Noir is an intelligent black cat with amber eyes who lives in a warm, watercolor-like world. His favorite spot is the top of an old bookshelf in his owner's study, which serves as his private 'castle.' One afternoon, Noir's owner discovers a mysterious golden bookmark—a magical item that causes the story within a book to slightly overflow into reality. When a sudden wind carries the bookmark out the window, Noir embarks on his first adventure outside the house. Following clues through the town,
Noir the Cat and the Vanished Bookmark - "Episode 17: Edgar"
1888. Late Victorian Britain, at the height of the Industrial Revolution.
Oswald's End, a desolate island floating in the turbulent North Sea east of London, was a port city that had undergone rapid modernization, shrouded in coal smoke and thick sea mist.
The island had flourished so greatly because, fifty years prior, the ruling nobleman of the time, the Grand Duke Oswald, had introduced the latest steam engines and constructed both a massive textile mill and a magnificent clock tower that overlooked the entire island. The islanders revered the Grand Duke's family as "saints who rescued them from poverty," and they accepted the black smoke pouring from the factories as proof of their prosperity.
Yet this island harbored two peculiar and strict "official rules" that did not exist in mainland London.
The first was an "absolute nighttime curfew beginning at the sound of the eight o'clock bell."
The Grand Duke's family explained it was because "the night mist contained poison that damaged the lungs"—a convenient lie. The truth was far different. In the darkness when the gas lamps were extinguished, the Grand Duke's subordinates hunted humans freely without interference.
The second was a "promotion system" where "excellent young factory workers could go to London for temporary work."
This too was a cruel trap. The selected young people were loaded into carriages and taken to the Grand Duke's castle, never to return. The islanders pretended not to notice the corpses drained of all blood that appeared in the back alleys each morning, content to exchange their silence for wealth.
Yet there existed one being who gazed coldly upon this deception.
Since long before the Grand Duke's family came to the island—back when this place was still a quiet fishing village—there had lived a black cat, watching over it like the guardian spirit of a church. That cat, with short, taut fur as black as lacquer and amber eyes that burned mysteriously in the darkness, was named Edgar.
He was no mere beast. He was a supernatural entity that descended from a "Cath Shee," a phantom cat spoken of in ancient British lore, possessing a longevity and mysterious power beyond human comprehension.
For Edgar, Oswald's End was "his territory." It was a comfortable space where the humans living there went about their peaceful lives. The Grand Duke's family had transformed it into an enormous steam-powered pen, polluting his domain with an eerie stench of death.
What Edgar upheld was not something as weak as justice. It was pride befitting the solitary king of cats: "Exterminate any vermin that disturbs my territory."
*"The Silver Incense and the Amber Gaze"*
When the great clock tower rang eight o'clock, human figures vanished from the streets all at once.
The uniformly arranged gas lamps extinguished one after another, and Oswald's End sank in an instant into pitch blackness and thick fog.
Edgar walked silently across the slate roof of the church, wet with mist. His amber eyes perceived every detail of the lightless street with perfect clarity.
A distorted footstep echoed through the silent stone pavement—clink, clink. It was not the gait of a human. It was heavier, colder. The footstep of a thrall—a servant of the "Grand Duke Oswald," the absolute ruler of this street and monster of the night.
Fifty years ago, the Grand Duke had been stricken with an incurable disease in his youth and cowered in fear of death. Driven by an abnormal obsession with his wealth, power, and life itself, he had taken an unknown "black parasitic fungus" discovered in the North Sea mines into his own body. Everyone before him had been destroyed by rejection. The Grand Duke was the first in the world to achieve compatibility with this forbidden fungus. Thus he became the source of all vampires that existed throughout the world, and the very first vampire in human history—the "Origin."
Those subordinates and islanders whose blood the Grand Duke had drained, who had been given the fungus factor, had become "thralls"—creatures wandering the night, having lost their sense of self.
Edgar leapt from the roof into the alley, following the thrall under cover of shadow.
They arrived at a dead-end alley shrouded in mist. There lay a young seamstress's daughter, pinned down after being attacked from behind.
As Edgar watched from his hiding place, the thrall drove its sharp fangs into the girl's neck and forcibly drew her blood. Once the girl lost consciousness completely, the thrall deftly opened a brass drain cover in the corner of the alley and pressed the girl's neck wound against it.
The fresh blood that poured from the girl's neck was not flowing into the sewers. Instead, it was being sucked into a "brass tube for blood collection" hidden beyond.
This was the third hidden rule—the infrastructure that threaded beneath the entire street.
Every drain cover in the alleys throughout the city connected to the central clock tower. The human blood that thralls deposited night after night was collected to the clock tower by the power of steam pumps. The Grand Duke's family, who consumed vast quantities of blood as fuel for their immortality, had transformed the entire city into an "efficient massive syringe."
The thrall, having finished its work, vanished soundlessly into the darkness.
Edgar approached the silent alley. The seamstress's daughter's skin had already turned white and cold as wax.
Then Edgar noticed something. A "silver button" gleaming with a dull shine lay rolling across the stone pavement, torn from the thrall's clothing during the girl's fierce resistance. On its surface was engraved the abominable crest of the Grand Duke's family. It was a special emblem that only the Grand Duke's blood relatives and their direct subordinates were permitted to wear.
