As a vampire, Leticia's image was indeed not that of the traditional vampire from human history.
On the contrary, apart from her proper and beautiful appearance and the characteristic of bloodsucking, she was more like a prim and proper, valiant young knight, without a hint of a monster's aura.
To Leticia, she might see herself as the true representative of vampires, a model once known as a "Knight of Little Garden." But to the world of Little Garden, she was the anomaly.
In current human history and mythology, vampires are more like a collection of monsters akin to fox spirits and succubi rather than guardian knights, bearing countless curses.
After innumerable curses and degradations, even with the deliberate rebellion against tradition in later literary works, vampires could at best maintain the image of "nobles of the night," their temperament still that of an evil being unfit for the mortal world.
From this perspective, Leticia indeed did not fit this classic image.
"Lamia..." Thinking of her younger sister, Leticia subconsciously felt a pang of bitterness. As an upright and honorable Knight of Little Garden, she knew why vampires had fallen from being knights to their current evil reputation.
Because the main culprit was her.
In the past, unable to contain her hatred for her family being killed by their own kin, she became a Demon Lord, tainting the honor of the vampire clan and giving poets the opportunity to cast countless curses and degradations upon them.
The poets, known as the fourth strongest species in Little Garden, possessed the power to rewrite human history with words and language, and the fall of the noble into evil was their favorite theme.
The vampire clan thus suffered countless curses, the weight of which, accumulated over so many years, was enough to rival three hundred million gods and demons.
As the main culprit, Leticia should have borne all these curses alone. But her younger sister, Lamia, knowing her sister's innocence, constantly defended her and voluntarily took on all the curses, finally having to fall into a sealed slumber.
To this day, Leticia does not regret her revenge on those traitors. But only towards her younger sister, she has always felt immense guilt. She often wonders if she hadn't been so impulsive back then, would her sister have fallen into this state of living death?
Now, hearing Su Mo mention her sister, the first thing that surfaced in Leticia's heart was the guilt of an older sister.
The next moment, realizing something, she quickly looked up, her gaze towards Su Mo filled with excitement and pleasant surprise. "Lord Su Mo, you just said you wanted to find Lamia to verify a hypothesis. Does that mean you intend to..." Her voice trembled, unable to complete her sentence, afraid of hearing a denial from Su Mo.
However, such a thought was completely unnecessary.
"I plan to release Lamia from her seal. You don't object, do you?" Su Mo said.
"Of-of course not!" Leticia quickly shook her head, her crimson pupils shining like gems, which soon filled with a watery luster. "L-Lord Su Mo, thank you so very much. Your generosity is simply... simply..."
Never expecting to be reunited with her sister, Leticia was so moved she couldn't speak, looking as if she would cry at any second.
Seeing her emotional state, Su Mo shook his head. "No need to thank me. I have my own purpose. And even if you objected, it would be useless. After all, Lamia's sovereignty is now in my hands."
After assimilating the Storyteller, the ownership of Lamia had fallen into Su Mo's hands. In fact, Su Mo could have released Lamia from her seal last time, but there were too many things to deal with then, and he hadn't given it much thought.
To Su Mo, this was the truth, but to Leticia, it was just a polite way of preventing her from feeling overly grateful.
Her favorability towards Su Mo was already maxed out; now, it had completely broken the meter.
"A grown daughter can't be kept at home. This time, she'll really have to offer herself in marriage!" Seeing Leticia's state, Canary muttered under her breath, but her expression was one of happy approval.
---||---
A few minutes later, in the North Side of Little Garden.
At the edge of a chasm deeper than any bottomless pit, Su Mo held the Sword of Gold and casually severed the self-seal formed by billions of curses. The chains of darkness had nowhere to hide under the envelopment of light.
Then, Su Mo dismissed the Sword of Bahram and commanded the curses with the absolute darkness of Angra Mainyu, making the jet-black curses tremble in submission.
Afterward, from within that bottomless darkness, a golden-haired loli, who looked very similar to Leticia in her loli state but with a more playful and cute temperament, floated up before Su Mo.
The curses, rivaling three hundred million gods and demons, trembled as they offered up the golden-haired vampire princess, as if presenting their master as a sacrifice to the supreme evil god. In a sense, that description wasn't wrong.
