Together, Stan and Camilla turned toward the mouth of the cave.
Beyond it stretched an endless white expanse of ice and snow. Beyond that lay a changing world. A world where ancient races would return, forgotten histories would awaken, and humanity would no longer stand alone.
The inheritance was his and the future awaited.
Outside, the polar wind hit them immediately - that sharp, dense cold that only the Antarctic interior produced, cutting through the ambient air with a knife-edge precision. Camilla’s red hair whipped sideways in the breeze. Stan pulled his coat tighter and pressed forward across the ice.
Camilla glanced sideways at him; "Do you live somewhere in this endless frost region?"
"No."
"Good." She said it dryly. "Your body’s cold resistance is impressive for a mortal - genuinely impressive - but the ambient temperature here is going to keep dropping as Qi returns. Even a cultivator’s body will suffer if you remain here too long. This is not a place for permanent residence."
Stan smiled. "I don’t live here. I was just visiting for obvious purposes..."
"Visiting." Camilla scoffed lightly. "How did you get here with your current strength, and how do you plan to leave? Even at your best speed, my senses can trace the terrain out to the frozen rivers - and beyond those rivers is an entire ocean. Are you planning to travel by boat?"
She said the word boat with the small, dubious inflection of a woman who had watched people use them before and found the pace insulting.
Stan thought of the plane sitting in his inventory.
He smiled wider. "Boats are too slow. I have something else in mind."
He walked a few more paces before continuing. "I can take you with me. But - before I do, I’ll need you to agree to a blood contract. You won’t feed on anyone close to me. You won’t attack anyone close to me. And while we’re sightseeing together - you won’t attack any humans at all."
He said it evenly, watching for her reaction.
He did not trust Camilla’s blood contract technique on its face. Camilla was, by profession and nature, a Royal Blood - and Royal Bloods, in his growing understanding, were exceptionally skilled at inserting loopholes into their own oaths. He planned to acquire a proper blood contract technique from the system’s shop, set the terms himself, and administer the contract through his own framework rather than hers.
Camilla scoffed lightly; "A vampire cultivator like me doesn’t need blood, cultivator. We crave it - it is a delicacy - but we can go for ages without feeding. I could travel with you for years and never bite a single one of your precious humans. The contract is theatrical. But if you insist, I’ll agree."
Stan filed that away too. "Then let’s -"
He didn’t finish the sentence.
A black streak of motion flashed in front of them.
Stan tensed on reflex. His senses - freshly upgraded, freshly attuned to space and to the auras of supernatural beings - locked onto the incoming presence with immediate clarity. He recognized the signature before the figure fully resolved.
’Him.’
The werewolf pack leader. The same one who had trashed him alongside the rest of the pack. The same one whose fingernail had opened Stan’s abdomen. The same one who had dragged his face along the polar ice while giving him a lecture on the natural order.
Stan’s jaw tightened. He held himself steady.
Beside him, Camilla only furrowed her brow slightly. She did not tense. She did not raise her aura. She did not, in any visible way, treat the arriving figure as a threat.
Which meant the werewolf had not come to fight.
The streak came to a stop three meters in front of them.
The werewolf was in his human form - the same lean, dark-eyed, composed figure who had opened the initial fight before the transformation had come. He stood in the polar wind, apparently unaffected by the sub-zero air, his bare torso still bare. His posture was completely different from what it had been during the fight. He was not smiling. He was not projecting the casual arrogance of a hunter. His expression carried, instead, the careful, controlled composure of a man who knew exactly what he was walking into.
Stan glanced at Camilla out of the corner of his eye.
’The fuck?! It really is him. My instincts weren’t wrong. I thought she killed them all. Did he escape her?’
Camilla sensed the glance. Her pride tightened by a small, visible fraction. She scoffed and looked pointedly to the side. "I figured the treasure was more important than chasing after a dog."
Stan let out a small internal sigh. ’Understandable, I guess.’
He turned his attention back to the werewolf.
The werewolf’s expression was strange. There was something almost quizzical in the way he was studying the two of them - a small, careful confusion running underneath his diplomatic composure.
Then, as if remembering himself, he bowed formally to Camilla.
The bow was clean and deep. The bow of a subordinate to a superior.
Internally, though, the werewolf was thinking something quite different. ’In what world does a Royal Blood have to explain herself to a mere human - one who isn’t even a True Human? Is this a romantic relationship?’
The thought surfaced. He dismissed it almost immediately. ’Impossible. Not this fast. Not between species whose ideologies of love are so fundamentally incompatible.’
He kept the thought off his face and spoke; "I come in peace, Royal Blood."
Camilla scoffed. "Continue."
"The portal to New Terra has closed..."
"Prematurely." It added
Stan frowned. "New Terra?"
Camilla glanced at him. "New Terra. Or the Second Earth. It’s what our ancestors - the ones transferred to the pocket realm - named the world once they had settled there."
Stan nodded slowly.
’Right,’ he thought. ’That confirms it. This werewolf and Camilla are both from the pocket realm the Void Sovereign told me about. They came through the same portal. And the portal has closed prematurely, which is not part of any plan they came in with.’