The robot processed my question with that specific pause of systems that cross multiple databases before responding.

  "There is an active reward for information on Jamine Bloodline. Calculating value…"

  Pause.

  "Ten large Nectar Stones."

  I almost lost my balance.

  Ten large stones. One large stone was equivalent to ten medium ones — and a medium one was what I had extracted from the Wendigo Alpha. The entire reward represented more resources than everything I had accumulated since the summoning.

  Whoever had placed that value had power. The kind of power that turns Nectar into a political tool without blinking.

  "Who would pay that much for someone who is logically already dead…"

  For me there was no ambiguity. If Jamine were alive, she would have already made herself known. I didn't know the Bloodline name — but I had known her sister, and her sister had been a vampire with the bearing of someone who had never needed to prove anything to anyone. That kind of posture didn't come from nothing. It came from generations of accumulated power. Someone from that family would have known the market's value from day one. Contact is power. Information is survival. With half of what that name probably represented, building the market would have been the first thing on the list — before walls, before workers, before anything else.

  Her silence could only mean one thing.

  So why a reward of that size? Whoever had placed that value probably already knew she was dead — any Lord with enough resources for ten large stones had access to enough information to reach that conclusion. A confirmation reward would be a tenth of that value. A hundredth.

  Ten large stones didn't buy confirmation.

  They bought location.

  The ring.

  My stomach went cold.

  Perhaps the interest wasn't in her. Perhaps it never had been. If the ring was valuable enough for an anonymous woman to send an epic egg as a signal of political alignment, it was valuable enough for another party to place ten large stones to track whoever had it.

  The reward wasn't for information about Jamine.

  It was for me.

  I breathed slowly.

  "Is it possible to know who placed the reward request?"

  "No. However, upon responding, you will be required to provide your approximate location."

  Location. Indirect tracking. Clean, efficient, designed to look like bureaucracy while functioning as a trap.

  Ten large stones were tempting in the way only things that can kill you are tempting — with that specific quality of an offer too good to be merely an offer.

  "I understand."

  I traded the four small stones for the four pieces of information within the twenty-kilometer radius and left the market immediately.

  "I almost sold my head for gold…"

  It stung to think that much of what had cost blood the previous night had turned into data. But when I opened the purchased records, the regret disappeared.

  ?

  A herd of Crukoton was migrating toward my territory.

  Fleeing.

  From at least four Urskra.

  My heart sank in a way different from fear — the weight of someone who recognizes that a large problem has arrived wrapped in opportunity, and that the difference between the two depended entirely on how the next few hours were managed.

  Crukoton were excellent prey — abundant meat, domesticable, farm potential in the medium term. But nobody was competing for them. The reason was simple: nobody wanted to be between them and what was chasing them.

  Urskra.

  I had read about them in the Compendium, memorizing every detail with the attention I dedicate to anything that can kill me. A fusion of bear and hippopotamus in general structure — but larger than any representation of either that I knew. Massive body, thick enough fat layer to function as natural armor, strength that made wooden walls irrelevant. Omnivores by necessity, carnivores by preference. Four of them together could destroy an initial kingdom without coordination, simply by combined weight.

  And I couldn't even call myself a kingdom yet.

  "The report is from yesterday…" — I murmured, checking the information's timestamp.

  That explained the silence of the previous night. It wasn't luck — it was cascading displacement. Everything that inhabited the Urskra's range had fled ahead of them, and the vacuum I had interpreted as relief was actually the shadow of what was coming behind.

  "They'll be here tonight."

  If they continued the hunt, they would pass through. But if they were satiated upon arrival — empty territory, no established threat, with enough space to accommodate four animals of that size — they might simply occupy it. Unlike the Wendigos, they wouldn't need to claim anything. Simply existing was enough to make the territory uninhabitable for anything else.

  I didn't have the power to face them directly.

  Not with Morgana. Not with the towers. Not with the palisade, which for creatures of that size was a decorative obstacle.

