Rebate King: Every Beauty I Spoil Makes Me a Billionaire

”But I want to know what you did. What was that? I didn’t even sense any Qi fluctuations. Where did you get a spatial storage technique of that quality? Answer me, and I’ll make the ending quick.”

Stan did not answer. His mind was working on one last theory.

He could not store the werewolf. The werewolf had will.

But while he himself had will, he won’t resist the inventory.

The inventory followed his will, so his will is the will of the inventory, so if this worked then he would, in theory, exist inside the inventory space until he willed himself back out.

It was a theory. It was a terrible theory.

He had no idea whether the inventory could contain a living being at all. He had no idea whether his consciousness would survive the storage attempt. He had no idea whether he would be able to will himself back out. He might dissolve. He might cease to exist. He might spend the rest of eternity inside a spatial pocket with no way to reach anything outside it.

The alternative was having his head removed by a werewolf claw in the next several seconds.

He decided. He took the last shallow, ragged breath his lungs could produce.

He focused then willed the inventory to consume him.

The werewolf’s clawed hand tightened on the back of Stan’s neck. The claw began to press.

Stan felt the first fraction of a second of the pressure that was about to sever his spine.

And then he vanished. Not sideways. Not upward. Not in any direction that the werewolf could see.

He was simply, in that instant, not present in the polar air anymore.

The werewolf’s hand closed on empty space. His claw sliced through nothing. His eyes went wide.

He straightened up abruptly, spinning on his heels, scanning the ice around him with the sudden, sharp alertness of a predator who had just watched his prey execute a technique he did not recognize.

The other three werewolves converged on his position in an instant.

The four of them stood in a tight formation, scanning the empty polar landscape.

There was no sign of Stan.

There was no scent trail. No footprints. No blood spatter leading in any direction. The pool of blood that had been beneath him was still there, staining the snow crimson, but the body that had been producing it was simply gone.

The lead werewolf’s face darkened.

”...Where did he go.”

None of the others answered. They stood in the polar wind, staring at the empty space where Stan Harrison had been a heartbeat before, the mystery of his disappearance sitting between them like a puzzle none of them had any framework to solve.

Stan opened his eyes. He was floating.

He was, more accurately, existing, in a space that was neither dark nor light, neither warm nor cold, that had no visible boundaries and no discernible dimensions. It did not feel like a room. It did not feel like a container. It felt like an absence, the specific absence of a place that was not intended for living things to occupy.

But he was alive. And, for the moment, he was somewhere no werewolf could reach him.

He let out a long, slow, uneven breath.

’It worked!’

The theory had held. He was inside his own inventory space, contained by the same infrastructure that had stored the Bone-Tempering Pill’s empty container, the Jade Purity Elixir’s bottle, the ’Introduction to Earth’ book, the Dao Language primer, and, as of a few hours earlier, an entire long-range polar aircraft.

He tried to move his arm. It did not move.

He tried again, still nothing.

His arm did not respond. Neither did his legs. Neither did his fingers. His entire body was locked in place, suspended in the neutral non-space of the inventory as though something had frozen him at the cellular level.

He tried to speak. His lips did not move. He tried to draw a fresh breath. His lungs did not respond. The realization arrived cleanly.

’Time. Space is locked, and time with it. The inventory freezes everything inside it, that’s how items don’t decay. That’s how the pill and elixir stayed potent.’

’But as the owner, I’m partially exempt. My mind is still running. My body isn’t. The space affects me the way it affects everything else, but the time freeze, my consciousness is outside it.’

He assessed rapidly.

His body was locked in its exact injured state. His wounds were still there, the hole in his abdomen, the torn chest, the ground-down face, but they were also frozen. The blood that had been pouring out of him had stopped at the exact moment he had entered the inventory. He was not, in this moment, actively dying. The catastrophic blood loss that had been about to kill him seconds ago had been paused mid-process.

But so had his breathing.

His last breath, the shallow, ragged one he had taken before triggering the inventory, was the only breath he had. He could not draw another one. His body’s oxygen reserves would carry him for a limited window, and after that, he would suffocate.

He estimated it.

In his current state, with severe injuries, blood loss, and the accumulated damage of the fight, he could probably hold what remained in his lungs for around thirty seconds before his brain began to fail. In his prime, he might have managed forty to fifty. In this state, thirty was optimistic.

Thirty seconds. That was his window.

He had thirty seconds to wait out the werewolves outside, and then he had to leave the inventory before he suffocated.

He forced his mind to remain calm. He counted.

’One.’

’Two.’

’Three.’

Outside the inventory, on the Antarctic ice, the lead werewolf stood over the empty patch of red-soaked snow where Stan had been a moment earlier.

His face carried an expression it had not carried once during the entire encounter, genuine, focused disbelief.

”He’s gone.” He crouched. He ran a clawed finger through the pool of blood on the ice. The blood was fresh. The scent was fresh. Every physical trace suggested Stan had been in this exact location a heartbeat ago. And yet the body itself had simply ceased to be present in the polar air.

”He actually escaped.” He tilted his head, sniffing the air. There was no trail. There was no scent moving in any direction. There was no residual heat signature disappearing into the distance.

There was no evidence at all that Stan Harrison had moved from this spot. He had, from every physical measurement the werewolf could perform, simply stopped existing.

”What kind of life-saving treasure was that.” His voice was low. The casual amusement of the previous minutes was completely gone.

The werewolf’s eyes were sharp now, calculating, the expression of a predator who had discovered that his prey had possessed a defensive tool he had not been able to categorize.

”This human is not simple.”