She spun her hand in a slow circle.
The werewolf began to spin. His body lifted off the ice and rotated in the air, slowly at first, then faster, then very fast, until he was a spinning mass of gray-and-black fur being whirled inside his invisible cage like a snowball caught in a centrifuge. His whimpers became a continuous, tumbling wail.
Stan snorted. He couldn’t help it.
The sight was, in the specific way that only karma could produce, deeply satisfying. The same werewolf who had dragged Stan’s face across the polar ice a few hours earlier was now spinning helplessly in mid-air like a hamster in a broken exercise wheel, while a Royal Blood vampire toyed with him for sport.
Camilla stopped the spin.
The werewolf collapsed onto the ice in a dizzy, wheezing heap. His transformed body twitched. His limbs would not coordinate. He tried to stand and fell over sideways with a small, disoriented whine.
Camilla shook her head. "You are terrible at this."
She raised her hand again. A small, precise Qi-blade formed above her palm, an invisible edge that Stan could sense but not entirely see. She flicked her wrist.
The Qi-blade zipped across the polar air and severed the werewolf’s tail.
The pack leader let out a shrieking howl of pure indignant pain and outrage. His transformed body seized. His severed tail flopped onto the ice a meter away from his rear, twitching helplessly. He turned his massive head to look at it and let out another wounded howl.
Stan actually laughed out loud. "Damn."
Camilla smiled at him warmly. "I’m just getting started."
She appeared to be having the time of her life.
She summoned a small sphere of condensed Qi above the werewolf’s head.
Then she snapped her fingers and the sphere dropped.
Thud!
It struck the center of his forehead. The werewolf blinked.
A second sphere appeared.
Thud!
His ears flattened. A third appeared almost immediately after that...
Thud!
A fourth...
Thud!
The pack leader let out a low, wounded growl. He was completely helpless, getting surpressed by her superior bloodline...
Anyways, Camilla ignored him and continued.
Thud!
Thud!
Thud!
Each sphere landed on the exact same spot with perfect precision.
The werewolf eventually stopped growling altogether. He simply lay there, battered and broken, enduring the increasingly humiliating impacts in defeated silence.
’Damn this is funny’ Stan was having the time of his life watching this..
For some reason, the complete lack of resistance made it even funnier.
"Alright," Stan said between laughs. "Alright. Camilla. I think he’s had enough. I think you’ve made your point."
Camilla considered it for a while. Her gaze drifted toward the crumpled, twitching, half-frozen, half-scorched, tail-less wreck lying in the center of her invisible cage.
Then she sighed, "I suppose."
She waved a hand one final time. The invisible barrier dissolved. The werewolf collapsed onto the polar ice in a broken, whimpering heap. Every long bone in his body was fractured. His tail was gone. His breath came in shallow, uneven wheezes. He could not move. From every visible sign, he was completely helpless.
He was still conscious, however. He looked up at Camilla with wide, unblinking eyes. In the span of less than a minute, he had learned exactly why Royal Blood vampires had once occupied a tier of authority that few dared challenge.
His lips peeled back in what was probably meant to be a snarl.
From Stan’s angle, it looked more like a defeated whimper.
Camilla smiled at him sweetly, "There you go, dog. That’s better."
She turned toward Stan, "Was that satisfying enough?"
Stan looked at the werewolf one more time. The pack leader who had chased him across Antarctica, torn open his abdomen, and very nearly killed him now lay broken on the ice, unable to do anything except stare.
A warm sense of satisfaction settled in his chest.
"Yeah." He grinned. "That was very satisfying. Thank you."
Camilla inclined her head with the effortless grace of a noblewoman accepting thanks for a service well rendered, "You promised me a hundred times the Spirit Pool’s volume."
"I did." Stan nodded. "Give me a moment to arrange the transfer."
Then he glanced down at the broken werewolf, who was still watching them with the wary, miserable look of an animal that had learned a very hard lesson.
"And in the meantime..." A smile spread across his face. "...we should probably decide what to do with him."
Stan decided to leave the werewolf for later. First, he needed to pay Camilla for a job well done.
Besides, he was looking forward to his rebate.
He focused inward, opened his inventory, and willed the transfer.
The Spirit Pool’s full accumulated volume, every drop the Void Sovereign had transferred to him from the inheritance’s Qi lake, over eighty-five thousand liters of condensed spatial Qi, flowed out of his storage and into Camilla’s spatial ring.
[Detected: Spatial Ring Artifact.]
[Transferring 85,376 liters of condensed liquid Qi to target space.]
[Transfer Complete.]
Camilla’s eyes widened. She knew a hundred times was an exaggeration as even her ring can’t take that much, but the sheer amount of what she got was immense...
She felt it arrive. Her spatial ring, which already contained over twenty-one thousand liters of Spirit Pool volume from their earlier transaction, suddenly received a payload nearly four times that size. Her senses registered the influx as an immense pressure settling into the pocket space anchored to her finger, a quantity of condensed Qi so vast that even powerful cultivators would struggle to acquire it over several lifetimes.
For a moment, she held her hand perfectly still.
Then she looked at Stan. Her crimson eyes carried that faint, focused shimmer they always acquired whenever her thoughts were moving faster than her expression allowed.
"What other secrets are you hiding, human?"
Stan smiled and shrugged. "I have plenty more I can offer you. As long as you keep your promise to be my comrade, you’ll find our partnership rewarding."
His smile widened slightly. "I look forward to it."
[Camilla Dragomir: Favorability +4.]
[Camilla Dragomir: Favorability 89.]
Camilla nodded slowly. Outwardly, her composure remained flawless.
Inwardly, her thoughts accelerated.
’A Spirit Pool the size of a lake,’ she thought. ’Handed to me with the casualness of a mortal offering spare change.’
Her gaze lingered on Stan. ’He is not a True Human. I verified that myself. His essence carries the resonance of a True Human, but not completely, as though something is close, yet unfinished.’
’And yet he casually hands over treasures that would make peak cultivators weep with gratitude. He did it with no hesitation, reluctance or any visible sense of loss.’
Her mind worked through the possibilities. ’Which means he is concealing far more than he allows others to see.’