  But Urskra had a classification that didn't match their size — C?, only one level above the Wendigo Alpha that had nearly killed me. To anyone who only looked at the numbers, it seemed like a cataloguing error.

  It wasn't.

  There was a reason. And it was exactly where my only advantage resided.

  "Zeus. Bring all workers inside the castle."

  "Order confirmed."

  "And build seventeen shovels."

  Morgana frowned.

  "What are you thinking of doing, Lord?"

  I began walking toward the outer perimeter. Time was already against me — hours, not days.

  "You'll understand on the way."

  I reached the front of the palisade and looked at the ground. Relatively soft earth, good natural drainage — the kind of composition that yields with consistent effort, not brute force.

  Perfect.

  "We're going to dig."

  ?

  The logic was simple, but depended on a premise most Lords would never consider: that there were creatures in the Oasis the system classified low not for what they were, but for what they couldn't do.

  Urskra were tanks. Strength, mass, resistance — numbers that would send any reasonable Lord fleeing before considering combat. But absolute strength had a cost that physics didn't allow to be ignored: miserable mobility. The more mass, the less agility. The denser the body, the less capacity for route correction in motion. And protective fat that made skin impenetrable also made the animal too slow to compensate for unexpected terrain.

  Intelligent creatures tested the ground before advancing.

  Urskra were not intelligent.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  They were powerful — and in the Oasis, sufficient power had eliminated the need for intelligence long enough for intelligence to stop developing. It was exactly that pattern the system classified as C?. Not for the damage they caused, but for the predictability that made them manageable for any Lord willing to think before fighting.

  Morgana and I dug for hours.

  The workers couldn't help outside the perimeter — it was a limitation of the Oasis, not of them. But the trench didn't need to be far. Seventeen shovels in rotation churned the ground in the growing darkness of an afternoon that had no time to wait.

  Seven meters deep. Wide enough to absorb the momentum of something running without reducing speed. Edges with a calculated incline so that the impact of the weight would compact the wall instead of creating support for climbing.

  I had planned for eight meters. We stopped at seven for lack of time.

  "It'll have to be enough."

  We covered the opening with thin branches and loose earth — enough to fool something that didn't test the ground before putting its full weight on it. We retreated to the palisade. And waited.

  ?

  It was already night when we climbed to the parapet.

  On the horizon, four silhouettes advanced with the slowness of things that had never needed to hurry. Even at a distance, they conveyed the specific sensation of mass in motion — not speed, but inevitability.

  When the moon reached them, I finally saw clearly.

  The Compendium's illustrations couldn't convey the magnitude of those creatures. On all fours, two of them nearly reached the top of the palisade. Broad, thick bodies, covered by the fat layer that turned tower bolts into an exercise in futility — against those, they would be toothpicks against stone.

  "They're more frightening up close…" — Morgana murmured.

  "They are."

  I observed the group. Two large males at the front — the ones that would advance first, drawn to the Lord as an energy source. A smaller female behind, with a posture different from the males, more cautious, eyes on the two large ones before moving. A cub at her side.

  "Two males. One female. One cub…" — I murmured. — "Now it makes sense that they're together."

  Family. Which changed the calculation in ways I needed to map quickly.

  "Why aren't they classified as a high-level threat?" — Morgana asked. — "By size and apparent strength, they would easily be B+."

  I smiled.

  "Because they're stupid, Morgana. Very stupid."

  Before she could ask more, the two males advanced — without caution, without testing the terrain, they simply charged toward the palisade with the confidence of something that had never encountered an obstacle that hadn't yielded to weight.

  The towers fired. The bolts found flesh and ricocheted.

  "Lucky me." — I breathed deeply.

  Less than five meters from the wall —

  CRACK.

  The sound of the earth giving way echoed through the night before the impact. The ground disappeared beneath both colossi simultaneously — as though the soil had decided it would no longer support them. They plummeted. The impact was brutal enough to make the earth tremble beneath my feet on the parapet.

