Chapter I
Shunji
This little fruit bat was seven years old the first time he transformed into his anthropic manifester form.
"I did it! I did it!"
His first steps were wobbly.
"This is quite managea—" He bumped into a wall.
"Ah, how am I supposed to know how far the wall is if the sound doesn’t bounce back?"
It was the middle of the night, so the little bat had yet to experience daylight in this form.
His origins remained a mystery. He had been discovered in a vampire cherry patch when he was barely a year old—these cherries earned their name from their bat-wing-shaped leaves and thick, crimson juice that ran as red as blood. Some speculated he came from the northern Cheshun Mountains, where these unique cherries thrived. But those lands were vast and desolate, and vampire cherries were harvested across the region.
Thus, he was named Shunji—"Shun", evoking high and steep mountains, and "Ji", meaning land.
Shunji, a frugivore vampire manifester, had been found sucking the juice from the cherries, draining them dry. You might mistake him for a sanguivore, a vampire who thrived on blood instead of fruit, but the latter fed on the life essence of other beings. Still, his bite proved just as sharp, as someone would soon find out.
The tiny bat had blended in effortlessly, his small, round body nearly identical to the cherries surrounding him. But then, out of nowhere, a pair of hands grabbed him by the wings and lifted him into the air. Startled, he dropped the cherry he had been holding and, in a panic, bit down on the nearest finger. As he tumbled back into the basket, he let out a squeak—not of fear, but of surprise.
The taste of blood wasn’t what he was used to.
Displeased, he immediately latched onto another cherry. Then, exhausted from the ordeal, he fell asleep, still clutching the fruit.
The crate of cherries bore a delivery label:
From: Cheshun Mountains.
Delivery for: The Haunted Tea House.
AUTHOR NOTES
I did´t realised that the most nerve wrecking part would be naming my characters. But here we are! In the honor of my move to Japan, I gave this bat a Japanese name and picked him his Kanji!
Since Shunji came from the mountains I decided to go with these two characters.
峻 - High and steep mountains
地 - Land
