This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Even in the midst of his pleasant, ordinary days, a problem had been quietly mounting—a deeply mundane one.

The mess.

His laboratory was a disaster. So was the breeder shop where the secret realm was installed. Months of research, of equipment shuffled, and materials spilled and a thousand small experiments, had left both spaces in a state of cheerful, accumulating chaos. Elias could, in theory, clean it all himself—but that would take ages, days of tedious drudgery he could think of a hundred better uses for. And the bees, when he glanced hopefully in their direction, very pointedly looked away, suddenly absorbed in important business elsewhere. Tidying a laboratory was not, apparently, in their job description, and none of them intended to volunteer for it.

So he needed help. And as it happened, the world had a perfect, time-honored answer to exactly this problem.

Care Pigs.

An Elite-potential spirit beast found in households the world over—experts at cleaning, beloved for it, an absolute staple of domestic life. Some families rented them by the season; others kept them as cherished pets. They were gentle, loving, clever, and emotionally attuned, as good at comforting a crying child or a grieving owner as they were at scrubbing a floor spotless. A Care Pig in the home meant a clean house and a warm one both.

Elias had a personal fondness for them, in fact. His own parents had rented one when he and Kyle were babies—a gentle creature to help manage the endless mess and chaos of two small children, to clean what needed cleaning and soothe what needed soothing. Half his earliest, haziest memories had a Care Pig somewhere in them, patient and warm. They were, simply, a good and beloved part of how the world worked.

He was on the very verge of buying a few to deal with his mess when a thought stopped him.

It had become reflex by now—that flicker of curiosity, that itch to ask. So before he placed the order, he spent his question of the day on the humble Care Pig: did it have an evolution path capable of reaching at least King level, while remaining affordable to the current him?

To his surprise, the answer came back yes.

Elias blinked, then smiled. Well. That settled what his next project would be. He’d gone looking for a cleaning crew and found a research subject instead—which was, he was coming to realize, simply how his life worked now. The most overlooked creatures, the ones everyone took for granted, so often held the most wonderful secrets. A common bee. A common vine. A party-decoration butterfly. And now the gentle household pig that had helped raise him.

The next few weeks went to working out the basics, as they always did.

The Care Pig’s evolution, he learned, would grant it the Mental attribute—a fitting gift for so emotionally attuned a creature—and it required three steps to achieve. The first of those steps was straightforward enough in principle: several of the pig’s existing skills had to reach Level 8 before the evolution could begin.

Which shaped his buying strategy at once. He didn’t want young pigs with fresh, low-level skills; he wanted old ones, experienced ones, creatures who had spent long years honing their abilities until those skills had climbed high on their own. An aged Care Pig would already have much of that first step’s work behind it.

And the moment he thought of where to find old Care Pigs, his plans took a turn he hadn’t expected.

He could have simply bought aged pigs on the market. But since he was specifically after old ones, his mind went instead to the spirit beast shelter.

It was an uncomfortable truth, and one Elias knew well. Care Pigs were used everywhere, in countless homes—and creatures used so ubiquitously did not always get the ending they deserved. Too often, a spirit beast that developed a shortcoming, or simply grew too old to work as it once had, was abandoned, surrendered, cast off once it stopped being useful. The shelters were full of them: faithful companions discarded the moment they became inconvenient.

So he went to the shelter, intending to adopt ten—five for the breeder shop, five for the laboratory in the secret realm. A modest, practical number.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Then he actually saw them.

The conditions of the old Care Pigs in that shelter entirely undid his careful plans.

They were in a sorry state, every one of them. Some were blind, or deaf. Some were missing limbs. Some were too old to move properly, shuffling stiffly or not at all. Some bore hideous scars, the marks of hard lives and harder owners. They were the ones nobody wanted—the broken, the aged, the imperfect, the inconvenient—waiting in a shelter for an end that, for too many of them, would not be a kind one.

Elias stood among them and felt something twist in his chest.

He’d come for ten. On a sudden, helpless, entirely uncalculated whim, he decided to adopt all of them. All twenty-eight old Care Pigs the shelter had—every blind, deaf, scarred, broken, given-up one of them. He couldn’t do otherwise. He simply couldn’t look at all those discarded, faithful old creatures and walk out with only ten, leaving the rest to whatever waited.

