This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

A month had passed since the Care Pigs first arrived in the secret realm.

It had not been a fast month, and Elias would not have wanted it to be. Healing rarely was. But day by day, in the small and quiet ways that mattered most, the twenty-eight old pigs had begun to settle. The endless flower fields, the humming of the bees, the drifting rainbow shimmer of the butterflies overhead—none of it frightened them anymore. They had stopped flinching at sudden movements. They had stopped huddling in the corners of the meadow as though waiting for the peace to be taken away.

Little by little, they had begun to believe that it would not be.

Elias had been careful with them.

He had learned, over the years, that there was a wrong way to love a frightened creature. Too much enthusiasm, too much fussing, too much eager affection—it overwhelmed them, crowded them, demanded a trust they were not yet ready to give. So he did not smother the old pigs with attention. He did not coo over them, scoop them up, or press himself upon them.

Instead, he simply stayed. He sat among them in the flower fields while he worked, a steady and unhurried presence. He spoke to them softly when he passed. He let them come to him in their own time, on their own terms, and asked nothing in return. It was not the affection of an excited boy with a new pet. It was something quieter and steadier—the gentle, patient reassurance of someone promising, without words, that he was not going to abandon them.

That, he suspected, was the one thing every pig in that meadow had stopped believing was possible.

For food, the pigs were given a mixture of Briar’s vines, fruits, and Lifebloom honey.

It was, by any ordinary standard, an absurdly luxurious diet for a household cleaning beast. The vines carried Briar’s balanced elemental vitality, the fruits were the finest the realm could produce, and the honey was rich with concentrated life energy—the same honey that had nursed butterfly larvae through the brink of death. For old pigs whose bodies had been worn down by decades of hard living, it was nothing short of restorative. Their coats grew softer. Their movements grew a little less stiff. The dullness in many of their eyes slowly gave way to something warmer.

They could not be made young again. But they could, at least, be made comfortable. And after lives spent giving so much and receiving so little, comfort was a gift Elias was more than happy to provide.

A Care Pig, on average, lived around fifty years.

Many of the pigs in the realm were already near that age. Some had passed it. A few were drawing close to sixty, ancient by the standards of their kind, their muzzles gone grey and their joints gone slow.

And one of them was older still.

His name was Sebastian, and he was over sixty—both blind and deaf, his world reduced to scent and touch and the faint trembling of the ground beneath his feet. He had been abandoned by his family, Elias had been told, after they could no longer afford to pay for his medical bills.

That was the story on the paperwork, at least. But truth be told, Elias suspected the truth was simpler and sadder than money. He thought they had simply not been able to handle taking care of him—an old, ailing, high-needs creature who could no longer see or hear them, who could no longer do the work he had been kept for. It was easier to let him go than to love him through the difficult years at the end.

The thought left a bitter taste in Elias’s mouth. He did not say so aloud. He simply made certain that Sebastian, who could neither see the flowers nor hear the bees, was never left alone in the dark and the silence for long—that there was always a warm hand to rest against his side, always the scent of honey nearby, always something to tell him, in the only language he had left, that he was safe.

Elias did not care for the old pigs alone.

Holly, Honey, and Hope helped immensely. The three queens organized everything with their usual quiet efficiency—scheduling feedings, directing worker bees to keep the meadow stocked with fresh flowers, fussing over which pig had eaten and which had not in much the same way they fussed over whether Elias himself had remembered to eat. Briar helped most of all, his clones spreading gentle vines through the flower fields, offering the pigs soft places to rest, fresh growth to nibble, and the constant balanced warmth of his elemental life energy.

Valentine, on the other hand, contributed nothing whatsoever.

The Blood Crystal Butterfly remained exactly where he always remained—curled against the side of Elias’s neck like a living tattoo, utterly unbothered by the old pigs and entirely uninterested in helping with them. He was perfectly content to let everyone else do the work so long as he kept his favored place against Elias’s pulse.

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Elias could only smile helplessly. He wasn’t going to force anyone to help. If Valentine wished to spend his days as a particularly possessive ornament, that was Valentine’s prerogative—and at least it kept the butterfly from glaring at every pig that wandered too close.

Once the pigs had grown used to him, Elias invited his family into the secret realm.

