Well, I feel like punching somebody right now. The issue is with my left ankle. I seem to have got it twisted in my escape from the inn. Normally it should have healed already but the damn thing is still aching. I just need to put my weight on it and it feels like somebody is pulling out all of my nerves out of my body. I can't figure out why. I will have to show it to one of the mages when I return home.

  Other than that though, I have managed to heal myself quite well. Well, I have been using my sword for the last couple of days. I still can't activate it fully or it would be detected. The little that I dared to use was because they wouldn't be looking at me. Right now the bloodfire gang has other worries than to detect a small trace of blood mana in the sewers.

  Well, all of these injuries have been worth it at least. After all, the prison break has been more successful than the people expected. I am sure that even Trevor could not have predicted that it would be this effective. Right now the bloodfire gang has lost almost all of its influence in the city. I guess that I should elaborate a bit more on that.

  There were two main types of prisoners in the inn, the first were the guards of the Mayfire castle. They were the people who maintained order in the castle before. While they are not particularly skilled at fighting, they are familiar with the city.

  They make use of their familiarity with the city to set up ambushes for the Bloodfire gang. Any time the Bloodfire gang has a group going on a raiding session, they find the guards of the city in the process. They are looted of everything on their body, especially their weapons.

  Whenever the gang tries to send a large group after them, they disappear like ghosts. Due to this, the Bloodfire gang has taken to moving in groups of at least ten to twenty people. This has greatly reduced their reach in the city.

  This stopped their mad rampage in the city. Even if they want to pull off something like that again, they simply don't have enough people to spare anymore.

  The reason for that is the other half of the prisoners. The other half of the prisoners in that group were the merchants. They were merchants who made the mistake of fighting the Bloodfire gang. Most of them are ex-mercenaries or ex-guards who had retired to become merchants. They are the type to still hide their weapons in their shops, meant for folks like the Bloodfire gang.

  The goal of the gang must have been to intimidate the folks of the city. That means whatever happens to them is nothing pleasant. Being fed on by a vampire is not a pleasant experience, if they don't wish you to feel. The fangs of the vampires contain a kind of toxin that numbs their victims.

  It is supposed to make them feel a sense of pleasure. A person would be smiling as their life is drained out of their body. I have seen people stumbling from a lack of blood, trying to get bit by their master. They can feel that ecstasy warp their heads even as their life is being drained out of them.

  It is not a pleasant sight to witness. It is even more terrible to experience without poison though. It pains like they are taking your spine out of your body. That is why vampires do not find it that hard to take over towns. The damn bastards can finetune the art of the stick and carrot to extreme degrees. Any merchant that would have experienced something like that must be itching to fight the creatures. They must be attacking the Bloodfire gang with a mad fury.

  They are not that many, but for every person killed by a guard, the merchants are killing three.

  All in all, the influence of the Bloodfire gang is completely wrecked in the outer keep. They are nowhere near defeated, mind you. They have just focussed all of their power into one location and they are not moving away from that place.

  The place where they have made their base is the guardhouse of the outer keep. It is supposed to be a place that is built to withstand an invasion and that is all I know about the place.

  As for why I know so little about the place. Well, all of this is something that I have just been hearing from the mouth of Trevor, to be honest. The man is completely quiet about the place. He is of the feeling that I am better off not knowing about there until I recover enough to participate. Seeing that my recovery is going to take another week at least, that man is not going to tell me anytime soon.

  From my side that is fine. I do need some time to heal. The only problem with healing is just how boring it can be. Right now, I am waiting for my ankle to heal and don't have anything worth doing at this moment. If I had my formations at the very least I would have something to do.

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  The pain is enough that I don't feel like studying my notes. Working on my cultivation at this time would be equivalent to suicide. If the pain were to flair up at the wrong time, I might just end up poking a hole into my mana core.

  The only thing that I can do is to study the sword I looted from that lady vampire. I have dubbed it as the "rock sword" until I can think of a better name for it. Well, I have seen a vampire artifact only once in my life. It was the spoils of war from one of our missions.

