Rebate King: Every Beauty I Spoil Makes Me a Billionaire

She had just finished bathing when she felt it. Her movements came to an immediate halt.

Her crimson eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

"...Impossible."

She had felt it clearly. She had not imagined it. It brushed against the edge of her spiritual sense with the unmistakable resonance of the thing itself.

'Qi.'

Fresh qi. Pure. Concentrated. Being deliberately drawn into a cultivator's body before circulating through their meridians.

Someone was cultivating. Somewhere nearby. Within this very apartment

For the briefest moment, Camilla stood perfectly still, extending her spiritual sense once more to confirm what she had perceived.

The result remained unchanged. Without haste, she lifted a hand.

A thin veil of crimson spiritual essence rippled over her skin, carrying away every remaining droplet of water before dissipating into nothingness. Her hair dried in the same quiet motion, each strand settling neatly into place as though untouched by moisture.

Only then did she dress. She smoothed the faintest crease from her robes, adjusted the fall of her hair over one shoulder, and allowed her expression to return to its customary calm, betraying none of the surprise stirring beneath.

Then she opened the bathroom door.

Her steps were as measured and graceful as ever as she made her way back toward the bedroom.

Stan sat cross-legged on the low, wide sofa in the corner.

Eyes closed. Hands resting palm-up on his knees. Back straight. Breathing slow.

The floating slab of pale green jade hovered nearby, silent and level. Camilla registered it in her peripheral attention and dismissed it. It was not the source of what she was feeling.

It was Stan. Around him, invisible to any ordinary human eye, and unmistakable to hers, thin ambient streams of Qi were gathering. Curling in from the air. Drifting inward from the corners of the room. Being drawn along the length of his spine and cycled, slow and clean, through the small precise architecture of a meridian system she had already noted was cleaner than any modern human's had any right to be.

His aura was rising.

Steadily. Cleanly. With the small controlled competence of a cultivator who had, at some point, learned exactly what he was doing.

Camilla's pupils contracted.

This was not possible. This city contained no Qi. She had confirmed it herself, in the hour after they had arrived, one small pulse of her spirit sense across Inksea, one careful scan of the ambient atmospheric density, one honest and unsentimental conclusion that the island was, in cultivation terms, a wasteland. There's no Qi at all...

And yet Stan's cultivation was progressing as though he were seated inside a first-class ancestral cultivation ground.

She watched. Then his aura surged. The pressure in the room briefly intensified, a small clean pulse of Qi settling into place in some newly stabilized layer of his cultivation base, and then smoothed out again, level and quiet, as if a small internal foundation had just been laid and had already dried.

A breakthrough. A clean one.

Camilla did not move.

She watched as Stan let out a slow, controlled exhale and opened his eyes.

His gaze found her immediately. "...What?"

He asked it casually. In the small unhurried tone of a man who had been meditating in his own bedroom and had opened his eyes to find his houseguest staring at him and could see nothing particularly unusual about it.

Camilla did not answer immediately.

She walked, slowly, several steps closer to the sofa. Her red eyes stayed on him.

"How," she said, "are you cultivating."

"Ah." Stan tilted his head. "That."

"There is no Qi in this city, human. Yet your cultivation base just advanced."

"It did. Just a minor stage."

"You're yet to answer how."

Stan smiled, the small, unhurried, genuinely amused smile of a man who had no intention whatsoever of answering the question. "...Trade secret."

Camilla's eyes narrowed.

Inside his own head, Stan permitted himself a very small internal chuckle.

The truth, in fact, was mildly ridiculous. He had opened the System's inventory in the private back of his mind and released a small measured trickle of the Spirit Pool Qi he had brought back from Antarctica, the same Qi Camilla had traded him, eight times rebated, directly into his own dantian. From the outside, to any observer with a spirit sense, it looked like a man drawing Qi from the ambient air of a city that did not have any.

It was, in his considered opinion, one of the great small advantages of his particular situation.

And one he had no intention of ever explaining to anyone. So he simply smiled and said nothing.

Camilla studied him for a long moment. Indirect probing was, apparently, not going to work.

'Fine.' She decided, in that moment, to ask the question she had been quietly holding since Antarctica.

"When," she said calmly, "are you going to admit to your true cultivation realm."

Stan raised an eyebrow.

"I refuse to believe," she continued, in the same measured tone, "that a cultivator in possession of the volume of spirit Qi you produced in that cave, capable of casually restoring himself from mortal injury with an artifact pill, and now cultivating in a city with no ambient Qi as if he were seated at the heart of an ancestral formation, is a Qi Refining stage practitioner."

She held his gaze. "You are concealing your true realm."

She said it with the small, absolute certainty of a woman who had been quietly assembling this conclusion for hours and was now presenting it, fully formed, and expected acknowledgement.

Stan almost laughed. Because the thing was, the actual thing was, his cultivation realm was, in fact, exactly what she was seeing. Genesis Realm initial stage. No hidden ninth heaven. No concealed transcendent tier. No shrouded eleven-thousand-year-old ancestor lurking behind the pleasant twenty-something face.

The absurd Qi reserve came from the inventory. The impossible cultivation speed came from the System.

The unaccountable resources came from a rebate multiplier applied to money he had spent on beautiful women.

The combat feats came from installed mastery he had paid points for.

None of it was hidden depth. All of it was hidden machinery.

But if a Royal Blood vampire, with all the small ingrained assumptions of Old Era hierarchy behind her red eyes, wanted to conclude that he was a concealed high cultivator disguising himself as an ordinary young man for reasons of his own,

Then that misunderstanding was going to work entirely in his favor.

For as long as he could sustain it.

Which, based on the past several minutes, was going to be quite a while.

He smiled and said nothing.

Camilla watched him.

The silence stretched. Then, slowly, the small corner of her mouth curved.

"...So," she said, softly. "You refuse to admit it."

Stan spread his hands, palms up, in the small universal gesture of a man declining to comment.

"Very well." A small elegant tilt of her head. "Keep your secrets, human. I will not press. One day, your true realm will reveal itself, whether you intend it to or not."

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