As Elias made his way back from his meeting with Maeve, his thoughts drifted, as they always did, to the work still ahead of him.
The final step of the Care Pig evolution had stumped him.
It was a familiar feeling by now—that particular wall he ran into near the end of every project, the last stubborn piece of the puzzle that refused to reveal itself no matter how he turned it over. He had the first step settled and the second prepared. The third remained a mystery, and his daily questions had so far only narrowed its shape rather than solving it outright. He would get there. He always did. But for the moment, it sat in the back of his mind like an itch he could not quite reach.
Still, the evolution was not the only thing that had changed over the past month.
He had been so absorbed in caring for the pigs and arranging the butterfly release that he had nearly overlooked it, but he had not been the only one growing. Quietly, without fuss, both of his contracted beasts had advanced. Briar and Valentine had each reached Lord Rank 1.
For Briar, it had only ever been a matter of time. The Hundred Fragrance Vine carried Lord Rank 10 potential, and surrounded day and night by the rich, balanced life energy of the secret realm he himself had helped create, his steady climb was as natural as a well-tended plant reaching toward the sun. He would keep rising, gently and inevitably, for a long while yet.
Valentine’s growth was a different story. As a Blood Crystal Butterfly with Monarch-rank potential, his early growth had been astonishingly fast—blazing upward at a rate that put even Briar to shame. Now, having reached Lord Rank 1, that breakneck pace had finally begun to slow. It was only to be expected. The higher a beast climbed, the steeper each step became, and Valentine had simply been sprinting up the easy slopes at the bottom. He would still go far—further than almost anything Elias had ever raised—but the effortless leaps of his infancy were behind him now.
And as his beasts grew, so too did Elias.
Through the feedback of their contracts, the strength of his companions flowed back into him, and over the month it had carried him upward as well. He had reached Commander Rank 4.
With that, his Beast Space had completely transformed.
It was no longer the empty white void it had been at his awakening.
Now it was a world.
Plants grew across it in abundance, rooted in rich and fertile soil. Life hummed through every corner of it. Water flowed in streams and pooled in clear ponds. It had its own cycle of day and night, the light warming and fading as though a true sun crossed a true sky. In one place stood a small volcano, gently steaming; nearby, a hot spring sent up curls of warm vapor. Elsewhere, windswept stretches of open ground rolled beneath restless air. And here and there, drifting through the landscape without warning, faint mists of blood and illusion would gather and shimmer before dissolving once more.
Every feature was an echo of his contracted beasts—the life and wood and water of Briar’s countless attributes, the blood and illusion of Valentine, each attribute they carried leaving its mark upon the world within him. The volcano, the wind, the water, the mist: all of it bloomed from the natures of the two beasts bonded to his soul.
The space had even gained weight.
This had nothing to do with his rank. It was Valentine’s doing—or, more precisely, the doing of the Fighting attribute the Blood Crystal Butterfly carried. That attribute, with its impact, force, and crushing weight, had settled into his inner world and lent it a grounding heaviness. He could feel it when he stood within the space, and he could feel its echo in the waking world: a steadiness in his stance, a toughness in his frame that made him harder to knock from his feet. A small thing, perhaps, but a real one—and a gift, he thought with some amusement, from the laziest of his companions.
For a Commander-rank space, it was more than merely luxurious. It was magnificent—the kind of domain that experienced beast tamers spent their careers cultivating, rich and varied, teeming with life and energy.
The irony, of course, did not escape him.
For all its splendor, not a single one of his beasts actually lived in it. Briar spent his days wrapped contentedly around Elias’s arm. Valentine refused to leave the side of his neck for more than a few moments at a time. And every other creature he cared for—the bees, the butterflies, the pigs—dwelled not in his Beast Space but in the secret realm. His magnificent inner world, this paradise grown from the souls of his companions, sat almost entirely empty, a beautiful house with no one home.
Elias could only smile at that. It was very much in keeping with how his life tended to go.
He had, of course, tried to coax his companions inside.
It seemed a shame not to. The space was a paradise made from their own natures, after all—surely they would want to see it. So he had brought both of them along to look.
Valentine lasted approximately two seconds.
The Blood Crystal Butterfly took one look at the vast, gorgeous, drifting-mist-and-volcano splendor of the inner world, fluttered a single uncertain circle in the open air of it—and then bolted straight back out, reappearing against the side of Elias’s neck with the urgency of a creature that had narrowly escaped some terrible fate. He pressed himself flat to the warm skin above Elias’s pulse and refused, utterly and immovably, to go back in. As far as Valentine was concerned, there was exactly one place in all the worlds worth being, and a glorious private paradise grown from his own blood and illusion was not it. It was too far from the Source. Nothing else needed saying.
Elias laughed quietly and stroked the crimson wings with a fingertip, which earned him a pleased little flutter and absolutely no change of heart.
Briar, at least, was willing to give it a try.
The vine slipped down from Elias’s arm and ventured out into the fertile soil, and for a little while he seemed genuinely delighted. He spread eager tendrils through the rich earth, drinking in the balanced energy of the place, and burst into a happy profusion of flowers as he went—pink and gold and pale blue blossoms unfurling along his vines, a small private garden blooming wherever he touched. For about five minutes, Briar was perfectly content to play in the world made partly from himself.
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Then he noticed Elias was leaving.
