This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

This time, Elias asked his questions differently.

All along, except for the vine, with every project before this one, his very first question had been the same: could the creature reach at least King rank? He had never spoken aloud his reason, but it was a simple one. There were beast tamers—plenty of them—who, upon climbing to a higher rank themselves, would annul their contracts and cast aside the companions who had carried them there, trading them for beasts of greater potential. It was a cold, calculating thing to do, and a risky one besides, for a broken contract left scars on tamer and beast alike. Yet people did it all the same, chasing strength.

Elias never wanted that for the beasts born of his hands. He wanted every creature he raised to have a future worth keeping—a potential high enough that no tamer would ever have cause to abandon it for something better. So he had always asked about King rank first. It was his quiet way of making sure none of his beasts would ever be thrown away.

But this one was different.

The Sleep Sheep was not meant to be a powerhouse. It was meant to help exhausted people rest, and for that, raw potential hardly mattered at all—a creature need not be King rank to give a frayed mind a good night’s sleep. So for once, Elias set the old question aside and asked instead about the only things that mattered here.

In a single, carefully worded question, he asked whether the evolution was affordable—the kind an ordinary soldier or shelter could actually manage—and whether, after the very first evolution step, the creature would already possess abilities suited specifically to helping people sleep.

The answer came back yes.

And as always, he asked the talent whether the Sleep Sheep had only a single evolution path that met his requirements.

The answer was no.

And that was the remarkable part. Spirit beasts almost always carried several possible futures—multiple evolution paths were ordinary, the rule rather than the exception. But in all his 2 years of questioning, this was the first, perhaps because the requirements had changed; after all, all his others were able to reach at least king rank, and being affordable was a steep requirement.

Not this time.

He kept questioning, narrowing it down, until the shape of it came clear: of the Sleep Sheep’s several paths, two of them fit. Two separate evolutions, each affordable, each with abilities suited to helping people sleep. He had asked for a single cheap, rest-bringing evolution, and among the creature’s many possible futures, two had answered the very same need.

He didn’t yet know where either path led. But it was enough to decide him. Whatever the Sleep Sheep was, it was worth his time.

He bought a thousand of them.

He bought them the way he always did—from the shelters, the overlooked ones, the sheep nobody else wanted. The old. The hurt. The disabled. A thousand small, unwanted creatures, gathered from across the district and brought home to the realm, where the first thing that met them was not a cage but a meadow without end.

And the household, as ever, simply took them in.

Sebastian had the pigs ready before the first sheep arrived. They moved among the newcomers with brisk, gentle competence—checking sore legs, combing matted wool, settling the frightened ones with a patience that no amount of mental-energy butler attire could fake. Sebastian himself crouched to examine an old ewe with a clouded eye and murmured something to her that made her stop trembling.

Holly, Honey, and Hope drifted down to welcome them with regal grace, the three queens inspecting the flock like benevolent monarchs receiving refugees. Briar was simply delighted—more mouths meant greater demand for his vines, flowers, and fruit, and the vine set about producing with joyful enthusiasm, spreading new growth toward the newcomers like a host laying out a feast.

Iris trailed Elias the entire time, brimming with questions about the new research—what were they, where had he found them, could she help? And Seraphina, characteristically, had already claimed one: she sat by the river with a book in one hand and a contented Sleep Sheep dozing in her lap, reading on as though she had been doing exactly this her whole life.

They were, Elias decided, almost aggressively ordinary creatures.

About the size of small dogs, soft and round, with wool that felt less like wool than like cotton—clean and light and impossibly fluffy. But for their eyes, a clear and gentle green, they looked like any old sheep one might pass in any field on Blue Star. They wandered the flower meadows that Briar had, by now, spread to every corner of the expanded realm, grazing contentedly on his vines, leaves, flowers, and fruit.

Elias scooped one up—a plump, unresisting ewe who blinked at him placidly—and brought up her status.

Race: Sleep Sheep

Type: Beast

Attribute: Wood

Current Rank: Common Rank 5

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Potential Rank: Common Rank 6

Skills:

Calming Aroma — Lv7

Regulate Temperature — Lv6

Regulate Moisture — Lv6

Cotton Shield — Lv3

Elias studied it thoughtfully.

It was, he realized, a slightly misleading name. For all they were called Sleep Sheep, the sheep did very little directly to make anyone sleep. The closest thing was Calming Aroma—a fragrance each one emitted passively, gentle and soothing. And it varied from sheep to sheep: he caught lavender from one, rose from another, a cool whisper of mint from a third, and a dozen other scents besides, but every one of them soft and quieting.

No, the name came from the rest of it.

A Sleep Sheep regulated temperature and moisture in the air around its own body, holding a small pocket of perfect comfort wherever it lay. Add to that the cloud-soft cotton wool, ideal for holding close, and the calming scent, and what one truly had was not a creature that put you to sleep so much as one that built around itself the perfect conditions for sleeping. A living, breathing good night’s rest. People had named them for the result, not the method.

