This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The laboratory was waiting for him exactly as he’d left it—spotless, white, and impossibly bright, with that vast artificial meadow stretching away beyond the great window like a held breath.

Elias set down his bags and got to work settling in. It didn’t take long. He had never owned much, and what little he’d brought slotted easily into the small living quarters: clothes folded into the dresser, books arranged on the shelf by a logic only he understood, his notebooks stacked within arm’s reach of the desk. Within an hour the place already felt, in its quiet way, like his.

He had only just sat down to rest when a soft chime sounded through the laboratory.

A delivery.

It was the order he’d been waiting for—the one he’d spent nearly everything on.

Three hives of Amberwing Bees, along with a full set of beekeeping equipment. It had cost him half of every coin he’d managed to save across the years, a sum he’d guarded carefully for exactly this kind of moment. Watching the balance vanish hadn’t hurt nearly as much as he’d expected. It felt less like spending money and more like finally trading it for the thing it had always been meant to become.

He filled in the delivery form with quick, neat strokes, signed where he was supposed to, and accepted the crates.

Then, one careful load at a time, he carried everything through the great glass door and out into the meadow.

It was strange and wonderful, setting the hives down among the wildflowers beneath that artificial sun. The scent of grass and blossoms wrapped around him, a warm breeze he couldn’t trace stirred the petals, and for a moment he simply stood there, three quiet hives at his feet and an entire small world spread out around them, and let himself feel the weight of the beginning.

The Amberwing Bees themselves were almost disappointingly ordinary to look at.

They were a touch larger than common bees, but only just—enough that a careful eye might notice, not enough that a casual one ever would. In every other respect they looked like any bee that had ever bumbled across any garden: the same fuzzy little bodies, the same busy, droning industry, the same single-minded devotion to flowers.

The one exception—the single feature that hinted at anything more—was their wings. Where an ordinary bee’s wings were a faint, papery transparency, the Amberwing Bee’s caught the light like polished gemstones, a warm translucent amber that glowed softly whenever the sun struck them just right. It was a small, lovely thing, easy to miss and impossible to forget once you’d seen it.

Beautiful wings on an otherwise unremarkable bee. That, more or less, was the whole of what the world thought of them.

Elias knew better. Or at least, he was about to find out just how much better.

The next several days were, to put it kindly, a learning experience.

Elias had read a great deal about beekeeping. He had, it turned out, practiced almost none of it. The gap between the two revealed itself almost immediately, and with great enthusiasm.

The protective suit defeated him first. He put it on backwards. He put it on inside out. On one memorable occasion he managed to seal himself halfway into it, arms pinned, and spent a dignified several minutes hopping in a slow circle around the meadow before he worked himself free. The smoker fared no better—he produced great choking clouds of it, most of them directly into his own face, and twice nearly convinced himself the laboratory was on fire.

The bees watched all of this with what he was fairly sure was judgment.

“I’m doing my best,” he informed a bee that had landed on his glove to observe him more closely. The bee did not appear reassured.

But the real work wasn’t the equipment. The real work was patience—long, still, quiet hours of simply being present, letting the bees grow accustomed to the shape and scent and sound of him until he stopped registering as something alarming and started registering as part of the furniture.

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So he sat. For hours. Motionless among the hives, breathing slow, doing his very best impression of a harmless garden fixture while bees crawled over his sleeves and bumped curiously against his visor. His legs went to sleep. His back ached. A bee walked the entire length of his nose, once, with great deliberation, and it took everything he had not to sneeze.

“We’re friends now,” he whispered to it, barely moving his lips. “This is friendship.”

Slowly—grudgingly, it sometimes felt—it began to work.

It helped that he’d always had a gift for this.

Ever since he was small, Elias had possessed an unusually high affinity for spirit beasts. They simply took to him, sensed something in him they trusted, in a way they didn’t with most people. And though the Amberwing Bee barely qualified as a spirit beast—so common and so weak that scholars argued the point—it was, nonetheless, a spirit beast. Which meant that buried somewhere in those tiny bodies was an intelligence a cut above any ordinary insect’s. Not much. But enough.

Enough that they noticed him. Enough that they could, in their small and simple way, decide whether or not he was welcome.

And little by little, the hives decided that he was.

Through all those long, still hours, Elias hadn’t been idle. Each day, his question renewed, and each day he spent it carefully—no longer asking whether a path existed, but how to walk the one he’d found.

He knew the first evolution required four steps. What he didn’t yet know was what those steps actually demanded. So he began, methodically, to map them.

Broadly, the requirements for any evolution fell into a handful of categories. Skills—the trained abilities a beast possessed. Materials—rare resources to be consumed or applied. Environment—specific conditions the beast had to live in or be exposed to. Combat—feats of battle or hunting. And occasionally something stranger, falling outside all four.

So for the first step, that was exactly what he asked. Did it require skills? Materials? A particular environment? Combat? Or something beyond those four?

One careful question at a time, the answer took shape.

The first step required only skills.

Nothing else. No rare materials to hunt down, no special environment to engineer, no battles to win. Just skills—trained, developed, and brought to the proper level. Of all the ways a first step could have gone, it was about as gentle and affordable as he could have hoped for. He felt a flicker of that fortunate luck again, the one that seemed to keep finding him.

By now, Elias knew the Amberwing Bee’s status by heart. He’d read it, recited it, and written it out so many times that he could have produced it in his sleep:

Race: Amberwing Bee

Type: Insect

Attributes: Wood

Current Rank: Common 1~2

Potential Rank: Common Rank 2

Skills: Foraging, Honey Production, Wax Production, Hive Mind, Pheromone Communication, Nectar Storage, Sting

Skills were the trained abilities of a spirit beast—the things it could actually do, refined through practice and growth. Seven of them, in the Amberwing Bee’s case, every one of them humble and practical, exactly what you’d expect from a creature built to make honey and little else.

With the category settled, Elias kept questioning, narrowing in on the specifics. Which skills mattered for the first step? And how far did they need to be developed?

The picture sharpened day by day until, at last, he had it complete.

Four skills. Foraging, Honey Production, Wax Production, and Nectar Storage—each of them raised to at least Level 4.

Skills, like everything else in this world, were measured in levels. Each one could be developed through ten stages of proficiency, from a clumsy, newly awakened Level 1 up to a flawless, perfected Level 10, the absolute ceiling of what a given creature could achieve with that ability. The higher the level, the stronger and more refined the skill.

Level 4 was no great height—comfortably within reach for an ordinary common beast given time and care. But “within reach” and “already there” were two different things, and Elias had no idea where his three hives currently stood. He would have to find out, bee by bee.

Which meant the next phase of work could finally begin.

Once the bees were comfortable enough with his presence—truly comfortable, no longer flinching at every movement—Elias began the painstaking task of cataloguing them.

One by one, with the gentlest hands he could manage, he gathered each bee and brought it to a piece of the laboratory’s equipment built precisely for this: an analyzer capable of reading a spirit beast and projecting its full status into the air, skills and levels and all. Each tiny creature was set carefully into the device, measured, and recorded.

He wrote down everything. He assigned each bee a number, marked it with a small, harmless dab to tell it apart from its identical sisters, and noted its skills and their levels in his notebook in neat, deliberate columns. Bee number one. Bee number two. Bee number three. On and on, through three hives’ worth of nearly indistinguishable insects.

It was slow. It was repetitive. It was the kind of work most people would have found mind-numbing beyond endurance.

Elias, naturally, was perfectly content.

Page by page, bee by bee, the shape of his first real experiment began to take form.

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