This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

With the worker bees hatched, the meadow came alive.

They threw themselves into their work with a tireless, single-minded devotion, exactly as their nature demanded. They fanned out across the field to gather pollen, returned laden to the great hive, and set about the endless labor of a thriving colony—making honey, working wax, and building. Always building. The enormous hive grew grander and more intricate by the day under their constant attention, expanding, reinforcing, and reshaping without pause.

Busy bees, every one of them. The meadow hummed from dawn to dusk with the sound of their industry.

Elias, by contrast, was stuck in bed.

His ten cocoons had grown steadily larger and heavier, until shifting them about had become genuinely difficult and moving comfortably all but impossible. So he lay where he was, more or less anchored in place, and did the one thing he could still do freely: think.

And there was a great deal to think about.

Chief among it was what came next. He knew—knew with absolute certainty—the sensation his discovery would cause once it became known. A brand-new evolution path for the Amberwing Bee, the most insignificant spirit beast in the world, raising it all the way to a Commander-rank queen with the potential of a Lord. It would shake the entire field of breeding to its roots. Something like that couldn’t simply be blurted out. He had to be smart about how he revealed it—careful about the timing, the framing, who learned of it and when. Handled poorly, a discovery this large could bring as much danger as glory.

So he turned it over and over in his mind, lying there beneath his slowly swelling cocoons, planning.

But that wasn’t the only thing on his mind.

Whenever his thoughts drifted to his meadow, he couldn’t shake the nagging sense that something was missing. The new Commander-rank flowers were wonderful, certainly—vivid and potent and lovely. And yet.

Elias, he admitted to himself, was getting greedy.

He didn’t just want flowers. Flowers had to be bought, again and again, planted and replanted, a recurring drain on his points and his purse. What he wanted—what he’d begun to truly covet—was a spirit beast that produced the flowers. A living, growing, self-sustaining source of them, one that could anchor his whole meadow and feed his bees forever.

It was worth understanding the difference, here, between the flowers he’d planted and the thing he now wanted.

The flowers in his meadow were all treasures—and treasures, in this world, had a specific meaning. When Spiritual Energy had first flooded Blue Star, it hadn’t only twisted animals into Demonic Beasts. It had soaked into everything, and where it gathered thickly enough, it gave rise to wonders of every kind. Plants grew rich with it and became something more. So did ores, and soil, and water, and stone. These were treasures: natural resources saturated with abundant spiritual energy, prized for the potency they carried. His life-attribute flowers were exactly that—born of the world itself, gathered and sold and consumed.

But a treasure, for all its value, was a static thing. It was what it was, and no more. It could be harvested and used, but it could never grow into something greater.

A plant-type spirit beast was another matter entirely.

Plant spirit beasts were, like all spirit beasts, artificial creations—bred by combining the bloodlines of different plant-type demonic beasts, refined through careful generations of work. In their day-to-day function, a plant spirit beast might do much the same as a treasure: produce flowers, bear fruit, exude useful essences. But unlike a treasure, which was forever fixed in place, a spirit beast was alive in the truest sense. It could be raised. It could be nurtured. And, rarest and most precious of all—it could evolve, climbing higher and growing greater, just as Floria had.

That was what Elias wanted. Not a treasure to be spent, but a living partner to be grown.

So for the better part of the next two months—a question here, a question there, species after species—that became his quiet obsession.

He went in search of the perfect plant spirit beast. Did this plant spirit beast possess an evolution path with the first evolution capable of being able to bear many life attribute flowers at once to sustain a hive, and without demanding rare, ruinously expensive resources he couldn’t hope to afford? All of it, weighed in one breath, answered with a single yes or no.

It was a tall order, and luck was not on his side.

Candidate after candidate came back with the same flat no. A little over two months of patient questioning, and Elias still hadn’t found the one he was looking for.

He wasn’t discouraged, exactly—he’d learned long ago that research moved at its own stubborn pace—but it was a thread left frustratingly loose, dangling at the back of his mind.

But the months hadn’t been idle ones, far from it.

In all that time, the meadow had flourished beyond anything he’d dared imagine. The hive had thrived, the workers had multiplied, and—most remarkable of all—a full thirty new Lifebloom Bee Queens had been born from it. Thirty. Where once there had been a single evolved queen, now there was the beginning of a true dynasty, an entire flourishing population of a species that, mere months ago, had not existed anywhere in the world.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Thirty queens. It was proof. Undeniable, living proof of what he’d achieved—that Floria had been no fluke, no one-in-a-million accident, but the founder of a stable, reproducible, thriving new lineage.

They were also, Elias had quickly discovered, an absolute handful.

Thirty Lifebloom Queens meant thirty proud, regal, intelligent personalities—and every last one of them had decided, somewhere along the way, that Elias was theirs. He was the strange gentle human who had raised their kind, after all, the one who tended the meadow and planted the flowers and spoke to them as though they were people. To a queen, that made his attention a prize worth competing for. Fiercely.

The trouble was that there was only one of him, and thirty of them.