It wasn’t a research decision. The evolution didn’t need twenty-eight. It was simply the only thing his heart would let him do.

Adopting them was no small undertaking.

There was a mountain of paperwork, first of all—and then a set of conditions that spoke volumes about why such safeguards existed. He would have to photograph each of the pigs every day to prove they were being cared for and doing well, and submit to weekly visits for three full months, so the shelter could confirm there was no abuse, no neglect, no foul play.

Because there had been cases. Cases where sheltered spirit beasts, adopted cheaply and without scrutiny, had been taken not to loving homes but to be used as food, or as disposable subjects for cruel experiments. The old and the broken were especially vulnerable, valued by some precisely because no one would miss them. The shelter’s strict oversight was hard-won, born of real horrors, and Elias didn’t resent a single requirement of it. He was glad, fiercely glad, that someone was watching. He’d gladly photograph twenty-eight pigs every day for the rest of his life if it meant fewer of them met such ends.

After the paperwork was done over a few days, he loaded the pigs into a truck and brought them to the secret realm.

They were confused, the lot of them, frightened by the sudden upheaval after lives that had taught them upheaval rarely meant anything good. Some fretted and trembled, anxious at the strange new motion and smells. Some were dull and unresponsive, retreated somewhere deep inside themselves. And some—these were the ones that hurt most to look at—simply seemed to have given up entirely, lying quiet and listless, expecting nothing, hoping for nothing, long past the point of believing anything good could happen to them.

Elias looked back at them in the truck—the blind and the lame and the scarred, the frightened and the dull and the defeated—and made them all a quiet promise.

“It’s all right now,” he said softly. “You’re safe. I’ve got you. Wait until you see where we’re going—I think you’re going to like it there.”

They didn’t understand him, of course. They’d been let down too many times to trust a gentle voice. But that was all right. He had time, and a whole warm world waiting, and every intention of showing them—slowly, patiently, for as long as it took—that the world could be kind after all.

And then they arrived—and the world did the first part of the convincing for him.

As the pigs were let out into the secret realm, the change that came over them was immediate and wonderful to watch. The endless fields of flowers stretched away in every direction beneath the warm artificial sun; the air hung thick and sweet with a hundred mingled fragrances and the rich, soothing density of life energy. For creatures that had spent their last years in the bare confines of a shelter, it must have seemed like stepping into a dream. One by one, the pigs lifted their heads. The frightened ones stilled. The dull ones blinked and looked around. Even some of the ones who had given up stirred, ears twitching, snouts working at the impossibly sweet air, a flicker of something—curiosity, maybe, or the faint beginning of hope—waking in eyes that had gone flat and empty. They marveled at the sight of it, this gentle paradise, hardly seeming to believe it was real.

And then they had visitors.

Drawn by the novelty, the bees and butterflies came drifting over to investigate the strange new arrivals. Curious workers hovered close, inspecting the pigs from every angle; a few of Holly’s, Honey’s, and Hope’s subjects circled with open interest, and the crystal butterflies came in a soft shimmer of rainbow, settling on the grass nearby to study the newcomers with bright, harmless fascination. The pigs blinked back at the glittering, humming welcome party, baffled and a little wary—but the bees meant no harm, and the butterflies only wanted a look, and slowly the wariness began, just slightly, to ease.

Elias watched it all from the edge of the field, his heart full to bursting. A blind old pig turned its face toward the warmth of the sun it couldn’t see and went very still, as though feeling something it had forgotten it could feel. A butterfly landed gently on the scarred back of another, and the pig didn’t flinch.

“See?” Elias murmured, to no one and to all of them. “I told you. You’re going to like it here.”

It would take time—he knew that. Trust broken so many times did not mend in a day. But watching them lift their heads in his impossible garden, watching the bees and butterflies welcome them without a shred of judgment for all they’d been through, Elias felt certain of one thing: these old, discarded, faithful creatures were home now. And he would spend as long as it took making sure they knew it.

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