This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

As much as Elias wanted to stay, he couldn’t.

His bees were waiting, and three weeks of careful work sat unattended in his meadow; the worry of it tugged at him no matter how warm the apartment was. His family had their own lives too—his mother and Kyle with the outskirts calling them back, his father with the district’s endless need of a healer. So he stayed two days, no more, and then said his goodbyes once again.

This time, though, the parting was an easy one. There were no tight, lingering hugs, no unspoken worry beneath the smiles. They all knew they’d see each other again soon—that this wasn’t some grand departure but simply a son heading back to work down the road. A wave, a few fond insults from Kyle, a bundle of food pressed into his arms by his father out of pure habit, and he was off.

It wasn’t the end of the world. It was just goodbye for now.

Back at the laboratory, the first thing he did was check everything—the hives, the flowers, the equipment, the bees themselves—half braced for some small disaster in his absence.

Thankfully, there was none. Everything was exactly as he’d left it, the meadow humming along contentedly without him.

And so his quiet shenanigans resumed.

Each day he analyzed the bees that had met the first step, watching for any sign that the two new skills had begun to emerge. He checked the unmarked bees too, recording the status of each and marking it properly, slowly extending his careful census across the whole growing colony. And growing it was—the three queens had by now fully settled into their new home, and fresh bees were hatching steadily, the hives swelling with new life.

Mercifully, the senior bees had taken it upon themselves to brief the newcomers on the single most important rule of their strange new world: do not sting the big annoying human. He was, the veterans seemed to convey, harmless, useful, and not to be antagonized—a courtesy Elias appreciated more than the new bees could possibly understand.

Two weeks passed like that, with Elias slipping home on the weekends and back to his bees by Monday.

And then, at last, he found it.

A bee with two new skills—and to his surprise, it was one he hadn’t marked. Just an ordinary, unremarkable worker that had quietly outpaced his careful standouts while he wasn’t looking.

From the outside, nothing about it had changed. It looked like any other Amberwing Bee in the hive. But through the equipment, the difference was unmistakable: a new organ had formed inside its small body, and beside its old, familiar abilities sat two it had never possessed before.

Life Absorption. Life Storage.

The third step, fulfilled. The two new skills emerged exactly as the talent had promised—grown naturally from nothing but flowers and patience.

Elias was so thrilled he could have kissed the little thing.

The bee, sensing perhaps that something undignified was being contemplated, promptly flew away.

But for every triumph, there was the wall.

Because for two whole weeks now, one thing had stumped him completely. The final step. The fourth. And no matter how he angled his questions, no matter how cleverly he phrased them, he could not crack it.

It was, by far, the most complicated of the four. Where the others had each asked for a single category, this one demanded three at once: skills, environment, and something else—something that wasn’t combat, and wasn’t materials, but lay stubbornly outside both.

The skills, at least, he’d deduced quickly enough; they plainly related to the two new abilities the bees had just gained, Life Absorption and Life Storage, developed further. But the environment? And that nameless final requirement? Those defeated him entirely. Question after question chipped at the edges and never reached the center.

And somewhere in all that frustration, a deeper question began to form—one that had nothing to do with his talent and everything to do with simple reason.

Why had no one found this evolution before?

It nagged at him. Because for all that the conditions seemed demanding, they were, in truth, among the gentlest of any evolution path publicly known. The first three steps could be met with skills the bees grew on their own, common flowers anyone could buy, and time. There were no rare catalysts, no deadly trials, no fortunes required. In fact—and this was the part that unsettled him—the first three steps could occur entirely in nature, without a single human hand to guide them. A wild Amberwing hive living near the right flowers could stumble through all three by pure accident.

Stolen novel; please report.

And yet, in all of recorded history, not one Amberwing Bee had ever evolved.

Which left only one conclusion. The final step—the one wall he couldn’t climb—had to be something genuinely bizarre. Something so strange, so specific, or so difficult that in all the uncounted centuries Amberwing Bees had buzzed across the world, brushing against the first three conditions again and again, not a single colony had ever stumbled into the fourth.

It was a sobering thought. Whatever the last step was, nature itself had never once managed it by chance.

A week more slipped by.

The bees, at least, were thriving. They’d grown so comfortable with him now that they greeted him in their own small ways—a little waggling dance as he passed, or simply alighting on his nose and settling there as though it were a favorite perch. More and more of them acquired the two new skills, the colony steadily climbing toward the third step en masse.

