An eerie and dark castle towers over a lake of floating black duckweed, with a spire that resembles a javelin in the style of an ancient magical empire.
Harold Steel Hammer carried a bag of ore on his back and walked towards the castle's warehouse, his steps heavy and his movements slow.
As a dwarf who was still a minor, he was not like those muscular elders who wielded huge hammers like fiddling with toys, so a bag of ore was indeed a little too heavy for him.
However, Harold had no complaints about the heavy manual labor, at least he could survive, at least not as food for the vampire masters as the delicate dwarves were chosen.
This is the castle of Vlad Cecil, the "Great Count of Vampires", who controls hundreds of surrounding dwarven villages, selects "pure blood and flesh" from them for food, and drives the remaining slaves to work in the mines and castles, mining and smelting for him the unique Nidam gold and rare karamo iron and mithril.
From birth, the fate of the dwarves seems to be predestined, either becoming food or dying early after squeezing the power within their clean bodies, and the scenery of their lives is only a part of the union for the sake of reproduction.
Although he had never left the village where he was born and Count Vlad's castle, Harold had "heard" that whether it was the desolate south where he was now located, or the north, where the reputation of terror spread, the dwarves in other parts of the plateau were living in this way, and the pain continued numbly.
Thinking of this, Harold raised his head, looking up at the darkness that was forever shrouded in the sky over the plateau, looking up at the bright and bright constellations, feeling a little dazed and sad in his heart:
"Is it possible that my life is moving forward miserably along such a fixed track, with no hope in sight, and we dwarves will never be able to restore the glory of ancient times?"
Snap, a sharp pain came from Harold's face, and a blood-oozing whip mark suddenly appeared on the left side of his face, and extended across the dwarf's unique large nose to the right.
"Hurry up, what are you doing!" A vicious and fierce voice came, and the shadow of the leather whip still echoed in front of his eyes.
Yes, the fate of the dwarves is not just two, they can also turn their backs on their ancestors, please vampires like a dog, become their blood servants, and take care of their companions in turn.
How can a self-proclaimed elegant and noble vampire manage dirty miners and coolies by himself, naturally need servants to do tedious things, but every vampire will consume the source of his own blood for the first time, and if a weak vampire develops more descendants, he will decay in advance, so even high-level vampires are unwilling to have offspring at will.
Moreover, vampires think highly of themselves, and regard most of the lives of other races as dirty and despicable lowly creatures, and they do not value or like them very much, and it is impossible to waste the origin of blood to transform them into blood people, so the number of orthodox vampires has always been kept in a small range, and a large number of blood servants who have been sucked by them and have not died, obeying orders like puppets.
As a blood servant, his strength is close to that of a formal knight, but it will never improve, and his lifespan is only one-tenth of that of his master, and he will never be able to resist his master, and he will never even have the idea of resisting.
Harold glanced at the dwarf next to him holding a leather whip and dressed in gorgeous clothes, lowered his eyes, and did not let the hatred and anger in his eyes be discovered by him: "Yes, Butler Wells."
This hateful traitor, I don't know how many of his own people have been reported and killed, and he is obviously just an overseer, but he likes to be called a butler, and when the real vampire butler Galata appears, he wants to kneel on the ground and kiss the toes of each other's shoes.
The red-haired dwarf Wells shaved his proud beard cleanly because his master Vlad hated beards, revealing his pitted face, and when he saw Harold's "handsome" brown beard, he couldn't help but feel annoyed in his heart, waved his right hand, and gave him a whip again:
"What were you thinking just now? Dwarves don't need to think! Do you understand? I asked you if you understood? Lowly filthy bastard dwarf!"
He seemed to have forgotten that he was also a dwarf, and completely regarded himself as a noble blood servant who was only a little worse than the orthodox blood race.
"Understood, Butler Wells." Harold's hands holding the ore bag burst into blue veins.
"Get out of here!" Wells did not dare to delay the progress so as not to be scolded by the housekeeper, Mr. Galata.
As soon as Harold took a few steps, Wells' fierce and vicious voice became extremely flattering: "Good afternoon, Mrs. Tess, Mr. Galata, please come this way, it's full of ore powder, it's very dirty, and the stinky and lowly dwarves will crash into you."
Even without looking back, Harold can imagine Wells' flattering look of bending over and bowing his head, and the meticulous style of Galata, the tall vampire butler - he is always dressed in black formal attire and always wears a neat bow tie.
And Mrs. Tess must still be that beautiful and enchanting, with long golden hair, a slender and moderately proportioned figure, and green eyes like lake water, which have not changed since she was first embraced by Count Vlad as a vampire.
She is the most beautiful female dwarf in hundreds of nearby villages, the lover of his dreams, but unfortunately she is favored by Count Vlad and becomes his vampire bride.
The cool breeze on the plateau blew, Harold buried his head, carried the ore bag on his back and moved slowly, a crisp sound like a birdsong came from behind him: "Hurry up the smelting of ore, don't let them be lazy."
"Pay attention to the investigation, some of the sneaking dwarves have formed a rebellion, and they must not be allowed to destroy the mine."
…………
It was not until the evening when the position of the constellation changed and the evening came, that Harold finished his hard labor and got a chance to breathe, and then left the castle with the rations he had been given—two loaves of black bread, and returned to his home in a nearby village.
As he walked, Harold suddenly looked around vigilantly, and when he saw that there was no one nearby, his expression immediately became excited, and he turned into a remote road, carrying darkness and starlight, and walking quickly.
