This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Once the ruckus had finally died down, Elias made his request.

He wanted to take Floria back to his laboratory for a while—to properly test her new abilities, to learn exactly what the evolution had made of her. And he asked, too, that they keep the whole thing secret a little longer, until he was ready to reveal it on his own terms. His father agreed at once, without hesitation. He understood, perhaps better than anyone, just how large a wave this discovery would make once it broke, and he was happy to let his son choose the moment.

And so the whole family came to the laboratory.

It was their first time seeing it, and they took their time taking it in—the gleaming white workroom, the small living quarters, and especially the great window with its impossible meadow stretching away beneath an artificial sky. Kyle pressed his face to the glass like a child. Selena whistled low and appreciative.

Damien, meanwhile, summoned Floria.

She emerged into the unfamiliar room and was startled at first, wings flaring at the strange surroundings—only to relax almost at once as her gaze found the meadow beyond the glass. The familiar sight of flowers and open green soothed her instantly. And the moment Elias opened the way and let her through into the field, the bees came to greet her.

What happened next made Elias hold his breath.

Floria moved toward the hives with an unmistakable air of quiet majesty, regal in a way that needed no announcing—and the three queens within came flying out to meet her. They circled her, hovered, and seemed, for all the world, to pay their respects, deferring to the radiant new queen as though her station were simply understood.

At the edge of the meadow, Elias let out a long breath of relief.

He’d been quietly dreading this moment. There had been a real chance that the colony might reject Floria—ostracize her for her changed, elevated race, or worse, that a fight might break out. It was rare, but not unheard of, for an evolved beast to be driven out by its former kin. Instead, the hives had welcomed her like royalty come home.

Her duties of greeting done, Floria drifted back across the meadow—and went, unerringly, to Damien.

She alighted on his shoulder, folded her great shimmering wings, and pressed herself lightly against the side of his neck, a gesture so plainly affectionate it drew a soft chuckle from him. Damien lifted a single finger and gently stroked the fur of her back, and she leaned into the touch like a contented cat.

“Yes, yes, I saw,” he murmured to her, amused, clearly answering something passed wordlessly down their bond. “You were very regal. The most regal. They were all suitably impressed.”

Floria gave a satisfied little wing-buzz, thoroughly pleased with herself, and Selena snorted. “She’s as vain as you are.”

“She has excellent taste,” Damien replied serenely.

With that settled, it was time for the testing—but first, there was something Elias wanted to do.

Now that they knew the process was safe, he asked his parents’ permission to undergo it himself. He was, after all, the closest of anyone to the bees; he could begin a new evolution immediately, with willing partners who already trusted him completely. His parents, reassured by Floria’s success, agreed.

What they didn’t catch—what Elias very carefully neglected to mention—was that he had never once said he intended to do it one at a time.

He spent his question for the day making certain. If he left the choice to the bees themselves—let them decide who would bond with him—would any harm come to the human at the center of it? The answer was no.

Reassured, and before anyone could think to stop him, Elias stepped before the hive and spread out his spiritual energy in open invitation.

The bees flooded him.

Hundreds of them rose in a humming cloud—and then, by some collective instinct, the strongest among them were chosen. Ten of the finest bees settled onto him, some crawling beneath his clothes to press against bare skin, and one after another they sank their stingers in and went still as stone, ten tiny anchors latched onto him all at once.

“ELIAS!”

He got a truly magnificent earful for that—from both parents at once, in stereo.

It was, in his private opinion, entirely worth it.

“Okay, that looked really cool, though,” Kyle offered, which earned him a glare from Selena and a moment of genuine doubt from Elias—because if Kyle thought it was a good idea, perhaps it had been a terrible one after all.

After the lecture ran its course, Elias set up an extra beehive he’d bought just in case, settling it into the meadow for his new charges.

Carrying ten simultaneous evolutions was, admittedly, tiring. With all ten bees drawing slowly on his life essence at once, simply walking felt like running, and a stroll across the meadow left him winded. He slept a great deal more than usual—and his father came by every single day to heal away the worst of the fatigue, easing the constant drain with patient, practiced care.

Floria looked forward to those visits more than anyone.

The moment Damien stepped into the meadow, she would come sweeping across it to meet him, circling him twice before settling onto his outstretched arm, and the two of them would simply… be together for a while, contractor and queen, communicating in the wordless way of their bond. Damien would tell her about his day, about the patients he’d seen and the district’s small dramas, and Floria would listen with what certainly looked like rapt attention, occasionally buzzing a comment only he could understand. Elias caught his father laughing quietly at her more than once, at some private remark passed between them.

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“She says your meadow is acceptable,” Damien reported to Elias one afternoon, entirely straight-faced. “High praise, apparently. She has standards.”

“I’ll treasure it,” Elias said dryly, while Floria preened on his father’s arm.

But the exhaustion bought him exactly what he’d wanted: the chance to study Floria properly, and to confirm what her evolution had truly given her.

The changes were remarkable.