That settled the matter at once. The flowers could wait. With a faint rustle that somehow managed to convey mild betrayal at having been left behind, Briar gathered himself up, abandoned his half-finished garden without a second thought, and hurried back out after his caregiver to wind snugly around Elias’s arm where he belonged.
And so Elias’s magnificent Commander-rank Beast Taming Space returned, once more, to standing empty—save for a small patch of cheerful flowers blooming quietly in the soil, the only evidence anyone had visited at all.
He decided he rather liked it that way.
There was one more change, however—and it was, by far, the most important of all.
For every third major rank a person attained, their talent evolved. Elias had crossed that threshold at Commander Rank, and his Omniscient Questions had grown alongside him.
It was the first time the Unique Talent had changed since the day it awakened. He had wondered, more than once, what shape its growth would take. Now he knew.
[Omniscient Questions II]
Effects:
Elias read it over twice and felt a slow smile spread across his face.
Two questions a day instead of one. It did not sound like much, perhaps, to anyone who had not lived by that single daily question for the past year—who had not spent so many days agonizing over how to spend it. To Elias, it was the difference between starving and being fed. His research would move twice as fast now. And he could store them, too, banking unused questions up to twenty against the days a breakthrough hung in the balance.
But the ability that truly caught his attention was the targeting.
To appreciate why, one had to understand how clumsy the talent had been before.
Until now, Omniscient Questions answered only about a species as a whole, and Elias had been forced to do all the narrowing himself beforehand, through patient question after patient question. He had to define the exact creature he meant before he could ever ask the question that mattered.
With his own beasts, he had simply been lucky. Each of them—the Amberwing Bee, the Evergrow Vine, the Crystal Butterfly, the Care Pigs—happened to have only a single evolution path that fit what he was looking for. Because there was only ever one path that satisfied his required conditions, he could lean on that fact as a kind of fixed control.
But that was luck, not skill. Many spirit beasts possessed two, three, or more evolution paths. And when a creature had several, the old talent fell apart. If two different paths both qualified, Elias had no way to tell the talent which one he meant. It had quietly limited which beasts he could even attempt to study.
The targeting ability swept that limitation away entirely.
Now he could specify a single evolution before asking—pinning it down with up to four descriptive words. The race. The attribute it would gain after the first evolution. The rank it would reach. Whether it was affordable. With a few careful words he could lock his talent onto exactly one path, and from that point every answer would concern that path alone, ignoring all the others. Better still, he could cancel the specification whenever he liked and choose a new one, rather than being forced to define everything in advance and live with it. Where before he had been fumbling in the dark, defining his target through variables, now he could simply point and ask.
The upgrade removed one of the greatest limitations of his talent and opened possibilities that had been impossible before.
For now, though, he had a more immediate use for his newfound abundance of questions.
The final step of the Care Pig evolution was going nowhere—so rather than keep beating his head against that wall, Elias decided to set it aside for the moment and turn his attention to something more productive. The second step.
The second step required a mental-attribute stimulant, something to grant the pigs two new skills as they took on the Mental attribute. That was the bare requirement. But with questions to spare now, a familiar curiosity took hold of him, and he found himself wondering—did it have to stop at two? Could he give them more than the evolution strictly demanded?
He asked. The answer came back: yes.
That settled it. Unfortunately, he could not simply pour stimulant after stimulant into the old pigs; the effect was a one-time thing, a single window in which their newly awakening minds could absorb what he offered. He had exactly one chance with each pig to get it right. So if he was going to do it, he would do it properly—he would craft the finest mental tonic he possibly could, packing as much benefit into that single dose as the pigs could take.
And so it went. For the butterflies, he had been a skill trainer. For the pigs, it seemed, he had become an alchemist.
The work consumed him.
Day after day he experimented with the mental materials Maeve had procured, testing which the pigs responded to best, which their gentle natures took to and which they reacted against. He questioned and brewed and adjusted, questioned and brewed again, slowly refining a formula through patient trial and careful truth. A month passed in a blur of mist and essence and quiet, contented pigs serving as his willing tasters.
At last, after a full month of nonstop research and questioning, Elias produced the finest tonic he was capable of making—at least for now.
It was a careful mixture: three different mental-attribute flowers, a measure of royal jelly, and a blend of water- and earth-attribute flowers saturated with Briar’s life energy, all bound together around a single Elite-rank mental essence at its heart. The water and earth suited the pigs’ own attributes; the life energy gentled the whole; the mental materials carried the awakening they needed.
All told, it was a rather expensive thing to feed a Care Pig. But then, Elias was wealthy by any normal standard—a fact that never quite seemed to dawn on him, even as he spent freely on creatures the rest of the world had thrown away. So might as well, he reasoned. The pigs deserved the best he could give them.
And the moment he completed the formula, the Wheel of Fortune appeared.
It spun before him, the familiar reward of his talent for a knowledge hard-won—its surface divided this time into green, blue, and purple. The pointer slowed, wavered—
—and, by some small miracle, came to rest on the purple. The one-percent purple.
A permanent boost to his Dexterity. He felt it settle into him at once, a new nimbleness flowing into his hands, his fingers suddenly quicker and more agile than before. For a breeder who spent his life on delicate, precise work—grafting, tending, mixing, handling fragile creatures and finer materials—it was a quietly perfect gift.
Elias flexed his hands, marveling at the change, and then turned back to the task at hand.
Now it was time to see what his formula could actually do. Through the night he worked, preparing twenty-eight doses—one for every old pig waiting in the flower fields of his realm.
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