Jenna shook her head. She wasn't the type who enjoyed mythological tales; she was more interested in pop music and comics, while her brother preferred audio equipment and motorcycles. Her concept of vampires was essentially still at the level of villainous monsters in video games.
But she quickly realized what the question implied, and after thinking for a moment, she said, "Do you think those legends are not just legends, that some parts of them are real?"
Jenna immediately reviewed all the information on vampires she had in her memory, but unfortunately, she really wasn't too knowledgeable, and there wasn't much useful information.
She initially thought about asking Batman for help, but she felt he might be busy at the moment. Instead, she sent a text to Cyborg, asking him to send her all the information he could find on vampires, even if it was just folklore. As long as it related to vampires, she wanted it.
Cyborg's information gathering skills were strong, and within minutes he sent over a large pile of materials, all neatly categorized.
Aquaman was actually curious as to why Jenna seemed distracted all the way, but seeing Zan's silent demeanor, he figured the siblings must be dealing with something and chose not to disturb them.
During her reflections, Jenna also realized that everyone in the Justice League was very tolerant towards them. Batman didn't probe into what was wrong with Zan. Superman was curious but didn't ask, and Wonder Woman even offered reassurance before she left.
Accompanying Aquaman back to Atlantis was supposed to involve acting as a messenger and security, but Jenna slacked off the entire time, and Aquaman didn't say a word.
Jenna had actually been somewhat dissatisfied initially because she and her brother didn't play significant roles in the Justice League, always assigned minor errand tasks. Like this time, since they were traveling underwater where there was hardly any danger, Batman letting them protect Aquaman was just giving them something to do.
But now she felt that this was quite alright; they weren't perfect colleagues, but they were almost perfect as a family.
Because she was so worried about her brother, Jenna's mind went into overdrive. She quickly scanned all the information and almost instantly grasped the key point.
Pure Blood Nobles? Do vampires also have disputes over pure blood?
Jenna encountered this concept in a synopsis of a vampire romance novel.
The male lead in the novel was a third-generation vampire, and the female lead was a young vampire who had been bitten accidentally and was carefully hiding her identity.
And, very predictably, all vampires were against this marriage. The reason was that if they married and had offspring, the impure bloodline of the female lead would weaken the powers of their descendants.
Whatever melodramatic story followed, Jenna didn't have the patience to read; she instinctively felt that there was some truth to the tale of bloodlines.
The human race had already recognized the disadvantages of incestuous marriages, which almost every country legislated against, especially prohibiting marriages between blood siblings, because children born from such unions were highly likely to have defects.
But if vampires classified their strength based on the richness of their bloodlines, then wouldn't the closer the incestuous marriage, the purer the bloodline, and thus the stronger they would be?
So, if converting descendants through the Initial Embrace ceremony, wouldn't the descendants transformed by vampires with purer bloodlines be stronger?
Jenna felt her speculation made sense.
Then, combining it with the theory of soul corruption, could it be that the descendants transformed by vampires with richer bloodlines were more evil?
Jenna always felt something was off.
Jenna's understanding of evil was somewhat different from others because she believed that any extreme of good or evil implied irrationality, and irrationality was essentially equivalent to lowered intelligence.
For example, an extremely kind person who couldn't stand to see anyone suffer and, just by seeing someone looking pitiful, couldn't help but give away all his possessions—wasn't such a person very easy to deceive?
Evil worked the same way. When Jenna realized that the mole was actually The Flash, she thought of many more efficient ways The Flash could have acted as the mole. He might not have gone undetected forever, but at least he could have prolonged the deception.
If it hadn't been for how badly Hal had suffered, everyone might have needed at least another two or three days to uncover things. In Jenna's view, The Flash's actions against Green Lantern must have contained a deliberate element; he just wanted to torment Green Lantern.
It was these evil thoughts that led him to be irrational, preventing him from acting as efficiently as possible as the mole.
Assuming that the purer the vampire's bloodline, the more evil they are, wouldn't that mean the higher-ups among the vampires have lower IQs? How would such a race evolve?
Jenna was somewhat reluctant to believe the conclusion she had deduced—that if this were true, wouldn't the King of Vampires be the biggest fool in the world?
If this is the case, the soul of the stranger before her was so rational possibly because he wasn't bitten by an Advanced Vampire.