He had told them beforehand what he had done—the shelter, the twenty-eight old pigs, the whim that had turned ten into all of them. None of them had thought it foolish. His mother, brother, and father had all told him, in their own ways, that he had done a good thing. Coming from a family that had once taken in a dying owl, a battered shelter monkey, and a stray ice sprite that simply refused to leave, perhaps that was no surprise at all.

The family threw themselves into helping the way they threw themselves into everything.

Selena and Kyle did their best to cheer the old pigs up, coaxing the dull and withdrawn ones toward the light with the kind of stubborn, relentless warmth the Arkwrights specialized in. Rime drifted among them too, building tiny ice sculptures to amuse them and asking an endless stream of questions about why pigs could not see the colors it could, why this one’s ears did not work, why that one moved so slowly.

At one point, Selena and Kyle began trading embarrassing stories about Elias as a child—something about a younger Elias full of eccentric action and ideas—which Elias shut down with a furiously red face before they could reach the worst of it. The pigs, naturally, understood none of it. But the warmth in the air, the easy laughter, the sense of a family at play—that they understood perfectly well. Several of them edged closer than they had dared all month.

Koda was especially helpful, and especially enthusiastic.

The Boxing Monkey threw himself into caring for the old pigs with a gentleness that surprised those who only knew him as a fighter. He carried the ones who could not walk well. He sat patiently beside the frightened ones. He seemed to understand them in a way none of the others quite did.

And perhaps he did. Koda, after all, had come from a shelter himself—a young Boxing Monkey, battered and bruised and unwanted, until a reckless silver-haired boy spotted him and decided, on the spot, to take him home. Kyle had chosen him when no one else would. Koda had never forgotten what that felt like, to be the discarded one suddenly, inexplicably, chosen. He looked at the old pigs and saw something of himself in them, and he wanted, more than anything, for them to feel what he had felt that day.

The other beasts found their own ways to help.

Eiren, calm and collected as ever, moved among the most withdrawn of the pigs and tried, in her quiet way, to guide them gently back toward hope—as she had once been guided back herself, long ago, by a girl who refused to let her die.

Amia and Floria turned their attention to the pigs’ wounds. Between the guppy’s healing waters and the queen’s life-attribute care—strengthened considerably by Damian’s Enhanced Healing talent—they did what could be done. They could not heal everything. The serious scars would never fully fade. The blind would not see again, the deaf would not hear, the missing limbs would not regrow. Some damage was simply too old and too deep to undo.

But they could ease the aches. They could soothe the inflammation in worn-out joints, close the small lingering sores, and take the edge off pains the old pigs had carried so long they had forgotten what it felt like to be without them. It was not a cure. It was relief—and for creatures who had expected nothing at all, relief felt very much like a miracle.

And so, like that, a month passed.

By the end of it, the Care Pigs had finally found the secret realm to be something they had not known in a long time, if ever—a home. They grazed contentedly through the flower fields, drifting from blossom to blossom at their own unhurried pace. They could not move as much as younger pigs; their old bodies would never allow that. But they moved far more than they had when they first arrived, when so many of them had simply lain still and waited for the world to disappoint them again.

Now they wandered. Now they explored. Now, in their small and gentle way, they lived.

With the pigs finally relaxed and thriving, Elias was at last able to see their full status.

Race: Care Pig

Type: Beast

Attributes: Water, Earth

Current Rank: Elite Rank 3

Potential Rank: Elite Rank 3

Mood: Relaxed

Skills:

Water Cleanse — Lv9

Self-Clean — Lv8

Dust Control — Lv10

Mud Massage — Lv8

Sense Dirt — Lv9

Mud Shot — Lv6

Description: Gentle, loving, and deeply attuned to the emotions of those around them. Care Pigs adore cleanliness and order, and take quiet pride in a tidy home. Affectionate by nature, they bond easily and grieve deeply, offering comfort to the sad and calm to the troubled. A truly good-hearted creature, often underestimated and too easily taken for granted.

It was exactly what he had hoped for.

Every essential skill except Mud Shot sat at Level 8 or higher—Water Cleanse, Self-Clean, Dust Control, Mud Massage, Sense Dirt, all honed to a sharpness that only decades of patient work could produce. These old, discarded pigs, the ones nobody had wanted, carried within their worn bodies skills more refined than any young pig could hope to match. The first step of the evolution required several skills at Level 8. The old pigs cleared it effortlessly, simply by virtue of the long lives they had lived.

Their age was not a flaw to be pitied. It was, in the strangest and most fitting way, exactly what made them perfect.

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