Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The academy work board had eleven listings for Fifth Class students and nine of them involved lifting.

Jin applied for the two that did not.

[POSTING: Resource Intake — Sorting & Preliminary Appraisal]

[Requirement: appraisal-class talent, C-Rank or above]

[Compensation: feed credit, banded by hours]

[POSTING: Nutritional Planning Assistant — supervised]

[Requirement: appraisal-class or analysis talent]

[Compensation: feed credit, banded by hours]

He got both, which he suspected had less to do with his tournament record than with the fact that most students with an appraisal talent regarded these postings as an admission of failure.

The intake hall was in the basement of the Beast Development Centre, and it smelled like a root cellar that had been left to think about its choices.

Resource Officer Orsill was a broad, unhurried man in his fifties who handed Jin a pair of gloves, a grading card, and a crate, and said, "Sort that."

"Into what?"

"Read the card."

The card had eleven grades on it, and Jin assumed for about the first hour that his talent would make the card unnecessary.

It did not.

[Common Ironroot Nodule]

[Condition: fair]

[Estimated potency: 61% baseline]

That was what Data Appraisal gave him. It was genuinely useful, and it answered approximately half of the actual question.

Meridian’s grading standards did not run on potency alone. They ran on potency, moisture content, storage age, visible fungal presence, root integrity, and whether the batch had been packed against something that would leach into it. Each factor had its own band on the card, written by people who had spent years watching these materials rot in specific ways.

He got things wrong for the entire first shift.

"That’s a C-Four," Orsill said on his third correction of the afternoon.

"Potency reads at sixty-one percent. That’s the C-Three band."

"Potency reads sixty-one percent today. Look at the cut end."

Jin looked at the cut end.

"It’s gone soft."

"It’s gone soft, which means it’ll read fifty in a week and forty by the time anybody feeds it to anything. We grade what a buyer gets, not what you’re holding." Orsill dropped it into the C-Four crate. "Your talent tells you what a thing is. It doesn’t tell you what it’ll be on Thursday. That’s the job."

Jin found that annoying, and then found that he had written it down.

He got better over four shifts.

Not through the Engine. Through handling six hundred nodules and learning what a soft cut end felt like through a glove.

The error he caught was on his ninth intake shift, and it was small.

A crate had come in labelled as low-grade greyleaf, which went into general herbivore feed preparation in bulk. Jin ran a sample and got a reading he did not expect, ran three more, and then sat back on his heels.

It was greyleaf.

Most of it was greyleaf.

Approximately a fifth of the crate was a similar-looking marsh species with an almost identical leaf shape. It was harmless to most beasts and mildly toxic to anything with an avian metabolism, and the general feed-prep line served four registered birds.

He flagged the crate and took it to Orsill, who checked it himself, checked the supplier tag, and made a face.

"Same farm. They cut both and the pickers aren’t graders." He wrote something. "Good catch."

"Does this happen a lot?"

"Twice a year, maybe. That’s why you’re sorting instead of a machine." Orsill handed the crate back. "Re-sort the whole thing, and don’t let it go to your head. You found it because you ran four samples instead of one, which is what the procedure says to do, and most students run one."

[Compensation: 340 feed credits]

Modest. Real. About four days of Glitch’s intake.

The nutritional planning work was quieter and taught him something worse.

He assisted a staff nutritionist named Corrin, and the assisting was genuine. He compiled intake histories, ran condition analyses, and drafted recommendations that Corrin then rewrote in front of him with a stylus while explaining why.

The beasts came through in a steady stream.

A Bronze-quality hound with a tendon strain, needing intake reduced during rest and specific support increased. A Silver-quality raptor going into a heavy training block, needing the opposite. An Iron-quality burrower whose owner had been overfeeding it out of affection for two months.

They were all different, and they were all comprehensible.

That was the thing Jin had not expected to find upsetting.

Every one of these animals changed in stages. A beast grew, plateaued, held, and grew again. The plateaus were long, and the growth phases were predictable enough that Corrin could sketch a twelve-week plan and be roughly right about week eleven.

"You can forecast these," Jin said on his fourth shift with her.

"Of course. That’s the whole profession."

"What if one didn’t plateau?"

Corrin looked up. "Then something’s wrong. Either it’s being pushed, or it’s sick, or somebody’s using something they shouldn’t." She went back to the slate. "Or it’s not the species you think it is, which happens more than you’d like with unregistered stock."

"And if all the markers are clean?"

"Then it’s exceptional, and I’d want it in front of a specialist." She glanced at him. "Why, is yours doing that?"

"He eats a lot," Jin said.

"They all eat a lot," Corrin said, and moved on.

By the end of his thirteenth shift across the two postings, spread over three weeks, Jin sat down and did the arithmetic again.

The feed credit from both jobs, at every hour he could physically take without damaging his academic standing, covered about seventy percent of the gap between his allocation and Glitch’s projected intake.

Seventy percent was better than nothing.

It was still a curve going one way and a line going the other.

It supplements. It doesn’t solve.

Which brought him back to a function he had used exactly once and then deliberately put away.

[REALITY MANIFESTATION]

[Converts an owned digital resource into genuine physical material.]

[Requirement: resource must exist in avatar inventory.]

[Cost: Engine Coins, scaled by resource grade.]

[Beginner Herb — Manifestation Cost: 12 coins]

[Current Coin Balance: 914]

He had manifested one Beginner Herb when the function first unlocked, mostly to prove that the impossible button actually did what it claimed.

Twelve coins had become one real green sprig on his desk.

He had appraised it, let Glitch have a small piece, and then done the arithmetic. Using coins to manifest common herbs as beast feed was terrible economics. Glitch needed protein, minerals, mana, and a balanced daily intake, not an expensive pile of magical weeds.

The provenance problem had been worse.

Reality Manifestation created an object. It did not create a farm, supplier record, harvest date, batch number, or believable history for where that object had come from.

So Jin had shelved the function.

At the time, he had not known what a Beginner Herb was actually worth, who bought materials like it, how buyers graded them, or what details would make an ordinary transaction suspicious.

Three weeks in a basement with Orsill had answered most of those questions.

Twelve coins, he thought. Two quarry runs is about eighty coins on a good night.

He opened his inventory and scrolled past everything that would have been a genuinely stupid idea—the mineral clusters, the mantis material, the two things he could not identify—and stopped on the most boring entry he owned.

[Beginner Herb ×47]

[Common grade. No restrictions. Widely cultivated.]

Common enough that Meridian’s own intake hall took them in crates.

That mattered.

One mysterious rare material was memorable. A common cultivated herb was something people moved by the crate.

He selected the Beginner Herb and opened the manifestation prompt.

Then he sat there with his thumb over it for a while, because knowing what the herb was worth had finally turned Reality Manifestation into a different question.

The Engine could turn coins into something real.

Jin still had no idea whether the exchange rate favored him.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!