Or, there could be another possibility, Jenna mused, recalling another legend: the higher the generation number of a vampire, the weaker its power. For example, the fourth generation is much weaker than the third, and the fifth is weaker than the fourth.
This is actually quite scientific, because if each generation were stronger than the last, the cosmos would have long been destroyed due to their increased entropy.
Jenna hypothesized that the so-called Initiation Ceremony could only grant limited power to the next generation of vampires, which is why each generation was weaker than the last.
If her own brother's soul contamination was more severe, it indicated he might have been bitten by an older vampire, whereas this stranger might have been bitten by a younger vampire, hence his relative normalcy.
Seeing Jenna's expression, Shiller knew she might have already guessed part of the truth.
After arriving in this world, Moonlight Shiller witnessed a premeditated vampire attack on Zatanna, with the leader being the one who converted her.
However, the outcome was as expected. Shiller killed several vampires, and the newly transformed Zatanna chased after Shiller, eventually running off to Constantine.
Shiller keenly noticed a clear distinction among the vampires he had killed; some looked hardly different from humans and knew to flee after being struck, but others were incredibly ferocious, becoming crazier the more they were wounded.
Theoretically, those who appeared more normal should be stronger. But in reality, it was quite the opposite. The seemingly normal ones were actually weaker, while those who went mad used various complicated magics.
At that moment, Shiller realized that although they were all vampires, there were individual differences among them. The stronger vampires had less cognitive function, while those with sufficient cognitive function had less strength.
Shiller didn't know how this race had developed to such a state, but so far, he had not found any vampire skilled in both intellectual and physical areas.
Take Zatanna, for example. She remained fairly coherent and, realizing she couldn't overcome Shiller, promptly fled, knowing her way to Constantine's place, rather than stubbornly fighting Shiller on the spot.
However, vampire magic didn't seem to provide her much advantage. The power she gained was only enough to transform into a bat with several seconds' delay, which not only didn't enhance her strength but also made her susceptible to sunlight and Holy Artifacts, impairing her ability to use Antilanguage Magic effectively.
On the other hand, The Flash seemed to gain more from the vampire bloodline; at least his Divine Speed allowed him to handle Green Lantern Hal, proving he had become stronger than before.
But his intellect seemed to be lacking. What kind of astonishing wisdom did he possess that made him think he could torment Green Lantern first and then threaten Batman?
It's as if the vampire race had evolved to a dead-end, with purer bloodlines correlating with lower intelligence and more mixed bloodlines with higher intelligence. How could this possibly work?
Constantine and Shiller had actually begun researching why this was the case.
Their plan was proceeding smoothly. After the disaster of The Flash's invasion erupted in the past timeline, vampires immediately realized they must stop The Flash or they'd either be killed in the past or starve in the present.
Rallying behind Penguin Man at Arkham Asylum, the bitten lunatics sought out Constantine, asking him to devise a method to tackle the past disaster. This opportunity allowed Constantine to make contact with more vampires and, like Shiller, he noticed the differences among individual vampires.
However, knowing more truths, he could deduce how such a counterintuitive evolutionary path had developed.
This still comes back to Mary's astonishing plan.
From Mary's perspective, her plan probably had no issues, but she forgot a very crucial fact—she was human.
Mary was a vampire, but she was also human, not some ancient species like Dracula. She was a human who had made a pact with the source of Blood Magic. Although transformed into a vampire, her body still carried human blood; otherwise, how could she possibly reproduce like a human?
The child she bore with a third-generation vampire also had human blood, and their marriage was quite like a union between two closely-related humans.
In human close kinship marriages, the offspring might only have intellectual or physical defects because that's the limit of human potential. But it's different for these vampires; their bodies contain immense energy, making the defects from close kinship marriages manifest more significantly in them, explaining the origin of that four-magic-wielding vampire monster.
Before the Great Prince and the Second Princess were killed, however, they had already left behind many descendants, and these descendants had developed even more over the years, meaning most contemporary vampires carry these blood defects from close kinship marriages. It was bound to cause issues.
Constantine couldn't help but laugh and cry at this realization. He felt they didn't need such a complex plan; just by letting things be, vampires were bound to drive themselves to extinction eventually.