This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

After days of measuring and recording—of numbered bees and patient readings and a notebook swollen thick with data—Elias finally reached a conclusion.

The higher-ranked flowers, for all their splendor, were not the answer.

It seemed counterintuitive at first. The Commander-rank blooms gave off life essence that was denser, purer, and far more plentiful than anything the common flowers could manage—and yet the bees simply couldn’t handle it. The energy was too rich, too concentrated, too much for their small and humble bodies to take in cleanly. Rather than being nourished by it, they were overwhelmed. And, surprising as it was, they knew it: left to their own instincts, the bees were drawn far more readily to the lower-ranked flowers than the grand ones.

With a little thought, it made perfect sense. Bigger didn’t mean better. The bees were lowly creatures, Common-ranked themselves—and the finest, densest life essence in the world meant nothing if they couldn’t actually absorb it. A feast was no good to someone who could only manage a few small bites.

And now, at last, his data could tell him exactly which bites the bees liked best.

Of the ten Common-rank flowers, three drew the strongest response by a clear margin—the colony taking to them with an ease and eagerness the others never quite matched. Of the five Elite blooms, two rose to rival those three. And of the precious Commander-rank flowers, the costliest of the lot, not a single one earned a high affinity at all. The grandest, most expensive specimens he owned were, for his purposes, very nearly the most useless.

Five flowers, then. Three Common, two Elite. That was his answer, measured and proven.

He had just settled on it—was reaching, in fact, to order more of the chosen five—when something appeared in his mind.

A wheel.

It surfaced unbidden, turning gently in his thoughts: a wheel of fortune, bright and strange, and the instant it appeared he understood why. He had consolidated new knowledge. Real, hard-won understanding—of which flowers best suited the Amberwing Bee as a species—earned through his own patient effort. This was the talent’s doing. This was a reward.

The wheel was divided into three colors. White claimed the overwhelming majority of it, a broad sweep of perhaps eighty percent. Green took a slimmer slice, around nineteen. And a single thin sliver of blue made up the last one percent, so narrow it was almost easy to miss.

Then, without his bidding, the wheel began to spin.

It whirled, colors blurring together, slowing by degrees—and at last clicked to a stop.

White.

As the wheel faded from his mind, the knowledge of what he’d won settled in its place. And a heartbeat later, he felt it: a week’s worth of meditation experience, delivered all at once. Spiritual energy stirred and gathered, flowing inward to merge with his Beast Taming Space, consolidating, settling—and his Space, ever so slightly, grew. The needle of his cultivation ticked forward.

Common Rank 2.

Elias blinked, genuinely caught off guard, then slowly broke into a smile as understanding dawned. So this was the reward the talent had spoken of—the prize for completing knowledge through questioning and his own effort. He’d wondered, vaguely, what form it might take. Now he knew: a turn of the wheel, and a gift drawn from it.

And, if he was honest with himself, it was a gift he sorely needed.

Because the truth was that Elias had been—there was no kinder word for it—rather neglectful of his own cultivation. He meditated each morning, yes, out of lifelong habit, the way he always had. But his focus, his real attention, lived entirely in his research. Bees and flowers and evolution paths filled his every waking thought; the slow, dull work of raising his own rank had quietly fallen by the wayside. A free week of progress, handed to him for doing the very thing he loved most, was almost embarrassingly welcome.

It wasn’t world-shaking. A single rank, a small nudge forward. But it was genuinely helpful, and it had cost him nothing but curiosity, and Elias found himself thoroughly pleased with it.

“Huh,” he said aloud, to no one. “I’ll have to remember to actually meditate properly now.” He almost certainly would not. But the thought was nice.

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There was more good news, too, gathered amid all that data on flowers and affinities.

Days earlier, he’d turned a question toward the third step—and its requirement, like the first, came back as skills. But not in the way he’d assumed. This step had nothing to do with raising the skills the bees already possessed. Instead, it called for them to gain two entirely new skills.

