This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Description: The larval stage of the Crystal Butterfly, a famous ornamental beast. Small and unassuming, it spends its days feeding and growing, its illusion attribute still dormant. A creature of beauty waiting to unfold.

Mood: Content

There it was—the Blood Affinity skill, gained in the egg from his careful misting. The first step had worked exactly as intended, across the whole batch.

Then he checked the special one—the greedy egg he’d set apart—and his pulse quickened.

Its status was identical to the rest in every line but one. Where its siblings had gained Blood Affinity, this one had gained Blood Mastery instead. A higher, rarer expression of the same talent, the difference between a knack and a gift. This particular larva, it seemed, had a genuine talent for the blood attribute—a natural affinity far beyond its fellows.

Which, when Elias thought about it, was only natural. Spirit beasts were not interchangeable copies stamped from a mold, however much a batch of ten thousand might suggest otherwise. Like any animals, they varied—in talent, in nature, in temperament. One was bolder, another shyer; one took to a skill effortlessly, another struggled. Now and then a true outlier appeared, a creature born with some exceptional gift or rare mutation that set it wholly apart. There were even breeders who specialized in precisely that, hunting and cultivating such natural variations. A single larva among ten thousand born with a mastery rather than an affinity wasn’t a miracle. It was simply nature being nature—and Elias, of all people, knew to pay attention when it showed him something unusual.

To his pleasant surprise, the hatching had gone better than the odds promised. Of the ten thousand, fully nine thousand five hundred had emerged safely—a rate well above the eighty percent he’d been told to expect. The rest, sadly, had not made it; some losses were simply unavoidable.

But the unusually high survival was no accident, and he knew exactly what to credit. He hadn’t mixed Lifebloom honey into that misting solution for nothing. The Life attribute was, as ever, a boon to any and all living things—and a haze of life-rich honey washing over the developing eggs had clearly nudged more of them safely through to hatching than would have managed it on their own.

Though he doubted, he mused, that many breeders would ever bother. Life-attribute material was precious and dear—far too valuable, most would think, to simply spray over a batch of cheap ornamental eggs for the sake of a few extra percent of hatch rate. Only someone with hives upon hives of Lifebloom Bees, honey practically running out of his ears, could afford to be so extravagant with it. He had that luxury, and so he used it freely; almost no one else in the world could have said the same.

“Though I doubt,” he added, glancing fondly at the racks of tiny larvae, then over at the greedy special larva already wriggling toward its next meal, “many of you will turn out quite as much trouble as that one.”

With the larvae hatched, the second step could begin—and it, too, came down to blood.

The step required feeding them continuously until they acquired a new skill. So Elias prepared their meals with care: dried pieces of Briar’s vines, soaked through with his blood mixture and Lifebloom honey, cut small enough for tiny mouths. Briar, for its part, gave up the cuttings without complaint—it had vines to spare and a clear, contented willingness to help its caregiver’s work however it could. The larvae devoured the offerings ravenously, and Elias settled in to feed nine thousand five hundred hungry mouths and watch for what would grow from it.

NovelFire is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

He had an audience, of course. He always did.

Holly, Honey, and Hope had taken up positions to observe the whole operation, and Briar’s main body coiled over his shoulder watching alongside them, the four of them studying Elias and his trays of squirming larvae with intense, varied interest. To the three queens he was, as he had always been, the Keeper—the gentle one who had raised their kind out of smallness and tended them ever since. To Briar he was the Caregiver, the bright warmth that had eased its hunger and never left. Two names for the same beloved person, each as fiercely felt as the other.

Holly supervised, naturally, buzzing the occasional pointed opinion about his feeding technique as though she could have done it better—which, to be fair, she might have. Honey watched the larvae with a soft, almost maternal attention, the diplomat in her apparently extending even to ten thousand baby butterflies. Hope was simply fascinated, drifting low over the trays to inspect the wriggling things up close, and had to be gently warned off more than once before she decided to taste one. And Briar, draped warm across his neck, observed its own donated vines being fed to the larvae with what Elias could only describe, through the bond, as proud parental satisfaction—as though pleased to see its contributions put to such good use.

