"And now, Lord? What should we do?"
Livina's question echoed in the stable as though the walls were also waiting for my answer.
I didn't have one.
A few meters from us, a mass of webs grew at a constant rate, covering almost all the available space. White opaque structures extended from floor to ceiling, filling the corners, the pillars, every gap that existed. It was methodical. It was deliberate. It was, in many ways, impressive.
But it was also a problem.
"Honestly?"
I paused.
"I have no idea."
✦ ✦ ✦
It had been almost a week since the incident that nearly killed me.
A week since the cocoon had cracked and she had emerged.
Arachne.
She wasn't like her mother. Wasn't like her grandmother. The matriarch was white as ivory — pure, absolute, ancient. The Yokai I had known carried ivory cut through with golden markings, like veins of metal in rare stone. But Arachne was different from both. The white was there, yes, but the markings that cut through it were of an opaque black — deep, without shine, like ink poured over porcelain. I suspected the Mark of Zaridan had left something in her. I didn't know what. I didn't know if it was aesthetic or power.
I remembered the first day I saw her — honestly, I had thought giving her a name would be simple.
It wasn't.
During the days when I could barely get up, while the body refused and the mind insisted, I had been thinking about it. Names of spiders from mythology, of weaving goddesses, of creatures that carried the thread and destiny in their hands. Elise. Anansi. Uttu. Neith. Basne. Ungoliant.
Every time I thought of one, I felt her response through the bond we shared.
It wasn't language. It was something more instinctive — like a musical note that sounds wrong before you can explain why. Elise came and went in silence. Anansi generated something that could only be described as indifference. Ungoliant, despite being the most powerful name of all I had considered, was received with a coldness I hadn't expected.
She didn't want borrowed power.
She wanted something of her own.
When Arachne came to mind — almost as a last resort, almost as a throwaway — the bond changed. It wasn't euphoria. It wasn't celebration. It was something quieter and more definitive, like a door closing in the right place for the first time.
Acceptance.
I didn't fully understand the reason. Perhaps it was phonetic — the sound of the word, the way it opened and closed in the mouth. Perhaps it was something I still had no vocabulary to name. But she had chosen. And I had learned quickly that with her there was no negotiation.
Arachne.
It was her name.
In the days that followed, everything I knew about her up to that point was the following:
When she emerged from the cocoon, there was no malice in her. No gratuitous aggression toward her creator, no destructive instinct. But there was a clear choice — she was only interested in me. With everyone else, hostility was immediate. Livina had learned that in the fastest way possible. Morgana, with more caution, had arrived at the same conclusion.
The bond between us was strange to explain.
It wasn't words. It wasn't telepathy. It was something more primitive — an exchange of feelings, of intentions, of desires. When I wanted something, she seemed to feel it before I said it. When she needed something, I understood without her needing to act. It was like two instruments tuned to the same frequency, capable of recognizing each other's note even in the middle of a storm.
My blood also transferred memories.
On the first day she left my room and explored the grounds alone, she already knew every corridor, every passage, every corner of the kingdom — as though she had lived there her entire life. The blood carried the map. It carried more than that, probably, but I was still learning the limits of what we shared.
After that first day, she advanced to the stable.
And stayed.
In the days that followed, we had contact only twice — when she was hungry. The amount of blood she needed now was much smaller than at the beginning. A fraction of what the cocoon had demanded. But there was one condition that hadn't changed: only mine would do. Morgana had tried once. Arachne hadn't even approached.
I needed to understand what that meant in the long term.
But first, I needed to get up.
Technically, my body was healed. One hundred percent, according to everything I could measure. But there was a tiredness that didn't come from the body — it came from something deeper, as though the bond with Arachne consumed a part of me that ordinary healing didn't know how to repair. Every morning was an effort. Every afternoon, a test of will.
Today was the first time I had come personally to check what she was doing.
And what she had done in the little time she had been free was, at the very least, surprising.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Has she done anything beyond occupying the stable?"
"Not yet."
Livina answered, her eyes fixed on the webs.
"But I don't know how the other creatures are going to deal with her. Arachne doesn't exactly… invite approach."
That was the point.
Everyone here was part of the same territory. The same structure. The same chain. Arachne would need to understand that sooner or later — preferably before some creature made a bad decision and I had a different problem to resolve.
"I'll talk to her. Everyone here is family. She'll learn that. Besides, when the additional stable is ready this one will be exclusively hers."
Livina didn't respond. But her silence had an opinion.
I ignored it.
The castle grew with each evolution, but internal space was still a counted resource. Repeated structures were considered waste — and I normally agreed with that. But building a second stable wasn't waste. It was necessity. With Arachne occupying the first, the other creatures needed space, and I needed mounts available for my soldiers.
Which brought me to the next problem.
Food.
I had the space. I had the structure. But I didn't have the food, and the problem was understanding what was considered quality nourishment for those creatures — after all, this type of information wasn't something that was actively found or sold.
"I'm going to the market with Morgana. I need to account for what we have and do some research."
