He Who Hunts Demons Chapter 19: 19-You Worthless Vampire

Read chapter 19 of He Who Hunts Demons by A_Random_Turtle on NovelPedia.

“A Primal Trait and a Primal Skill?” Oz cackled softly. “A very lucky brat, you are, aren’t you, boy?” The goblin was filled with great joy as I recounted my experience in the Dreamscape to him. Which was very creepy, considering his mouth was pushed apart into a grin, exposing yellow, sharp teeth as he wrote down what was most certainly my experiences in a very weathered and large tome of his. It almost looked like the kinds the scholars of the medieval era used to record the events of the conquests of their kings. At first I’d assumed it was just the obsession of an alchemist to jot down the workings of his potion and similar, but the more Oz posed his questions to me, the more I realized he was less curious about how my body had reacted to the potion, or how it might have shaped my experience, but my actual journey in the Dreamscape. For someone who was working for the church, he should have had enough data gathered from the Transcendents he had helped create—which I assumed would be quite the number, surely—so why was he still bothered with every single detail that came from mine? Was it that every Transcendent’s experience differed? I was curious, so I asked, “Why?” Oz paused and glanced at me, his grin subdued by my question. “What?” he said. “Why are you asking me all these questions?” The goblin snorted and dipped his quill into his ink bottle, ready to continue writing. “Keep speaking, human,” he said. “The details don’t matter.” I paused, staring at him. When he didn’t hear a word from me, he shot me a glare, his yellow eyes glinting—most especially his right eye, which had a monocle seated over it. “Speak!” he insisted. I still remained silent. Oz’s nose wrung up like a wrinkled towel. I was getting on his nerves, just as Gaston had told me not to, but I wasn’t particularly bothered. The risk of me dying due to Oz’s temper was extremely low at this moment. After all, I was out of the range of his expertise for now. When I eventually needed his help with a healing potion or something of the sort, then I would try to get in his good graces once more. And besides, he had thrown me into the Dreamscape without giving me any warning as to what I was to expect. I would say this was fitting enough for a payback. Oz realized that my adamancy knew no bounds and eventually grunted in defeat. “Fucking brat!” he spat—literally. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled. “The Dreamscape’s a recount of the journey of the Great Ancient One’s path to immortality,” he explained. “Every Transcendent relives a timeline of His experience, and only those who manage to survive become, well, you know what you are now, don’t you?” My brows pulled together as my mind flew back to the image of the little boy whose body I’d been in. His skinny self, haggard face and clothes, and brittle hair. That boy was the Great Ancient One? I shook my head. “Hard to believe, eh?” said Oz as though he’d read my thoughts. “Well, that’s the truth. Now, get on with the rest of the story.” I wasn’t keen on that just yet; there were still more things I wanted answers to. “Is it random?” I asked, and Oz turned to me with an even more severe frown than the one he’d had before; I shifted my gaze towards his astronomical globe, so I didn’t have to stare him in the eyes, and continued, “The Journey to Transcendence we Transcendents take. Is it random? Are we just hurled into a random point in the Great Ancient One’s history, or is there some sort of criteria that determines where we end up?” There was a snort of extreme annoyance from Oz, accompanied by a grunt of frustration; but things didn’t escalate. He held back his anger shortly after, and with a loud click of his tongue, he said, “Random, yes.” That answer made my heart skip a beat. I wasn’t religious, nor did I know much about what encompassed the doctrines of the Church and the writings that dated the pilgrimage of the Great Ancient One. But even a pauper lounging in a pothole in an alley was well aware of the