Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The batch Jin had taken to Kass eleven days earlier was the most boring one he had ever assembled.

Five damaged Iron-Shell plates, all cracked, two of them badly. One forelimb blade, which had a chip in the edge that Jin had not caused and could not hide. Nine mineral fragments of the sort Kass had once told him were barely worth the walk.

[Manifestation Complete — 173 coins]

Kass had tested all of it, which took twenty minutes and which Jin no longer found tedious.

"Four twenty," he had said. "The blade’s chipped so it’s not a blade price, it’s a good-material price. Plates are plates. The fragments are the fragments."

"Fine."

"You could have left the fragments at home."

"I know." Jin had taken the Credits. "It makes the batch look like a batch."

Kass had given him a look that Jin could not entirely read and had not pursued it.

[Personal Savings: 2,180 Credits]

That sale, followed by the forty Credits from Vann’s tiny herb lot, was already reflected in the balance. Now, eleven days later, Jin had returned to Kass’s shop without another batch. He waited until the counter was clear and then asked the question he had been building toward since the earlier transaction.

"Do you know anyone who sells cheap eggs?"

Kass did not laugh, which Jin appreciated. He leaned back against the bench and folded his arms.

"Define cheap."

"Under five thousand. Legal."

"There is no such thing as a cheap egg that’s also a good egg," Kass said. "You know that, right? You’re a nutrition student. You know what an incubator costs to run."

"I know."

"Under five thousand means one of three things. It’s stolen, in which case you go to prison and I lose my licence for having pointed you at it. It’s unregistered wild stock, which is a coin flip on whether the thing that hatches decides you’re food." He held up a third finger. "Or it’s clearance."

"Clearance."

"Every licensed hatchery has a back room." Kass reached under the counter for a slate. "Eggs that stalled, eggs that got dropped, eggs from a bad clutch. Incubation costs money every single day and at some point the accountant looks at an egg that’s forty days overdue and says stop."

"And they sell them?"

"As-is. No viability guarantee, no refund, no support. If it dies in your hands that’s your problem, and most of them die in somebody’s hands." Kass wrote a name and an address on a chit. "Verrow’s, third district. They’re straight. Brannoch runs it and she won’t sell you a story."

Jin took the chit.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you spent four months learning to grade damaged goods," said Kass, "and clearance is a room full of damaged goods. You’ll either find nothing, which is the likely answer, or you’ll find something everyone else wrote off. That’s the only edge anyone gets in that room."

Verrow’s main floor was bright and busy and smelled faintly of warm mineral, with incubation banks along two walls and a family arguing amiably in front of a Bronze-quality display case.

The clearance section was through a door at the back and it was nothing like that.

It was cooler. Quieter. Eleven units along one wall, each with a card slotted above it, and a countertop with grading equipment on it that had clearly been used that morning. No display lighting. No signage other than a printed notice about as-is sales that took up half a page.

A technician let him in, told him not to open any unit, and went back to her work.

Jin started at the left and went along the row with Data Appraisal running.

It was educational in the worst way.

The first was a Stonecrest Fowl egg, forty-two days overdue.

[Vitality core: collapsed]

[Embryonic response: none]

[Assessment: non-viable]

Dead, and had been for some time, and was still on the shelf because clearance stock got cleared in batches and nobody had done the batch.

The second was a Bronze-quality burrower with an impact fracture that had gone through the membrane. Alive, technically. Actively septic.

The fourth had a developmental deformity that Jin looked at for a long time. The embryo was well past halfway and it had grown two spinal branches instead of one, and the readings said it was still developing, and it was going to keep developing until it could not.

This is why the room is quiet.

He went along all eleven and found nine that Appraisal confirmed as exactly what the card said. Not a single one was a hidden treasure. That was the thing that struck him hardest. He had come in half-expecting the room to be full of things people had been too lazy to check, and instead he found a room full of eggs that had been checked carefully by professionals who had reached the correct conclusion.

They’re not stupid. They’re not overlooking anything. They graded these properly and the answer was no.

The tenth was a Dust Fennec egg that was perfectly healthy and had simply come from a clutch too large for the hatchery’s current contracts. The card listed it at ninety thousand Credits, which was heavily discounted for a Bronze-quality tracker and still more than forty times what Jin had.

He stood in front of it for about a minute, then made himself walk away. A Dust Fennec was a fine beast, but it was not what he needed, and ninety thousand Credits he did not have was not made better by wanting it.

The eleventh unit was at the end of the row and the card was written in smaller handwriting, as though whoever filled it in had needed the space.

[ASHWING SPARROW — Iron quality]

[Status: 61 days overdue. Vitality low and declining. Incubation continued past standard review at technician discretion.]

[No viability guarantee. As-is.]

[Clearance asking price: 10,000 Cr]

The egg was small and pale grey, roughly the size of two fists, with a faint darker mottling toward the narrow end.

A healthy Ashwing Sparrow egg usually sold for somewhere between seventy and eighty thousand Credits. Ten thousand was what Verrow’s wanted for legal ownership and the small chance that its own assessment was wrong.

Jin ran the standard read and got exactly what the card said.

[Vitality: 11% — declining]

[Developmental stage: incomplete]

[Hatching probability (standard incubation): negligible]

Sixty-one days.

He almost moved on. That was the honest part, and he thought about it afterward more than once. He had one hand off the frame and had already decided that eleven percent and falling was a different word for finished.

Then he ran the deeper structural read, because he had spent three months being told by a man in a basement that a talent tells you what a thing is and the job is knowing what it will be.

It took nine seconds.

[Organ development: complete]

[Skeletal structure: complete]

[Circulatory formation: complete]

[Neural response: present, weak]

[Terminal maturation: NOT INITIATED]

Jin read it twice.

Every one of the other ten eggs had failed somewhere in the middle. Collapsed core. Fractured membrane. Malformed structure. Systems that had started building and had built the wrong thing or had stopped building at all.

This one had built everything.

It had assembled an entire functioning sparrow, down to the neural response, and then it had simply not started the last step.

It hasn’t collapsed. It’s stalled.

He stood in a cold quiet room at the end of a row of dead things and looked at an egg that was dying for a completely different reason than everything else on the shelf.

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