This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

By the time he left the last shop, the afternoon had begun to soften toward evening, the light turning long and gold across the rooftops. He took his time on the walk home, hands in his pockets, turning a single thought over and over in his mind.

His first question.

One question a day. Guaranteed truth about any spirit beast or demonic beast in existence. It was the kind of power that could reshape a career—an entire life—and he refused to waste it on something careless. So as he walked, he let his mind wander back over every spirit beast he’d ever met, every creature he’d studied, sketched, theorized about, or simply stopped to admire.

The great combat breeds in their meadow. The radiant ornamental beasts in their living garden. And the humble workers in that last unremarkable shop, the moles and toads and beavers nobody ever looked at twice.

By the time the apartment came into view, he had already started to make up his mind.

He would aim for the common ones.

It was a strange choice, and he knew it. Most breeders, most beast tamers, most people of any sense at all would have aimed higher. If you were handed a talent that could pry loose the secrets of any beast alive, surely you pointed it at the strongest, the rarest, the most prestigious creatures you could find.

But he had always believed something that most of his classmates considered, charitably, naive.

He believed no spirit beast was truly limited in its potential.

Not really. Not in the way people meant when they dismissed a creature as “weak” or “common” or “a dead end.” To him, a beast that couldn’t grow stronger wasn’t a beast without potential—it was simply a beast whose path forward hadn’t been found yet. The limit wasn’t in the creature. The limit was in our understanding.

And finding what hadn’t been found yet was, after all, the entire point of being a breeder.

To explain why that mattered so much, one should understand what breeders actually do—because the profession isn’t one job, but two.

The first kind of breeder is a creator. They make new spirit beasts. Working from the raw bloodlines of demonic beasts, they weave those wild lineages into ordinary animals, or cross demonic beasts in careful combinations, or invent entirely new and innovative methods of their own, all in pursuit of a species that has never existed before. A successful creation breeder might give the world a wholly new kind of beast—and a name that endures for centuries.

The second kind of breeder is a researcher of evolution. Rather than creating new species, they unlock the hidden futures of those that already exist. They study a spirit beast and ask: what could this become? Under what conditions, fed on what materials, trained in what way, might it shed its current form and rise into something greater?

It was the second path that had always called to him. And to understand why it matters, you have to understand ranks.

Every beast in this world—and every beast tamer, for that matter—was measured along the same ladder of ranks. From the bottom: Common, Elite, Commander, Lord, Monarch, King, and Emperor.

There were whispers of ranks beyond even that, of course. Realms above Emperor that the general public never heard spoken of, known only to ancient organizations and a handful of beings old enough to remember them. But those were the stuff of legend, far beyond anything that concerned a freshly awakened eighteen-year-old. It was much too early for him to be thinking about the roof of the world when he had not yet laid a single brick.

What mattered to him, here and now, was potential.

Every beast is born with a Potential Rank—a ceiling written into its very bloodline, marking the absolute limit of how strong it can ever become. A beast might be born with the potential to one day reach Commander, or Lord, or, in rare and treasured cases, far higher. That ceiling shapes everything about a creature’s worth and its future.

Demonic beasts, wild and savage as they are, can raise that ceiling on their own. By battling and devouring stronger opponents—humans most prized among them—they tear their way past their own limits, growing in both strength and potential through sheer ferocity and slaughter.

Spirit beasts cannot.

A spirit beast, for all its loyalty and gentleness, is fixed. No amount of training, no quantity of resources, no number of victories can push it past the potential it was born with.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to NovelFire for the genuine story.

Except by one single, miraculous road.

Evolution.

When the right conditions are met—and the right conditions are different for every race, often maddeningly specific and almost never obvious—a spirit beast can evolve.

It can shed its current race entirely and ascend to a higher one, emerging stronger and, crucially, with a brand-new, loftier Potential Rank. An evolved beast isn’t merely a more powerful version of what it was. It has become something new, with a higher ceiling and a longer road ahead.

Evolution is the one door through which a spirit beast can climb toward the heavens.

And finding the key to that door is exactly what evolution breeders devote their lives to. The specific requirements, the rare catalysts, the precise thresholds—every discovered evolution path is a hard-won treasure, and every breeder who finds a new one changes the future of an entire race.

