Chapter 1022: Chapter 365 Triumphal Chariot of Antimony

“A child of one and a half years old…shouldn’t be able to speak yet, right?”

“Beyard” tapped his amber-colored wine glass lightly, speaking with some surprise.

“That’s probably right. One or two words will still be fine, complete sentences though, those indeed can’t be said.”

Franz Pomponazzi nodded: “Before I learned to speak, I could already kill. That was my first time drawing blood from a living person, rather than drinking from a blood bottle.”

“When I grew older, I found out… apparently everyone knew about it. It seemed like they all knew… that when I had just learned to walk, I personally killed my own biological sister. Hahaha…”

He laughed out loud, but there was no joy to be heard in his laughter.

He put his wine glass back on the table.

Even though the wine in that glass was supreme in this world, he had no interest in drinking it.

“Do you still remember, what people used to call me back then?”

Pomponazzi did not wait for “Beyard” to respond, so it was a rhetorical question: “‘The little monster of the Pomponazzi family’.”

“So, you became a real monster?”

“Beyard” said softly: “Killed your whole family?”

“Why not.”

Pomponazzi declared indifferently: “My brother killed my sister, my sister killed my brother. My father killed my brother, and I myself have also killed my sister. Since the education I received from a young age was such, and this was what people expected of me, why can’t I turn into such a person when I grow up?

“Besides, I didn’t completely kill them…”

As he spoke, Pomponazzi caressed his chest and belly.

Aleister realized something: “You didn’t just…”

“Oh, it wasn’t as simple as consuming them.”

Pomponazzi smiled: “At that time, all the servants in our house were killed as ‘Blood Packs’, fighting each other to death… and the one who emerged victorious in the end was myself.”

“But I myself was gravely injured and dying in that ‘civil war’, struck by my mother’s curse. Thus, I prepared the revival ritual–I directed the remaining blood within me out. Mixing those small remnants of collected blood, I used them to bring myself back to life… through this way to cleanse the curse.”

“At that time, I had a sudden idea–Because I was worried, what if I failed to revive due to lack of blood, and they coincidentally were revived by someone else.”

“So, I smashed all the statues of my family members, gathered a portion of their ashes to my side. I took away part of them, thereby preventing any of them from reviving completely.”

“And when I died and was reborn, I was merged with them. At that time, I had one sister left, two brothers, along with my father and mother, five parts in total, and including myself as the sixth… precisely the ‘number of Adaptation’. The blood available then was barely enough to revive even one person, let alone six sets of ashes. I think… being able to survive from that state, perhaps it was the Lord of Scalefeather’s favor.”

—-So, that’s why he would call himself “Pomponazzi”.

Aleister understood.

It wasn’t because he was distant from people, nor because he, as a fallen noble, still remembered his family name. Because to him, it was more than just a surname… It represented “family”.

He was not merely “Franz”, but rather the ultimate amalgamation of all of “Pomponazzi”.

That’s why he liked both men and women, was gentle yet volatile, conservative yet radical… because “Pomponazzi” was composed not of the same ritual.

“Since I was the only remaining ‘Pomponazzi’, the family’s property naturally became mine. Although my family was noble, we had long since had no fiefdom… we were nothing but fallen nobility. Thus, I simply sold off all the family assets for my own pleasure.”

“People despise me, they reject me. Although they respect me to my face, I know… they just want my money.”

Pomponazzi scoffed: “They want it, I give it to them. Watching them fight to the death over such things, backstabbing and framing each other, it gives me immense pleasure–who indeed is the monster? Is it me? Is it them? Or those shiny golden coins?”

“After all, I never cared about such stuff, rather, I was ready to die long ago. I’m not a ritualist; that revival ritual was merely a mechanical apparatus. If something went wrong, I might not have been able to come back to life; even before I made this decision, I did not know whether what would be revived would be me, or some sort of Chimera.”

“Until I met Bashir. He was a rather interesting human… I could feel that he was one of the few who neither feared nor mocked me–he dared to directly ask me for money the first time we met.”

“…Oh?”

Aleister couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

So, it was a “this man caught my attention because he was so special” kind of development?

But Pomponazzi’s words negated Aleister’s guess:

“In order to fund his research, he was even willing to die. Not as a Blood Slave, and not the empty talk of ‘I am willing to die for you’… he came to me directly with a contract certified by the Silver-Crowned Dragon, entrusting his life to me in exchange for a sum of money.”

“Until later he became the Monarch, established a Kingdom… this contract is still with me. He never took it back, nor did he request that I destroy it.”

“You must have accepted.”