  It was a spear, with the spear tip being made from the bone of a vampire count. It was a particularly bad mission too. This group of grunts was trying to get possessed by a vampire from the court. It was a proper cult as well.

  We can't be sure exactly which vampire it was, but we are sure that it was a countess. It was a proper blood bath. You see the stronger a vampire is the more costly it is to summon them even for possession. (You need to sacrifice at least twenty to thirty bodies to get enough blood mana.)

  A basic vampire soldier (the stage beyond the grunt.) can possess a grunt directly without much extra cost. With those higher up in the court, they require a lot of blood sacrifices to be summoned even as a spirit. In this case, the cost was an entire village.

  We did not manage to protect the villagers. We did end up destroying the countess, though the process was long and drawn out.

  The instant that we recovered the spear we destroyed it within the week. I was the only person allowed to study it because I had already begun work on my sword then. I was sure that studying the spear would have helped me with the bloody fang. Well, it was kind of useless as I didn't learn anything.

  Well, the sword that I have at hand is about as useful as the spear. The problem with both of them is the same. The thing is that with a vampire artifact, I simply have no idea how to activate the damn thing.

  I have been probing around the entire thing for almost half a week now and I have gotten nothing of use. It is full of runes, that I am barely able to detect. I have been probing their functions for a week now. The only thing that I can tell is that the damn thing doesn't accept my vital mana.

  The only thing that it accepts is blood mana and the little I have is not even enough to activate a single rune properly

  Well, that is also the reason that I have not managed to activate the petrification effect. I don't think I expected to anyway. Well, it is essentially dead weight in my hands. The only thing that I can use it is to study the blood magic of the vampires. Right now I am trying to activate each rune and see how it works. I have barely been able to do that.

  Even if I could activate the formation now, figuring out a different branch of magic is not easy. Now the problem is that this is not going to happen easily. The scholars have to study for centuries to figure out one of the spells of the elves. They have one of the most detailed records on the continent for elven magic. Still, it takes them that long.

  With blood magic, I have nothing like that. I have nothing at all. The court made sure of that. My problem is figuring out the purpose of a rune is not easy. It is like language in that regard. Every rune has a particular purpose.

  Every rune brings about a particular change in the world. The only problem is figuring out that particular change. With language, it is still easy since everything you need to understand is on the paper with you.

  Let's say you get a book from some ancient dead era. To decipher that book, you need to guess the mood of the person that was writing the book. A symbol written in anger would mean something different from a word written in boredom and so on.

  Working with runes is kind of like that as well. The problem with runes is that beyond the shape of the runes, you also need to figure out the intent of the rune as well.

  Figuring out the intent is always the hardest. For example, a spark spell with an offensive intent will absorb as much mana as possible. It will output as large a spark as possible. The same spark rune, if given the instantaneous intent would burn all the mana provided to create a spark in an instant.

  Just the spark rune has seventeen runes like that. All of these would have the same shape with the only difference being in intent. At least figuring out the intent is straightforward. I just need to feed the rune with my mana and try to predict their behavior from the way that they react.

  It is not particularly dangerous. It is just very time-consuming and the possibility of making errors is very high. I just need to make sure that I am activating only single runes. If I were to activate a set, there is a possibility that the sword might explode on my face. The chance of that happening is pretty low since I will be very careful about it after all.

  Now the truly dangerous thing would be to build something on my own using these half-formed ideas. The chances of that sword exploding on my face are pretty high. Well, I have nowhere near enough information to attempt something like that.

  Now I am not the variety to take such a risk but the potential benefits of it are worth it. Right now, the blood mana in my body is still pretty low. That is not going to be the case forever. Soon enough, I will have enough blood mana to activate this artifact. I will be going beyond that soon enough as well. I need to have something ready.

  The only way that I will be able to make full use of that mana is to learn blood magic. The problem is where exactly am I supposed to learn blood magic from? I could sell myself to a vampire but then becoming a grunt would be the better option.

  This is the only way that I have. Well, studying runes is something that I will have to learn anyway. There is simply no way that my master will skip teaching that. The man loves learning new runes too much to skip that.