A disease that takes hold of the soul and steadily drains it.

Soul-afflicting

In order to avoid causing fear and panic, rural vampires tend to live a good distance away from civilization. Urban vampires, meanwhile, live among other vampires in certain districts.

Like many other soul-afflicting illnesses, vampirism is often fatal for hollows who contract it. In addition, although many strains can inflict various organic races, humans and ellesh tend to adapt to contracting it the best.

People with weak souls are far more likely to die from contracting vampirism.

Vampirism is most often spread when a vampire transfers a tiny piece of their diseased soul into a non-infected target. The disease then takes hold of their soul over time (typically between a few days to a couple weeks).

Those infected with vampirism tend to have a slightly paler complexion than normal, as if they were suffering from a fever.

The deadliness of vampirism depends on the strength of the sick person's soul. For hollows and particularly weak mages, the most likely outcome is that the disease eventually completely corrupts and consumes the soul. Unless the vampire frequently consumes soul energy to replace their lost soul, they will most likely die in a matter of days.

For mages who aren't weaklings, vampirism tends to instead become a chronic illness. The mage can still use magic, but must periodically take in new soul energy from others. This typically must be done once a week, but stronger souls can go without this for a bit longer.

Vampirism is a chronic illness that, if it doesn't kill the host, will affect them for the rest of their life.

Once vampirism consumes and corrupts enough of the host's soul, the host will start to feel a constant feeling of fatigue and nausea. In particularly bad cases, typical soul-rejuvenating exercises (i.e. meditation) will become much less effective.

Although this varies depending on the particular strain, vampirism often inflicts a peculiar feeling of coldness upon the infected. This chill is inconsistent with actual body temperature. The longer the infected goes without consuming soul energy, the more persistent and severe this feeling becomes.

Like most soul-afflicting illnesses, typical vaccines are not available for vampirism. However, a standard blessing from a medicinal deity (i.e. Ehanis) can usually protect the soul from it.

Typically, people simply refuse to lend soul energy to vampires, unless said vampire has a close relationship with them. Usually, vampires can prevent their own soul from infecting others, but it can happen if the soul is corrupted beyond control (although this degree of corruption is usually fatal).

A typical soul sampling test can usually identify vampirism. A far simpler test can also diagnose it via listening to the patient's symptoms and getting a bit of their history regarding vampires.

If the disease is diagnosed quickly enough and an expert is able to help, vampirism can be cured via isolating the infected portion of the patient's soul from the rest of them.

This treatment can severely weaken or even kill the patient, however, so most just try to live with it. For mages, soul recovery exercises such as meditation and magic venting can keep the soul strong enough to slow the disease.

Vampirism is generally a very rare disease, affecting only 1 out of 200 people.

Historically, vampirism was rumored to be a punishment sent by Hallit, a disease deity who felt that some mages had souls too strong for their own good.

• In order to drain soul energy from others, vampires usually cut their "donor" and take some of their blood. They only want the soul energy, though, so they spit out the blood once that's been absorbed into them. It's kinda gross.




• If a vampire tried to sustain themselves with Life-stream , they'd probably die from both the sheer soul energy and having their insides melted by it.