Chapter 374: The Other Path

"Beasts will change first. The larger and older ones especially. Any creature carrying even a distant trace of beast-kin bloodline will begin to mutate. Slowly at first. Then quickly. The polar bear you killed at the pool, the one whose head you removed with a single strike, that beast had been in Qi-saturated air for perhaps two days. No more. Its strength was already twice that of an unmutated cousin of the same size."

Stan was very still. "Two days, huh?"

"Yes. Two days."

"Thats crazy."

"I suppose it is, from your perspective. That was merely the edge of the saturation, where the density of Qi was still thin. Closer to the source, or after longer exposure, the change is greater. And there are stronger bloodlines than a polar bear's. Wolves. Great cats. Corvids. Cetaceans." A small pause. "The oceans will be... interesting."

Stan let out a long, slow breath.

"And humans?"

Camilla was quiet for a moment.

"Some," she said. "Not all. Perhaps not even most. Any human line carrying even a fragmented inheritance of an old bloodline, beast-kin, demihuman, True Human, cultivator ancestry that never fully faded, will begin to stir. Slowly. It will not look like power at first. It will look like, restlessness. Vivid dreams. Sudden strength in a moment of fear. Small children speaking to animals that speak back."

She lifted one shoulder, a small elegant fraction of a shrug.

"Later, it will look like power."

Stan sat very still.

The sea, outside the tall glass, had gone from gold to something deeper.

"Thank you," he said, quietly. "For telling me."

Camilla studied him for a moment.

Then, very quietly: "You are welcome, cultivator."

She turned back toward the bathroom.

At the threshold, she paused once more, one hand on the doorframe, her back to him, and permitted herself one small final glance over her shoulder.

Stan remained where he was, his attention fixed somewhere beyond the windows.

Camilla filed that expression away, quietly, in the small careful place where she was, day by day, building her private inventory of the man she had bound herself to.

She stepped into the bathroom.

She closed the door behind her. Taking a deep breath, she stood, for a moment, simply looking at the room.

It was strange, in ways she was going to need to sit with. Everything was polished porcelain, chrome, and pale stone. No spirit formations along the walls. No arrays carved into the corners. No engraved runes catching light. And yet every object appeared, on closer inspection, to have been deliberately placed, arranged with the careful precision of someone who had designed the space with purpose and paid, presumably, an enormous sum to bring it into existence.

Her attention settled on the shower. At first glance, it resembled nothing more than a length of chrome jutting out from a stone wall. Nothing more. No Qi. No spirit stones. No inscriptions. Nothing.

She extended her spiritual sense into it. 'Solid metal with hollow channels running back through the wall... Huh?'

'They're also small moving components housed inside a valve at the base. Ingenious and entirely mundane. Impressive...'

Her crimson eyes settled upon the small handle beneath the fixture. Her spiritual sense flowed through the metal, revealing the intricate arrangement hidden behind the wall. Pipes. Valves. Rotating seals. Each component moved in precise relation to the others. It was an activation mechanism. Crude by the standards of ancient artifact engineering, yet undeniably ingenious in its own way, accomplishing its purpose without the aid of qi or formations.

She reached out and turned the handle slightly.

Nothing came out, but knowing that would happen, She adjusted it, a careful, considered fraction further,

And a stream of icy water poured out of the fixture above her head, cascaded over her hair and shoulders, and down her skin with the small unhurried thoroughness of a system operating exactly as designed.

Camilla did not flinch nor did she step back.

She did not, in any sense that a mortal observer could have identified, react at all.

She simply stood there, perfectly composed, as the icy water ran down over her, and permitted her spiritual sense to follow the flow backward through the pipes into the wall and along a length of channel and up, up, up through the building to some larger reservoir she chose not to trace further.

"...Interesting," she said, quietly, to the empty bathroom.

She reached for the handle again. A measured, careful turn. The water gradually warmed.

Not through spiritual fire. Not through a heating array. Not through any conceivable manipulation of Qi. Simply, through the small clever adjustment of a mechanism she could feel operating deep within the wall.

Her crimson eyes lingered on the fixture with the small focused attention of a Royal Blood who was, quietly, revising a great many assumptions.

She experimented.

One motion adjusted the temperature. Another changed the pressure. A third, hidden along the side of the fixture, redirected the flow entirely from the overhead into a second unit on a sliding rail she had not initially noticed. Each function was precise. Each was reliable. Each was, as far as she could tell, having now traced the entire mechanism from the wall to the building to the reservoir, entirely, unambiguously, gloriously mundane.

No cultivator, at any time in the long history of the Old Era, would have devoted this much thought to the comfort of an ordinary mortal.

And yet, humanity had.

In the several thousand years since Qi had left the world, ordinary humans had not curled up and died. They had not, in some diminished and pitiful form, simply hung on. They had built this. They had chosen a road that was not the road of cultivation, and they had walked it very far.

Not a road of Qi.

A road of knowledge.

For the first time since she had woken beneath the ice, Camilla permitted herself the small quiet acknowledgement that the descendants of the ancient mortals were, in their own strange and specific way, brilliant.

She lifted her chin under the warm water and allowed herself, finally, to bathe.