Quinn discovered he couldn’t just bite anyone. The moment he tried, his incomplete hybrid nature caused the victim’s System to flag him as an . A colony-wide alert would follow. He learned to be surgical: a tiny incision, a stolen blood-pack from the medical incinerator, a drop of his own saliva to seal the wound.
And that was his power.
But to get it, Quinn would have to hunt a predator far stronger than himself. He would have to expose what he was. And he would have to decide: was he still Quinn Talen, the orphan who just wanted to live? Or was he something else entirely—the first vampire in a System that had no rulebook for monsters? My Vampire System
Second, the System arrived.
Quinn’s team—a group of C- and D-Rankers who only kept him around for cannon fodder—abandoned him within the first hour. They left him in a dead-end corridor, three Lurkers closing in. Quinn discovered he couldn’t just bite anyone
He stared at the screen. Then, with a thumb that trembled only slightly, he pressed . The pain was not transformation. It was deconstruction.
His bones didn’t break; they unmade , dissolving into a slurry of dark matter that reconfigured itself along a fractal, predatory blueprint. His blood boiled, not from heat, but from a new hunger—a thirst that had no name, only a red, screaming void. He felt his humanity peel away like wet paper, and in its place, something ancient and feral took root. He learned to be surgical: a tiny incision,
He used it once, on a bully who had cornered him. The boy’s own combat knife stopped an inch from Quinn’s throat. The bully’s arm simply refused to move. Quinn whispered, “Walk away,” and the boy did, tears streaming down his face, screaming internally. The turning point came during the Mid-Year Trial: a simulated dungeon-break in the colony’s lower sectors. A real rift had opened, spitting out beasts. The teachers sealed the exits, turned it into a graded exercise. Survive for six hours. Kill as many as you can.
He survived on medical waste and the blood of butchered livestock. Each feeding healed his lesions by a fraction, but the hunger… the hunger grew louder.
While other students at the Atlas-7 Combat Academy trained their flashy Firebolts and Steel Skin, Quinn lurked in the margins. He fed in shadows. He grew stronger. By the end of month two, his Blood Rank rose to C-Rank (Fledgling). New skills unlocked: Mist Form (escape), Claw Rend (combat), and the most terrifying of all— Blood Puppetry (control a bleeding target’s body for 3 seconds).
His only solace was a glitch. Because he was a “forced integration,” the main System didn’t recognize him as Awakened. But it also didn’t recognize him as a monster. To scanners, he was a Level 0 Null. Invisible. Forgotten.