’But if she can’t find it, if the Qi convergence caused by the spirit pool in this region is too broad for even a vampire’s senses to localize the pool precisely, then I have something no one else can give her. I have the system’s map.’
Gaining confidence, he took a breath and began; "I know why you’re here."
He held her gaze. "The Spirit Pool."
Her eyes sharpened. But her expression did not shift into shock. She had, evidently, expected him to know.
"Well of course you know," she said dryly. "What else would a normal human be doing in this desolate corner of the Earth? I’ve heard mortal humans cannot survive in temperatures like this without freezing to death. It’s already strange enough that a human like you, with no Qi to speak of, can stand upright in this cold. Anyway, what does it matter if you know?"
She tilted her head. "So what if you know why I’m here?"
Stan smiled slightly. "Do you know exactly where the Spirit Pool is located?"
The vampire fell silent. Her red eyes narrowed by a small, careful fraction.
He watched her expression closely. She was thinking. She was weighing whether to answer him. She was, he suspected, wrestling with the specific pride of a Royal Blood being asked whether she could accomplish something that a mortal was implying she could not.
’She can’t find it.’ He knew it immediately.
The vampire’s senses were extraordinary. She had tracked the general area of the Qi convergence from hundreds of kilometers away, but the pool itself was buried under layers of glacial ice, and its exact location was not something even a Royal Blood could pinpoint through the mass of frozen water surrounding it. She could feel the region but she could not localize the target and she was too proud to say so.
Which meant Stan had exactly the leverage he needed.
He kept smiling. "I can take you to it. And that’s not all."
He watched her carefully as he added; "Can you excavate the entire pool yourself, every single drop?"
She fell silent again. This was the second question she could not answer with confidence. Extracting the Spirit Pool would require moving liquid Qi out of the glacial cavity that contained it, a substance that dissolved every known material it touched, that had already eaten through steel and glass and stone during the researcher’s initial investigation...
She could feed on it, cultivate with it, but she could not, in any practical sense, ’carry it away.’ even her spatial ring can only consume Qi, it can’t in any sense store Qi.
Stan smiled wider upon seeing her fall silent. His heart was warm with glee as he said softly with a slight smile on his face, "Well, I can help you with that as well. Instant excavation of the entire pool. It would be troublesome doing it, or cultivating with the spirit pool while annoying insects like those werewolves are still lurking around."
A slow, wide grin spread across the vampire’s face.
"Annoying insects." She rolled the phrase on her tongue with the low, amused satisfaction of a Royal Blood who had, for years, held exactly that opinion of the werewolf clans. "Well. You’re not wrong about that."
Her red eyes glittered. "And the excavation, I assume it’s with that unique spatial artifact of yours."
[Camilla Dragomir: Favorability +20.]
[Camilla Dragomir: Favorability 30.]
Stan said nothing. Revealing too much would eliminate the leverage he had just established. Besides, there was no telling if she’d become greedy and demand that he hand over the spatial artifact, which was impossible anyway. His system inventory was completely tied to his mind and consciousness. It had no physical medium like a ring or storage bag that he could simply hand to someone else, making it literally impossible to steal from him.
Meanwhile, she studied him for a long moment. Then the amused edge slowly left her expression, replaced by something colder and more focused.
"Alright." Her voice went quiet. "Lead the way."
The smile disappeared entirely as she added, "I’ll keep you alive until we reach the pool. If you’re lying to me, if this turns out to be a trick or a stalling tactic, I’ll drain every last drop of blood from your body. Slowly. Are we clear?"
Stan nodded once. "Fair."
Taking a deep breath, he stood then turned toward the direction the system arrow was pointing.
Then he began to move, running across the ice at the fastest sustained pace his enhanced body could produce, his boots leaving deep prints in the compacted snow.
Camilla kept pace effortlessly.
She glided beside him with the same fluid ease she had demonstrated arriving at their meeting point. Her feet barely seemed to disturb the surface of the snow. Her red hair streamed behind her in the polar wind. She matched his speed without any visible effort at all, the specific kind of effortlessness that made it clear she was moving at a fraction of what she could actually do.
Stan filed that away. He knew she had committed to keeping him alive until they reached the pool. That was, for the moment, protection. It was also an opportunity. Since she had promised to keep him safe, she’d refrain from attacking him herself. That gave him the chance to gather as much information as he could.
"You didn’t exist until today. From my world’s perspective. Every historical record of your kind ends at what my people call the Night of Vanishing. What happened?"
Silence.
Sighing, he tried a different angle.
"The Realm portal. What’s on the other side?"
He was slapped with another moment of silence. But Stan wasn’t about to give up so easily, so he tried another.
"Are all of your kind coming through? Or is it just a scouting force? Are there more Royal Bloods among the vampires? How many werewolf clans have crossed? Are there demihumans as well?"
Another stretch of silence as response...
He asked another six questions, each one carefully framed to elicit a fragment of information that would help him understand what the world was about to become.
Each one landed in the polar air and evaporated. Camilla did not respond. She simply ran beside him, her red eyes fixed forward, her expression completely neutral.
Stan cursed inwardly.
She had seen through him completely. Every question was a probe. She had recognized every probe. She was, evidently, willing to fulfill the terms of their arrangement. She would keep him alive until they reached the pool, but she was not willing to answer a single one of the intelligence-gathering questions he had tried to slip past her.
He stopped asking and simply focused on running....