This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Elias smiled.

“There is a favor I’d like to ask,” he said. “I want to use all my Contribution Points to build a portable secret realm.”

Maeve’s expression sharpened with interest, and she gestured for him to go on.

It was worth understanding what a secret realm truly was.

Every beast tamer carried a Beast Taming Space within their soul—that much was ordinary, the birthright of anyone who awakened. But spirit and demonic beasts had no such space of their own… until they reached the King rank. Upon ascending to King, a beast gained an exclusive space all its own, and with it the power to project its aura across a battlefield, bending the very ground to its will. It was the reason that, from the King rank upward, only a King could truly contend with another King—below that threshold, one simply could not stand against the weight of a King’s domain.

And when a King-rank beast or tamer finally perished, they left something behind.

The space remained—orphaned, ownerless, lingering in the world after its master was gone. That was a secret realm. Some were passed down within families as treasured heirlooms; others were discovered wild and untamed, hidden away in forgotten corners of the world, holding within them countless dangers and just as many treasures for whoever was strong enough to claim them.

But a secret realm had another use, once it had been cleared and emptied. The hollowed space could be reshaped—repurposed into a subspace.

For a breeder, a subspace could become an exclusive laboratory—and that was something Elias had wanted for as long as he could remember.

It wasn’t merely the convenience, though that alone would have been worth a great deal. It was something far more valuable than space or privacy.

Time.

Within a properly built subspace, time itself could be made to flow faster than the world outside. And for a breeder, that changed everything. Research that would otherwise consume years could be compressed into a single one; the patient, generational work of cultivating and evolving spirit beasts—some of which took centuries to fully mature into adulthood—could finally be made to move at a pace a single lifetime could keep up with. An accelerated subspace was the difference between a breeder who could test one idea a decade and a breeder who could test ten.

Elias had no illusions of acquiring some grand, powerful realm—such a thing would be far, far beyond what his points could buy. He aimed for something modest but sufficient: a large area to work in, a natural water source within it, and at least a twofold acceleration of time. Nothing extravagant. Just enough to begin building the future he had in mind.

Maeve listened to all of it, nodding slowly.

“It can be done,” she said at last. “Your points would stretch to a subspace of that description, comfortably enough.” Then she paused, and a note of caution entered her voice. “But there is something you should understand before you spend everything on bare land and a stream. Doing so would leave you without the one thing that actually makes such a realm worth having.”

She set down her cup.

“A secret realm is a severed space—cut off from the world, and from the omnipresent spiritual energy that fills it. On its own, a subspace is barren. Devoid of spiritual energy entirely. It is, frankly, a poor place to raise spirit beasts; nothing grows well in soil the world’s energy can’t reach.” She regarded him evenly. “That is why breeders who build these realms always furnish them with a treasure to serve as a heart—an everlasting one. A spiritual spring that produces spirit water without end. A vein of spirit ore that never exhausts. A node that births spiritual energy endlessly, forever. Such treasures never run dry; they will nourish a realm for as long as the realm exists.”

“The catch,” she went on, “is their price. Everlasting treasures are staggeringly expensive—they are, after all, the very heart of any realm worth the name. If you were to set aside enough of your points for one, you would have precious little left for the realm itself. The space would shrink considerably. You’d be trading away most of your land to buy the thing that makes land worth having.” She spread her hands. “A small, thriving realm, or a large, barren one. That is the choice most young breeders face. Neither is ideal.”

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It was sound advice, the genuine counsel of an expert trying to keep a promising young breeder from a costly mistake.

But Elias only smiled, because he had thought of this already.

He didn’t need to spend a fortune on an everlasting treasure to serve as the heart of his realm. He had something better—something living, and something that cost him nothing at all.

Because what were his bees, if not the finest gardeners in the world? And what were plants, if not nature’s own answer to barren ground? Floria and her hives drew in life essence, refined it, and poured it outward through Verdant Blessing, nourishing everything around them without end. His plants and flowers in the lab thrived on that bounty and gave back in turn, knitting vitality into dead soil. Where Maeve saw an empty void that demanded an expensive treasure to fill it, Elias saw fertile ground waiting for the right seeds.

And that changed the entire calculation. He didn’t have to choose between a small realm with a heart and a large realm without one. By bringing his own living source of vitality, he could pour every last point into the land itself—claiming the large, spacious realm he wanted—and still have it bloom with life. His bees and plants would be the everlasting heart, free of charge.

He didn’t need to buy the heart of his realm. He would simply plant it, and let it bloom.

“Thank you for the warning,” Elias said, with quiet, genuine gratitude. “But I think the emptiness won’t be a problem. I’ll take the space—all of it. I intend to bring my own heart for it.”

Maeve studied him a moment longer, then inclined her head, a small, approving smile touching her lips at the answer.

“Very well,” she said. “Then it’s settled. Building a portable subspace of that size is no small undertaking—it will take three to four months to prepare properly. But as a courtesy, the Association will begin work on it at once. You’ll have it before you know it.”

With that, and the last of the paperwork done, the meeting drew to a close.

The family headed home.

Elias was thoroughly wrung out by the time they piled into the car—the meeting had taken far more out of him than he’d expected, all that careful negotiation and worldbuilding and holding his composure before a woman who might be older than some districts. He was asleep in the backseat before they’d cleared the first few streets, slumped against the window while his family let him rest.

Back home, he shuffled to his room—and, almost without thinking, drifted to his desk to write down everything that had happened, the way he always did. The meeting, the terms, the realm to come. Putting it to paper settled it in his mind.

It was only then that he realized he hadn’t used his question for the day.

Too tired to deliberate, he simply reached into his mental list of candidate species—the plant spirit beasts he’d been mulling over for his meadow—and picked one at random, asking whether it held the evolution path he sought.

The answer came back: yes.

His exhaustion evaporated in an instant.

Wide awake now, Elias began jotting down the race at once.

The Evergrow Vine.

A fodder spirit beast—and, much like the Amberwing Bee, one that barely counted as a spirit beast at all. It was known for one thing above all else: its astonishing speed of growth, sprawling two to three meters in a single day. Its vines were nutritious and genuinely delicious, and the fluid they produced made superb fertilizer for other plants. It was a longtime favorite of farmers and herbivore-beast breeders everywhere, cheap, common, and endlessly useful.

Elias sat back, faintly bemused at himself. He’d always assumed, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he’d end up evolving some grand flower-blooming plant beast to anchor his meadow—the Evergrow Vine rarely even flowered. But perhaps, he thought, that was exactly the sort of assumption that buried so many undiscovered evolutions. Preconceived notions of what a creature “should” be were precisely what kept people from looking at what it could become. He of all people ought to know better by now.

A common bee had become a life-attribute queen. Why not a common vine?

With his next project in hand, he didn’t waste a moment.

He placed an order online then and there—a thousand Evergrow Vines in all, young and old alike, a generous spread to work with. This time, he used his parents’ money without the usual pang of guilt. Soon enough, once the rights to the Lifebloom Bee Queen evolution began to pay out, money would cease to be a concern for any of them; he could pay it back many times over. For now, it was a loan he was entirely confident he could repay.

He sent off one more message before he let himself rest—an invitation to Professor Aldwin to visit the laboratory the next day. He thanked the old man for putting him in contact with Maeve, told him the meeting had gone well, and promised that the long-awaited reveal of what he’d been hiding was finally at hand.

Then, with the order placed and the invitation sent, Elias pulled out everything he could find on the Evergrow Vine and began to read—deep into the night, the way he always did when a new project had its hooks in him, exhaustion forgotten and a familiar quiet excitement humming in his chest.

Evergrow Vine

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