MMORPG: Asterra Online

Mia had peeled off toward the Artisan District that morning, muttering something about finding a Mana Control instructor who wouldn’t laugh at a half-cracked spell fragment. Ember hadn’t argued. Whatever waited at the edge of the coastal flats sounded like exactly the kind of errand that went better with fewer witnesses if it went sideways.

The northern outskirts of Azure Shore traded the harbor’s clean stone pathways for something rougher — packed dirt and sea-bleached driftwood fencing, the salt breeze curdling into something muddier and more mineral the farther Ember walked from the docks. Here, where the town gave way to the coastal flats, the air smelled of brine, crushed samphire, and the faint animal musk of too many creatures kept too close together.

Ember followed a winding dirt path lined with overgrown sea-lavender until he reached a rickety, timber-framed cottage. It wasn’t quiet the way a cottage should be. Something scratched steadily inside a covered hutch by the door. Somewhere behind the building, a low, huffing growl rose and fell like it was pacing. Dried bundles of root-herbs and cured hides hung from the sagged eaves, and threaded between them, half-hidden, were collars — a dozen at least, sized for everything from a house cat to something that would need both of Ember’s arms to hug.

A sign crudely carved with the shape of a taloned paw print hung beside the door frame.

Ember didn’t bother knocking on the warped wooden door. Garrick’s advice at the Hunter’s Lodge had been explicit: if the old bastard doesn’t set something loose on you, he might actually teach you something.

Stepping inside, Ember was hit by a wall of warm, musky air — hay, feathers, and old fur underneath something sharper, medicinal. The single room was a chaos of cages and crates stacked at angles that shouldn’t have held. A three-legged ferret-thing dozed in a nest of shredded cloth. Something with too many eyes watched him from a covered birdcage without blinking. In the corner, a cracked glass tank held a single sluggish mud-newt drifting in murky water, utterly unbothered by the racket around it — proof, if any were needed, that whatever Kael did to calm his animals, it worked on something.

Ember’s first instinct — the same one that made him double-check knots and count arrows before every hunt — itched to start sorting the mess into some kind of order. He killed the impulse fast. Nothing here looked like it wanted to be touched by a stranger.

Behind a cluttered workbench sat an elderly man in a stained leather vest, sleeves rolled to the elbow and both forearms crossed with the pale, thin scars of old bites and claw-marks. His hair was a wild fringe of iron-gray, and his sharp, hawkish eyes were buried behind thick, brass-rimmed lenses.

"Out," the old man growled without looking up from the small, snapping creature he was calmly restraining with one hand. "If you’re here about a mount, save your breath. I don’t sell them, I don’t rent them, and I definitely don’t hand out advice for free."

"Garrick sent me, Master Kael," Ember said, keeping his voice calm and steady as he stayed near the doorway.

Kael’s head snapped up. "Master? I hung that title up with my License twenty years ago, boy, and good riddance to the paperwork that came with it. Just Kael." He set the snapping creature down in a straw-lined box, gave it a scratch under the chin that made it go still, then looked Ember up and down — bow, travel pack, the careful stance of someone used to standing near things that could hurt him.

"Garrick," he said, some of the growl easing out of his voice. "That old iron-head still thinks a bowstring makes a man qualified for my time." He wiped his hands on a rag. "Fine. Talk fast. I’ve got a fox-kit two doors down who bites strangers on principle, and I’d rather it be you than me."

"I need guidance on wild monster incubation," Ember replied. He pulled the heavy, wool-wrapped bundle from his pack and unrolled the cloth just enough to expose the dull blue, crystalline shell of the Deep Basin Serpent Egg.

The moment the egg met the humid air of the cottage, the temperature around the workbench dropped visibly. Frost crystals traced thin, geometric webs across the wood.

Kael went still. Every animal in the room went still with him — the fox-kit’s ears flattened, the many-eyed thing in the birdcage went silent, even the mud-newt stopped drifting. He reached out slowly, the way Ember had seen hunters reach toward something that hadn’t decided yet whether to bolt, and laid two fingers against the shell.

"A Deep Basin line," he murmured, all the gruffness draining out of him at once. "Still dormant. But it’s listening — feel that? It knows something’s in the room with it." He tilted the egg toward the lamplight, watching the frost patterns shift and resettle as it moved. "Where in the Nine Hells did you find something that still listens?"

"In an abandoned sanctuary beneath the flooded marshland," Ember said. "It was preserved in a mana focus basin."

Kael’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment the performance dropped away entirely — no growl, no theater, just a man doing arithmetic he didn’t like the answer to. "’Deep Basin’ isn’t a bloodline, boy. It’s a burial ground. Whatever’s in there, I can’t tell you it’ll hatch into anything I’ve handled before, or anything I’ve even heard of. Could be an ordinary river serpent that got lucky and slept a long time. Could be something a lot less ordinary than that."

He let out a dry, rattling laugh and leaned back, one boot braced against the workbench leg. "And let me guess. You want to hatch it, name it something heroic, and ride it into your next dungeon."

"I want it to still be alive when it hatches," Ember corrected, deadpan. "Beyond that, I don’t have the first idea what I’m doing."

