Creak…
The door groaned open as though roused from a century-long slumber, protesting its awakening.
A thick, stagnant stench of rusty sweetness and decaying mold flooded the room.
It clung like a sticky spiderweb with physical weight, smothering Charles’s nose and mouth until he nearly retched.
“Ah… yes… ‘Paleblood’…”
A hoarse murmur drifted into the ward.
Charles’s vision was still blurred, as though he were looking through bloodstained glass.
All he could make out was the sound of a wheelchair rolling over the old wooden floor.
The noise drew steadily closer, uneven and halting.
“Creak… creak…” Each turn of the wheels sounded as though it were grinding over rotting ribs, slow and heavy, beating against his eardrums.
“Heh heh, you’ve come to the right place. Yharnam is the legendary land of Blood Ministration, after all… You need only uncover its mysteries…”
A figure emerged from the gloom.
His hunched body seemed almost fused with the wheelchair beneath him, its frame stained with dark, ancient grime.
His overcoat had long since frayed into tufts, while the shadow beneath his wide-brimmed hat swallowed nearly his entire face.
Only a wisp of gray-white beard protruded from the darkness, like wild grass stubbornly surviving the depths of winter.
His gaunt fingers, thin as a bird’s claws, tapped idly against the wheelchair’s armrest.
“Tap, tap.” The faint sound mingled with his rasping, bellows-like voice.
“But where should an outsider like you even begin?”
Charles did not answer.
Buried deep within his exhausted body was what he knew of Yharnam’s Blood Ministration.
It was a forbidden art that could cure any illness through the injection of special blood, perhaps even allowing one to steal the power of the gods.
Three weeks earlier, he had seized upon that rumor like a drowning man clutching at a straw.
With nothing left to lose, he had forced his way into this town, forever shrouded in cold, damp mist, hoping it could sever the nightmare that had haunted his family for generations.
It was an incurable hereditary disease.
Every member of his family afflicted by it had withered away before reaching thirty.
With neither a cure nor a traceable origin, it had come to be known as the “Bloodborne Curse.”
Seeing Charles remain silent, the Blood Minister gave a muffled, broken chuckle, like a battered bellows struggling to draw breath.
“It’s simple… You only need a little Yharnam Blood…”
“Please begin Blood Ministration as soon as possible,” Charles interrupted, his voice dry and hoarse.
He needed no guidance and no philosophical musings.
He needed only a result, even if that result led into another abyss.
“Tsk, tsk.”
The shadow beneath the Blood Minister’s hat seemed to shift slightly, like a silent sneer.
He produced a roll of yellowed parchment, its writing resembling writhing vermin.
“Of course, we must sign this contract first.”
“Mm.”
Charles practically snatched the contract from him.
His eyes skimmed over the nearly illegible script before he signed his name with a trembling hand.
Then he fell heavily back onto the cold, hard hospital bed, as though it were an altar prepared for him by fate.
The stained mirror of a cabinet nearby reflected the blurred image of a body that had almost been hollowed out.
His shoulder blades protruded sharply like broken wings, nearly piercing through his thin shirt.
His dry, lifeless hair clung to his sweat-soaked, bloodless cheeks.
His once sharply defined jaw was now buried beneath a layer of ashen stubble.
Only his pupils remained, two dried-up wells reflecting the spiderweb of cracks across the ceiling.
Then, in the deepest reaches of those wells, a faint spark suddenly flickered.
Like a candle wick on the verge of going out, it spent the last half-inch of its life defying the cold draft sweeping through the room, flaring with one final, unwavering light.
“Very good. The contract is now in effect.”
The Blood Minister rolled up the parchment with satisfaction.
It slipped deep into his sleeve as though it were alive.
He began preparing the Blood Ministration, his movements slow and precise.
The syringe was unusually long, gleaming with a cold metallic light.
The liquid in the vial was not bright red, but a dark, viscous substance with an almost amber hue, glimmering strangely beneath the dim yellow light.
At first glance, it looked little different from an ordinary infusion, yet something about every detail felt deeply wrong.
Doubt spread through Charles’s mind like a poisonous vine, but the last grains in his hourglass were already running out.
“Tick… tick…”
The instant the needle pierced his vein, a sharp chill ran through him.
Then came a slippery warmth, almost alive, like heated honey slowly and stubbornly forcing its way into his veins, accompanied by an unsettling sense of satisfaction.
“Mmm…”
A soft sigh of relief escaped Charles before he realized it.
Wherever the warmth spread, the crushing weight of his illness truly seemed to recede.
His taut nerves finally began to loosen.
Then, in the next instant, everything changed.
What surged through his veins was no gentle warmth.
It was molten lava, or perhaps countless tiny, razor-sharp shards of ice.
His veins bulged and twisted violently.
Beneath his skin, it felt as though thousands upon thousands of starving ants were frantically gnawing and burrowing through his flesh.
A slick, freezing sensation seeped outward from the deepest reaches of his marrow, as though invisible tentacles were taking control of his body.
His vision warped and folded in on itself.
The cracks across the ceiling seemed to come alive, twisting into writhing black veins.
His consciousness sank into a bottomless mire and was rapidly swallowed by darkness.
“Doc…tor…”
Charles tried to call for help, but an invisible force clenched his throat.
All he could force out was a broken breath, barely louder than a delirious murmur.
“Don’t worry.”
The Blood Minister’s withered hand, impossibly strong, pinned down Charles’s violently convulsing body.
A smell of rotting leaves, stale blood, and some indescribable spice washed over Charles’s ear with almost tangible weight.
“No matter what happens… you’ll think it was only a Nightmare… cough, cough, cough, cough… It’s all right…”
Nightmare?
Charles had no time to consider what the word meant before a surging black tide swallowed his consciousness completely.
…
He had no idea how much time had passed.
Perhaps only an instant.
Perhaps an eternity.
Then he was hurled back from the void.
The Blood Ministration was over.
The ward lay in deathly silence.
The Blood Minister was gone as though he had never existed, leaving behind nothing but the cold that filled the room.
“Gurgle… gurgle…”
Suddenly, a thick, muffled bubbling sound reached his ears, like gas rising through a swamp.
With great difficulty, Charles turned his eyes toward the foot of the bed.
Dark red, boiling blood was seeping continuously from the cracks between the floorboards.
It gurgled as it gathered into an ever-expanding crimson swamp, strange heat rising from its surface.
Ripples spread across the pool of blood.
From its depths, a wolf-headed monster with a human body slowly rose to its feet.
It was enormous and heavily muscled.
What covered its body was not fur, but countless fine, writhing threads of blood resembling red worms, woven into a coat that rippled silently across its flesh.
Cold light gleamed from the claws at the ends of its fingers.
Its savage wolf-like jaws split open, thick saliva dripping from its fangs and mingling with the blood below, radiating the rawest kind of violence and bloodlust.
As the werewolf reached toward him with claws sharp as obsidian, Charles clearly understood the look in its eerie green eyes.
It was not simple bloodlust.
It was something far more chilling.
The pity of a predator for dying prey whose destruction was already certain.