This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Another two weeks passed—and this time, at the end of them, Elias was ready.

He’d finally worked out the last step, the one that came after the cutting. Once a larva had been “cloned”—divided into pieces, each meant to become its own whole—the divided remains had to be submerged in blood. Death by the blade, and rebirth in blood. With that final piece in hand, the whole path lay clear before him at last, start to finish. There was nothing left to figure out.

There was only the doing of it. And the doing of it was going to take a steady hand.

Elias stood in a proper surgical room, one set up in a clean corner of his laboratory for exactly this—gloved, masked, every surface sterile, the small operating plate lit bright before him. He’d treated this with all the gravity of true surgery, because that was precisely what it was.

In his hand he held a special scalpel, its blade forged from Lord-rank materials—keen enough to slice through certain Lord- and Commander-rank substances with ease, and so more than sharp enough to divide a tiny larva with the cleanest, kindest cut possible. It had not been cheap. The scalpel had cost him a full quarter of the Contribution Points he’d earned from selling the Hundred Fragrance Vine—a staggering sum for a single instrument. But the success rate hinged on the sharpness of the blade, and the lives of his larvae hinged on the success rate, and so he had not hesitated. A sharper blade meant more of them lived. That was worth any price.

He was not performing this alone. He’d assembled a surgical team, each member suited to their role.

Briar, as always, was wound about his neck—and Briar had the most important job of all: anesthesia. Through its carefully concentrated, enchanting fragrance, the vine could lull a larva into a painless, senseless calm, sparing the small creature the agony of what was to come. Whatever else this procedure was, Elias would not have it be cruel.

Holly and Honey were stationed at the side, his healers—ready to pour life energy and Lifebloom honey into the larva the instant the cutting carried it into danger, to stabilize and mend and hold it back from the brink. And Hope had the subtlest task of the three: she watched the larva’s life force directly, monitoring the flickering vitality within it, ready to signal the moment it grew too weak to continue. She would be the one to tell him when to stop.

It was, Elias reflected, a strange surgical team—three bees and a vine. But he wouldn’t have traded it for the finest team of human surgeons in the world. They knew the patient. They cared about it. And so did he.

The first larva was laid upon the surgical plate.

Briar’s fragrance drifted over it, and the small creature went still and calm, its struggles easing into a quiet, painless stupor. Elias breathed in, breathed out, and steadied himself—steady heart, steady mind, steady hand. Then, with a surgeon’s precision, he made the first cut, dividing the larva cleanly in two.

Clear blood welled up from the division. The larva squirmed once—then subsided as Briar’s fragrance deepened, sinking back into painless calm, while Holly and Honey moved in at once, channeling honey and life energy into the wound to stabilize it. And it held. The larva did not die. All those skills he’d so carefully grown into it—the Sturdy Body, the Regeneration, the toughened constitution—paid off exactly as he’d hoped, carrying it through a wound that would have killed an ordinary larva outright.

So he continued.

Again, and again, and again. Two became four. Four became eight. Eight became sixteen—each cut precise and even, each division measured, the healers steadying the pieces between cuts, Briar keeping the whole process mercifully painless. Elias worked with total focus, his hands sure and unhurried, dividing the larva into more and more smaller and smaller pieces, always watching for the limit.

And then Hope signaled. A sharp, urgent buzz—enough. The larva’s life force had dropped as low as it dared go. One more cut, and he’d lose it.

Elias stopped at once.

The final step came next, and quickly. A mixture of blood—ordinary blood blended with his own—was poured over the divided larva, submerging the sixteen tiny pieces entirely.

And the remains came alive.

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The moment the blood touched them, the little fragments began to squirm—livelier than they had been even whole, writhing with sudden, hungry vitality, drinking in the blood around them without end. They absorbed it greedily, endlessly, the pieces drawing the blood into themselves as though they’d been starving for it their whole short lives. And as they fed, they drew together, the blood thickening and binding around them—until, on the surgical plate, a single cocoon of blood slowly formed, encasing the divided larva within it.

It had worked. The fifth step and the final step both, done in a single careful sequence, and the larva—divided, submerged, reborn—was alive inside its strange crimson cocoon.

