This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

It was somewhere in the middle of all that marking and analyzing—pen in one hand, an indignant bee in the other—that Elias turned his daily questions toward the second step.

The answer came back as cleanly as the first. Where the opening step had asked only for skills, the second asked only for materials. No environment to engineer, no battles to win, no mysterious extra condition lurking outside the usual four. Just materials—things to be gathered, provided, and consumed.

That was promising. Materials, at least, were a problem he could solve with preparation and a little coin rather than weeks of uncertain labor. The only question was which materials.

And here, his earlier discovery gave him a head start. He already knew that the first evolution would graft the rare Life attribute onto the humble Amberwing Bee. It stood to reason, then, that the materials feeding that transformation would themselves carry the Life attribute—that the bee would have to take in, little by little, the very essence it was destined to embody.

A few careful questions confirmed the instinct and sharpened it to a point.

The second step required the colony to forage from life-attribute flowers—and not just one kind. At least five different types.

Five types of life-attribute flowers. Simple enough to say. Rather more expensive to acquire.

Life-attribute plants were never cheap. Even the most ordinary among them sold at a markup, for the simple reason that anything bearing the Life attribute was coveted the world over—its rarity alone enough to inflate the price of a flower that, in every other respect, might look like something growing wild by the roadside. A common life-attribute daisy wasn’t ruinous; it ran perhaps ten times the cost of an ordinary flower of any other attribute, pricey but bearable. The trouble was rank. The higher a flower’s rank, the more steeply—the more brutally—its price climbed, the numbers rising not step by step but in great exponential leaps. A Common bloom might cost a trifle, an Elite one many times that, and a single Commander-rank flower more than a whole armful of the lesser kinds put together.

Elias briefly considered asking his family for help. His parents would have given it gladly, without a moment’s hesitation.

Which was precisely why he didn’t want to ask. Not yet. This was his work, his first true undertaking, and some stubborn, quietly proud part of him wanted to stand on his own feet for as long as he possibly could. He’d lean on them when he truly had to—but not for his very first step into the world.

So he turned instead to the resource he’d earned with four hard years of his own effort: his Scholarly Points.

He could have bought the bare minimum—five cheap common varieties and nothing more, just enough to satisfy the requirement on paper. But his questions had taught him something that made him reach deeper into his points than strictly necessary. The evolution did require at least five types of life-attribute flowers—that part was a hard condition. But the particular types chosen, the way they were combined, and the ranks of the blooms all bore a direct link to the evolution’s success rate. Five was the floor; everything above it was a dial he could turn. The right assortment of flowers, in the right mix of ranks, could meaningfully raise the odds of the transformation taking hold, while a careless five scraped together for cheapness would leave those odds languishing. Where there was a variable to be tested, Elias wanted room to test it—so rather than buy the minimum, he resolved to buy broadly and experiment.

In the end he spent thirty points. A meaningful sum, but a worthy one. In exchange, the Breeder Association furnished him with a generous spread of life-attribute flowers—ten varieties of Common rank, five of Elite rank, and three of Commander rank. Eighteen kinds in all, far more than the five the evolution strictly demanded.

The points were spent about as lopsidedly as the prices themselves. The ten common varieties together had cost only a handful of points; the five Elite blooms rather more. But the three Commander-rank flowers alone had swallowed nearly twenty of his thirty points—two-thirds of the entire outlay for a mere three species. It was a stark, tidy lesson in just how sharply value climbed with rank, written right there in his dwindling balance.

When the order arrived, it nearly took his breath away.

He’d expected flowers. He had not quite expected this. Even sealed in their careful containers, the life-attribute blooms seemed to glow from within, vivid and impossibly alive, as though each one held a small private spring inside it. The air around them felt fresher, greener, gently humming with vitality. Setting them out across his workbench, Elias felt as though he’d been handed a fragment of some perfect, eternal garden.

The common varieties were lovely in their unassuming way. There was the Sunblossom Daisy, a simple thing of white petals around a golden heart, the kind that carpeted sunlit meadows and that herbivorous beasts loved to graze; it carried only the faintest trace of life essence, just enough to lend a sweeter taste and a touch more nourishment to anything it touched. Beside it sat the Heartleaf Orchid, its pink petals shaped like little hearts, a flower people kept in their homes as a charm for health and good fortune, breathing out a gentle aura that kept cut blossoms fresh a while longer than they had any right to be.

There was the Verdant Bellflower, pale green and bell-shaped, swaying softly even where no wind stirred—the sort farmers ringed their orchards with, since a great many of them together coaxed the surrounding plants into healthier growth. And the Dewpetal Lily, a small white lily that woke each morning beaded with sparkling droplets; the dew it produced, faintly rich with life essence, was prized by novice alchemists even more than the flower itself.

The Elite blooms were grander, their auras stronger and harder to ignore. The Emerald Bloom Rose, elegant and green-petaled with golden stamens, gave off a clean, refreshing fragrance—the kind of flower refined into tonics that knit wounds closed and bolstered the body’s vitality. And the Lifenectar Magnolia, blossoms from a flowering tree whose sweet scent drew bees and butterflies from far around, its nectar so dense with life energy that it was a genuine feast for any creature lucky enough to find it. Elias suspected his bees would adore that one in particular.

