"Did those daggers just absorb all the blood from that beast?" Camilla asked, her crimson eyes fixed on the twin blades. "Human... you seem to possess an endless number of treasures."
Sighing at that question, he stored the daggers back into the inventory before Camilla could have other thoughts...
Camilla scoffed seeing him do that...
"I am a noble Vampire," she said. "I will keep my word. It is insulting for you to doubt me by hiding the artifact away like I’m a thief."
Her tone was dry rather than angry.
"I will spare you this once, since you have led me to the Spirit Pool and you know nothing about vampire customs. But do not do it again."
’This bitch, just you wait!’ cursing her silently in his mind, Stan sighed and said softly. "Understood."
She glanced past him at the fallen bear, then at the darker passage ahead.
"Keep moving. Based on my investigation of this cave, that beast was a pregnant mother that came here two days ago to give birth. The cubs should be somewhere ahead. Go to the pool at the end of the passage and show me what your spatial treasure can do."
Stan turned to walk forward. He had taken perhaps six paces when the shapes emerged from the shadow ahead.
Two polar bear cubs. Newborn. Their eyes barely open. They were pressed against the ice wall, small and helpless, whimpering softly at the loss of their mother’s presence.
Stan slowed.
He had been prepared to fight the mother. He had not, in the several seconds since noticing the cubs, figured out what he was going to do about them. They were newborns. They were not threats.
But before he could make any decision, both cubs’ heads separated from their bodies.
Cleanly and simultaneously.
An invisible force, moving too fast for Stan’s eyes to track, had swept through the passage in a fraction of a second and beheaded both cubs with the same surgical precision that had ended the werewolf’s life a few minutes earlier.
Stan turned to look at Camilla.
She was standing exactly where she had been. Her expression was unchanged. She had not visibly moved.
"It’s probably not a coincidence that the beast came to this specific cave to give birth," Camilla said quietly. "Basking in ambient Qi can accelerate a beast’s development. In two short days of exposure to the leaking Spirit Pool energy, this bear’s strength had already increased beyond the normal parameters of its species. It was still non-mutant, but it was well on its way to becoming a proper Qi Beast. The cubs would have inherited the advantage. It was better to end them now."
She said it with the same casual, matter-of-fact composure she brought to everything else.
Stan absorbed the explanation without comment.
His mental picture of what the bear had been just before he had killed it now included the small, uncomfortable detail that he had been slightly luckier than he had realized.
The polar bear had been at the upper end of its species’ normal power range and climbing.
He had defeated a version of it that was two days from being significantly stronger. If he had encountered it in another week, the fight might have gone very differently.
He filed the information away and they walked deeper into the cave.
The Spirit Pool came into view.
It was, in physical appearance, exactly what the Antarctic researcher’s descriptions had suggested. A pool of crystal-clear liquid, resting in an untouched glacial cavity, its surface perfectly still. The liquid seemed to hold light inside it, the pale blue glow of the surrounding ice was refracted through the pool at strange angles, giving the surface a soft, internal luminescence that had no obvious source.
Camilla stopped at the edge of the cavity and simply looked at it.
Her expression, for the first time since Stan had met her, softened into something quiet and reverent.
She had come, Stan realized in that moment, from a place where things like this had once been common. She was looking at the pool the way someone looked at a piece of home they had thought they would never see again.
She sighed.
’Cultivating here would have been the ideal choice,’ she thought internally. ’But time will not permit it. My own spatial artifact cannot store conceptual energy like liquid Qi. It rejects such substances. But he claims his can. If he actually can, I can carry the entire pool back to the clan and transfer it to a proper cultivation chamber. The clan will owe me for the rest of my long, long life.’
She turned to Stan. "Proceed."
Stan stepped forward to the edge of the pool.
He extended his hand. He willed. The Spirit Pool dematerialized.
Every last drop of it disappeared from the glacial cavity in a single instant, twenty-one thousand liters of impossible liquid vanishing into his personal spatial storage with the effortless, silent efficiency he was becoming used to.
The cavity that had held the pool sat empty in front of them. The ice walls, which had held the pool for however many years, now surrounded nothing but faintly glowing air.
Camilla stared at the empty cavity. Her composure cracked for a moment.
"...So." Her voice was quiet. "You truly weren’t lying."
She looked at him with something almost like awe.
"Consider me impressed."
She removed a ring from her right hand. It was a delicate, ancient-looking band of dark metal, its surface engraved with fine patterns similar to but distinct from the ones on the Bloodfangs. She held it out to him.
"If you can claim it, can you transfer it? The way one would move an object from one storage into another?"
Stan considered. ’System, can I do that?’
[Yes. You just need to will the object toward the target spatial artifact to initiate transfer.]
Taking a deep breath, he took the ring. He focused. He willed the entire Spirit Pool from his inventory into hers.
[Detected spatial ring artifact.]
[Detected pocket space of approximately 0.5 standard football field capacity.]
[Confirming transfer target. Does host wish to send the full stored volume?]