Meanwhile, Stan looked at Camilla.
He was, if he was being honest, a small amount disappointed. He had wanted to be the one to end the werewolf. The pack leader was, in a very specific and personal sense, ’his’ — the being who had dragged Stan’s face across this same polar ice, and had cut open his abdomen, and had spoken to him like meat. Stan had, at some point in the past twelve hours, been quietly looking forward to being the one whose hand ended him.
Camilla caught his gaze.
She looked briefly away.
"What," she said with a small, defensive scoff. "He is still alive. Even with his head cut off, it will take some time for him to actually die. If you want the honor of finishing him, you still can. I was simply... silencing him. He was being loud."
Stan let out a small, dry breath.
He could tell she had done it partly because she had wanted to, and partly because she had not quite been able to stomach hearing the werewolf accuse her, aloud, of siding with what her race had spent centuries considering food.
He didn’t press her on it. He nodded slowly and moved to the werewolf’s body.
He willed both pieces, the massive transformed body and the severed head, into his inventory.
The werewolf’s will, with its head separated from its body and its consciousness already collapsing into the specific dying-brain state that followed decapitation, was too weak to resist the storage. His transformed corpse dematerialized from the polar ice in a heartbeat and settled into Stan’s private storage space alongside the polar bear, the Rift Wolves, the Void Mantis, the Mirror Serpent, the Abyss Bats, and the Void Whale, every trophy Stan had accumulated over the past several hours of impossible days.
The polar ice around them, moments before crimson with blood, was now empty except for the drying stain of what had been left behind.
Stan straightened up.
His system chimed.
[Target Elder Fang: eliminated.]
’So he’s called Elder Fang,’ Stan thought. ’Fitting.’
The notification was, he suspected, delayed because the werewolf had continued to survive in his inventory for a small period after Stan had stored him. The inventory’s lack of ambient oxygen, combined with the werewolf’s decapitated state and his depleted Qi reserves, had presumably accelerated his final death. Within a minute or so of storage, the werewolf had, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.
Stan filed that observation away with the small, cold discipline of a man who was starting to build a proper tactical model of what his inventory could and couldn’t do.
The system chimed again.
[Notice: Host has been marked.]
Stan’s expression tightened. ’Marked? The fuck?!’
The specific implications sat immediately in his mind. Werewolves, if their internal lore matched what the Introduction to Earth had described, possessed pack-scent tracking capabilities that operated over considerable distances. If Elder Fang had, in his final moments, applied some kind of aura mark to Stan, some spiritual signature that other werewolves could track, then Stan was going to have a very bad time the next time he encountered another member of the same clan.
He was not, at his current strength, ready to fight a pack led by an alpha.
He was barely ready to fight what he had already fought. His face changed.
He was about to consider what protective measures the system might offer through the shop when the next notification arrived.
[The Mark is being suppressed.]
Stan blinked.
[The Mark has been suppressed.]
Stan let out the long, slow breath of a man whose luck had, for once, held.
The system had apparently registered the mark and had, of its own accord, taken defensive action. Whatever mechanism it had used to suppress the tracking signature was operating quietly in the background, the same infrastructure, Stan suspected, that had been suppressing his financial transaction trails for weeks. Whatever the system was, it had a consistent talent for hiding him from surveillance he did not wish to be subject to.
He would look into the mechanics later. For now, the immediate threat had been contained. He glanced at Camilla.
She was watching him with a small, thoughtful expression, the specific expression of a Royal Blood who had noticed his face change through two separate registers in the span of a few seconds and had drawn her own conclusions about what had happened.
She said nothing. He appreciated the discretion.
He straightened, brushed the polar dust off his coat, and looked out toward the horizon of the endless white plain.
"Alright, Camilla." His voice was calm again. "Let’s get moving. I have a very long trip ahead, and a very long list of people who are going to be extremely upset with me by the time I get home."
She smiled slightly. "Lead the way, human."
He walked forward across the polar ice.
She fell into step beside him. Together, they moved away from the empty Spirit Pool cavity, away from the site of the werewolf’s death, away from every trace of what had just happened here.
Behind them, the polar wind picked up.
They walked in silence for a few minutes, the endless white plain stretching out ahead. Stan was just about to will the plane back into existence when he paused, glanced at Camilla, and asked the question that had been forming in his mind since the werewolf’s death.
"Now that the portal is closed, does that mean the demihumans and True Humans your realm was going to send never actually made it through?"
Camilla was silent for several seconds.
"I’m no expert on portals," she said eventually. "But I do know when one opens a path to an unknown place, those who cross do not choose where they arrive. The portal seeks concentrations of Qi and deposits arrivals nearby."
Her crimson eyes swept across the endless white landscape.
"In the current era of Earth..." she paused. "This place is the only location I have sensed with Qi dense enough to attract a crossing. The Spirit Pool acts as a beacon."
She folded her arms. "If demihumans or True Humans had already entered Earth before the portal closed, they should have appeared somewhere in this region."