After walking for about ten minutes and passing through a few sparse black "wind poplar" forests, Harold saw an ordinary boulder.
He looked around again, then cautiously tiptoed behind the boulder and gently tapped the stone surface.
"Steam is supreme." Strange dwarven words came out of his mouth, like spells but without any mental cooperation.
As soon as the sound disappeared, a crack suddenly appeared in the boulder, as if a door had opened, and a gray-haired dwarf stuck his head out and looked around, then waved his hand: "Come in, Harold."
Harold quickly got in, watched the dwarf close and lock the stone door, and threw him a piece of black bread: "Uncle Warren, I'll go down first."
"Go quickly, the eldest elder is waiting for you, my child." Warren took the black bread, put it on the water, and bit it with excellent teeth, as if he had been hungry for a long time.
Harold understood that Uncle Warren's dwarven rebels hiding underground had been short of food for a long time, so he shook his head sadly and inexplicably walked along the passage to the depths of the earth.
While drinking the water he carried with him and eating black bread, he lamented the grandeur of the underground palace built by his ancestors, which made people deeply shocked:
"Why was such a great ancestor defeated by vampires?"
"Are you rejected by the gods?"
On both sides, there are many murals carved on the stone bricks, including overwhelming airships, steam engine ships sailing on the ocean, terrifying cannons bombarding dragons, and Mercedes-Benz steam trains on the plains...... Although Harold had seen these murals many times, he couldn't help but feel excited every time he saw them, so he loved to listen to the great elder Augustus tell the story of the steam age, thinking about the glorious civilization of his ancestors, as if he was just thinking that life was full of hope and inheriting glory.
At the end of the passage, there was a hall that seemed to be used for sacrifices, flanked by rows of small houses, and the roar of steam kept coming from inside, and strong dwarves were driving steam sledgehammers to forge weapons.
"Harold, are you here?" A dwarf with a long white beard nodded slightly at Harold, then followed his gaze and sighed softly: "It's a pity that our civilization has been lost, and we can't make complex steam engines, cannons, and rifles at all, so we can only make sharper long swords and axes. But this can only deal with blood servants, and there is no way to deal with vampires, let alone the north where terrifying vampires are."
His tone was vicissitudes and desolate.
The "Grand Elder ......" several "high-ranking" who were dressed simply but had a faint higher status than other dwarves spoke out to stop it, how could they create an atmosphere of despair within the rebels.
The Great Elder Augustus smiled calmly and calmly: "Myrna, Quikins...... We must make our people who follow us understand our situation, this is a path with no hope in sight, whether to live on our knees numbly, or to defend the glory of our ancestors with our blood, to die like a true dwarf, we must make our own choice."
"Steam is supreme!" A roar suddenly sounded in the small houses on both sides, "Anyway, they are all destined to die a painful death!"
They chose Count Vlad's territory to hide because they heard that he had been traumatized by "magical magic" in a war in his early years, and had never fully recovered, and needed to sleep often to keep himself immortal.
「…… Mrs. Tess is ordering the blood servants to look for you......" After Harold reported the only news he knew, he looked at Augustus hopefully: "Grand Elder, can you tell me about the ancient steam civilization again?"
The beautiful female dwarf Mirna is also full of expectations, and listening to the elder tell the story of the past is a rare "light" in the difficult life of the rebels.
「…… We dwarves once ruled vast lands, at the mouth of the endless ocean, on the banks of the Negnin River, in countless prosperous places, there are megacities that we have built...... The steel chimneys tower like forests, spewing billowing black smoke, sometimes even blocking the sunlight and darkening the day......"
「…… Between cities, huge steam trains run and it only takes a few hours to get north from here...... Every dwarf gets plenty of food and uses various mechanical products, such as a steam elevator that can lift people to the roof, such as a steam boiler that always has hot water for you to bathe......"
「…… The great dwarven warriors carried high-pressure steam packs, equipped with robotic arms, and carried steam rifles, pioneering the dangerous wilderness...... Steam engine ships sail on the ocean, and huge gun barrels make the enemy surrender ......"
Although they didn't know much about what daytime and sunlight was, it didn't prevent Harold, Myrna, and the other dwarves from listening to it with relish, which was the heaven of their dreams.
Combined with the mural painting, the city of steam machinery came to their minds so vividly.
Harold clenched his fists and vowed to rebuild such a dwarven city one day.
As he told this, Augustus' expression was full of pride and yearning, and the folds on his face seemed to bloom.
"Okay, that's it for today, we will sacrifice the god of steam in time, the great master of life and death." Augustus got up and walked to the center of the hall, where there was an altar painted with strange patterns.
"Great Elder, is it really useful?" Mirna, a girl with flaxen hair, asked suspiciously.
Augustus glared at her and said sternly: "When we excavated this ruin, didn't we find the ancestral ritual of sacrificing the gods? They are so powerful and so smart, how can they do useless things? I think our civilization must have been destroyed because we neglected the steam god and were abandoned by him, so we need to be more religious in order to regain his favor."
"Yes, the elder." In this desperate situation, any chance can make the dwarves ignite the torch of hope.
Therefore, all the dwarves, including Harold, gathered in front of the altar and followed the Great Elder in strange gestures and movements, dancing inexplicable dances.
"Great god of steam, your pious servant prays to you."
Thank you Goose Feather for pushing my friend to become the leader of the alliance all my life, you rewarded me at the end of last month, thank you very much~
(End of this chapter)