Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Eleven weeks after the review notice, the formal cycle came around.

Jin spent those eleven weeks doing almost nothing interesting, which was the point and which he found unexpectedly difficult.

He attended classes and kept his marks in the upper band without straining for the top. He worked his shifts in the intake hall and his shifts with Corrin. He took Glitch’s Tremor Sense from two-minute intervals to five, then eight, then twelve, on Pell’s schedule and never ahead of it. He ran the quarry’s upper galleries for coins and materials and did not once go near the fourth descending route.

He sold to Vann five times, in lots of three to six, and never anything above common grade.

And he documented everything, because he had understood by week two that the review would look at eleven weeks of records and that records were the one thing he could build deliberately.

The audit was a room with a table in it after all.

Three staff, a slate each, and Jin sitting across from them for ninety minutes while they went through his life in categories.

"Academic standing. Upper band, both terms, no failed components." The woman on the left made a mark. "Consistent rather than spectacular."

"Yes."

"Contract stability." The man in the middle pulled up a graph Jin had never seen. "This is unusually clean. Bond resonance variance is lower than most Fourth Class contracts. Do you know why?"

Jin did know why, and could not say it.

"We spend a lot of time together," he said. "He sleeps in my room."

"That’s most students."

"He sleeps on my feet."

The man made a note that Jin very much wanted to read.

They went through the tournament record, then the Rift. They spent eleven minutes on the Rift, and most of it was Marr’s language read back to him.

"Voluntary sensory shutdown," said the woman on the left. "You had your only detection asset degrading and you took it offline mid-emergency and reported the capability loss to your leader unprompted."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because he was going to fail anyway," Jin said, "and I’d rather choose when."

Then the feed records, which took the longest.

They had everything. Every dispensary transaction, every credit band from both postings, every entry in the intake log he had kept since the egg hatched. They put his allocation curve next to Glitch’s intake curve and looked at the place where they crossed twenty-four days out, and then at what he had done about it.

"Your margin has been extremely thin across most of this review period."

"Yes."

"You’ve never missed a required feed."

"No."

"You reduced training loads during the recovery period at cost to your own conditioning marks." The woman scrolled. "You’ve taken every available appraisal shift. Your personal dormitory meal usage dropped by about a third across the same period."

Jin had not known that was recorded anywhere.

"That’s not a criticism," she said. "It’s evidence. Committees like evidence."

The private sales never came up. Three to six common-grade herbs, five times over eleven weeks, sold legally to a licensed dealer who recorded her lots properly, buried inside a city’s ordinary small-lot trade. Nobody in the room had any reason to look for it, and nothing in his academy records pointed at it.

Glitch’s examination was the following afternoon and it took four hours.

It was not Pell. It was three specialists from the Beast Development Centre’s upper floor, the one Jin’s card had never opened, and they had equipment he had never seen.

Glitch behaved for the first ninety minutes and then became a problem, at which point Jin sat on the floor next to the frame and let him put his head in his lap, and the specialists worked around that.

They measured everything.

Skeletal density at eleven points. Muscle cross-section. Tendon insertion geometry, which took an hour by itself. Joint stability under load. Metabolic efficiency across a rest-and-exertion cycle. Nutritional uptake, calculated against his complete feed history. Contract resonance. Harden’s activation threshold and duration. Tremor Sense sensitivity across three substrate types.

They did not find Acid Breath. The examination measured Glitch’s body and tested his declared skills; it did not produce a complete inventory of every ability he could use, and Jin gave them no reason to test for one he had never revealed.

They did not find the Engine, because there was nothing to find.

What they found was a Grey Rock Lizard sitting at the outer edge of his species in almost every direction at once. Glitch remained Rank 1 Novice, 3-Star; all that development had strengthened the foundation inside the stage without carrying him across the 4-Star threshold.

Jin listened to them talk to each other for four hours and learned a great deal about how close he had come.

"Bone density’s at the ninety-eighth percentile."

"For age?"

"For the species. Any age."

"Show me the tendon set."

A pause.

"That’s proportionate."

"That’s the part I don’t like. It’s all proportionate."

Jin kept his hand moving slowly along Glitch’s jaw and did not react to that at all.

He understood the sentence perfectly. A beast that had been pushed too hard developed unevenly, because whatever was being forced outran the structures that had to support it. A beast that had been given something it should not have been given developed unevenly in a different way, and left residue behind.

Glitch had grown the way a healthy animal grows, across every tissue at once, at roughly three times the species’ median developmental rate.

Because none of it was forced out of his real body. The avatar had earned the development in balanced increments, and each full Synchronization had transferred the complete result together into a body Jin kept properly supplied.

"Contamination screen?"

"Clean. No residue, no rejection markers, no inflammatory response anywhere."

"Growth-accelerant panel?"

"Clean."

"Bloodline anomaly indicators?"

"Nothing flagging. It reads as Grey Rock Lizard through the standard panel."

Nothing there was a lie. Every individual number sat inside the natural range for the species. The range was broad, because ranges are broad, and Glitch was living at the top edge of it in eleven categories simultaneously.

At the four-hour mark, the senior specialist stopped, went back three screens, and pulled the skeletal density reading again.

"Run that one more time."

They ran it again.

She looked at the result, then at the original, then had a technician re-seat the frame and run it a third time on a different axis.

Jin sat on the floor with his beast’s head in his lap and watched three qualified people spend eleven minutes on a single measurement.

He could not tell what it meant. It could mean they had found something. It could equally mean that a professional who saw a ninety-eighth-percentile result on an Iron-quality lizard did not believe it after one pass and would not sign her name to it after two.

He kept his hand moving along Glitch’s jaw and said nothing at all.

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