This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The shelters didn't have any.

Elias had called several of them, the same ones he'd worked with for the Care Pigs, and every answer came back the same. No Fool's Turtles. Nobody had one. Nobody had had one in years.

In a way, that was a relief. It meant there wasn't some old, forgotten turtle sitting in a pen somewhere waiting on him, the way the pigs had been. He'd half-dreaded the answer either way — finding one would have meant another rescue, another long sad story to make right, and not finding one meant he could just go about it the simple way.

The simple way was to buy them.

That turned out to be quick work.

There was a shop that kept Fool's Turtles for the usual trade, renting them out to households with an exam looming and a child who wouldn't study. The owner, it happened, had been thinking about getting out of the business for a while — it was a slow, niche thing, and the turtles took up space and lived practically forever. After a few meetings and a fair bit of friendly back-and-forth, Elias bought the whole lot.

All five hundred of them.

It was a strange number to say out loud. Five hundred turtles. The owner had been almost embarrassed to have so many, but Fool's Turtles bred slowly and died almost never, and over the years they'd simply accumulated. Elias didn't mind. He had the money, and he had the space, and, more to the point, he had a feeling he was going to need a healthy population to work with if he wanted to figure out the evolution properly.

A few days later they were shipped to the realm, crate after crate of them, and then they were just there — five hundred turtles, blinking out at their new home.

They were about the length of his forearm, and at a glance they looked like any ordinary old land turtle. Brownish, domed shells, stubby legs, the slow patient blink of a creature in no hurry about anything.

The eyes were the one odd thing. Pure white, clean and pristine, with no visible pupil at all. It should have looked unsettling and somehow didn't — it just made them seem a little dreamy, like they were always half-thinking about something else.

They were calm, gentle creatures, which Elias had expected. In the realm, where nothing was going to hurt them, they needed almost no looking after. He let them loose and let them get on with it, and they spread out across the meadow at their own unhurried pace to do the only two things they seemed truly interested in: finding a warm patch of ground, and eating.

Mostly eating Briar.

The vines, the leaves, the flowers — the turtles worked through Briar's endless growth with quiet, steady appetite, and Briar, bless him, didn't seem to mind. He had clones and cuttings to spare, and something about being nibbled on by a herd of placid turtles apparently registered to him as a kind of compliment. Flowers kept blooming faster than they could eat them.

There was one thing Elias had to watch, though, and it wasn't Briar's doing at all.

Some time back, Maeve had passed him a gift — a small batch of mental-attribute flowers, given to her by someone who'd never put a name to it, and handed on to him because she'd thought he might find a use. He had. He'd planted them carefully in a corner of the realm so they could grow and seed and be used again rather than spent all at once, and that little plot of mental flowers had become one of the rarer, more precious things he kept.

The turtles loved them. Loved them. Out of everything growing in the realm, the mental flowers were the ones they made straight for, and if Elias had let them, they'd have stripped the whole plot bare inside a week. So he had a quiet word with Briar about it.

Briar took the job seriously, the way he took anything Elias asked of him. He grew a screen of his own ordinary blossoms around the mental-flower plot, curled protective vines over the top, and kept the turtles off. Only a few flowers got through at a time, and those became treats. When a turtle did something Elias wanted to encourage, or simply when one of them looked particularly pleased with itself, Briar would lower a single mental flower down within reach and let the lucky turtle have it. The turtles caught on fast. A mental flower was the best thing in the world, and it had to be earned.

It took a little while before the turtles let him get close enough to read them properly. They weren't skittish, exactly, just slow to care about anything that wasn't food. But once they'd decided he was harmless — which mostly meant once they'd decided he was associated with the flowers — they let him crouch right down among them, and his talent finally gave him a clear look.

Race: Fool's Turtle

Support the creativity of authors by visiting NovelFire for this novel and more.

Type: Beast

Attribute: Mental

Current Rank: Elite 2

Potential Rank: Elite 6

Skills:

Mind Acceleration — Lv8

Mental Shield — Lv3

Low Presence — Lv3

Mental Resistance — Lv2

Simple, all of it. That was the whole story of the Fool's Turtle, really — a rare mental attribute wrapped around a handful of very modest skills, which was exactly why nobody ever bothered with them.

Mind Acceleration was the famous one, the gift the creature got its unkind name for. Mental Shield could throw up a barrier of mental power that held against both physical and mental attacks. Low Presence made the turtle harder to notice, so it could go unnoticed. And Mental Resistance did about what it sounded like.

