This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

This time, Elias was confident enough to meet Maeve on his own.

The first time, he’d brought his parents along—a sensible precaution, a way to be certain he wouldn’t be pressured, tricked, or coerced into anything he didn’t fully understand. He’d been a fresh graduate then, unknown and uncertain, with no idea whether he could trust the woman across the table. But he knew Maeve better now. She’d proven herself, more than once, and he no longer felt the need for a chaperone.

So he invited her to his rented laboratory himself, and within a few days the meeting was arranged.

It was a far less formal affair than the first. Relaxed, even—two people who’d come to respect one another, rather than a wary breeder and an official sizing each other up.

Elias began by showing her the evolved vines—the Hundred Fragrance Vines—and walking her through what they were and what they could do: the hundred varieties of flowers and fruits, the elemental variants, the environmental transformation, the life energy threaded through it all.

Maeve kept her composure, mostly. But inwardly, she was reeling.

Another one. The thought turned over and over behind her practiced calm. Another evolution—a second new species, dragged up out of the common and the overlooked, and barely any time at all since the first. She had told him, that day in her office, that his future was boundless. She had believed it. But believing a thing and watching it unfold before her eyes were two different matters entirely. Most breeders spent decades chasing a single discovery. This young man handed her a second as though it were a routine bit of progress—and from the quiet ease in his manner, she had the distinct, dizzying sense that he didn’t intend to stop at two. She had invested in a talent. She was beginning to suspect she’d badly undervalued it even so.

Then came the matter of the contract—and this time, Elias chose differently.

For the Hundred Fragrance Vine, he wanted a semi-public release. Breeders could pay a fee to access the method for research, and those who wished to actually use it could buy a license for a much larger sum. Not free to all, as the Lifebloom Bees had been, but not locked away either.

His reasoning was sound, and he laid it out plainly.

The Lifebloom Bee evolution, for all that its process seemed daunting, was, in truth, cheap and accessible. Anyone could attempt it, so long as they could earn the trust of their bees—and that was precisely why he’d given it freely to the world. It cost almost nothing but patience and good faith, and healing should belong to everyone.

The Hundred Fragrance Vine was a different beast. Its evolution demanded a great deal of life-attribute material—and no one should mistake the casual way Elias himself spent honey and royal jelly for the stuff being cheap. He had hives upon hives and thirty queens; an ordinary breeder did not. Sold on the open market, the amount he poured into a single vine would be enough to support a well-off family for a good while. It simply wasn’t something most could do for free, the way they could with the bees.

There was the question of usefulness, too, and Elias had thought it through.

The Hundred Fragrance Vine wasn’t a healing miracle for the masses the way the bees were. It was better suited to ornamental gardens, prized for its beauty and its hundred fragrances—or to alchemists and the like, who could make use of its potent, life-rich flowers and fruits. The catch was that those flowers and fruits had to be used quickly, spoiling within days; a fast turnaround that would suit a working alchemist far better than a casual buyer.

But its Life attribute alone made it worthwhile—a living, growing, self-renewing source of life energy was no small thing. And that was before one even considered its sheer diversity of attributes, a versatility nothing else on the market could match. So Elias wasn’t the least bit worried that no one would see its worth. The right people would understand exactly what they were looking at.

The contract was settled along those lines—and once again, Maeve agreed to keep his name out of it entirely, shielding his anonymity as she had before.

Before she left, though, Elias had one more thing for her.

He retrieved a small, carefully kept seed—one of his rarest, the three-favorite variant, its surface marbled with the swirling hues of its three mingled elements. Of all the Hundred Fragrance Vines he’d produced, only the single three-attribute one stood higher; this seed carried a Potential Rank of Lord 7, a treasure by any measure. He held it out to her.

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“This is for you,” he said. “A thank-you. For the laboratory—which I still say was far too much.” He smiled. “It isn’t worth as much as the lab, I know that. Not in pure coin. But for a breeder, I think its value speaks for itself.”

Maeve went still, looking at the seed in his palm, and for once her composure slipped entirely. He was right, of course—measured purely in money, a single seed could hardly match the worth of a fully outfitted laboratory. But she also knew exactly what she was being handed, and what it meant to someone like her. A multi-attribute Hundred Fragrance Vine with Lord-rank potential—one of perhaps a handful in all the world, given freely and without a moment’s hesitation. To a breeder, its value was self-evident. Holding a brand-new species of that caliber in her own hands was a quiet dream come true, the sort of thing no amount of money could simply buy off a shelf.

