The illegal research institution that served as a trading partner for slave dealing—it belonged to
And the fate that awaited the slaves purchased there was human experimentation.
The former slaves who were raided and rescued were victims of those experiments.
Of vampire experimentation.
Vampires.
The general public regarded them as fictional creatures from fairy tales, but in truth, they actually existed.
They were living beings mutated through the use of special magic—that was the true nature of a vampire.
Once a creature became a vampire, it fed on the blood of other living beings, and those drained of blood in turn became vampires themselves.
A grotesque creature with an ecology unseen elsewhere—one that turned its food into its own kind.
The sole reason such creatures had been treated as fictional was that the dragons despised vampires and had moved to eliminate them.
And so only vague oral traditions remained, and vampires came to be regarded as mythical beings.
It was Potimas who had unsealed those traditions and brought vampires back into existence.
Vampires possessed many distinctive traits, but the one Potimas had fixated on was their immortality.
His thinking was simple: if he turned himself into a vampire, wouldn't that solve the "immortality" portion of immortality and undeath?
However, he was not the kind of man who would boldly subject himself to such a procedure outright.
Instead, he used slaves, repeated his experiments, and only moved forward once safety had been confirmed.
In the end, the vampire transformation was never performed on Potimas himself.
It was far too dangerous.
Every slave subjected to the vampire transformation lost all sense of self, becoming nothing more than monsters that attacked any living thing they laid eyes on and drank its blood.
Worse still, the creatures they attacked were also turned into vampires as an added bonus.
This was nothing remotely resembling the immortality and undeath that Potimas sought.
Thus, he repeated his experiments and tried every approach he could think of to see if the subjects' consciousness could be preserved—when the raid occurred.
Potimas caught wind of it at the very last moment and fled.
The slaves used in the experiments, along with the research records, were seized.
At the time of their rescue, some of the former slaves were in the middle of biting people.
And several of those bitten by the vampire-transformed slaves eventually turned into vampires themselves, with a time delay.
They lost all sense of self and lunged at anyone they saw.
The new victims were drained of blood, becoming vampires themselves, and in turn became perpetrators.
Vampires multiplying in geometric progression.
Had things gone even slightly differently, it could have thrown the entire world into catastrophic chaos—a crisis of the highest order.
But it was contained at the water's edge.
Because Foduei collapsed.
More precisely, it was contained because two individuals learned of Foduei's collapse and grasped the full scope of the situation.
Sariel and Gulye.
The two learned of Foduei's collapse and went to check on his condition, combining a hospital visit with reconnaissance.
That was when they detected that Foduei had been transformed into a vampire.
From that point onward, their response was swift.
They tracked down the vampire that had bitten Foduei—the captain—then traced the former slave who had bitten the captain, and in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, they swiftly carried out the quarantine of all vampires.
Even so, the damage was immense. But thanks to the speed of their initial response, it could be said that the number of casualties was kept to a minimum.
Sadly, there was no way to save those who had been turned into vampires.
The vast majority resisted when attempts were made to restrain them, and were shot dead—or else self-destructed upon exposure to sunlight.
The few vampires who survived remained in a feral state, stripped of all consciousness, and were placed in quarantine.
"Which means I'm to be quarantined as well, I take it."
Foduei—the sole individual who had succeeded in retaining his sense of self—was also ultimately quarantined, given his inherent danger.
There was no telling when he might lose control.
And even with his consciousness intact, the fact remained that he was a vampire.
His canines had sharpened to points that no human tooth should ever possess.
With those teeth, he could bite someone and drain their blood, turning the victim into a vampire.
Before any discussion of Foduei's personality or character could take place, he had to be isolated as a dangerous creature.
"I will do everything in my power to ensure your inconveniences are kept to a minimum. However, you will not be granted permission to go freely outside."
"Well, that itself is what you'd call an inconvenience," Foduei retorted with dry sarcasm to the man who had come to explain.
Yet his tone carried a certain frailty.
Foduei himself was still unable to fully process the misfortune that had befallen him.
Retaining his sense of self was nothing short of a miracle, but he was hardly in a position to celebrate it.
No matter how much water he drank, the thirst would not be quenched. The moment blood intended for transfusion touched his lips and the parched agony finally eased—there were no words to describe the despair that followed.
Perhaps he was fortunate not to have been reduced to a laboratory animal. But for Foduei, this incident was nothing less than a bolt from the blue—and in a way, it was even more shocking than dying from some accident or other misfortune.
He had already been advanced in age, his remaining years a life meant to be spent digesting whatever little time he had left.
Death was frightening, certainly, but he had made his peace with it.
And now, suddenly, he had been turned into a vampire, rendered immortal, and condemned to lifelong quarantine.
The rails of the life he had walked until now had been derailed in a direction he could not have fathomed—and even Foduei could not help but feel a deep unease.
And so, this pivotal figure in the financial world, Foduei, temporarily vanished from the public stage.
This significantly curtailed the activities of the Sariela Society.
But perhaps that was ultimately for the best.
The Sariela Society would go on to devote its efforts to a particular field.
The protection and treatment of Potimas's human experimentation victims.
Vampire experimentation had not been the only thing Potimas conducted.
He had carried out numerous other human experiments as well, and the number of victims was staggering.
The vampire incident brought it all to light, and the full scope of his atrocities was uncovered in a cascading chain of revelations.
As a result, Potimas was placed on an international wanted list.