  Silence for two seconds.

  Then the roars.

  "Unfortunately I couldn't dig deeper…" — I murmured. — "But it's enough."

  The head of the largest one nearly reached the edge. Seven meters deep and his head came close to the surface — which said more about the creature's actual size than any description in the Compendium had managed to convey.

  They tried to climb. Their paws found loose earth that yielded under weight instead of offering support. Each attempt to ascend compacted the walls in a way that reduced the available friction for the next attempt. The more they struggled, the more the trench worked against them.

  It was the weakness of being a heavy titan. Strength that moved mountains on stable ground became an instrument of imprisonment on ground that didn't cooperate.

  The female stopped at a safe distance from the trench. She observed. A low rumble rose from the pit — the males, asking or ordering, I couldn't distinguish. She responded with a different sound, higher-pitched.

  She was calculating.

  Smarter than the males — enough not to have run when they ran, enough to recognize the trap they hadn't. But with a cub at her side that made any calculation more complicated.

  "Now it's attrition." — I said quietly. — "Let's see if maternal instinct is stronger than pride."

  She circled the trench for minutes. Snarled. Scratched the earth at the edge. But didn't get too close — the cub's weight in the calculation was visible in every hesitation.

  The hours passed.

  The males roared, struggled, tired. The cub began to whimper at the frequency of something that didn't understand what was happening and expressed it in the only available way.

  When the first ray of sunlight appeared on the horizon, the female let out a last roar — long, directed at the pit — and disappeared into the forest with the cub.

  Silence.

  Only two giants breathing heavily at the bottom of a trench, with the cadence of things that still hadn't accepted the situation but were beginning to feel its weight.

  ?

  "Morgana, can you sense her presence?"

  She closed her eyes for a moment. "No. She moved away."

  "Good."

  I looked at the pit. At the two colossi that had arrived as an unstoppable force and were now breathing heavily at the bottom of a trench dug by a healer, fifteen workers, and myself — with nothing but ordinary shovels and borrowed time.

  There was an irony in that which I preferred not to elaborate on aloud.

  "As long as the male and probably the older cub are trapped here, no other predator will dare enter this radius. The female won't completely abandon the area — not with the two of them here."

  Territory temporarily protected by prisoners. It wasn't what I had planned when I woke up yesterday, but the Oasis rarely delivered what I planned.

  "Zeus, what is the current probability of taming?"

  [ Domestication probability: 0%. ]

  I smiled.

  Zero was only the initial state — the number the system registered before any variable was introduced. In the Oasis, taming a creature meant breaking the will without breaking the animal. Extremely rare. Extremely difficult. Most Lords didn't even try because the cost of failure was high and the timeline was long.

  But I had three variables that most wouldn't have simultaneously.

  They were trapped — with no possibility of escape, no territory to defend, no pack hierarchy to sustain the resistance. They were stupid — without the capacity to build a narrative of resistance that intelligent creatures developed during prolonged confinement. And they had basic needs that confinement made my responsibility to satisfy or deny: hunger, thirst, pain, sleep.

  Intelligent creatures resisted with purpose.

  Instinctive creatures yielded when the instinct had nowhere to go.

  "Morgana, watch the territory and the two that stayed outside. Any change in behavior, wake me. I'm going to rest for five hours."

  "Yes, my Lord."

  Before I left, Morgana did something she had never done before.

  She knelt.

  It was the first time — not the head tilt I had learned to recognize as her standard gesture, but a full kneel, with the weight of deliberate choice that separated one gesture from the other.

  I stood still for a second, not knowing what to do with that.

  "You don't need to do that…" — I said, and it came out with a slightly wrong tone, like someone who knew what they wanted to say but hadn't rehearsed the line. — "Just tell me you understood. It's fine."