"Guu..." Seemingly sensing the external interference and stimulation, the young-looking vampire girl groggily opened her crimson eyes.
"Lamia!" The first thing she saw upon opening her eyes was her older sister's extremely concerned gaze.
"Am I dreaming of Sister again?" The dazed vampire loli rubbed her eyes, wanting to fall back into the slumber of her self-seal.
"It's my sister from when she was little... how nostalgic..."
Sighing, the girl, who had no idea how many illusions she had experienced, closed her eyes once more.
"Lamia! Lamia! Wake up! This isn't a dream, I'm real! Don't be improper in front of Lord Su Mo!"
Leticia had been deeply moved and was preparing for a tearful reunion hug, but she hadn't expected Lamia to just go back to sleep, apparently dismissing it all as a hallucination.
Although her heart ached for what her sister had been through, knowing that this state was a result of prolonged torment and solitude, now was clearly not the time to let her sleep.
Lord Su Mo was still watching!
"I know, I know, Sister..." In response to Leticia's calls, the young vampire girl replied as if by habit. Clearly, she had experienced similar illusions many times, to the point where she couldn't tell this one was real.
Even as she subconsciously grabbed Leticia's hand and nuzzled it with her pale, delicate cheek, she didn't sense anything amiss.
Just as Leticia was preparing to take further action, the petite vampire before her suddenly realized something, her eyes flying open as if she'd seen a ghost.
"Wait a minute! That's not right! Since when does my lazybones sister wake me up? That's impossible, even in a dream!"
Muttering these embarrassing words, the vampire loli slowly looked up at Leticia, and then at Kāla behind her. She raised a hand in disbelief and touched Leticia's cheek.
"It's really you, Sister?! And Kāla?"
She glanced around at the surrounding wilderness, her expression first shifting to one of ecstatic joy, then trembling with fear.
"Is this real... or have I finally gone mad?"
She couldn't tell. She truly couldn't.
Seeing the girl tremble, Leticia immediately embraced her sister, her voice filled with heartache. "Lamia! Don't worry, you haven't gone mad. This is real. It's all over now. You've been saved from the seal by Lord Su Mo. With him here, nothing will go wrong."
The two sisters, so similar in appearance, held each other tightly. After a long while, Lamia's mind finally settled, and she accepted that she wasn't dreaming.
Once she understood the situation, Lamia immediately came before Su Mo, curtsied, and bowed with immense gratitude. "Lamia, Princess of the Vampire Clan, at your service, Your Excellency Su Mo. Please forgive my earlier rudeness. Thank you for your great benevolence, Master, for allowing me to reunite with my sister."
Even if Leticia hadn't told her, she had sensed that her sovereignty now belonged to Su Mo, hence the difference in her address.
Having been raised as a princess, she had no resistance whatsoever to becoming Su Mo's property. This was not only out of gratitude but also because of who Su Mo was.
In any era, for a princess of the small vampire clan to become a retainer of an existence of his caliber was a supreme honor.
Of course, given her current power, she didn't need to be as humble as before. After all...
"A vampire with a Divinity on par with Indra's... that has to be a first in all of Little Garden, right?" Canary remarked, sensing the three-digit level Divinity emanating from Lamia.
Hearing this, Leticia finally pulled herself from the joy of their reunion. Feeling Lamia's Divinity, which was far stronger than her own, her expression wasn't one of happiness, but of even deeper guilt.
"Lamia, it's all my fault..."
This top-tier, three-digit Divinity was born from the endless insults and curses of the poets—every single curse a punishment for her past recklessness.
"Sister, don't say that!" Lamia's small face grew stern, and she corrected Leticia with great seriousness. "Your revenge for our family was absolutely not the wrong decision. Choosing to bear this curse was my own will. Neither of us has any reason to feel guilty. The ones who should feel shame and disgrace are those vile poets and the traitors."
Though she was the younger sister, and looked much more childish than Leticia, her aura was even stronger than her older sister's, completely overwhelming her.
With that, she looked up at Su Mo, her gaze full of gratitude and admiration.
"Besides, haven't we overcome our suffering and been rewarded by our Master? Our old enemies are all gone, my sister and I are reunited, and we have Lord Su Mo's protection. Could there be a better ending in the world?"
"To be honest, even now, I'm half-convinced I'm still dreaming."