Elias let out a long, shaking breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“Okay,” he murmured, easing back from the plate, his shoulders sagging with relief. “Okay. That’s… that’s one.” He looked at the blood cocoon, then at his strange, devoted little team—Briar limp with the effort of its long anesthesia, Holly and Honey drooping from the steady drain of their healing, Hope still hovering watchfully over the cocoon. “We did it. We actually did it.”

The relief in the little surgical room was palpable, shared wordlessly between a young man and the creatures who loved him. One larva, safely through. It was only the first of thousands—but it was proof the thing could be done, and done without losing the patient. And for now, that was everything.

He steadied his breath. Beside him, in their own ways, so did the others—Briar drawing itself back together, Holly and Honey shaking off the drain of their healing, Hope settling from her watchful hover. And then, ready again, Elias continued.

Larva after larva came to the plate, and he learned quickly that each was its own creature with its own limits. Some could only be safely divided into eight before their life force dropped too low; some held strong all the way to sixteen. And every so often—rarely—an extraordinary specimen endured being cut clear to thirty-two, hardy beyond all its fellows. But those were the exceptional few. Most settled somewhere in the middle, and Elias learned to read each one, to feel out how far it could go and stop a hair before the edge.

He worked, and worked, and worked. The first operation had taken him a full minute of careful, deliberate effort, but each one after went a little faster as his hands learned the rhythm, until the work became something close to second nature—cut, stabilize, divide, submerge, cocoon, next. By the time he’d done five hundred larvae, he’d found a steady, practiced flow, his strange surgical team moving with him like the well-drilled unit they’d become.

It was not, however, all good news.

For all his care, for all his preparation, not every larva survived. Some, despite everything, slipped away on the plate—and a few, heartbreakingly, made it through the cutting only to fail at the very end, wriggling weakly in the poured blood, struggling to live, but unable to form their cocoon before their strength gave out. They died in the blood that should have reborn them.

In the end, his losses came to roughly one in a hundred. One percent.

It was far, far lower than he’d dreaded—a testament to his preparation, his careful skills and materials, and above all to his companions, whose tireless healing and anesthesia and watchful eyes had saved countless larvae that would otherwise have been lost. By any measure, one percent was a triumph.

It still didn’t feel good. Five of every five hundred. Small, trusting creatures he’d raised from eggs, gone despite his best efforts. The number was a victory, and the small deaths were a grief, and both of those things were true at once, and Elias sat with the weight of it.

His companions felt his mood and gathered close to comfort him, as they always did.

And they offered him, in their wordless way, a perspective he hadn’t quite let himself sit with. Spirit beasts carried an instinct deep in their natures—a yearning to evolve, to rise, to become more than they were born. It was woven into what they were. Holly, Honey, Hope, and Briar conveyed to him, as clearly as creatures without words could, that any spirit beast would gladly take the risk for the chance to evolve. That the larvae would have chosen this, had they been able to choose. That the possibility of becoming something greater was, to a spirit beast, worth the danger of the trying.

It didn’t erase the grief. Nothing could quite do that, and Elias didn’t want it erased—the day he stopped mourning the ones he lost was the day he stopped deserving the ones he saved. But it helped. It helped to know that the creatures in his care would have wanted this, would have reached for it themselves. He held onto that.

By the time he finally set down the scalpel, some seven and a half hours had passed, and Elias was utterly spent.

So were his companions. Briar hung limp and drained about his neck; Holly and Honey could barely keep aloft after hours of ceaseless healing; even tireless Hope had gone quiet and still. They had given everything to the long day’s work, every one of them, and it showed.

But before them, arrayed across the surgical tables, sat four hundred and ninety-five cocoons of deep blood-red—four hundred and ninety-five larvae carried safely through, each one waiting now to become whatever the evolution would make of it.

Elias looked at them, and at his exhausted, devoted little team, and smiled—a tired, full, profoundly grateful smile.

“Thank you,” he said softly. “All of you. We saved nearly every one. That’s… that’s because of you.”

He misted the rows of cocoons with the honey mixture one last time, just in case, a final gentle safeguard for the night. Then, swaying on his feet, he went to wash up at last—and, with his companions drowsing wherever they’d collapsed, finally let himself rest.

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