Unremarkable, the lot of it. But that was the point, wasn't it? That was why they were here. The bees, the vine, the butterfly, the pigs — none of them had started out as anything special either. Overlooked was practically the job description. Elias had stopped thinking of it as a drawback a long time ago.

The rest of the realm took the newcomers about how Elias expected, which was to say most of them didn't take them any way at all.

The bees had work to do and got on with it. Five hundred turtles arriving in the meadow changed exactly nothing about the running of a hive, and Holly, in particular, gave the whole herd one assessing pass and clearly filed them under harmless before going right back to her schedule. Honey drifted by, polite as always, and seemed to decide the turtles were pleasant enough company even if they had nothing much to say. Hope took the most interest, hovering over them with bright curiosity for an afternoon, plainly trying to work out whether five hundred turtles could be incorporated into some grand scheme, before apparently concluding they could not and losing interest.

What did happen, and kept happening, was that the smaller fliers discovered the shells made excellent furniture.

A turtle would settle in a warm patch of meadow, tuck in for a long contented sit, and within minutes there'd be a bee dozing on its shell. Then two. The worker bees took to it especially well — a sun-warmed turtle shell was apparently the perfect place to rest between foraging runs, broad, stable, and pleasantly heated from below. The turtles, for their part, could not have cared less. They simply sat there, dreamy white eyes half-closed, carrying their little passengers around the meadow at a pace that suited everyone involved.

The butterflies joined in too. Valentine wouldn't lower himself to it, of course — he had standards, and a neck to guard — but plenty of the realm's ordinary crystal butterflies thought nothing of folding their wings and settling on a passing shell to catch the light. From a distance the turtles ended up looking like slow-moving flowerbeds, dotted with resting bees and butterflies, ambling nowhere in particular.

Even some of the Butler Pigs warmed to them, in their dignified way. One old pig took to setting a turtle gently the right way up whenever it managed to get itself stuck on a slope, then standing over it a moment as if to be sure it had learned its lesson, before going back to work. The turtle never learned its lesson. The pig never stopped helping.

Briar, naturally, was the favorite. The turtles followed his vines around like the world's slowest parade, and Briar — shy, clingy Briar, who startled at strangers — had apparently decided five hundred placid turtles didn't count as strangers at all. He let them trail after him, doled out his rationed flower-treats with great ceremony, and seemed quietly delighted to have something in the realm that was even more interested in his flowers than Elias was.

Elias watched all of it from the edge of the meadow one evening, a turtle asleep against his foot with three bees on its back, and thought that the realm had gotten a little fuller and a little warmer, the way it did every time he brought something home.

In between all of it, he worked.

By the time he'd spent enough days among the turtles to know them, he'd pulled the first pieces of their evolution loose. Two things were clear straight off. The attribute wouldn't change — they'd stay mental beasts the whole way up, no surprise grafting of new elements like Briar had needed. And the path had four steps.

The first step was almost too easy. It only asked that Mind Acceleration reach at least Level 5. And because he'd bought these particular turtles from a shop that had rented them out for years — worked them, really, exam season after exam season — every last one of them already sat well past that. Their Mind Acceleration ran from Level 6 all the way up to Level 9. Step one was done before he'd started.

It was the second step that stopped him cold.

This much his talent would confirm: the turtle had to use Mind Acceleration on him. Not on itself, not on another beast — on Elias. That part he was sure of, and it made a certain sense; whatever bond or process the evolution needed clearly ran through the contractor.

It was everything after that he couldn't work out.

Because using the skill on himself was the easy bit, and obviously not the whole answer — if it were, the turtles would have evolved years ago, what with all the desperate students they'd been pointed at. No. The acceleration had to be used on him, and then something had to happen, something he had to do or feel or accomplish in those few racing minutes before the inevitable crash. And that something stayed stubbornly out of reach. Every neat little theory he formed came back no. The skill was the door, he was sure of that now — he just had no idea what he was meant to do once it opened.

Elias didn't mind. He'd been here before, on every evolution he'd ever cracked — the wall, the stretch of not-knowing, the dozens of wrong guesses before the right question. It was, if he was honest, his favorite part. The turtle dozing against his foot certainly wasn't in any hurry, and neither, for once, was he.

He scratched a fresh note, set his pencil down, and let a worker bee land on the turtle's shell while he thought about it.

Fool's Turtle

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