This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Over the next two weeks, the sheep changed.

It happened slowly, a little more each day, as they used Induce Dream and Induce Nightmare again and again and drank deeper of the dreams they were given. Elias watched it like a man watching a sunrise—too gradual to catch in the moment, unmistakable across the hours.

The funny-dream sheep grew steadily more golden, wool and eyes alike warming toward a bright, cheerful yellow. The ones devoted to love deepened into soft rose-pink. The food-lovers began to give off an aroma that was frankly mouthwatering. The lone devotee of nonsense erupted into a riot of mismatched colors, no two patches of wool quite agreeing with each other. And the Nightmare sheep went the other way—wool and eyes darkening, shade by shade, toward deep and shadowed hues.

Then, at last, the colors set, and the whole flock lay down to sleep.

Two weeks later, they woke. And Elias, holding his breath, brought up their statuses.

Dream Sheep

Race: Dream Sheep

Type: Beast

Attribute: Wood, Mental, Mystic (Dream)

Current Rank: Elite Rank 10

Potential Rank: Lord Rank 5

Mood: Content

Skills: Induce Dream — Lv3

Dream Builder — Lv1

Sleepy Aroma — Lv1

Dreamer’s Aura — Lv1

Leaf Bed — Lv1

Dreamer’s Shout — Lv1

Dream Visitor — Lv3

Dream Eater — Lv1

Dream Protector — Lv1

Nightmare Sheep

Race: Nightmare Sheep

Type: Beast

Attribute: Wood, Mental, Mystic (Nightmare)

Current Rank: Commander Rank 1

Potential Rank: Monarch Rank 1

Mood: Content

Skills: Induce Nightmare — Lv3

Nightmare Builder — Lv1

Nightmare Aroma — Lv1

Nightmare Aura — Lv1

Nightmare’s Shout — Lv1

Nightmare Visitor — Lv3

Nightmare Eater — Lv1

Nightmare Storage — Lv1

Nightmare Master — Lv1

He read them twice, and then a third time, grinning wider with each pass.

It had worked. Both paths, exactly as intended—mercy and terror grown from the same gentle root, each now a true and complete spirit beast.

And two consecutive wheels showed up, landing one on green and the other on blue, giving him a year and a month of meditation experience.

He and the pigs went out to welcome the newly evolved flock, and Elias need not have worried about the Nightmare sheep.

They were just as gentle as their brighter kin. Just as soft, just as lovable, crowding around him and the pigs with the same placid affection, butting their dark heads against offered hands, utterly without menace. Whatever terrors they could now reach into a sleeper’s mind, the creatures themselves remained what they had always been—sweet, sleepy sheep who liked to be scratched behind the ears. Sebastian was soon entirely surrounded by them, and looked quietly overjoyed about it.

With his Insight talent and a few days of study, Elias worked out what his new sheep could do.

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The Dream sheep, it turned out, were marvels of comfort. They could weave a blanket and mattress out of moss and leaves that was—impossibly—softer and more comfortable than any bed Elias had ever slept in, holding a small pocket of perfect temperature and moisture around it. They could create dreams now, true dreams, and shape them however they wished. Their Sleepy Aroma was a Wood-attribute drowsiness that settled over the body; their Dreamer’s Aura did the same to the mind. And their Dreamer’s Shout could simply put a person to sleep outright—though how well depended entirely on the sleeper. When a sheep tested it, Rowan dropped off instantly, mid-sentence; Cassian barely felt a thing.

They no longer ate ordinary food at all, but fed on dreams—and they guarded the dreaming, shielding any mind that slept near them from mental attack. And where Dream Visitor had once let them step only into dreams of their own making, the evolved skill went further now: they could enter any dream at all, their own or another’s, walking freely into a sleeper’s mind to soothe, shape, or simply sit alongside whatever they found there.

But it was one quieter ability that caused all the trouble.

When a Dream sheep drew a dream into itself, it did not simply consume it. It gave something back.

The sleeper, it emerged, gained cultivation from the exchange—as though they had spent the night in meditation, advancing their spiritual strength at roughly half the efficiency of the real thing. A night of good dreams that also made you stronger.

To Elias, this was a pleasant footnote and nothing more. He had never been one for meditation; he could not remember the last time he had sat down to meditate. He said as much, offhandedly—and very nearly started a riot.

“You don’t—” Rowan stared at him. “You don’t meditate?”

“Not really,” Elias said, puzzled by the intensity. “Why?”

The guardians descended on the Dream sheep like gulls on bread.

