This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Over the month, Elias chipped away at the fifth step the only way he knew how: trial and error, one careful question at a time.

He began, as he always did, by narrowing down what kind of step it even was. He had his familiar categories to test against—was it a matter of a basic skill, of materials, of combat, of environment, or of something else entirely, that catch-all “other” that always meant trouble? One by one he ruled them out, and one by one they came back no, until only the last remained.

Other.

He sighed when it landed there. “Other” was never simple. It meant the step didn’t fit any of the tidy boxes; whatever it required was unusual enough to defy ordinary patterns. The genuinely strange steps always landed in “other”—and the strange ones were the ones that made him suffer.

From there came the slow work of pinpointing what “other” actually meant.

Question by question, he circled in on it. The step was related to something physical—he established that much. It wasn’t about feeding, or environment, or teaching a skill through strain. It required him to do something to the larvae directly, something hands-on and physical, and it was tied somehow to the way the creatures had gained their fighting-type qualities along the way.

But knowing it was physical only narrowed the field; it didn’t answer the question. He pressed on. Was the fifth step done during the larval stage? Yes. Did it require instruments of some kind? Yes. And there he stalled, circling the same frustrating ground over and over—he knew the shape of the thing, knew roughly what region the answer lived in, but couldn’t close his hand around it. Physical, larval-stage, instrument-aided, and tied to combat. And yet the actual method stayed maddeningly out of reach.

The breakthrough, when it came, came the way they so often did—sideways, from something he wasn’t even thinking about.

He was sitting in his laboratory, worn down from another fruitless session, idly watching Briar. The main body was coiled about his arm as ever, but his gaze had drifted out the lab window to the fields beyond, where Briar’s countless clones swayed and worked across the realm. Clones. A whole world filled with copies of a single being, each one its own and all of them Briar.

And something clicked.

The Crystal Butterfly was an illusion-type beast. Its whole signature—the thing that made it famous—was the way a single butterfly could appear as many, a shimmering flock conjured from one. Copies. Duplicates. A creature defined, at its heart, by becoming more than one of itself.

Slowly, Elias turned to look at the larvae, and then back at the swaying clones in the fields, and a suspicion took shape.

He asked his question. Did the fifth step require him to make clones of the larvae?

The answer came back: yes.

For a moment, Elias just sat with that, a slow dread gathering.

Because he had a fairly good idea of how one went about “cloning” a larva, and it was not a pleasant one. There was no gentle, magical duplication here, no clean copy conjured from thin air. If the fifth step needed clones, and it was physical, and it involved instruments, then the absurd, obvious, deeply unappealing method that presented itself was cutting them. Dividing the larvae—physically splitting them apart—and somehow having each piece become its own whole.

It was grotesque to contemplate. It was also, he had to admit, horribly plausible. The natural world was full of creatures that could be divided and regrow; and he’d just spent the past stretch deliberately granting these larvae Regeneration and a hardy, toughened constitution. He’d been building them, without realizing it, into creatures that could survive exactly that.

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The next day, when his question renewed, he asked it outright. Did the fifth step involve cutting the larvae to create the clones?

The answer came back: yes.

Elias put his face in his hands.

It was, without question, becoming a headache. But—and he held onto this—he wasn’t lost. That was the important part. A headache meant he was close, that he had the shape of the answer and only needed to fill in the details. Lost was worse. Lost was those long weeks with no thread to pull at all. This was just hard, and hard he could work with.

He wasn’t working alone, either.

As he sat there in his turmoil, scowling at his notes and dreading the work ahead, his usual companions gathered close. Holly perched on his shoulder and buzzed what was unmistakably a stern instruction to stop sulking and eat something. Honey settled near his cheek, a soft, soothing presence, radiating the gentle reassurance she gave so freely. Hope flitted in restless, sympathetic circles overhead, plainly wanting to help and having absolutely no idea how. And Briar coiled a little snugger about his arm, pressing close, sending wordless warmth down the bond—it didn’t understand his trouble in the slightest, but it understood that he was troubled, and that was enough to make it want to comfort him.

“Thanks, all of you,” Elias murmured, reaching up to brush a fingertip along Holly’s wing and earning an approving buzz. “I’m all right. It’s just… a delicate one. I don’t want to hurt them more than I have to.”

That, he realized, was the real weight of it. Not the difficulty. The care.

So he was careful. Painstakingly, exhaustively careful.

Over the next three weeks, Elias asked every single question he could think to ask, determined to understand the procedure completely before he so much as picked up a blade. He would not go into this blind, not when living creatures in his care hung on getting it right—and one careful question at a time, the full shape of the fifth step came clear.

The instrument mattered, it turned out, and mattered a great deal. The sharper the blade, the better—a cleaner cut meant less trauma to the larva and a markedly higher success rate. A dull edge would mangle where a keen one would divide, so the finest, sharpest instrument he could obtain was not a luxury but a necessity.

The number of cuts was not fixed. It depended entirely on the individual larva—on how much each one could endure. A hardier, stronger larva could be divided into more clones; a frailer one, into fewer. Push past what a given creature could handle, and he’d simply kill it. So each would have to be judged on its own merits, the cuts tailored to the resilience of the particular larva before him.

The resulting clones, he learned, had to be of similar size to one another. An even division was essential; a larva cut into lopsided pieces would not produce viable clones, the mismatched fragments failing to take. Each cut had to be measured and balanced, and the larva parceled into roughly equal parts.

And yes—they could die from it. That was the hard truth at the center of it all, the one he’d been bracing for. The procedure carried a real risk of death, and no amount of care would reduce that risk to nothing. Some larvae simply would not survive the cutting. He would lose some. There was no version of this where he didn’t.

But there was, at least, a way to tilt the odds. The survival rate could be raised—through skills and materials. The right skills already developed in the larvae would help them endure and recover; the right materials, applied at the right moment, would support them through the trauma and coax the divided pieces to take hold. Regeneration, Sturdy Body, the Lifebloom honey and royal jelly—he’d been laying the groundwork for this all along without knowing it, building creatures equipped to survive being divided and steeping them in the very substances that would carry them through.

By the end of the three weeks, Elias had it all—every risk mapped, every variable accounted for, every danger noted down in his careful hand.

The sharpest blade he could find. Cuts measured to each larva’s strength. Even, balanced divisions. Skills and materials marshaled to keep as many alive as possible. It was a complete and meticulous picture, and it had cost him three slow weeks of single daily questions to assemble.

He didn’t resent a moment of it. If he was going to take a blade to the small, trusting creatures he’d raised from eggs—knowing some would die no matter how careful he was—then he was going to do it knowing exactly what he was doing, and exactly how to save every one he possibly could.

Anything less, to his mind, would be unforgivable.

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