Here, though, was where he parted ways with most of the field.

Common wisdom held that only a select few species could truly evolve to the higher ranks. That some spirit beasts were simply destined for greatness while the rest were born to remain small, useful, and forgettable—a natural order no amount of research could overturn.

He didn’t believe a word of it.

He believed every spirit beast had the potential to reach the sky. Every single one. The grandest combat beast and the humblest common spirit beast alike. It wasn’t that most creatures couldn’t evolve—it was that no one had yet bothered to find out how. The paths existed. They were simply waiting, undiscovered, for someone patient and stubborn enough to look.

Someone, perhaps, with a talent for finding truths no one else could reach.

Which brought him back to his choice.

Common spirit beasts were not exceptional. Nobody would write epics about the Ironclaw Mole or compose ballads for the Raincloud Toad. But they had one quality the grand and glorious breeds did not, a quality that mattered more to him than rarity ever could.

There were so many of them.

Common beasts were everywhere. They filled the farms and the worksites, the delivery routes and the quiet households. They were the spirit beasts that ordinary people—people without fortunes or famous bloodlines—could actually afford, actually raise, actually love. If he could find a way to make even one common species stronger, to unlock an evolution no one believed it had, the benefit wouldn’t go to some single wealthy collector locking a treasure away on a private estate.

It would go to everyone.

That was what he wanted. Not a discovery a handful of elites could enjoy, but one that improved the lives of countless people who would never otherwise have been given the chance. He wanted as many people as possible to benefit from his work—farmers and laborers and children with a single beloved companion perched on their shoulder.

And—if he was being completely honest with himself—there was a simpler reason too.

Half the breeders in the world were already racing one another to produce stronger, deadlier, more spectacular combat beasts. There was no shortage of brilliant minds bent on making the powerful even more powerful.

Somebody, he thought with a small smile, ought to take care of the little guys.

He climbed the stairs to the apartment, the decision settling comfortably into place.

Back in his bedroom, he shrugged off the day and sat down at his desk, pulling a familiar volume from the shelf—a thick, well-worn reference book cataloging the most common spirit beasts in the world. Its spine was cracked from years of handling, its margins crowded with his own notes.

He opened it and began to read.

Page by page, he worked through them, lingering on each entry—the Ironclaw Mole, the Raincloud Toad, the Ironjaw Beaver, and a hundred other modest, useful creatures. He studied their habits, their attributes, their known forms, weighing each one carefully against the others. There was no rush. Choosing the target of his very first question deserved patience.

At last, his finger came to rest on a single entry. He read it over one more time, considered, and made his decision.

He closed his eyes, focused on the race, and asked.

“Does this race have an evolution path capable of reaching at least King level—and can I afford its first evolution?”

The answer surfaced in his mind as naturally and effortlessly as remembering his own name.

No.

He wasn’t disappointed. He hadn’t expected anything else—a King-level path on a common beast, affordable on day one, would have been absurdly lucky. The answer was exactly what reason had predicted. One door checked and quietly closed.

Calmly, he reached for his notebook and began to write. The species. The question. The answer. Neat and precise, in his own hand.

He knew, of course, that he didn’t strictly need to. His talent kept a perfect, permanent record of every question he’d ever asked and every answer he’d ever received; he could call them up at will. But writing things down was a habit he’d never been able to shake, and never wanted to. Something about putting pen to paper made the knowledge stick. It settled his thoughts, organized them, turned a loose tangle of facts into something he could actually hold and reason with. A truth he had merely been told was data. A truth he had written out himself was understanding.

With the entry recorded, he returned to his book.

The afternoon bled into evening, and the evening into night, and still he read on—reviewing, comparing, narrowing the field, building a mental list of which species might be worth a question and in what order. The apartment grew quiet around him. The lamp on his desk became the brightest thing in the room.

It was only when his parents leaned in to tell him, gently but firmly, that it was well past time to sleep, that he finally set the book aside. He waved them goodnight with a tired smile and crawled into bed.

And as he drifted off, one last warm, idle thought followed him down into sleep—

Which race should he ask about tomorrow?

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!