What Elias had taken for a footnote was, to everyone else, extraordinary. Meditation was the great tedious labor of every cultivator’s life—necessary, useful, and excruciatingly boring, a daily grind of two or three straining hours that most people endured rather than enjoyed. The notion of a soft creature that would do that work for you, while you slept, while you dreamed pleasantly—it was the kind of thing people would have paid fortunes for. The guardians scrambled to claim sheep of their own and showed no intention whatsoever of giving them back.

Elias watched the chaos in bewilderment, and slowly understood his own blind spot. He had never found meditation a strain, because before a person awakened their talent there was no strain to it—only boredom. And after he’d awakened, he’d done so little of it, an hour here and there at most, that he’d never felt the grind everyone else complained of. To him it had simply never been a burden worth avoiding. He had genuinely not known it was something people suffered through.

It was Iris, still clutching a newly claimed Dream sheep, who turned the conversation.

“Wait,” she said. “If you barely cultivate—what rank are you, Elias?”

“Commander Rank Seven,” he said.

The silence was immediate.

“Briar reached Lord Rank Three a while ago,” he explained into it, a little sheepishly, “and Valentine’s at Lord Rank Five now. Contractors get a feedback boost from their beasts—the stronger the beast, the more the contractor rises with them. So I went up as they did. I didn’t really have to do anything.”

That, somehow, only made it worse.

They were shocked twice over, in quick succession.

First by the rank itself—Commander Rank Seven was nothing to dismiss. And then, a beat later, by the rest of it: that his contracted beasts had climbed to Lord Rank Three and Lord Rank Five, and that the whole of it—his rank and theirs both—had been built in a little over two years. Elias had awakened his talent barely two years ago. To have come this far, this fast, with so little deliberate cultivation, on the sheer strength of the beasts he raised—it was, by any measure, astounding.

Most of the guardians simply marveled.

Cassian felt something else.

It surprised him as much as anyone—because Cassian Sagittarius was not, as a rule, a jealous man. He had never had cause to be. But sitting there, listening to Elias describe a Lord-tier feedback he had risen into almost by accident, carried upward on the cottails of the beasts he loved, the commander felt an unfamiliar, unwelcome thing stir in his chest.

Jealousy. Plain and simple.

Because Cassian had clawed for every rank he held. His King-rank strength was not a gift from any beast—he had no beast, and never had. Every scrap of his power was borrowed faith, drawn from soldiers who admired him, and to earn that admiration he had walked into death again and again, held lines that should not have held, spent himself body and soul to be worthy of the trust that made him strong. He had bled for King rank. He was bleeding for it still, reaching toward it one impossible battle at a time.

And here was Elias, gentle and unhurried, climbing nearly as high simply by being kind to the creatures who adored him.

It was not fair, some small tired part of him said. And Cassian, ashamed of the thought even as he had it, said nothing at all.

He did not know—could not have known—that the guardians watching the two of them saw no difference between them whatsoever.

To Iris, to Rowan, to Oliver and Seraphina, it was the same astonishing thing wearing two faces. One man had risen by pouring his whole heart into the beasts in his care until they lifted him with them. The other had risen by pouring his whole heart into the soldiers in his care until they lifted him with them. Kindness repaid as strength; devotion returned as power. They had simply spent their love in different places.

Neither of them saw it. But everyone else did.

And there was something more the guardians understood in that moment—something that had been creeping up on them for weeks, and only now arrived fully.

What had happened to Elias would, from now on, happen to them.

They were his family. His companions. And the beasts he raised, he raised for them as readily as for himself. They had already seen the proof and somehow not quite reckoned with it: Rowan’s Taka, the abandoned two-headed bird no one had wanted, had hatched at Monarch Rank Ten potential—a height the great families of the empire schemed across generations to reach even once. A single overlooked creature, in a single evolution, lifted higher than most beast tamers would climb in a lifetime. They had been surprised by it at the time.

They understood now that they should stop being surprised.

Because this was simply what it meant to stand beside Elias Arkwright. The Lucky Ravens. The Protector Turtles. The Dream sheep that meditated for you while you slept. Taka at Monarch potential. Whatever he turned his quiet, relentless curiosity toward next—they would share in it. Their own beasts would rise. Their own strength would follow. Bound to him, they had been set, without quite noticing the moment it happened, onto a road that climbed higher than any of them had dared imagine for themselves.

It was Rowan who said it aloud, watching Taka wheel overhead, both heads catching the light.

“You know,” he said, to no one in particular, “I think we picked the right person.”

No one disagreed.

Dream Sheep

Nightmare Sheep

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