It took him a while to untangle the two evolution paths, but eventually the shape of them came clear.

Both paths led to the Mental attribute, paired with the rarest category of all—Mystic. But there the two diverged.

One path ended in Mystic (Dream).

The other in Mystic (Nightmare).

Two faces of the same gentle creature.

Elias chose the Dream path without hesitation.

The Dream path had four steps, and the first was almost laughably easy.

The sheep simply had to have slept beside a person—truly slept, sharing rest—one hundred times. For a creature whose entire purpose was being held while someone drifted off, this was no obstacle at all. Nearly every sheep in the flock already qualified, having spent their years as living comfort for people, and the few who didn’t soon would; there was no shortage of guardians, pigs, and family members happy to nap with a cloud-soft sheep in their arms.

The second step was harder. It required a concoction—a draught steeped in Mental-attribute energy, fed to the sheep to awaken the latent path within them.

Elias asked, as he always did now, whether there was a way to improve the concoction, to make it more potent or more efficient.

This time, the answer was simply no.

Unlike the Care Pig tonic, which had hidden depths he’d spent weeks refining, the Sleep Sheep draught was what it was. There was no clever trick to find, no elegant shortcut. There was only the work—the slow business of sourcing rare Mental-attribute materials and brewing them correctly.

So he got to work.

It was Cassian who noticed first.

He said nothing about it—he rarely said anything—but a few days into the work, as Elias’s stores of Mental-attribute material began to run low, fresh supplies simply appeared. Quietly. Without ceremony. Rare materials the commander had no obvious reason to be carrying, left where Elias would find them, with no note attached.

It was, Elias realized, exactly what Cassian had done once before, long ago, when the breeder had still been anonymous, and the commander had still been a stranger sending gifts into the dark.

“Thank you,” Elias said the next time their paths crossed. He didn’t need to explain what for.

Cassian only nodded, as though it were nothing worth mentioning, and went on his way.

With the materials in hand and the method fixed, the rest was patience—and patience, Elias had in abundance.

In two weeks of steady experiments and careful questioning, he had it: a working Mental-attribute concoction, ready to wake the dreaming path in a thousand sleeping sheep. The second step was solved. Two more lie ahead.

But the research, for once, was not the only good news the realm had to offer that fortnight.

The first came from Rowan, who came sprinting across the meadow with both arms full of a golden egg.

Taka had done it. A month of games, fortune borrowed from his contractor at every turn, and the two-headed Carrier Raven had quietly met every requirement of the Lucky Raven evolution—and then, all at once, dissolved into the same warm golden light the flock had, leaving behind a single luminous egg. Rowan carried it everywhere now, refusing to set it down, alternately fretting over it and beaming at it, asking Elias roughly once an hour whether it was supposed to be that warm. (It was.)

The second came from Kyle via message: his Protector Turtle had finally finished evolving. It had settled into its artifact form—a small turtle-shaped earring, very nearly the twin of the one Selena wore. Kyle was, by all accounts, insufferably proud of it and had already informed everyone he met that he and his mother now matched.

And the turtles, it turned out, had been busy too.

In the weeks since the breakfast, the rest of the guardians had each gone quietly searching through the Fool’s Turtles for a mind that fit their own—and one by one, they had found them. Rowan, Iris, and Oliver each came away with a turtle that had welcomed them, a guarded mind of their own to match the family’s. Only Cassian remained without, and Seraphina, whose talent had never allowed it; the rest of them were now as protected as Elias could make them.

Which meant the time had come to keep his promise.

The remaining turtles—the better part of five hundred, every one that hadn’t found a person here—were gathered up to be sent to the Sagittarius frontier, to the soldiers who needed them far more than an empty meadow did.

It was, in its small way, an emotional farewell. Elias had grown fond of the lazy, sleepy things. Holly, Honey, and Hope drifted solemnly among them in something like a send-off, and Briar wound gentle vines around a few in quiet goodbye, and Elias himself felt a genuine pang at seeing them go.

The turtles, for their part, could not possibly have cared less.

They blinked. They yawned. They lazed about in their crates with the serene indifference of creatures who had never once been troubled by an emotion in their lives, supremely unbothered by the heartfelt goodbyes being lavished upon them. One fell asleep mid-farewell.

Elias laughed, despite himself, and let them go.

They were going somewhere they were needed. And somewhere on a distant, sleepless frontier, a thousand exhausted soldiers were about to receive a guardian for their minds—and, before long, if his work went well, a good night’s sleep to go with it.

And all the while, buried happily in his flowers and his sheep and his quiet work, Elias never knew the commotion that had begun to stir outside the realm—out in the wider world, where his discoveries had a way of landing like stones in still water, and the ripples were only beginning to spread.

Sleep Sheep

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