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And then there were the Commander-rank flowers, rare enough that he handled them as though they might bruise from a hard look. The Springheart Magnolia, a modest tree clothed in pale green blossoms that, in season, drew swarms of insects and small creatures to its branches, its nectar potent enough to hasten the growth of young beasts and plants alike. The Emerald Dewflower, a cluster of emerald petals that gathered glowing dew overnight—condensed droplets of pure life essence in which nearly all the flower’s value lay. And the Greenveil Rose, deep green with silver stamens, the prize of wealthy families and healing houses, said to strengthen vitality and shore the body against sickness, exhaustion, and hardship.

Eighteen kinds of living jewelry, and every one of them his to plant.

The following days passed in a haze of happy, dirt-under-the-fingernails labor.

Elias read voraciously first—soil conditions, sunlight, spacing, watering, the particular temperaments of each species—and then he went out into his meadow and got to work. One careful bed at a time, he planted them: the common flowers in broad, generous swaths, the Elite blooms in tended clusters, the precious Commander-rank specimens in their own protected corners where he could fuss over them to his heart’s content.

Under the artificial sun, in soil thrumming with the meadow’s gentle energy, the flowers took beautifully. Within days his once-plain field of wildflowers had transformed into something that genuinely glowed, threaded through with vivid greens and golds and the soft luminous shimmer of concentrated life. The whole laboratory seemed to breathe easier for it.

And then came the part that delighted him most.

The bees noticed.

Almost the moment the first life-attribute blossoms opened, the colony stirred with new interest—and strangest of all, it was his standouts who noticed first. The very bees that had already met the skill requirements, the diligent veterans he’d marked and numbered, were the quickest to find the new flowers and the most eager to work them, crowding the life-rich blooms and drinking deep of their nectar as though they’d been waiting their whole short lives for exactly this.

Elias watched them, and slowly smiled, because he understood what he was seeing.

It was a thing every breeder knew, though few could fully explain it. Spirit beasts might lack the creativity and intellect to research their own evolution—they could never sit with a notebook and a talent for truth and reason out the path the way he did. But they didn’t need to. Buried in every spirit beast was an instinct for it, a quiet, wordless pull toward the very behaviors that would carry them higher. A beast destined to evolve simply found itself drawn, without knowing why, to do the things its evolution required.

His bees couldn’t know that these particular flowers were a step on the road to becoming something far greater than themselves. But somewhere beneath that simple insect awareness, something ancient and certain recognized the path—and reached for it.

The ones closest to the threshold felt it the strongest. And so they came to the flowers first.

“So you do know,” Elias murmured, crouched at the meadow’s edge, watching a marked forager bury itself happily in a Lifenectar Magnolia bloom. “You knew before I did, didn’t you?”

The bee, predictably, ignored him—too busy chasing a future neither of them had words for.

Once the colony had settled into the new flowers and the novelty had worn off and routine set in, Elias began to experiment in earnest.

This was, after all, exactly why he’d bought so many types. If the particular flowers, their combination, and their ranks all swayed the evolution’s odds, then he wanted to know—precisely, measurably—which blooms his bees responded to best. And the laboratory had just the tool for it.

Not the analyzer this time. That device read a beast’s status—its skills and levels and ranks—but for this he needed something subtler: a spiritual-energy resonance meter, a finer instrument built to track the live flux of energy passing between a creature and its surroundings. With it, he could watch in real time how strongly a given bee drank in the life essence of a given flower, reading the rise and fall of the exchange as a flower’s energy flowed into the bee that worked it.

So Elias set up his trials. He would take a single numbered bee, let it forage from one specific type of flower while the meter recorded the resonance between them, and then repeat—another flower, another bee—building his comparisons one careful reading at a time.

The results overturned an assumption he hadn’t even realized he was holding.

He had quietly expected the higher-ranked flowers to simply be better—stronger blooms feeding stronger surges, rank lining up neatly with effect. They didn’t. Again and again the readings refused to fall into that tidy order. A prized Commander-rank flower might draw only a lukewarm response from a bee that, moments later, lit up vividly over a humble Common-rank one. Rank set a flower’s ceiling, perhaps, but it plainly didn’t decide how well any particular bee actually drew from it. Some lower-ranked flowers simply resonated with certain bees far better than their grander, costlier cousins did.

And there was individual variation, too—real and unmistakable. One forager all but glowed whenever it worked the Emerald Bloom Rose and shrugged at everything else. Another ignored the grand Commander-rank specimens almost entirely, yet thrummed with energy over a simple Sunblossom Daisy. No two bees were quite alike in their tastes.

But beneath that scatter of individual quirks, as the readings mounted, a deeper pattern began to surface—one that belonged not to any single bee, but to the species itself.

For all their differences, the Amberwing Bees as a whole leaned the same way. One particular type of flower drew a consistently stronger resonance from the colony than any other, the readings climbing higher across nearly every bee that worked it, individual preferences and all. It was as though the race itself were tuned to that bloom—its small, simple nature naturally in harmony with that one flower’s life essence in a way it never quite was with the rest. The individual variation rode on top of that shared inclination like ripples on a current: each bee had its own favorites, yes, but the whole hive was quietly pulled in one direction beneath them.

That, Elias suspected, was the thread that truly mattered. Affinity wasn’t a coin toss, and it wasn’t purely personal either. It had a logic—faint, intricate, written into the species itself—and entirely missing from every book he’d ever read.

It was the sort of thing only patient, hands-on measurement could ever have revealed.

Elias filled page after page with the readings, a slow, private grin tugging at his mouth the whole while.

This. This was the part he loved—the moment a flat rule on paper dissolved into something living and specific and strange, full of quirks no one had bothered to look for. He could have measured bees and flowers for a week straight and called it the best week of his life.

In point of fact, he very nearly did.

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