This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Unfortunately, not everything went to plan.

Elias had assumed the hard part would be the research. He had not expected to be unable to get his hands on a single guppy at all.

It turned out that money was not the problem. The problem was qualification. Sparkling Jade Guppies were the specialty of Silverstream—and more than that, a strategic resource, guarded and licensed and not sold to just anyone who walked in with coin. A person needed the proper standing to buy even one. Elias had the coin and none of the standing, and no matter which stall or house he tried, the answer was a polite, immovable no.

He could have gotten one, of course. He could have given his name. “Elias Arkwright” would have opened every door in the district in about an hour. But that was exactly what he didn’t want—the commotion, the fuss, the crowd that always came with it. He had come here to work quietly, not to be a spectacle.

So he walked back to the breeding house empty-handed and sullen, and Cassian walked beside him.

The commander did not know what to say. Comfort was not a weapon he had ever trained with, and he could see plainly that Elias was disappointed, and he had no idea at all how to fix it. So he simply stayed close, matching his pace to the shorter man’s, a steady silent presence at his shoulder the whole way back—which, though Cassian didn’t know it, helped more than words would have.

It was only when they crossed back into the secret realm that some of the weight lifted. The moment the familiar world closed around him—Briar’s vines reaching for him, the warm green light, the smell of home—Elias felt himself settle. This was his second home now, and it went where he went, and there was something steadying in stepping back into it after a hard afternoon.

Oliver, as always, was working.

He had a call going when Elias found him, and two more waiting, and the particular look of a man holding six problems in the air at once. But when he saw Elias’s face he wrapped the call and set it down and gave him his attention, because Oliver, for all his busyness, always had attention to spare for the people who mattered.

Elias explained the trouble. Oliver listened, fingers steepled, and when it was done he asked the obvious question. “So. Do you need me to procure some for you quietly? Because I can. It’s not even difficult.”

And Elias, who had turned this exact thing over the whole walk home, said no.

Because on the way back, thinking it through, he had realized the shape of the real problem—and it was bigger than his father’s fish.

Sparkling Jade Guppies were rare. Part of that was Silverstream hoarding them, guarding their monopoly the way districts did. But part of it, he suspected, was simpler and worse: that they were genuinely hard to make. Hard enough that even the district that specialized in them kept them scarce.

And that mattered, because Elias’s whole purpose was never really just Amia. It was the evolution—the affordable, honest path he’d found to lift a guppy past its ceiling. But an evolution method was worthless to the world if almost no one could get the beast to evolve in the first place. If he did all this work and it only ever reached the handful of people wealthy and connected enough to own a Sparkling Jade Guppy, then he hadn’t really given anything away at all. He’d have made a gift that only the rich could open.

So the question underneath the question was not how do I get some guppies. It was how do I make guppies common.

He’d tested it on the walk, the way he tested everything. Was there a better way to make Sparkling Jade Guppies than the one Silverstream used?

Yes.

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That single word had changed the whole trip.

So he brought Oliver something harder than a quiet purchase. He didn’t want guppies to sell. He wanted the method—the way Silverstream actually made their Sparkling Jade Guppies, their guarded, monopolized process—not to copy for profit, but to study. To take apart. To improve, and then give away.

Oliver went quiet at that. He tapped his fingers against the table in a slow, thinking rhythm, turning over just how difficult a thing his friend had casually asked for—the crown secret of a district, handed over for research. Then he stopped tapping.

“Give me a few days,” he said.

During those few days, Elias and the others were tourists.

There was nothing to do but wait, so they did it well. They wandered Silverstream properly—the markets and the canals, the glacier-view terraces, the little water-gardens tucked between the streets. Kyle and Rowan found something new to break or climb every day. Iris shopped. Seraphina read her way through the district’s bookshops. It was a good few days, easy and bright.

But Elias, who watched things closely, noticed something small.

His parents, who had walked into Silverstream glowing with nostalgia, who had been so happy that first day—were, on one of those days, not quite so happy. A quietness had come over them, Damian and Selena both, a shadow that hadn’t been there when they arrived. It was subtle. He might have imagined it. When he asked, gently, if everything was all right, they smiled and said they were fine, and he let it go, because they were his parents and they were entitled to their own weather. He didn’t think much of it.

He would, later.

And then Oliver—the mad genius—actually delivered.

Elias never did learn exactly what strings had been pulled, what favors called in, what impossible diplomacy had been done in those few days. But Oliver came to him with the method in hand: the real Silverstream process for making Sparkling Jade Guppies, obtained for research. The crown secret, unlocked.

Elias was so delighted he threw his arms around him.

“You’re incredible, you know that?” he said into Oliver’s shoulder, laughing, entirely sincere. “Thank you. Genuinely. I don’t know how you did it and I don’t want to know.”

Oliver, pleased and a little smug, accepted the hug with grace.

From across the room, Cassian watched the two of them—the easy warmth of it, Elias’s arms around someone who wasn’t him—and felt something go sour in his chest, sharp and unfamiliar, for a reason he could not name and did not examine too closely.

Then Elias dashed off to study, and his delight curdled almost at once.

The method was simple enough to follow. That was not the problem. The problem was what it was.

It began by injecting a mixture of demonic beast blood into ordinary guppies. Then the little fish were fed life-attribute materials—and kept alive, barely, forced through it, as their bodies began to come apart and remake themselves: skin shedding, bones reshaping, the whole small creature reforging itself into that iconic shimmering jade. A few final concoctions fixed the change in place. That was the process. That was how the beautiful things were made.

And most of them died.

That was the part that made Elias’s jaw tighten. The success rate was roughly one in ten thousand. For every gleaming jade guppy in some noble’s fountain, thousands of ordinary little fish had been put through agony and torn apart and simply died. The method was crude. It was cruel. It worked, in the narrow sense that it produced results—but it produced them over a mountain of small deaths, and no one had ever bothered to find a better way, because scarcity suited Silverstream just fine.

So Elias asked the question he had come all this way to ask.

Was there a different, affordable way to make Sparkling Jade Guppies—one with a survival rate of at least ninety percent?

Yes.

And pressing further, narrowing it down the way he always did: there was exactly one such way. One method, out there to be found, that could make these creatures kindly and cheaply and without the mountain of dead.

That settled it.

He set the evolution of Amia aside for now—it would keep; his father’s fish would wait—and turned the full weight of his attention to the new problem. He designated the search with care: affordable. Ninety-percent survival. Sparkling Jade Guppy.

And his research began.

For the first time, it was not an evolution he was chasing. This was the breeder’s other craft entirely—not lifting a beast up its hidden path, but making a spirit beast from the ground up, calling a new kind of creature into being. Or, in Elias’s case, doing the same old thing he always did, in the only way he knew how.

Taking something cruel, and finding a kinder way.

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