Rebate King: Every Beauty I Spoil Makes Me a Billionaire

Void Sovereign gestured, and a small holographic display materialized in the air above the table between them, a soft, ambient projection of light that resolved into a scrolling list.

”The things I’ll give you; First. My cultivation technique. The Void Sovereign Sutra. A peak-tier technique that governs the comprehension of space and void. Its full mastery would place a practitioner at the highest realm of cultivation the greater cosmos recognizes. You will not master it in your current lifetime, but even reaching its intermediate stages will place you well above the vast majority of returning cultivators.”

Stan absorbed this.

”Second. The residual resources of this inheritance. That includes the Qi lake, whose remaining volume will be transferred to your inventory. Roughly forty times what you currently possess. It also includes the memory fragments in the temple, which will remain accessible to you as reference material. My records of the Age of Dao. Names, sects, races, techniques, alliances, hostilities. Everything I knew, up to the moment I entered dormancy.”

Stan nodded.

”Third. This chamber, and the tea room we currently occupy, will become your private cultivation space. It is dimensionally separate from the pocket realm the vanished races occupy. They cannot reach you here. You will be able to enter and exit from any location on Earth once your comprehension of space allows it.”

”Fourth. Several artifacts I created during my active years. Including a robe of woven spatial threads that will protect you from most direct physical damage. A cauldron for refining pills. A refined spirit sword that grows with its wielder. A spatial compass calibrated to detect the presence of returning cultivators anywhere on Earth. And several minor tools of practical utility.”

He paused. ”Fifth. And most importantly. My accumulated understanding of the formation itself. Once you have absorbed my technique to the required stage, you will be able to slow the formation’s collapse. Delay Earth’s return to full Qi by 5 months, if you choose. Give humanity more time to prepare. This last gift is the one I care most about, because it means you can determine the pace of what happens next.”

He set his cup down. ”That is the inheritance.”

Stan let out a long, slow breath. The list was, by any measure, staggering. Any single item on it would have been world-changing in its own right. The whole set, taken together, represented a shift in his personal capabilities on a scale that would place him among the strongest cultivators to exist on Earth in thousands of years.

He asked the next obvious question. ”What happens to you? To this split soul?”

”It dissolves.” The Void Sovereign said it simply. ”The moment the inheritance transfers, this consciousness dissipates. I have been waiting a very long time for it. I look forward to the rest.”

Stan looked at him.

The man across the table, old beyond ordinary reckoning, tired in a way that his youthful face could not entirely conceal, was ready to end. He had held on for millennia because a promise required him to. That promise was, apparently, about to be kept.

Stan understood the moment for what it was; ”I accept your condition.”

He said it plainly. ”I will protect humanity, to the extent that my strength allows, from what your formation’s collapse will release. I will not commit to preventing every death. I will commit to drawing the line you described. If ordinary humans are threatened with the same treatment they once received, I will oppose it with every resource you give me and every resource I possess.”

The Void Sovereign smiled. The smile carried, for the first time in the entire conversation, something like relief: ”Thank you, cultivator.”

He raised his cup. ”To the future of your Earth.”

And then he drank from it, Stan nodded to that, but still didn’t dare drink from the cup on his own side of the table.

With that, the transfer began. The Void Sovereign gestured with one hand, and the ambient Qi in the tea room began to move. It gathered itself around Stan in slow, careful streams, flowing from the walls, from the floor, from the very air above the table. The Qi did not batter him. It did not shock him. It settled onto his skin gently, then sank into him, integrating with his existing meridians and reserve like a river filling a series of small pools it had always been intended to fill.

Knowledge arrived with the Qi.

The Void Sovereign Sutra unfolded in Stan’s mind in a single vast download. The technique settled into his consciousness with the same clean orderliness that all of the system’s previous installations had used, but on a scale that dwarfed anything he had experienced before.

He felt the sutra layer itself into his understanding, its foundational stages, its intermediate stages, its advanced stages, its peak stages. He would not comprehend all of it immediately. He would spend years, possibly decades, working through its layers. But the entire framework was now his.

The Qi lake’s remaining volume transferred into his inventory. He felt it settle, a colossal reserve of condensed spatial Qi now anchored inside his private storage, ready to be drawn upon over the long process of his cultivation.

The artifacts materialized one by one on the table.

A robe of woven silver-gray fabric that seemed to move slightly of its own accord, as though the threads themselves were made of tiny fragments of space.

A small dark cauldron, no larger than his forearm, its surface engraved with characters Stan now, thanks to the Dao Language Primer, recognized as reading Refinement of the Void Origin.

A slender sword, its blade a deep midnight blue, resting quietly in a plain wooden scabbard.

A small brass compass with an intricate needle that seemed to shift in multiple directions at once.

A small pouch of what he immediately recognized as high-grade cultivation pills.

The Void Sovereign watched as each item settled, then gestured for Stan to pick them up.

Stan willed them into his inventory. The system accepted each of them silently. The addition of the resources into his storage space produced a small, warm sensation of expansion, the inventory itself had grown, adapting to the scale of the new gifts.

The Void Sovereign nodded with satisfaction. ”Good. It is done.”