Rebate King: Every Beauty I Spoil Makes Me a Billionaire

”Whatever humans had access to in your time was probably very simple. Grains. Vegetables. Cooked meat. Salt if you were lucky.”

”That is a fair description, yes.”

”Well. In the several thousand years since then, new age humans got very bored.”

She looked at him. ”Bored, huh?”

”Yes, bored. Without spirit fruits and cultivator delicacies to chase, humans spent thousands of years figuring out what to do with grains and vegetables and cooked meat. Every region on the planet developed its own methods. Every culture invented its own dishes. Sauces. Spices. Fermentation. Preservation. Techniques for cooking that don’t exist anywhere in nature and had to be invented from scratch. There are now, at conservative count, tens of thousands of distinct culinary traditions on the planet, and any decent-sized city will give you access to a hundred of them within a ten-minute drive.”

Camilla was quiet. ”...Tens of thousands.”

”Give or take.”

”For ordinary mortals.”

”For anyone with a wallet.”

She settled into the leather seat of the car and looked out through the window at the small clean streets of Inksea rolling past. To a vampire like her, whose eyes is mostly on blood, tens of thousands of different food was indeed a lot...

Stan slid in beside her letting her enjoy the sight...

The driver, a discreetly professional man in a dark suit provided by the airport’s VIP service, pulled smoothly away from the curb without a word.

”I would,” Camilla said slowly, ”like to sample this.”

”That was the plan.”

”A vampire’s palate is not as sensitive as a human’s, cultivator. Our taste for anything that is not blood is generally limited.”

”Then we’ll find out what your exceptions are.”

She almost smiled.

The car moved through Inksea with the quiet, unhurried competence of a professional driver on a familiar route. Stan let his shoulders finally, properly, unclench against the seat. The tension of the past several days had settled somewhere in the muscles of his back, and it was going to take more than a car ride to work it out, but the car ride was a start.

Beside him, Camilla watched the world roll past.

She was very quiet.

The vehicles on either side of them moved in smooth, patient traffic, sedans and small delivery vans and the occasional low sports car easing along the coastal road. The buildings rose on either side of the wider avenues in clean glass-and-concrete columns, catching the afternoon light in long angled reflections. The advertising screens along the sides of the taller structures scrolled through their patient, hypnotic loops of colour and text. Pedestrians moved along the walkways in their ordinary hundreds, going about their ordinary afternoons, walking dogs, carrying shopping, glancing at phones, laughing at friends.

Camilla watched all of it.

Her face did not change.

But her red eyes moved with the slow, cataloguing attention of a woman who had gone to sleep in a world of sects and kingdoms and had woken up in a world of glass towers and traffic lights, and was, in her own private and unhurried way, comparing the two.

’Did humanity truly grow weaker,’ she wondered, ’after Qi departed the world? Or did it simply grow strong along a different axis?’

The kingdoms and sects she remembered had been powerful in their own way. They had commanded mountains. They had reshaped landscapes. They had produced individuals who could level cities with a gesture. And yet, in all of those centuries, they had never produced this, the sheer, patient, distributed miracle of a coastal city on a random weekday afternoon, in which millions of ordinary people who could not lift a boulder had nonetheless collectively built glass towers and paved roads and mechanical carriages that moved without horses and glowing screens that displayed the faces of distant persons on command.

The tools were toys, from the perspective of a Royal Blood.

But there were so many of them. And every ordinary mortal had access to them. At least that’s what she thought...

She filed the thought away, unresolved, and returned her attention to the window.

Stan, glancing sideways at her, caught the small distant absorbed expression on her face and permitted himself a private smile. Introducing someone to the modern world was, apparently, becoming a recurring feature of his life. He was not sure how he felt about that.

...

The car pulled up outside a low, elegant building perched on the cliff edge of Inksea’s coastal promenade.

The restaurant was one Stan had used before, not the loudest or the most extravagant on the island, but the one with the best combination of quiet service, good food, and windows that overlooked the sea. He preferred restaurants where the waiters did not need to be told to leave him alone.

The maître d’ recognized him at the door and did not make a production of it. They were seated at a corner table by the tall glass windows, with the afternoon light coming in over the water in long slanted bars.

Camilla settled into her chair with the same fluid, unhurried grace she seemed to apply to every physical motion. She looked out through the window at the sea. She looked at the small unfamiliar objects on the table, the folded linen, the polished cutlery, the small candle in its glass holder. She picked up the menu.

She read it. For several minutes, she did nothing else.

Stan watched her read with quiet appreciation. She was not startled. She was not overwhelmed. She was simply, methodically, working through the list of dishes with the focused attention of a person trying to build an accurate mental map of a category she had not previously known existed.

”...There are eighty-four dishes on this menu,” she said eventually.

”That’s about standard for a place like this.”

”Eighty-four.”

”Give or take.”

”And this is one restaurant.”

”One of hundreds on this island alone.”

She lowered the menu slightly. Her red eyes met his over the top of the leather binder.

”When my ancestors spoke to me of the era that came after ours, cultivator, they described a world of weakened mortals scraping out existence in the ashes of what had once been our dominion.”

”Uh-huh.”

”They did not mention that the weakened mortals had, in the meantime, developed access to eighty-four distinct dishes per establishment.”

”Ancestors tend to leave that part out.”

Her mouth twitched at the corner. ”So it seems.”

Stan ordered.