An intimate travelogue and field report by Mr. Erpel. Timestamp: 04:12 AM.

-REUPLOAD-

LOCATION WITHHELD – I want you to close your eyes for a moment. Imagine the absolute silence of the Sahara Desert at midnight. The air is so cold it bites your lungs, and the sand looks like silver under the moonlight. This is where my journey into the abyss truly began.

To my loyal readers: I have to ask you to keep an open mind. If I had read these words a few months ago, I would have laughed. I need to talk to you about vampires.

Forget the silk capes. Forget the gothic romances, and please, for the love of God, forget the sparkling teenagers in the sun. The reality of this condition is not romantic. It is raw, it is agonizing, and it is older than civilization itself.

I spent the last five weeks in a subterranean city carved from red clay, deep beneath the dunes. They found me when I was half-dead, burning under the African moon. They didn't speak my language, but when they looked at me with eyes like polished black obsidian, they knew exactly what I was.

Our days were spent in absolute darkness. When the surface baked at 50 degrees, we lay in the cold, damp earth. I learned that my condition isn't a curse, but a brutal, ancient biology. An elder; a woman whose face looked like carved mahogany; became my guide. She taught me to filter the world. Before her, the sound of a scorpion walking on the sand above us sounded like shattering glass. She taught me to build mental walls, to isolate the noise of a thousand distant heartbeats so I could finally sleep.

And then there was the thirst. It is a living entity inside you. You do not cure it; you leash it. They taught me the reverence of the desert hunt. They showed me how to draw just enough from a wild jackal or a desert fox to survive, without turning into the mindless, shaking beast I was in that dirty alleyway weeks ago. I learned to become a phantom. Sitting around a fire that provided light but no warmth, I finally mourned the human I used to be.

But this travelogue is not just a diary of my physical changes. It is an investigation.

The most crucial lesson came during the nights. The elders chanted their oral history in a language that hasn't been spoken on Earth for a millennium. Through drawings in the dust and broken translations, I pieced it together. They are not native to these African sands. Centuries ago, they fled a massive purge in Europe. They drew mountains. Jagged peaks. Ancient pine forests and a bloodline rooted deep in the cold earth.

The Carpathian Mountains. Transylvania.

The myths are real, built on a foundation of brutal, historical truth. And this realization brought the fog in my mind crashing down. Why me? Why Manchester? If the architects of "Project Chlorophyll" infected me, they didn't create this disease in a lab. They unearthed it.

The journey to the docks to leave this continent tested everything the elders taught me. Before reaching the port, I found a filthy, flickering internet terminal on the outskirts of the city to upload my notes. That was when I saw what the editors had done to my previous dispatch—running it through an AI to turn my agony into cheap poetry. I fired off my angry response into the comment section. But the fury didn't control me. I harnessed it.

The port itself was a nightmare of sensory overload. The smell of diesel, salt, and unwashed bodies hit me like a physical blow. A month ago, I would have curled into a ball or lashed out in a blind panic. Instead, I built my mental walls. I breathed through the chaos.

There was a moment of friction. To get to the freighters, I had to cross a restricted loading zone. A port guard, heavy-set and reeking of cheap alcohol, stepped out of the shadows. He put a hand on his holster, shouting at me to stop. The old me would have frozen. The starving beast from the alleyway would have torn his throat out. But the clay city taught me restraint.

I didn't run. I stepped directly into his personal space, moving faster than his eyes could track. I didn't touch him. I just let him look into my eyes in the dim light. I let him feel the cold, apex-predator stillness radiating from me. I heard his heart rate spike from a steady 80 to 140 beats per minute. He took his hand off his weapon, backed away slowly, and looked down. I slipped past him, nothing more than a phantom in the fog.

Now, I am standing at the docks, the salty Mediterranean wind in my face, watching the cargo being loaded onto a rusty freighter heading east. Among the crates on the pier, one massive shipping container caught my eye.

Stamped on its side, in bright, mocking letters, is the corporate slogan of GreenTree SE:

Grow With The Giant.

They really think they are the giants. But they have no idea what kind of monster they just woke up in the dark.

Next stop: Romania.