"Unfortunately, besides the warriors themselves, the squad needed much more. There were no sturdy carts, not enough tents, and even food was insufficient. The restless baron tried to solve all these problems without raising prices. After all, the duke thought he could easily find everything in the city, but in his youth, he didn't consider that over the decades, everything had reached equilibrium and there were no surpluses.
The small surplus that did exist was ruthlessly bought up by a southern merchant who carelessly lost all his caravan horses on the road. And so the baron, instead of paying attention to his young wife, devoted it to preparing the expedition.
Yes, the baron got married! After thinking over the knight's advice, he decided there was really nothing to wait for. He liked the young girl and quickly became engaged to her, and within a day, they had a wedding. How much it cost him, the baron kept secret, but the bishop went away satisfied and didn't object to such a rapid development of events.
The bride was surprised by the swift turn of fate but was very pleased when, after the wedding, her father was escorted home, his drunken body loaded into a carriage. It turned out she sincerely despised her father and was very ashamed of these feelings, unworthy of a true daughter. The baron quickly explained to her that now she should only worry about his feelings and focused on "producing" a new heir. The young wife seemed to be satisfied...
Three days before heading to the pass, Maria burst into Alexander's office in an excited state.
"I did it! I did it!"
"What did you do?"
"I turned someone into a vampire!"
The girl was radiant as the sun. It was her first major success in her position. She had achieved one of her goals. Running up to the vampire, she danced around him.
"I made a vampire!"
It turned out to be quite simple, of course, if you ignore the previous unsuccessful attempts. After receiving a new batch of convicts, the girl decided to start almost from where she had left off. It was decided to again feed the subject vampire blood but slow down the transformation process with magic. If injected blood turned a person into a vampire or a ghoul in five minutes, then drinking prolonged the time to a couple of hours.
The girl decided to smooth out the process and stretch it out to make it longer and less painful. She spent almost twenty hours on the first convict, slowing down the processes in his body with her personal magic. The result of the experiment added another ghoul to the basement, in addition to those already there.
Then it was decided to do the opposite and accelerate the process. Logically, there was no point in this. After all, the accelerated process occurred when blood was injected directly into the veins. But Maria couldn't refrain from conducting such an experiment. She needed one more negative result to abandon the experiments. But here, too, she encountered failure, though with a positive outcome!
The convict who drank a gulp of vampire blood as usual fell to the ground in convulsions, and the vampire accelerated the processes in his body as much as he could imagine. Less than a minute later, an unconscious man lay at her feet. He felt no pain and seemed to be simply sleeping.
Awakening a couple of hours later, he felt a wild thirst for blood. Deciding that she had received another ghoul, the girl handed him a flask of rabbit blood, which her ward eagerly seized. And putting down the empty flask, he asked a question that Maria would never forget in her life:
"Why did I see the life of a rabbit?"
Memory of blood! The effect that until now had been accessible only to those who originally entered this world as vampires manifested itself in the convict.
"The only difference from us is a greater thirst. Even when saturated with blood, he feels the urge to drink it, whereas for us, it disappears," corrected Alexander, the chief scientist.
An urgently convened council examined the new vampire from all sides. Each drank a couple of drops of his blood, and Maria had already twice told her story of what had happened.
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