Kael studied him for three long seconds — the same weighing look Ember had seen the fox-kit give him a minute ago, deciding whether to bite. Finding nothing worth biting, he grunted.

"Good. Means you might listen." He jerked a thumb at the cages behind him. "You city kids come in here wanting a white tiger or some thunderbird, and half of you have never once fed something that could bite back. An egg’s worse. An egg can’t even tell you it’s dying till it’s too late."

"I’ve fed things that bite back," Ember said. "I’ve cooked worse than toad."

That got him the first real look Kael had given him since he’d walked in — not quite approval, but a cousin of it.

"Cute," Kael said, though the corner of his mouth twitched before he turned it back into a scowl. He rummaged beneath the workbench and came up with a rack of small glass vials, each stoppered with wax. "Here’s the trade, and I’m only saying it once. Twenty vials of fresh Slime Fluid — five each, River, Gale, Ironsilt, Loam. You don’t mix them and you don’t cut corners squeezing it out of them, because a slime that’s been mishandled bleeds fluid that’s already gone sour with fear. Won’t do either of us any good."

"Where do I find them?"

"River’s easy. Tidal flats past the—" He stopped, waved a hand like he was swatting the thought away. "No. You’ve walked past a dozen of those without noticing, I’d bet money on it. They pool up where the mud goes soft at low tide." He held up a second finger before Ember could ask about the next. "Gale strain’s flightier. Meadows south of the ridge, wherever the grass moves wrong — chase the wind, not the slime, and you’ll find it." A third finger. "Ironsilt digs into the old quarry cuts west of the boundary road. Don’t go stomping around like a hunter after a mount. They startle, and a startled Ironsilt buries itself somewhere you’ll spend a week digging for it." He held the last finger up and actually paused, like he was picturing it. "Loam’s the one that’ll test you. Buried shallow, deep in the Beginner Forest, under root systems. You won’t see it before you feel it — usually through the sole of your boot."

He was already turning back toward the fox-kit’s box when he added, almost as an afterthought, "One more thing, and don’t get excited about it. Every so often you’ll find one that’s got no color to it at all — not River, not Gale, none of the four. Blank slime, some tamers call it. Doesn’t sit right in any strain I’ve ever cataloged, and the handful of alchemists who’ve asked me to keep an eye out for one have never once told me why they want it." He shrugged, already done with the thought. "You won’t see one. Nobody does. But if you do, don’t touch it bare-handed, and bring it here before you bring it anywhere else."

"Twenty vials," Ember repeated. "Clean, unmixed, no rough handling."

"Now you’re listening." Kael grunted approval. "Do that, and I’ll walk you through incubation properly — not the version Garrick half-remembers from thirty years back."

A familiar UI window opened in Ember’s vision.

[Quest Accepted]

Kael’s Reagents

Objective:

Deliver 20 vials of Slime Fluid to Kael — 5 each from River, Gale, Ironsilt, and Loam strains.

Rewards:

25 EXP

Beast Taming — Guided Training Unlocked

Twenty-five EXP wouldn’t move his level an inch, not at Level 8 against Level 1 slimes. That wasn’t the point. Everything else he’d learned — Archery, Observation, even Trapcraft — had come from someone willing to spend the time on him. This was just the price of admission for one more teacher.

"One more thing," Ember said, before Kael could wave him fully out the door. "Until I’m back — anything I should be doing differently? Garrick just said not to let it sit in the sun."

Kael snorted, crouching to check on the fox-kit. "Garrick knows enough to keep it from cooking. He doesn’t know enough to keep it from starving. Wrap it in something damp, keep it clear of open flame, and don’t feed it anything stronger than ambient mana till you understand what ’balanced’ means — the same way you wouldn’t hand a hatchling raw meat before it’s got teeth. Watch how it pulses. Slow and even, it’s resting. Quick, twice in a row, it’s scared — and a scared creature burns through everything it’s got just to stay scared. Egg or otherwise, doesn’t matter. That part’s the same for all of them." He straightened. "Now go. Door’s behind you, and so is my patience."

"I’ll have your vials by evening," Ember said, wrapping the egg back into its wool padding and stowing it securely.

"Don’t rush the extraction," Kael called after him, already crouched back over the fox-kit’s box. "A slime that dies scared gives you fluid that’s worthless. Same as anything else."

Outside, the salt wind hit him again, sharper now that the cottage’s animal warmth wasn’t clinging to his skin. Twenty vials of Slime Fluid wasn’t a hunt so much as an afternoon’s chore — the kind of thing he could have knocked out blindfolded four months ago. But the walk down to the tidal shallows would at least give him time to work out how to explain to Mia that fixing one problem in his pack had somehow turned into homework.

He ran through what he actually knew as he walked: an egg that fed on raw mana and punished imprecision, a cranky expert who’d only half-agreed to help, and a deadline measured in a shell’s patience rather than his own. Not the cleanest problem he’d ever mapped out, but it followed the same shape as everything else since he’d first stepped off the ferry into Azure Shore — earn the lesson before the reward, one commission at a time.

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