This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

While Elias buried himself in sheep and dreams, Oliver Locke went quietly to war.

It was the kind of war he loved—one fought entirely with paper, patience, and the careful application of pressure to exactly the right people. No one would ever know it had been fought at all. That was rather the point.

He had two campaigns to win. The first was the release of the Lucky Raven evolution. The second, far more delicate, was the unveiling of a name that had been a secret for the better part of two years: Elias Arkwright.

The preparation alone consumed a month.

Oliver’s study, filled with ledgers and correspondence and carefully ordered stacks of paper, and the calls—there were always calls—came without end. Companies wanting first access. Politicians wanting to be seen on the right side of it. The military, the police, the Breeder Association, every one of them needing to be spoken to, soothed, positioned, and quietly maneuvered into the place Oliver had decided they should occupy before the announcement ever went out.

He handled all of it with the unhurried pleasure of a man playing a game he was very good at. He slept little and smiled often. By the time everything was in place—every contingency mapped, every important door pre-opened, every powerful party given just enough to feel they’d been consulted—he was, if anything, disappointed it had only taken a month.

Then he gave the word, and the world changed.

The Lucky Raven came first, and it landed exactly as Oliver had known it would: like a stone the size of a mountain dropped into still water.

The Carrier Raven was one of the most common spirit beasts on all of Blue Star. There was not a city without thousands of them, hauling parcels for a wage of grain. Everyone knew them. Everyone had seen a hundred. And now the whole world learned, all at once, that this plainest of birds could be made to ascend—reliably, repeatably—into a creature of peak Lord potential.

That alone would have been enough to set the markets aflame. But it was the attribute that turned a sensation into a frenzy.

Mystic. The rarest category in existence. And not merely Mystic—Fortune.

Luck.

There was not a person alive who had never once wished for a little more luck.

The gambler who had lost everything on a final hand. The merchant whose ship came in a day too late. The parent praying for one more stroke of fortune to carry their family through a hard winter. Every person who had ever cursed a near miss or mourned a what-might-have-been looked at the Lucky Raven and saw, suddenly, the thing they had wanted their whole lives made real and reachable.

And the cruelest, kindest part of it—the part that turned want into madness—was that it required no rare materials at all. No fortune to buy fortune. Only patience, and time, and a willingness to play. Anyone could have it. Anyone at all.

So everyone tried to.

What followed was, by every honest account, a bloodbath.

The scramble for Carrier Ravens was immediate and total. Gamblers, adventurers, merchants, nobles, desperate people and greedy ones alike—all of them descended on the humblest bird in the world as though it were spun from gold. Delivery companies that had given the birds away a month earlier now sold them for hundreds of times the price and could not keep them in stock. Shelters that had begged people to adopt their broken, elderly Carrier Ravens found themselves barring the doors against crazed crowds trying to seize every bird inside.

Overnight, the most worthless spirit beast on Blue Star had become the most coveted.

It was precisely the chaos Elias had feared, and could imagine only a tenth of.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

Oliver had imagined all of it. And he had prepared.

So even as the frenzy peaked, the strings were already being pulled.

Prices were not left to riot; they were fixed—capped, by careful arrangement, at ten times the original cost, high enough to discourage hoarding and low enough that an ordinary person still stood a chance. The police and the military, spoken to well in advance, moved in to hold order at the shelters and markets, turning a stampede into something resembling a queue. Politicians, eager for the goodwill, were guided toward programs that distributed Carrier Ravens to the poor, the rural, the overlooked—precisely the people Elias would have wanted to reach. The Breeder Association lent its weight to verify the method and steady the trade.

What might have been weeks of riots became, instead, a managed storm. Loud, vast, history-making—but controlled. The avalanche came down exactly where Oliver had built the channels to catch it.

He allowed himself a single, satisfied cup of tea over that one.

But while the world lost its mind over the ravens, a smaller number of people noticed the other thing—the quieter, heavier thing buried in the same announcement.

The name.

For two years, a string of impossible discoveries had drifted out of the dark, each one credited to no one. The Lifebloom Bee Queen, that had cut frontier casualties and rewritten the economics of healing. The Hundred Fragrance Vine. The Blood Crystal Butterfly. The Butler Pigs, that had given a second life to creatures the world threw away. The Protector Turtle, that had ended a particular kind of madness on the frontiers. And now the Lucky Raven.

Six discoveries. Six separate miracles, each one attributed to a different anonymous master in the minds of most.

And now, all at once, they had a single name written beneath them.

Elias Arkwright.

To those who understood what they were looking at, it was staggering.

Six world-shaping evolutions in barely a year and a half—some that had altered the course of nations, some that had simply made a lonely person’s home a little warmer—and every last one of them from the same quiet young man. There had never been anything like it. There might never be again.

And so, of course, they came for him.

Not openly. Never openly. But the moment the name was known, the maneuvering began—the great families and corporations and powers that had spent two years wondering who the anonymous master was, now suddenly certain, and suddenly very interested. They sent inquiries. They sent offers. They sent feelers probing for weakness, for leverage, for a price or a pressure that might bring such a person under their control. Some wanted to poach him. Some wanted to own him. And a few, the uglier few, wanted to make certain that if they could not have him, no one safely could.

None of them got close.

They did not get close because every road that led toward Elias Arkwright had, somehow, already been blocked before they set out upon it.

The corporation preparing a hostile approach found itself abruptly entangled with rivals it hadn’t known it had. The official who began quietly assembling leverage discovered old enemies surfacing at precisely the wrong moment. Ventures stalled. Alliances frayed. Unfortunate incidents befell the over-ambitious with a regularity that, to anyone counting, would have stopped looking like misfortune and started looking like design.

It was design. All of it.

Oliver never raised his voice and never showed his hand. He simply made certain, with the patience of a man bred for exactly this over a dozen generations, that anyone reaching for Elias found their own footing giving way beneath them first. He did not need to win every battle. He only needed to ensure that none of them ever reached the meadow.

And none of them would. He would see to that personally.

That evening, Oliver stood at the edge of the flower field and simply watched for a while.

Out among the endless blossoms, Elias sat in the grass, half-buried in spirit beasts. Briar was wound contentedly around one arm. A Sleep Sheep had fallen asleep against his leg. Valentine perched at his neck, scattering light; the bees drifted overhead; a pair of ravens squabbled gently for his shoulder while he laughed and tried to settle them both. He looked, as he always did, entirely unaware that he was at this moment one of the most sought-after people on the planet—and entirely, uncomplicatedly happy.

Good, Oliver thought. Let him stay that way.

That was the whole point of all of it—the ledgers, the late nights, the quiet war fought in rooms Elias would never see. Not power. Not credit. Just this: a gentle man in a field of flowers, left free to keep being gentle, while someone else held back the weight of the world pressing in at the gates.

“Don’t worry,” Oliver murmured, too far away to be heard. He watched Elias coax both ravens onto the same shoulder at last, beaming as though it were the finest achievement of his life. “You just keep being you. Leave the rest to me.”

Then he turned, and went back to his study, and got back to work.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!