This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The next day, Elias returned to his laboratory.

“Morning,” he greeted the meadow as he stepped into it, and the bees answered the way they’d come to—a scatter of them rising up to bob and waggle around him in their small, earnest little dances, a greeting returned in the only language they had.

From there, the days settled back into their familiar shape: checking the bees, analyzing the bees, recording, marking, and—every morning without fail—asking. One careful question at a time, he laid siege to the final step, and over the next two or three weeks, piece by piece, he finally pried the whole of it loose.

The fourth step required another living organism. That much his father’s offhand wisdom had already won him. The rest, he had to earn the hard way.

First, he learned that not just any living thing would do—only certain organisms qualified. Rather than waste weeks trying to break down exactly which, Elias took the practical route and simply asked whether a human would qualify. The answer was yes. He followed it immediately with the question that mattered most: would the process be life-threatening, or carry any lasting side effects for the human involved? Mercifully—thankfully—the answer to both was no.

Then came the what. Reasoning from the bees’ two new skills, Life Absorption and Life Storage, he pieced it together and confirmed it through questioning: the bee had to continuously absorb and store the life force of a single living organism. Not drain it dry—nothing so crude or cruel—but draw upon it steadily, over time, as the final transformation took hold.

How long? Two to three weeks of that steady connection, he found.

And then, finally, the last piece—the one that had stumped him the longest, and the one that turned out to be the true key to the entire path.

Both parties had to be fully willing.

Not merely present. Not merely consenting in word. Willing, wholly and sincerely, on both sides—the human and the bee alike. If either one of them held back, doubted, or failed to truly trust the other, the evolution would simply fail.

And there, at last, was his answer to the question that had haunted him—why no Amberwing Bee had ever evolved in all of history. It wasn’t a rare material or an impossible trial. It was trust. A genuine, mutual, willing bond between a humble honey-bee and another living soul, sustained for weeks. Nature could stumble a colony through the first three steps by sheer accident—but it could never manufacture that. That was something only deliberate care could create.

Elias sat with that realization for a long moment, and felt something like awe.

With the whole path finally laid bare, there was only one thing left to arrange. And it required a conversation he suspected would not go smoothly.

He harvested honey first—painstakingly, jar by golden jar, from his own hives—and carried it home, sending word ahead that he wanted the entire family present. All of them. Together.

He decided to ease into it. Diplomacy first. He set the honey on the table with his best disarming smile and offered it round like the bribe it plainly was.

His parents were not fooled for a second. They looked at the honey, then at Elias, with the flat, serious expressions of two people who knew their son well enough to smell a scheme from across the room.

Kyle took the honey. Kyle scooped a generous spoonful straight into his mouth, entirely untroubled by whatever was about to unfold.

So Elias abandoned subtlety and simply came out with it. He told them he’d had a breakthrough—that the evolution was real, the path complete, the final moment at hand. And then he confessed the rest: that the last step required a willing human partner, and that he intended to experiment on himself, and that he would need his father’s cooperation to do it.

“No,” his father said. Instantly. Flatly. Before Elias had quite finished the sentence.

What followed was a solid thirty minutes of argument.

Elias pressed; his father refused. Elias explained the safety, the questions he’d asked, the guaranteed absence of harm; his father refused. Elias invoked his talent, his certainty, his careful work; his father, immovable as a mountain, refused. Round and round they went, neither giving ground, the tea going cold between them.

Kyle watched the entire thing with honey in his mouth, head turning between them like a spectator at a particularly good match.

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At last, they reached a standstill—and his father changed tack.

“Show me,” he said. “The bee. The one you mean to do this with. Show her to me.”

Elias, sensing a crack in the wall, eagerly obliged. He’d brought her with him—the very first bee he’d found to carry the two new skills—and he opened her small cage. She drifted out, rising to float lazily around him in slow, familiar loops.

And then, to his utter shock, his father’s spiritual power stirred.

It reached out, gentle and sure, and brushed against the little bee—and in the space of a breath, a contract formed.

The whole family froze.

“What—?!” Elias shot upright. “What?! Dad—!”

His father met his stunned face with a slow, satisfied smirk.

