Song of the Black Blood

"It all began the day I found a dying fox cub near an abandoned nest. The mother had left it, and the scent of sickness hang heavy in the air.
As I approached it, I did not notice there were many more wrong things with it than what it seemed at first. That's how my first investigation started."

"I suppressed its last wisps of life with a claw, carefully cutting the main blood source hidden just beneath the neck's skin. Its last breaths reeked of death, but there was more.
As I opened its body, I found something interesting: little slithering creatures had already begun eating the cursed beast from the inside, and all the flesh had been corrupted. It was black blood.My claws carefully sliced the tiny scavengers apart, but they were way simpler than any body I had ever teared apart until that moment. Foxes were way more complex, and yet this one had succumbed to a much weaker force.
One more body to my collection.

"I have many names. Blood Song, Black Blood, The Death Collector. But you can call me just Blood.I am a scavenger of the forest. I go and look for corpses to collect, open, study. And if I can't get one, I'll create it.
If I find an interesting subject, my claws will know how to deal with it. And I'll never give up until I put my paws on it.I collected kittypets, foxes, rogues, kits, every kind of prey, and a dog once. Sometimes even buried bodies, yes.
My den is full of remarkable memories from my travels. Would you like to visit it sometime?No, I don't bury my bodies. They all belong to me, not to the earth!
I'll breathe in the stench of death and laugh with the skeletons, dancing around the bones of those who rebelled against their fates.Then, one day, I started experimenting with plants too.

• Playing with life and death, are we?

There were specific herbs that prey avoided at all costs. I fed them whatever I could get my paws on, and found out with much enthusiasm that there were some plants that could poison the body. Of course, I was more interested in the effects they had on cats rather than on prey.I was on the verge of poisoning a dying, young cat I had snatched up from a hawk's nest when something incredible happened. Giving it the wrong plant from the one which was supposed to kill it, I had the opposite effect: the cat lived on for another three days, even though it could not move. But the bleeding had suddenly stopped. I clawed its flank once more, but again, the blood stopped flowing much sooner than anticipated.
My eyes glowed with a new, renowned interest and suddenly my world seemed much larger than before.That day, I sang my success... before a weird individual came to seek me.That's how I met the Atari.