This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

While Elias cared for the pigs, he had not been idle in his research.

Caring for the old Care Pigs had filled his days, but it had not filled all of them. Over the same weeks, in the quiet hours between feedings and visits and slow walks through the flower fields, he had also worked out the second step of the Care Pig evolution—and arranged, at last, to release the Blood Crystal Butterfly evolution to the world.

Maeve, by now, had long since stopped being surprised by him.

Three entirely new evolution methods in the span of a single year—the Lifebloom Bee, the Hundred Fragrance Vine, and now the Blood Crystal Butterfly. Any one of them would have been the achievement of a breeder’s lifetime. To produce all three so quickly should have been impossible. And yet here he was, this quiet young man with emerald eyes, presenting a third as though it were simply the natural thing to do. Maeve had made her peace with the fact that she was watching something extraordinary unfold, and had decided to simply enjoy it.

For the Blood Crystal Butterfly, Elias opted for a semi-public release.

He would have liked to make it fully public, the way he had with the Lifebloom Bee. He believed, deeply, that good things should be shared. But he knew the risks too well. The butterfly’s evolution carried a high death rate—and that was with him using life-attribute honey and royal jelly to minimize the losses. In untrained hands, without those advantages, the process would slaughter larvae and butterflies by the thousands. Better, then, to leave it to professionals. Better to restrict it to those who knew what they were doing, so that no more of the gentle creatures would die than truly had to.

He had watched too many of his own butterflies fail to reach the end. He would not lightly hand that grief to careless strangers.

He had also asked Maeve for a favor.

The second step in the Care Pig evolution required mental-attribute materials, which were notoriously difficult to come by. Mental was a rare attribute, prized by researchers and scholars, and its resources rarely sat unclaimed on any open market. On his own, gathering enough would have taken him weeks of searching and a small fortune in contribution points.

But with Maeve’s help, he was able to procure an entire batch. Mental-attribute flowers, demonic beasts' parts, and vials of mental essence. The essence was shaped like a marble—a small sphere with pale mist drifting and curling slowly within it, ranging in grade from Common all the way up to a single precious Lord-rank specimen. It was more than enough to begin the second step properly.

When Elias tried to pay for it all with his contribution points, Maeve stopped him.

It was a gift, she told him. Not from her—from someone else. Someone who had asked her to pass the materials along, and who wished, for the moment, to remain unnamed.

Elias blinked. “Who?” he asked.

Maeve only smiled, that knowing smile she wore so often these days, and shook her head. She would not say. All she would tell him was that it came from someone who appreciated what he had done—someone who had been touched, in some way, by the quiet work of a breeder who never asked for recognition.

Elias turned the mental marble over in his hand, watching the soft mist swirl within, and found himself genuinely puzzled. He had released his discoveries anonymously precisely so that no one would know him, so that the gifts of his research could spread without the weight of his name attached. And yet somewhere out there was a person who had not only benefited from his work, but cared enough to repay a stranger they had never met.

“I wonder who they are,” he murmured, half to himself, half to the drifting mist.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Far away, on a distant frontier, the answer to that question set down a report and allowed himself a rare, quiet moment of thought.

To understand Commander Cassian Sagittarius, one first had to understand where he stood.

Across Blue Star there were places where the spiritual energy ran turbulent and thick—vast regions where it churned and pooled and converged in densities the rest of the world never saw. Such places produced demonic beasts like nowhere else: more numerous, more powerful, more relentless. What would have been a once-in-a-generation beast tide for an ordinary district, the kind of disaster spoken of in fearful whispers for years afterward, was little more than an ordinary day on a frontier.

And on a frontier, a beast tide could never simply be weathered. It had to be stopped—at all costs, without exception. For if even a single tide were allowed to break through the line, it would not end there. The breach would draw more beasts, and the blood and chaos of the fighting would draw more still, until one tide became an unending chain of them, a flood that would pour past the frontier and crash down upon the peaceful districts sheltered behind it. The frontier held so that the rest of the world would never have to.

That was why the Twelve Great Legions existed. Each of the twelve was stationed at the most difficult and most dangerous battlefield the empire possessed—the worst of the worst, the places no ordinary force could hold. And each fought a different kind of war.

For the Sagittarius Legion, the war was one of mind and wits.

Their frontier was a place where immense heaps of illusion-attribute and mental-attribute spiritual energy converged—a churning sea of it, thick enough to drown in. An unprepared soul who set foot there would not last a day. They would lose their grip on what was real, slipping into hallucination, their own mind turning traitor against them. Madness came for the untrained long before any beast did. To fight on that frontier at all required a mind honed like a blade, disciplined and fortified against an enemy that attacked from within.

As the heir to the legion, Cassian had been tempered for exactly that. Years of grueling exercises had sharpened and toughened his mind until illusions broke against it like waves against stone, until he could stand at the heart of that maddening storm and remain, unshakably, himself. It was the foundation of everything he was—and it was the reason the Sagittarius Legion held, year after year, a battlefield that would have shattered anyone else.

It also meant that, of all the things the Sagittarius frontier lacked, mental and illusion materials were not among them.

Where most of the world scrambled and paid dearly for even a handful of mental-attribute resources, the legion gathered them by the heap as a simple byproduct of the war it fought. The dense energy of their battlefield saturated the land, the flora, the very cores of the beasts they slew. For Cassian, such materials were not rare treasures. They were abundant—as common to him as the lifeblood of coin that flowed to the frontier to keep it standing.

So when word reached him—passed along by the one who guarded the anonymous breeder’s identity—that the same breeder behind the Lifebloom honey had made yet another breakthrough, and that mental-attribute materials might aid whatever quiet work came next, the request was an easy one to grant.

Cassian thought of the casualty reports.

For the first time in longer than he cared to remember, the numbers were lower. Wounds that should have crippled men had closed. Soldiers who should have died had walked out of the medical tents on their own two feet. The reason was no secret to anyone who looked closely—the Lifebloom honey now reaching the legions, the healing it carried, the lives it quietly saved with every passing week. More of his soldiers were going home to their families than ever before.

And it was all the work of one anonymous breeder. A person who asked for no recognition, no payment, no glory. A person who had simply given the world a gift and stepped back into the shadows.

Cassian had spent his life surrounded by people who wanted things from him—his name, his rank, his power, his family’s influence. He had grown used to it. He understood it. What he did not understand was this: a genius who could have demanded anything, and instead chose to remain unknown, asking nothing at all.

He had so little he could offer in return. But mental materials he had in abundance, and the breeder, it seemed, had need of them. So Cassian decided to show a little gratitude. A small gift, routed quietly through the Association, his name kept firmly out of it—a small thing, truly, set against the lives that the breeder had saved. But it was the only way he had to say thank you to a person he had never met.

A person who, somewhere out there, was no doubt wondering exactly who had sent it.

Cassian found, to his own faint surprise, that he hoped one day to find out who they were, too.

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