It took Elias several seconds and a great deal of spluttering to find his words, and when he did they came out as a long, exasperated, increasingly energy-less tirade—every objection he could think of, hurled at a man who simply sat there and drank his cold tea and let it all roll off him.

Finally, wrung out, Elias managed the only word that mattered. “…Why?”

“You said the final evolution adds Life,” his father replied, easy as anything. “And that she’ll evolve into something greater. A Life-attribute beast, with a healer for a partner.” He spread his hands. “Am I not perfect for it?”

But that wasn’t true. Or—it wasn’t certain, which to Elias was nearly as bad.

He could be wrong. Even with his talent, even with everything he’d confirmed, a thousand small things could still go astray. And even if the bee did gain the Life attribute, that was no guarantee of healing—Life expressed itself in countless ways, and not every life-attribute beast was a healer. Worse still, if the evolution failed entirely, then his father would have spent a precious contract slot on nothing.

Because that was the part that made Elias’s stomach knot. Contract slots were not given freely. Every beast tamer received only a small number of them, unlocked one at a time at each major rank, and each one was irreplaceable. If a contracted beast died, or a contract was dissolved, that slot took years to recover—if it ever recovered at all. His father had just spent one of those precious, finite slots on an unproven gamble, on a common honey-bee that might never become anything more than what it already was.

How. How could his father be so certain—so completely, recklessly confident—when Elias himself, with a talent that handed him truth, still wasn’t?

Because there was something his family didn’t know.

He had never told them what his talent actually was. Not the specifics. Not Omniscient Questions, not the guaranteed truths, not the daily questions that had built this entire path. And not because he didn’t trust them—he trusted them more than anyone alive.

It was because he understood, all too well, how dangerous that knowledge would be in the wrong hands. A talent that could extract absolute truth about any beast in existence was the sort of secret that could paint a target on a person for life. And in a world this full of supernatural power, where mind-reading and stranger arts were far from impossible, a secret known by too many was a secret already half-lost. The fewer who knew, the safer they all were—his family included.

His family had never pushed him on it. They’d known, in their quiet way, that he was holding something back—and they’d never once demanded he share it, never pried, never made him feel he owed them the answer. They simply trusted that he had his reasons, and loved him anyway.

Which was exactly why he couldn’t explain now—couldn’t simply say, “I know it will work, because my talent told me so.” He could only stand there, the certainty locked behind his teeth, watching his father gamble on faith alone.

Elias’s eyes stung. He looked, for a moment, dangerously close to tears.

Then Kyle bumped his shoulder, hard and warm, and grinned around his mouthful of honey.

“Oh, come on. Of course it’ll work,” he declared, with the supreme confidence of a man who had understood perhaps half of everything said in the last hour. “When has the little genius ever been wrong? It’s gonna work. Quit looking like someone kicked your bee.”

It startled a wet laugh out of Elias despite himself.

His mother shot her husband a sidelong look—a silent comment on the sheer audacity of contracting a beast mid-argument to win it—but, notably, she didn’t scold him for it. Instead she reached over and gave Elias’s arm a firm, steadying squeeze.

“It’ll work,” she said simply. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll figure it out. That’s what family’s for.”

Outmatched on every side—outvoted, outmaneuvered, and thoroughly loved—Elias let out a helpless laugh and raised both hands in surrender.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. You win. You all win.”

And so it was decided, whether he’d meant it to be or not.

Elias gathered himself, the researcher resurfacing through the lingering worry, and began to explain what came next. His father should spend the coming days drawing closer to the bee—naming her, learning her, building something real between them. With the contract already formed, that part would come easily; a contractor and their beast could sense one another’s thoughts and feelings, communicate without words, their hearts already half-open to each other. Genuine trust would have a head start.

Because trust was the whole of it. The final step would live or die on whether the two of them were truly, wholly willing—and there could be no faking that, not for the talent, not for the evolution, not for anyone.

If it failed—

No. Elias stopped the thought before it could finish.

His father had chosen to believe in him, recklessly and completely, without even knowing the truth that made Elias so sure. The least he could do was believe right back.

So he chose to. With everything he had.

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