First, her intelligence had risen sharply. According to Damien, communication through their contract had grown noticeably smoother, her thoughts clearer and more nuanced than before. She was far more cooperative with the research, too, holding still for analysis and seeming to grasp what was being asked of her.

With his new talent, Insight, Elias could read the fine detail of each of her skills—but reading a thing and feeling it, he soon learned, were worlds apart.

Her core ability remained what it had been: Life Absorption, drawing in excess life-spiritual energy, which was then held by Life Storage. That much was unchanged from her days as an ordinary bee. But what transformed everything was the new ability layered atop it—Life Amplification. She could take the life essence she’d stored and refine it, multiplying it into something greater and purer than what she’d absorbed. What had gone in as a trickle came back out a flood, richer and cleaner than before.

And that refined surplus did not simply sit idle. Through Verdant Blessing, Floria passively radiated her accumulated life energy out into the world around her, gently and constantly, an aura of pure vitality that nourished every living thing within its reach. Plants drank it in and grew greener and stronger; flowers bloomed fuller; even the bees and the soil itself seemed to thrive in her presence. She did nothing to make it happen—it simply spilled from her, the way warmth spills from a hearth. Wherever Floria rested, the meadow flourished, and life of every kind quietly flourished with it.

And then there was Symbiotic Bond. She could attach to another living creature and feed that refined life essence directly into them. Elias felt it firsthand—a warm, renewing current flowing into him, leaving him comfortable and quietly restored. According to his father, who would know better than anyone, the essence seemed best suited to mending fatigue and old, lingering injuries rather than knitting fresh wounds closed. A balm for the worn and the weary more than the bleeding.

Floria, for her part, had taken a particular interest in Elias.

She wasn’t his contracted beast—that bond belonged to Damien—but she clearly remembered, in whatever way a bee could remember, that this was the strange, gentle human who had spent months among her kind, the one whose careful hands and endless patience had set her whole transformation in motion. Whenever he sat down to work, she had a habit of drifting over to settle on his notebook, his shoulder, or, to his exasperation, directly atop the very page he was trying to write on.

“You’re on the data again,” he informed her, holding the notebook up to eye level. Floria regarded him with serene, unbothered dignity and did not move. “You know, for a queen, you have remarkably little respect for paperwork.”

She buzzed her wings once, scattering a faint shimmer of golden light across his notes, and Elias sighed and gave up—though he was smiling as he did. More than once, when the strain of his ten cocoons left him grey and worn, he’d found her settling against him unbidden, feeding a slow trickle of that renewing warmth into him without anyone asking her to. She seemed, in her own regal way, to be looking after him.

“Thank you,” he’d murmur on those days, and she would preen as though the gratitude were no more than her due.

A week in, something new happened.

Drones hatched across the three hives, and a mating ritual began—and Floria took her part in it as a queen should. Once it was done, she rose and flew off with the greater part of the colony streaming behind her, making for the new hive Elias had set up for her.

Within a week, they had built something extraordinary.

An enormous hive rose in the meadow, far grander than anything the ordinary Amberwings had ever made. The spare beehive Elias had provided didn’t quite suit a queen of her new size—so, rather than waste it, the bees had simply incorporated it into the structure as a kind of supporting pillar. Elias chose to be delighted by this. At least she was using it, he reasoned, rather than ignoring it outright or unceremoniously dumping it somewhere.

Floria took up residence within the great hive and began to lay—finger-sized eggs, far larger than any common bee’s- while her workers streamed endlessly in and out to feed both their queen and the growing brood.

Lying out in the field one afternoon, ten cocoons now fixed to his body, Elias found himself doing arithmetic. All those new mouths would need feeding. He’d have to buy more flowers—a great many more.

But first, there was something he wanted to check.

He spent his question on it: now that they had evolved, could Floria and her kind handle Commander-rank flowers—the very blooms that had once overwhelmed the humble Amberwings? The answer came back yes. Their new bodies could take the denser, richer life essence with ease.

So he did exactly that. He poured what remained of his Scholarly Points into flowers, buying as many as he could afford—Commander-rank and all—and planted every last one throughout the meadow.

Floria sensed the new flowers at once, and something in her seemed to light up with excitement. She drew on her stored life essence and poured it into the waiting larvae, imbuing them with refined vitality and hastening their growth.

The results came quickly. Within a week, Elias’s own cocoons were visibly swelling by the day—and the queen’s first larvae had only just hatched.

He looked down at the newly hatched young—and, to his surprise, found he could read their status too. Perhaps, he thought, it was his closeness to their queen that extended the reach of his Insight to her brood.

The status bloomed before his eyes:

Race: Lifebloom Worker Bee

Type: Insect

Attributes: Wood, Life

Current Rank: Elite Rank 6

Potential Rank: Commander Rank 7

Mood: Eager — freshly hatched, brimming with purpose, devoted to queen and hive

Description: A worker born of Floria’s evolved lineage, far surpassing its humble Amberwing ancestors. Roughly the size of a human palm, it gathers and spreads life essence to nurture both plants and living things, and is fiercely protective of its queen and hive despite its gentle nature.

Skills:

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