It made for chaos. The moment Elias settled anywhere—to read, to write, to so much as close his eyes for a moment’s rest—queens would begin to converge, jockeying for the best position. One would claim his shoulder, only for another to land pointedly on his head, as if to assert a superior vantage. A third would settle directly in his open notebook, daring the others to challenge her. They would buzz at one another in what was unmistakably bickering, wings flaring, until his lap and arms and the entire space around him bristled with affronted royalty all competing for the same small patch of human.

“There is enough of me for everyone,” he tried to reason with them once, holding very still as five queens arranged themselves along one arm in order of seniority. “Genuinely. Please stop elbowing each other.”

They did not stop. Queens, it turned out, did not elbow so much as wing-check.

And when jostling for position failed, they resorted to showing off.

Each queen seemed utterly convinced that if she could only demonstrate her particular brilliance, Elias would surely favor her above the rest. So they performed. One would alight on a wilting flower and pour her life essence into it until it burst into vibrant, exaggerated bloom, then turn to him expectantly, plainly awaiting praise. Another, refusing to be outdone, would coax an entire patch of grass into lush green growth in seconds and preen with insufferable smugness. A third took to performing elaborate, swooping aerial loops trailing ribbons of golden light, which would have been genuinely impressive if she hadn’t kept glancing back mid-flight to check whether he was watching.

Floria, the eldest and the first, regarded the whole circus with the lofty disdain of a true sovereign who had long since secured her place and felt no need to grovel for it. She would simply settle in her favorite spot at Elias’s side and radiate quiet superiority while her descendants made spectacles of themselves—though Elias noticed she always made sure to claim that spot first, before any of the younger queens could take it.

“You’re all ridiculous,” Elias informed the assembled court, applauding a daisy that had just been bullied into blooming. “Wonderful. Beautiful. Ridiculous. Yes, very good, that’s a lovely flower—no, don’t do the loops indoors—”

It was exhausting. It was absurd. And, lying there half-buried in devoted, squabbling, show-off queens, Elias couldn’t remember ever being happier.

And that meant it was finally time.

The plan he’d discussed with his parents, turned over so many times in his mind through all those bedridden weeks—it was time, at last, to set it in motion. Time to show the world the proof of his achievement, and his worth.

It began with a phone call.

Elias rang Professor Aldwin and, after the usual pleasantries, asked a favor: would the old man arrange for him to meet a representative of the Breeder Association? Not a clerk at a terminal, but someone with real authority—someone who could act on what Elias had to show.

There was a pause on the line, the particular pause of a man who knew his former student well enough to know he didn’t ask for things lightly.

“I can do that,” Aldwin said slowly. “On one condition. Whatever it is you’ve been hiding away in that laboratory of yours—you show me afterward. All of it. I’ve been patient, Elias, but I am not a saint.”

Elias laughed. “That’s fair. You have my word, Professor. After.”

“Then consider it arranged.”

And so, with his parents at his side, Elias went to meet the representative.

She introduced herself as Maeve Thornwell, one of the heads of the Northern Breeder Association in the Heartwood District—a title she offered lightly, as though it were nothing much, which only made it more impressive. She was a middle-aged woman of pleasant, unremarkable appearance, with a warm and amiable smile that put one immediately at ease. Elias knew better than to be fooled by it. In a world where a strong enough contract could stretch a life across centuries, appearances meant nothing—the comfortable-looking woman across the table might well be a thousand years old. And to hold a position like hers within the Association was no small feat. Behind that gentle face was certainly a mind sharp enough to have earned it.

Pleasantries were exchanged. Tea was poured.

Then Maeve, with the easy command of someone who had done this a great many times, recited what she knew of them—a quiet demonstration of how thoroughly the Association kept its records. She knew Selena: a combat beastmaster of considerable reputation. She knew Elias: a recent graduate, awakened not long ago. And she knew his father, Damien—a healer who, before either of his sons had been born, had moved his family to the Heartwood District, a region that specialized in wood-attribute spirit beasts and a smaller share of life-attribute ones. He had already carried his Sparkling Jade Guppy, Amia, since his youth; they’d settled in Heartwood at Selena’s insistence so that Damien, with his healing talent, might one day have the chance to contract a second precious life-attribute spirit beast to stand beside her.

And then she paused, her gaze settling on Damien with the faintest flicker of something—surprise, perhaps, quickly mastered.

“Forgive me,” she said, and the apology sounded genuine. “Your aura, Healer Arkwright—it doesn’t match our records. You’ve advanced. Commander rank, unless I am very much mistaken.” She inclined her head graciously. “It is my work to know such things, so I hope you’ll pardon my noticing. And allow me to congratulate you on the breakthrough. A significant one.”

Damien accepted the congratulations with his usual easy grace.

But Maeve’s eyes were already moving—drifting, thoughtful and knowing, from the father to the quiet young man seated beside him. She said nothing of it yet. She didn’t need to. The look alone made it plain that she understood exactly where a sudden, unrecorded advancement like that might have come from—and that the person truly worth her attention in this room was not the newly minted Commander at all, but his unassuming son.

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