“Elias,” she said slowly, “you undersell it. A breeder would not measure this in coin at all.”

“Then we understand each other,” he said, and pressed the seed gently into her hand. “It’s yours. Please—take it. Consider it the first fruit of the investment you made in me.”

For a long moment Maeve simply held it, this small swirling treasure, and when she looked back up at him there was something in her expression warmer and more genuine than any official courtesy. She inclined her head—a real bow, small but sincere, from a woman who might be a thousand years old to a young man barely begun on his path.

“Then I accept,” she said quietly, “with my sincere thanks. I’ll treasure it, Elias. Truly.” And she meant every word.

With that done, Elias returned to his secret realm—and stopped, just to look.

By now the place was utterly transformed. Where there had once been only barren, empty land, there now stretched field upon field of flowers, an endless rolling garden in every direction, all of it Briar, all of it blooming. The once-lifeless world was now saturated with every kind of spiritual energy, balanced and whole—light and dark, wood and life, water and fire, wind and earth—woven through the air and soil in a gentle, even measure. It no longer felt severed and dead. It felt alive.

Elias took it all in, the green and the color and the soft mingled fragrance of a hundred blooms, and thought to himself that it was time. Time to move his whole operation here—the hives, the plants, the research, all of it—into a world of his own that finally lived and breathed.

Then, through the contract, he felt Briar approach.

Not as a seed this time, nor as the vast spread of fields all around him, but as a single small vine—slender and lovely, hung with beautiful flowers and trailing an enchanting fragrance. It came to him slithering across the ground like a gentle snake, and wound its way up to coil softly around his arm and his neck, settling against him with evident affection.

Through the bond, Elias felt exactly what it wanted, its emotions flowing to him clear and warm. It had done its work—filled the world, made it live—and now it wanted only what it had always wanted: to be near him.

“You did wonderfully,” Elias murmured, lifting a hand to gently cradle the little coiling vine. “Look at all this—you made a whole world live, Briar. Thank you. Truly. I know I worked you hard, right after everything you went through.” He smiled, warmth spilling down the bond. “I promise we’ll stay close. Wherever I can manage it, you’ll be right here with me. All right?”

Briar positively glowed with delight, coiling a little snugger around his arm, its joy washing through the contract bright and unmistakable.

Before he left, Elias checked Briar’s status—and his brows rose.

Commander Rank 10. Already. From a Common Rank 3 seed, in this short a span—an alarmingly fast rate of growth by any normal measure.

Though, he reflected, perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised him. Briar carried a Potential Rank of Lord 10, and that potential was the whole point. A beast’s potential wasn’t merely a ceiling; it was a promise. Given time enough to grow, a creature would climb steadily toward its potential rank as surely as water finding its level—the higher the potential, the faster and further that rise. A Lord 10 potential meant Briar would keep ascending, swiftly, until one distant day it stood at the very heights of the Lord realm.

It was, Elias supposed, deeply unfair. A common beast with a low potential might labor its whole long life and never reach even half of what Briar would attain almost without trying. But what could he do about that, except the one thing he was already doing—giving every common, overlooked beast he could the chance to evolve, and to raise the ceiling on what it might one day become? That was the whole of his work, in the end. Not to mourn the unfairness, but to widen the door.

And there was a personal benefit to Briar’s relentless climb, one Elias hadn’t fully anticipated.

As Briar rose in rank, so did he. The contract ran both ways; the feedback of his beast’s growth flowed back to him, lifting his own cultivation along with it. It did mean he had to set aside a little time each day to properly consolidate that feedback, to settle the surging energy into his Space rather than let it run wild—but the result spoke for itself. He had reached Elite Rank 6.

Elite 6. From a young man who, by his own admission, neglected his meditation shamefully. If word ever got out how quickly he’d climbed—and that the bulk of it came from riding his spirit beast’s coattails rather than any diligence of his own—he had no doubt plenty of people would grumble themselves sick with envy.

But Elias couldn’t bring himself to mind. A higher rank meant a stronger body and a deeper well of energy, and that, to him, simply meant one thing: he could study longer, work harder, and research more. Whatever the source, he’d happily put it to use.

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