But on the fourth step, there was nothing. Not a crack, not a clue. Just the same blank wall.

And so Elias returned home that weekend, sullen and out of sorts, his usual quiet contentment worn thin by weeks of beating his head against an answer that wouldn’t come.

His father noticed at once, the way he always did.

He said nothing of it at first. He simply returned from work, took one look at his slumped, brooding son, and quietly set about brewing a pot of tea. He poured a cup, set it down in front of Elias, and sat across from him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, gently.

Elias took the tea, slumped further against the table, and—slowly at first, then in a long, tumbling rush—began to explain. The bees, the steps, the wall he couldn’t climb. The questions that led nowhere. His father simply listened, saying nothing at all, letting his son ramble himself empty.

When at last the words ran out, his father reached over and gently patted him on the head.

“You need to slow down,” he said. “It’s research, Elias. Research takes time. It takes persistence. You can’t force it to come faster than it wants to.”

Elias knew that. He knew it better than almost anyone.

He knew, too, that if he simply published what he already had—the three proven steps, the partial path—it would still shake the world. A new evolution for the Amberwing Bee, the most insignificant spirit beast alive, was the kind of discovery that made careers and rewrote textbooks. By any reasonable measure, he had already succeeded beyond what most breeders managed in a lifetime.

And yet something in him couldn’t rest.

He’d been given a talent of staggering power—a gift that handed him truth itself—and somewhere deep down it felt as though he had to prove he was worthy of it. That a gift so rare demanded results to match.

But more than the talent, more than any of that, he wanted to prove it to them. To his family.

He remembered being very young, announcing in his small, serious voice that he wanted to be a breeder—and how his parents had never once laughed, never brushed it aside as a child’s passing fancy. They had simply believed him, and supported him, wholly and without condition. He remembered Kyle squaring up against other children who called him strange for burying his nose in books all day, knocking them flat in his defense and getting soundly scolded for it afterward—and never once stopping.

All of it, all those years of quiet, unwavering faith, and now the result was finally almost in his hands.

Maybe, he thought, he was just being greedy.

His father listened to all of it, and when Elias finally fell quiet, he spoke softly.

“You don’t have to prove anything,” he said. “We’re already proud of you. We have been for a long time.” He turned his teacup slowly in his hands. “Not because of any talent, or any discovery. Because you followed through. Because you’ve worked harder than anyone I know to get where you are. That’s the part that matters.”

He gave his son a level, gentle look.

“So don’t take it so hard. And don’t be afraid to lean on people now and then. You’ve always had that habit—trying to carry everything by yourself, as if asking for help were some kind of failure. It isn’t. It never was.”

It didn’t banish the anxiety, or the quiet insecurity that had lived in him since a life he could only half-remember. Those things rarely vanished so easily. But it helped. It eased something in his chest, loosened a knot he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying.

“…Thanks, Dad,” he said quietly.

And then—as those words left him—it hit him.

Lean on people. Don’t do everything by yourself.

By yourself.

The thought struck like a spark catching dry grass. He’d been assuming, all this time, that the evolution was something the bees accomplished on their own—through their own skills, their own bodies, their own foraging. But what if that assumption was the very wall he kept hitting? What if the final step wasn’t something the bees did alone at all?

Not cooperation among the bees themselves—if that were it, the colony would surely have done it already, instinctively, the way they’d done everything else. But what about something—someone—outside the hive entirely?

His daily question still sat unused. He reached for it now, heart quickening, and shaped it with care.

“Does the final step require a living organism to participate other than the Amberwing Bees?”

The answer surfaced, clear and certain.

Yes.

Elias shot to his feet.

That was it—that was the crack in the wall, the thread he’d been missing for three weeks. The final step needed another living thing. Some organism beyond the bees, brought into the process from outside. It changed everything; it opened a dozen new avenues to question, to test, to chase down.

He was already moving, halfway to his room and reaching for his notebook, his mind racing ahead in a dozen directions at once.

“Thanks, Dad!” he called over his shoulder, not quite registering that his father had been the spark for all of it.

Behind him, his father exhaled a long, exasperated breath at his son’s sudden whirlwind exit—then shook his head slowly, a fond smile tugging at his lips as he listened to Elias clatter off down the hall toward his work.

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