shit! Shit! Shit, not again …. ' as the sweeper swung the flat end of his sweeping broom to knock Max out unconscious.
Before Max was knocked out cold, he heard a familiar voice ring inside his head that said something like ' Idiot ' before he blacked out.
The sweeper bent his knees and allowed Asiva to suck just enough blood until the color returned to her face and her life was out of danger before he pulled Max's arm off her mouth, stopping her from sucking his blood dry and waking the princess up in the process as she bared her fangs towards the sweeper.
" Night night ", the sweeper said as he swung his broom once more, and knocked Asiva out too.
The sweeper pulled up Max's bloody arm to his nose as he took a good whiff of his fresh blood, his mouth salivating at the prospect of feeding himself some human blood today.
However, before he began dining on Max's blood, a green pendant hanging over Max's neck piqued his interest.
The sweeper used his inspection spell on the green winged angel pendant over Max's neck and was surprised to see that he could not check the information of the item even with his high inspection level.
Interested, he checked Max's stats only to find that Max did not have a single point of mana in his body, but only moments ago, with his own eyes the sweeper witnessed his prowess as a mage.
The sweeper grinned from ear to ear now, it had almost been a decade since he met someone as interesting as this boy, and now he no longer wanted to eat him but rather learn about all the secrets that he harboured.
Scanning his body inch by inch, the sweeper eventually found out the source of Max's mana prowess, the embedded Agni-Astra as he could not stop giggling at his find.
Drax had shielded the identity of the Agni-Astra from prying eyes for upto tier 3, which suggested that the sweeper was a powerhouse at least at tier 4.
'Just who are you? '. Murmured the sweeper, clearly interested in Max's unusual fate and identity, as a mischievous thought took birth inside the sweeper's mind.
It was a borderline insane procedure, one that was used by the mad mage millions of years ago to create a breed of vampires so strong that they were relentlessly hunted down by their own kind after being declared a danger to the universe.
While the turning of humans into vampires was a procedure dangerous by itself, having a death rate of over 90% for the human.
The procedure of bloodline manipulation during the transformation was one that was even more dangerous with only 1 in ten thousand subjects ever surviving the procedure, and 1 amongst ten thousand of those who had survived the procedure ever remaining sane afterwards.
Inherently Vampires were a race much superior to humans, vampires had an average lifespan of 280 years while some lived upto the ripe age of 400.
With the peak of their life coming at the age of 30-150.
All vampires had an affinity to blood, they could regain HP by consuming blood and could sustain their bodies at peak performance while consuming nothing but blood for years, unlike humans food and water was not a necessity for this race.
Vampires were also inherently much faster, stronger and were known to have bloodline traits.
Some bloodline traits allowed vampires to see in the dark, some bloodline traits allowed vampires to exercise control over some creatures of the dark such as bats and wuterhags, Overall there were over 24,000 known bloodline traits for vampires till date, almost all monopolised by some or the other noble families.
However, the mad mage believed that this was not the limit of the vampire race. He believed that the primordial vampires were masters of blood itself, having the ability to manipulate blood itself, mastering not one, not two, but all bloodline abilities of all races.
The primordial vampires were said to have gone extinct when the primordial vampire planet underwent the first awakening, with the survivors of the awakening being the noble vampire houses standing till date.
Hence he made it his life's mission to reintroduce the bloodline of the primordial vampires, those who were rumoured to have mastered blood itself.
To achieve this goal he created a procedure called ' Bloodline Manipulation ' , a procedure that purposefully introduced a specific kind of bloodline trait into a test subject while undergoing the conversion procedure from human to vampire.
After countless millions of test subjects dying for his experiments, he finally succeeded, however, his success led to the birth of the most unstable kind of vampires who were infamously given the nickname ' Blood Overlords ' .
Blood Overlords were vampires who had the bloodline abilities of some of the strongest vampire bloodlines, and sometimes they even had the abilities of two or more noble bloodlines making them an extremely formidable tool of mass destruction.
Blood Overlords were basically like vampires on steroids meaning they had all of the strengths of the vampire race exaggerated within their bodies, however, they also had all of the weaknesses exaggerated as well.
They were unable to control their bloodlust and remained extremely true to their primal instincts, unable to be moulded or civilised.
The then vampire king declared the Blood Overlords a menace to the universe and started a universe wide hunt, resulting in the mad-mage's operation being shut down and his creations all ending up dead.
Although the mad-mage had failed to create the vampire wielding the primordial ability to manipulate blood itself , the bloodline abilities displayed by the Blood Overlords during their lifespan were so powerful and shocking with some having even displayed abilities that were thought to have been thought lost to time that many drew inspiration from the project and started their own variations of it, but unfortunately nobody in history got close enough to recreating the work of the mad-mage after his death.
Time went on, and with centuries passing soon the tale of the mad-mage and his Blood Overlords was forgotten.
Forgotten by all but his descendants who continued to study the work of the mad-mage, trying to perfect it generation by generation in secret. Staying true to the goal of re-introducing the primordial bloodline.
After thousands of years of research, they were able to finally extract the primordial bloodline lying dormant in a descendant, however all attempts to create a viable holder of the bloodline failed, with the cause of death being the same in all test subjects, the reason being ' Mana Poisoning'.
Looking at the manaless man with a weird fate, the sweeper, a descendant of the mad mage felt his heart flicker with hope.
It was a mad hope, a hopeless kind of hope
A hope that perhaps he could be the one to wield the cursed bloodline.