Which two, the talent wouldn’t tell him; it lay beyond what a single yes-or-no could pin down, and he hadn’t yet narrowed it. But further questioning did reveal something far more useful. The new skills would emerge on their own—naturally, inevitably—so long as the bees kept interacting with the life-attribute flowers. And the bees with the highest affinity would develop them fastest, their stronger resonance both raising the odds and shortening the road.

It meant the third step was, in a sense, already underway. The very flowers he’d planted for the second step were quietly driving the third as well.

And he could see the proof of it, faint as it was.

When he analyzed the bees that had met the first step—his marked standouts, the ones most steeped in the flowers—he found something new inside them. Minuscule traces of life-attribute spiritual energy, so faint as to be all but undetectable. Invisible to the naked eye, impossible to feel by hand; only through the laboratory’s equipment could he confirm it at all. But it was there. Tiny seeds of the Life attribute, already taking root in creatures that had never carried so much as a spark of it before.

The evolution had begun. Slowly, quietly, flower by flower—but it had begun.

So once the new flowers had been delivered and carefully planted, Elias made a decision he’d been putting off for too long.

He went home.

It had been three weeks since he’d last seen his family—the longest stretch apart in his entire second life. He’d called them often, more often than was probably reasonable, but it wasn’t the same. He missed them. The noise of them, the warmth of them, the simple presence of them in the next room.

And, he could admit with a small private smile, he was starting to badly miss his father’s cooking.

The apartment was empty when he arrived.

He wasn’t surprised. His father was surely still out at work, tending to the district’s endless need for a good healer, and his mother and Kyle were just as surely off in the outskirts somewhere, hunting demonic beasts and foraging for materials in the way they loved best.

But an empty house didn’t stop him. If anything, it gave him an idea.

Elias rolled up his sleeves, went to the kitchen, and began to cook.

He’d always enjoyed it, and he was good at it—one of only two people in the household who could be trusted near a stove, the other being his dad. Mom and Kyle, by contrast, possessed a rare and terrible talent: the ability to perform genuine alchemy upon perfectly innocent ingredients, transmuting them reliably into ash and stone. It was safest for everyone that they stayed firmly on the eating side of any meal.

The smell of a proper home-cooked dinner soon filled the apartment.

He was halfway through when the front door opened.

His dad stepped in—and stopped short, nose lifting, an expression of dawning recognition crossing his young face. He didn’t need to see who was at the stove. The simple fact that the kitchen was producing food rather than catastrophe told him everything.

“Elias,” he said warmly, already smiling. “You’re home.”

Then he crossed the room and pulled his son into a tight, warm hug, and from her tank Amia drifted close to the glass, blowing a slow, gentle stream of welcoming bubbles.

They ate together, just the two of them, and afterward sat and talked.

Nothing important. Nothing grand. The little ordinary things—how the district had been, how the bees were coming along, some bit of harmless gossip about a neighbor, the food in front of them. The kind of small, unhurried conversation that filled no purpose except the company itself.

And Elias, sitting there in the warm lamplight with his father across the table and Amia bubbling contentedly nearby, was quietly struck by how much he had missed exactly this. Not anything dramatic. Just—this. The simple, steady comfort of being home among people who loved him.

He hadn’t known how to miss something so plain until he’d gone without it.

The next day, to his great delight, his mother and Kyle came home.

They returned from the outskirts dusty, windblown, and grinning, and the moment they spotted him the apartment erupted all over again. Kyle had him in a headlock before he’d managed more than a word, loudly demanding three weeks’ worth of updates at once. Selena ruffled his hair hard enough to undo it entirely, looking him over with fierce, satisfied approval, as though checking that the world hadn’t dared damage her son in her absence.

Their beasts joined the welcome with equal enthusiasm—Eiren dipping her head in dignified greeting, Koda clapping him so heartily on the shoulder he nearly buckled, Rime spinning joyful loops overhead and dusting the whole entryway in harmless snowflakes.

The apartment was loud again. Crowded and chaotic and bright.

Elias stood in the middle of it, thoroughly mussed and faintly overwhelmed and happier than he’d been in weeks, and let the warmth of it wash over him.

The work would still be there when he went back. The bees, the flowers, the slow miracle quietly unfolding in his meadow.

But this—this was worth coming home for.

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