  She hesitated. Rose with the expression of someone who had miscalculated the reaction and was still processing the result. She inclined her head in the gesture I knew.

  I went inside before the silence became longer than I knew how to manage.

  ?

  Zeus's voice pulled me from sleep.

  [ Castle expansion complete. ]

  I got up and went outside immediately.

  I stood in the doorway for a few seconds.

  The castle had doubled. The old internal tower was now part of the main structure — fused to the walls, with integrated attack capability instead of separate. More internal construction space. More structural slots available.

  I opened the map.

  The territory's radius had doubled. Nearly two kilometers to the edge. And there, at the boundary —

  Two red dots.

  "There you are."

  The female. The cub. She hadn't left — she had retreated to the edge of the radius and stopped there, exactly where she could still sense the males without exposing herself. Waiting with the patience of something that hadn't learned to give up.

  I stared at the two dots for longer than necessary.

  There was something in that — not sentimental, but functional. She had calculated the minimum safe distance for the cub and stopped exactly there. Not farther, not closer. Loyalty with precision. The kind of thing I had seen in people and rarely in animals.

  "Unfortunately I need them to survive." — I said quietly, to no one in particular.

  "Are you alright, my Lord?" — Morgana asked.

  I hadn't even noticed she was beside me.

  "Nothing. Did anything happen while I slept?"

  "No. Only the female's laments, from time to time."

  I sighed.

  "If I could capture her and the cub without hurting either of them, I would. Together we would be unstoppable. But I won't risk something reckless while I'm still consolidating the territory."

  I returned to the system.

  "Zeus, do I have the materials for the barracks?" "Yes, my Lord." "Begin construction."

  [ Construction initiated. Estimated time: 9 hours. ]

  While the barracks rose, I went to the stable.

  Small — four stalls, one occupied by the egg that still hadn't revealed what it contained. At the back, a floating screen with the management interface. I touched it.

  Among the available options:

  Beast Tamer — Requires Worker + 100 Wood.

  To tame a creature, the system required over eighty percent submission — a number that represented not just the breaking of physical resistance, but the reconfiguration of behavioral patterns. With a beast tamer, the rate of progress increased consistently through controlled exposure, response conditioning, and basic needs management.

  Losing a worker and a hundred wood was a real cost. But I had fifteen workers and production running at full capacity — and what I would gain in return was the difference between trying to tame with basic tools and trying with a tool specifically designed for it.

  The investment was worth it.

  "Zeus, train a beast tamer."

  With the tamer ready I allowed myself to build more houses for new workers and reorganized the territory. The increased radius allowed me to begin raising a second palisade around the cave — the depot there was vulnerable, and losing it would be catastrophic. Connecting everything to the castle would cost two full days. Time I didn't have.

  "Strengthen the area around the cave first. Then expand the rest."

  ?

  I returned to the pit in the late afternoon.

  The two Urskra were breathing differently from when I had left. Less energy in their movements — still resisting, but with the cadence of something that had begun to feel the accumulated cost of hours without water, without food, without stable ground beneath the weight. The fury was still there. But there was something beneath it now.

  Despair has a different texture from rage.

  The tamer circled the edge of the trench with mechanical rhythm. Whip. Pause. Whip. The sound descended to them and rose back as a roar that was losing volume with every hour.

  [ Domestication probability: 2%. ]

  I watched.

  [ Domestication probability: 3%. ]

  The number climbed slowly — the way numbers climb when the process is correct but the time is long. There was no shortcut for this. No force or resource that could compress what needed hours into minutes.

  It was the kind of thing most Lords would abandon.

  [ Domestication probability: 4%. ]

  I sat on the edge of the palisade and kept watching.

  Four percent.

  At some point between zero and eighty, they would stop being the problem and start being the solution. I didn't know exactly when — the system offered no projection, only current state. But I knew the number was going in the right direction.

  The Oasis rewarded brute force.

  But those who survived were the ones patient enough to let the number climb.