Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The Mossfall Thicket was the first area the Engine had ever given him, and Jin had not opened it in three months.

[Mossfall Thicket — Tier 1]

[Status: Cleared]

[Recommended: Rank 1, 1-Star]

It was a soft green place with fog in it and a total of four enemy types, none of which had ever been able to hurt Glitch even when Glitch had been a very small lizard with no idea what he was doing.

He walked through it now like a landlord.

Jin sent him to the second grove and did not bother with the enemies, and Glitch cleared them anyway on the way past with a sort of offhand contempt that Jin found funny for about eleven seconds and then stopped watching.

[Resource: Palewood Berry ×6]

He pulled the description before he did anything else, and read all of it, twice.

[Palewood Berry]

[Common restorative. Tier 1.]

[Supports vitality recovery in weakened or convalescent beasts. Mild. Digestible by hatchlings and injured stock.]

[Does not treat underlying developmental conditions, structural damage, or physiological blockage.]

[Effect scales with the recipient’s existing recovery. Provides no benefit to an entity in active decline.]

Jin let that last line sit on the screen.

Provides no benefit to an entity in active decline.

Before the first night’s cycling took hold, it would have done nothing. It would have been a berry given to something that was dying, and the Engine was telling him so in plain language, which he appreciated and which he also noted had taken him asking.

It works because the incubator works. It’s not medicine. It’s food for something that’s already started eating.

He checked the remaining fields for anything that looked like a shortcut and found nothing. No rank, no skill, no acceleration. It was a berry.

In the Engine’s ordinary grey management render, Jin loaded Glitch’s avatar beside the chick and transferred one stored berry into their shared view. Watching them together was strange.

The chick was tiny. Jin had known that in the abstract. Next to an obsidian lizard who could cross eighteen meters in under two seconds it stopped being abstract entirely, and the size difference made something in his chest do a thing he chose not to examine.

Glitch put the berry down about a hand’s width from the chick’s beak.

Then he sat down and waited.

The chick had its head up. It had been managing that consistently since maturation restarted. It looked at the berry with unfocused dark eyes and made an attempt at it, which involved leaning forward roughly three centimeters and then having to stop and rest.

The second attempt got its beak to the berry and it could not do anything with it, because a Palewood Berry was slightly too large for a hatchling that had never eaten anything and had no strength in its neck.

Glitch reached out with one foreclaw and split the berry.

He did it carefully, which was not a word Jin had ever needed for Glitch before. One claw, one motion, and the berry came apart into pieces about the right size, and he pushed one of them forward with the side of the same claw until it was touching the chick’s beak.

Then he sat back.

The chick got it down on the fourth try.

It took, by Jin’s clock, two minutes and ten seconds to eat one berry’s worth of pieces, and it had to stop three times, and twice Glitch nudged a piece back into reach and then withdrew and waited again.

He did not eat any of it.

There were five berries left and a lizard who ate four kilograms a day, and it did not appear to occur to him.

Yeah. All right.

The chick slept afterward. That was all it did for nearly an hour: lay on its side with its chest moving, while Glitch sat in the grey space and Jin ran three complete cycles on the actual incubator and did not look at the screen more than nine or ten times.

At 2314 the chick woke up and tried to stand.

Jin did not notice at first. He was scanning the shell and looked over because Glitch’s attention had sharpened through the bond, and by then it had already got one leg under itself.

The second leg took eleven seconds.

Then it pushed, and its whole body came up off the floor, and it was standing.

It shook. Its legs shook and its head shook and its wings, such as they were, came out slightly for balance and shook as well, and it was not stable at any point in any of it.

Jin counted.

Four seconds. Five. Six.

At seven it went down, and it went down badly, sideways, with its legs still trying.

It did not lose consciousness. That was the difference from every other collapse since the first night. It lay there with its eyes open and its chest heaving and looked, as far as an unfocused hatchling could look, extremely put out.

Beside the desk, the real Glitch lifted his head at the same instant. His eyes moved from Jin’s phone to the incubator, a sharp pulse of attention checking that both versions of the chick were still there.

[Permanent baseline improvement recorded.]

[Entity may now achieve brief unsupported stance following adequate rest.]

[Status: Cannot walk. Cannot engage. Cannot enter instanced areas.]

Jin sat back in the chair.

Somewhere in his files was a line he had deliberately avoided since Sunday:

[Hidden Potential: SS]

It described something that did not exist yet and might never.

Seven seconds of standing existed.

That’s real. That’s the first thing it actually has.

Glitch had not moved. He was still sitting in the grey render space watching the chick be annoyed on the floor, and what came up the bond was not affection and not softness. It was something closer to approval, of the specific kind Glitch reserved for things that kept getting up.

The Engine put a panel up.

[Permanent avatar improvement available for transfer.]

[Limited synchronization — provisional bond.]

[Proceed? Y/N]

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