"Understood."
A short pause.
"Good luck, Lord."
Livina's tone was neutral. But she knew I would have enormous difficulty.
✦ ✦ ✦
The real problem wasn't just knowing what a two-meter-tall spider ate.
The food was only the surface.
What I truly needed was information about training, care — specific, restricted information, the kind that an entire race kept as a structural advantage and that wouldn't leak through carelessness or generosity.
Arachne, I discovered while recovering, was capable of parthenogenesis.
Reproduction without a partner. Alone.
The news was good and bad at the same time. Good because it meant independence — I wouldn't need to open the territory to any external process. Bad because, from what I felt from Arachne through the bond, she herself had a difficult relationship with that method — it wasn't exactly fear, it was something closer to an old weight, like someone who knows the price of something they've never paid, but knows it's too high to ignore. Massive energy expenditure. A period of extreme vulnerability. Inability to feed the offspring during the initial phase. These weren't words she passed to me. They were sensations — exhaustion, exposure, hunger. Her body telling me what her mind hadn't yet decided. Probably that was why Arachne's mother had never used that capacity, even knowing she had it. The risk simply wasn't worth it.
But now I needed Arachne to use it.
And she had agreed.
Which brought us to the question that hadn't left my head since then:
How to manage the offspring to the point where they were capable of fighting?
It was simple to state. It was brutally complex to resolve. And the answer — or at least part of it — was with the Bloodsuckers.
"But how do I extract that information from them?"
Morgana walked at my side as we left the stable heading toward the market.
"You're not the first to try. You won't be the last. Honestly I think only the least influential of that race would open their mouths, but I seriously doubt they know enough to be useful."
She was right.
I knew that.
But I also knew that guarded knowledge, even from the incompetent or low-ranking, is still knowledge — and that every system has flaws. Every castle has a crack. Every secret has someone who knows too much and is worth too little to whoever guards it.
"I'm not looking for the complete method. I'm looking for rumors. Fragments. Points I can connect."
Morgana was silent for a moment.
"Separating truth from the lies they deliberately let leak."
"Exactly."
✦ ✦ ✦
The market in the afternoon was a different creature from the market in the morning.
In the morning, there was urgency — quick transactions, watchful eyes, the tension of those who don't yet know what the day will bring. In the afternoon, the place breathed. The tables were occupied, the voices were louder, and the presence of the Bloodsuckers among the humans was almost casual — as though that coexistence were something natural, built over enough time to seem normal.
It wasn't normal. But it worked.
The vampires of the high castes had an obsessive relationship with the vintage. Clothes from past centuries worn with complete seriousness — structured coats, gloves, fabrics the Oasis had forgotten how to manufacture. Impeccable posture. The nose slightly raised, as though the air around them were of inferior quality and they simply tolerated breathing it out of politeness.
It was their culture. I had nothing against it.
What I found fascinating was that that aesthetic rigidity survived here — in the Oasis, where everything was about armor and protection, where what should matter was the quality of the metal that protected, somehow, they managed to bring their questionable aesthetic, carrying style to where only the monochrome existed. They were an aesthetic anchor in a place without anchors. And there was a practical advantage in that: despite being physically close to humans, they stood out almost instantly. They didn't need to announce themselves. You only had to look.
I approached the counter.
The attendant saw me before I opened my mouth.
"Lord. Can I help you with something?"
"I want information about the Bloodsuckers' mounts."
Brief silence.
The system responded before the attendant.
[ Synchronizing data… 3 records registered in the last 30 days within a 10,000 km radius. ]
Three.
They were few. But they were recent. And the radius distance meant they weren't local rumors — they were pieces of information that had moved, that someone had carried or sold over hundreds of kilometers.
The price appeared in my vision.
I stared at it for a second longer than I should have.
"That's serious."
I paused.
"Can I at least know the content before deciding?"
"Unfortunately not, Lord."
The attendant maintained the neutral tone of someone who repeats the same sentence dozens of times a day.
"Access is restricted to payment. No exceptions."
"Can you at least tell me the level of confidentiality of this information?"
Obtaining restricted information from the market was almost impossible. It had no side — it functioned by the justice of the system, keeping everything in the place it should be, at the agreed value. But the Codex taught that there was a loophole. Not to extract the content, but to refine the territory. With the right questions, it was possible to create criteria — limit the areas, understand the degree of restriction without touching what was protected.
I didn't need to know the what. I needed to know the how much.
The attendant processed for an instant.
"Analyzing… Information classified as restricted method exclusive to the Bloodsucker race."
It was exactly what I needed to hear.
I looked at the numbers.
Then I looked at Morgana.
She looked back with the expression of someone who already knew what I was going to decide — and preferred not to comment.
I breathed deeply.
In the Oasis, expensive information was always one of two things: colossal uselessness sold with the packaging of rarity, or something that someone absolutely didn't want circulating. There was no middle ground. And what was in front of me had the second type written in every number of the price.
The risk was worth the reward.