"Reducing my territory's humans once more. And this repugnant stench..."
Edgar growled low in his throat. This black parasitic fungus was compatible only with human genetics, so it had no effect on Edgar's body as a phantom cat. On the contrary, Edgar's wild antibodies immediately rejected and destroyed the fungus.
Edgar grasped the "silver button of the Grand Duke's family" firmly in his sharp fangs, leaped to the rafters, and dashed away into the darkness.
In a corner of the city, Edgar slipped into a soot-stained brick atelier.
Waiting in the room lit by white porcelain lamps was Julian, a young perfumer.
"You've returned, Edgar."
Julian's refined face twisted with intense anger and deep sorrow when he saw the "silver button of the Grand Duke's family" that Edgar had dropped. It was identical to that terrible night when his sister's life had been stolen.
Julian was originally a talented pharmacist—a perfumer—employed and favored by the Grand Duke's family. But several years ago, when his beloved sister Lily was summoned to the castle for "temporary work in London," he had grown suspicious of the mysterious selection. That night, he infiltrated the castle's underground research laboratory.
There, Julian discovered the "Report on Human Body Mutation by Black Parasitic Fungus"—biological data coldly documented by the Grand Duke himself.
Learning the terrible truth of the street from these records, Julian had arrived too late. His sister had already been implanted with the fungus and had lost her self, becoming a thrall in the Grand Duke's experiments. Lily, who no longer even recognized her brother's face, had attacked him with fangs bared like a blood-starved beast. With tears streaming down his face, Julian could do nothing but splash her with an incomplete silver experimental compound he found in the laboratory.
"Brother... I'm so cold..."
In a corner of her disintegrating mind, Lily, for just a moment, regained consciousness and whispered those words before quietly turning to ash in Julian's arms. Julian seized only the research documents from the disintegrating castle, clutched his sister's remains, and barely escaped to the city.
Having witnessed the hell of burying his beloved sister with his own hands, Julian had since devoted everything to developing weapons to completely annihilate vampires, working behind the sign of his perfume shop.
Then, on a rainy night, a black cat appeared at Julian's door carrying a ring engraved with the Grand Duke's crest. It was Edgar, a lonely avenger standing on the brink of despair.
Edgar had smelled the medicinal herbs Julian mixed nightly to create poisons against vampires and had seen through him—"this human can craft a weapon to exterminate those vermin." He proposed a deal.
"A human who wishes to avenge his sister" and "a phantom cat angered by his territory being violated."
Though they could not exchange words, their interests aligned perfectly. Edgar would return from the night streets with intelligence on the Grand Duke's movements, and Julian would analyze them and formulate countermeasures. Their collaborative research was about to bear fruit tonight.
"Edgar, the Grand Duke's 'harvest' has entered its final stage. The master of this button—the Grand Duke's direct unit moving—means tonight he intends to activate all the brass tubes throughout the city simultaneously and drain the blood of every islander."
Julian picked up the completed "high-concentration silver ion incense burner."
A small steam boiler was built into the brass sphere. Pure silver dissolved in strong acid was combined with the weakness of vampires determined from the documents—extracts of aconite and poisonous ginseng—creating a special liquid that a gasket would vaporize instantly using the boiler's heat. Any vampire that inhaled this would have their blood vessels invaded by silver from the inside and collapse into dust.
The "hypnotic wave" emitted by the Grand Dukes had no effect whatsoever on Edgar's amber eyes as a phantom cat. More than that—Edgar's eyes possessed a wild spiritual power that reflected and nullified the fungus's mental control, directly destroying their brains.
"Let's go. To restore true dawn to this city."
The black cat and the perfumer melted soundlessly into the night's fog.
At midnight, Edgar and Julian reached the lowest level of the heavily guarded clock tower.
A massive steel door that towered above them. Where Julian could never squeeze through, Edgar found merely another passage. Edgar crept along the piping and infiltrated the interior, flicking the bolts open with his claws from inside to open the door.
As they climbed the stairway, an eerie "thump, thump" sound like the earth groaning grew louder.
When the two reached the machinery chamber on the top floor, they beheld the crystallization of a nightmare.
In the center of the room sat an enormous "heart-shaped mechanical device" made of brass and glass. Vast quantities of blood drawn up from underground pipes throughout the city flowed into glass tubes, writhing like serpents, pulsing ominously in the central tank.
Before it stood Grand Duke Oswald in a lavish Victorian frock coat, arms spread wide with an expression of ecstasy.
"Magnificent. Tonight, every life in this city shall become the nourishment for my true immortality."
From behind the Grand Duke, shadow-like thralls poured forth in succession. Julian lit the incense burner and trailed silver smoke, but overwhelmed by their sheer numbers, he was gradually driven back toward the wall.
(A human cannot reach that device...!)
Edgar, watching from above on a beam, opened his amber eyes to their limit.
The target was not the Grand Duke. It was the thickest rubber high-pressure hose at the base of that device, controlling the steam pressure. Destroying it would cause the entire system to collapse.
Edgar plummeted violently from the beam.
A pitch-black shadow danced through the air. A vampire's sharp claws grazed Edgar's fur, drawing blood. But Edgar pressed on, landing on the hose.
He concentrated all his muscular strength into his short limbs, driving his wild claws deep
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