“You’re all terrible supervisors,” Elias informed them, feeding another row of larvae. “Deeply unhelpful. I love you all very much.”

The assembled court radiated smug agreement.

As the weeks went by and he checked the growing larvae, the results began to show.

Some had started to learn the skill the second step promised: Blood Absorption, the ability to draw nourishment and power from the blood they fed on. One by one, more of them gained it, exactly as the path intended.

The special larva, predictably, did something more. It hadn’t merely learned Blood Absorption—it had positively gorged itself on the blood-and-honey mixture, slurping down far more than any of its siblings, and from that voracious feeding it had gained Blood Leech: a stronger, hungrier cousin of the absorption skill, drawing blood’s essence more greedily and more efficiently than the ordinary larvae ever could.

Its appetite, it turned out, did not stop at its meals.

The first time Elias reached in to check on it directly, the little glutton latched onto his fingertip and tried, with great determination, to bite him—gnawing at his skin in search of the blood it had grown so fond of, having clearly decided the source itself was fair game. It didn’t hurt; its tiny mouth could barely dent him. But the sheer, single-minded greed of it made him laugh out loud.

“Hey—no. That’s attached, you little vampire.” He gently pried the wriggling larva off his finger, where it squirmed in his palm, plainly searching for more of the blood it could smell on him. “You get yours in the bowl like everyone else. No biting the hand that feeds you. Especially not literally.”

The larva, unrepentant, made another hopeful lunge at his thumb. Elias sighed, equal parts exasperated and charmed. Whatever else this one became, it had certainly inherited a taste for his blood—which was, he supposed, rather the point. A butterfly bonded to him by blood from the very start. He just hadn’t expected it to be quite so enthusiastic about the bonding.

“I really do wonder,” he murmured, watching the greedy little thing gnaw the air where his finger had been, “just how different you’re going to turn out.”

In the same stretch, he managed to work out the third and fourth steps—and unlike the first two, which had hinged on skills and materials, these called for environment and skill instead.

The third gave him trouble until inspiration struck, prompted by an unlikely memory. He found himself thinking back to a day at home, sitting in the living room having his blood drawn, while from the gym down the hall came the racket of his mother and brother mid-workout—the pair of them hauling weights heavier than Elias himself, grunting and huffing and competing as they always did, until his father had called out dryly to ask whether they could possibly manage to be any louder.

Muscle built through strain. Strength earned by forcing the body against resistance. The third step granted a body-related skill—so, on something more than an arbitrary guess, Elias wondered whether the larvae had to have force applied to their bodies to gain it.

The answer came back yes. Careful, controlled strain, applied within safe limits, and the body would learn a skill in answer to it.

The fourth step followed the same logic in reverse. It was a healing skill—and the way to grant it, he found, was to push the larvae’s natural recovery, to let them heal again and again until healing itself sharpened into a learned ability. Strain, and then mending. Force in the third step, recovery in the fourth. The body taught first to endure, and then to repair.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Elias paused and laughed quietly at himself.

He was, at the moment, hardly a breeder at all. Blood and feeding, strain and recovery, skill after skill coaxed carefully out of his charges—he was a skill trainer, plainly and simply. Skill trainers were a profession in their own right, cousins to breeders, specialists who focused not on creating or evolving spirit beasts but on teaching them abilities and honing their proficiency. He’d never expected to wear that hat in the middle of his own research, and yet here he was, running ten thousand butterflies through a curriculum of his own design.

“Whatever the work needs,” he said to Briar, with a wry little smile, “I suppose that’s what I am that day.”

Briar, understanding nothing and agreeing entirely, gave his neck and arm a contented squeeze.