This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The eureka had been simple, once it struck—so simple Elias could have laughed at himself for missing it.

He’d been so fixated on affinity, on the resonance between a creature and the spiritual energy of a flower, that he’d never stopped to ask whether the rule he’d learned from the bees even applied here. It didn’t. His talent had told him so. The hundred flowers weren’t chosen by affinity—and the moment he accepted that, his mind had finally been free to reach for the answer that had been sitting in plain sight all along.

To test it, though, he needed materials. A great many of them.

So he placed an order—one of every common attribute essence he could find. These were treasures of a particular kind: condensed nuggets of attribute-saturated spiritual energy, each one the distilled essence of a single element, gathered from places in the world where that energy ran thick. One by one he gathered them: Water Dew Essence, beaded and cool; Earth Crystal, dense and heavy; Fiery Ash, warm to the touch; Windy Feather, light as a breath; Dark Shade, drinking in the light around it; Poison Venom Gem, glinting an oily green; Ice Frost Crystal, rimed and biting; Lightning Spark, faintly crackling; Metal Dust, fine and grey; and Light Prism, scattering little rainbows wherever it sat.

Ten essences, ten elements, arrayed across his workbench like a jeweler’s tray. The common attributes of the world, distilled and ready.

Now for the theory itself.

If the hundred flowers had nothing to do with the vine’s affinity for spiritual energy, Elias had reasoned, then perhaps the answer lay somewhere he’d never thought to look—not in affinity at all, but in preference.

It was a strange idea, and yet the more he turned it over, the more sense it made. Consider the Life attribute: every living thing benefited from life energy, drawn to it and nourished by it, regardless of whether its affinity for Life was high or low. Affinity governed how well a creature could wield or absorb an energy—but it didn’t govern what a creature liked. Those were two different things entirely. A person might have no particular talent for music and still love a song.

So what, Elias wondered, if it came down to taste? What if every Evergrow Vine simply had a personal favorite among the attributes—a preference all its own, independent of affinity, and the hundred flowers had to be matched to that?

He spent his question on it.

“Does every Evergrow Vine have a personal favorite attribute?”

The answer came back: yes.

Elias exhaled slowly, something warm and triumphant unfurling in his chest. Preference, not affinity. Taste, not talent. It was such a human thing to find at the root of an evolution—and so perfectly, beautifully easy to overlook. No wonder no one had ever found this path. Who would ever think to ask whether a fodder vine had favorites?

With the theory confirmed, it was time to experiment—and he had the perfect subject.

His special vine. The once-frail runt he’d nursed back to health, the one he’d grown close enough to that his Insight could read its mood. That was the key: he didn’t need to guess at the vine’s preferences. He could simply watch how it felt.

So he began. One by one, he brought each essence close to the vine and watched its mood through his talent, reading the small flickers of feeling the way another might read a friend’s expression. The vine itself never stirred, of course—it was a plant; it had no way to lean toward a thing it liked or shrink from a thing it didn’t. Outwardly it did nothing at all. Only through Insight, in the quiet real-time shift of its mood, could Elias tell anything was happening inside it. A favorite attribute, he reasoned, would surely show itself there as simple happiness—a vine quietly delighted by the nearness of the thing it loved best.

That was the plan, anyway. The vine had other ideas.

Because to his considerable confusion, the vine was happy with nearly all of them.

Not just one. Not a clear, singular favorite standing out from the rest. He brought the Fiery Ash close, and its mood warmed with pleasure. He tried the Earth Crystal—happy again. Water Dew Essence, happy. Windy Feather, happy. Dark Shade, happy. Light Prism, happy. Fire, earth, water, wind, dark, light—its mood welcomed them all with the same evident contentment, as though he’d laid out a feast and it adored every dish, even as the vine itself sat motionless and silent through every test.

A few it was merely neutral toward. But six of the ten—six different attributes—drew that same glow of happiness, with no one of them rising clearly above the others.

It made no sense. The theory said a favorite. The vine insisted on half a dozen.

Elias sat with that puzzle through the evening, turning it over, and a new suspicion slowly took shape.

He’d known from the start that this vine was special—his talent had said as much, the very first time he’d asked. He’d known, too, that the evolution’s gained attribute was strangely variable, capable of becoming water or fire or wind or any number of others rather than settling on one. And now here was this single frail runt, alone among a thousand vines, delighting not in one attribute but in six.

The threads were starting to draw together. He just needed to confirm the shape they made.

So the next day, when his question renewed, he asked the thing he’d begun to suspect.

“Is this vine’s special quality its compatibility with many attributes?”

And he waited, heart quickening, for the answer.

It came, clear and certain.

Yes.

There it was. That was what made this frail little runt so special—not strength, not size, not any grand and obvious gift, but a rare and quiet compatibility with many attributes at once, where an ordinary vine made do with one. Six favorites, not by accident, but because it could genuinely embrace them all. It explained everything: the vine’s specialness, the strange variability of the gained attribute, the feast of essences it had welcomed without complaint. The pieces clicked together into a single, elegant whole.

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It even explained the frailty—the very thing that had drawn his eye in the first place.

A vine compatible with so many attributes was not a simple thing to sustain. Where an ordinary vine drew on a single, narrow channel of energy, Briar’s broader nature demanded far more—more spiritual energy to feed its many compatibilities, more nourishment than its humble body could gather on its own. Left among its siblings, fed no differently than they were, it had simply starved. Not because it was weak, but because it was greater, and greatness, it turned out, was hungry. That was why the oldest vine in the batch had been the most sickly: it had been quietly going without for its entire life, asking for a feast and given only scraps. And the moment Elias had lavished it with Lifebloom honey and shared life energy—the moment it finally got the abundance it needed—it had flourished, transforming from a brittle runt into the robust, thriving thing it was always meant to be.

Elias sat back, a slow grin spreading across his face. He loved this part. He always had—the moment a tangle of stubborn, contradictory observations finally resolved into something clean and true.

And the moment that understanding settled into place, the wheel appeared in his mind.

He’d been half-expecting it. He had, after all, consolidated genuine new knowledge—the truth of Briar’s rare multi-attribute compatibility, earned through his own patient work—and his talent rewarded exactly that. The familiar wheel of fortune turned gently behind his eyes.

This time it was divided into three: white claimed a fifth of it, a slice of perhaps twenty percent; green took a far broader portion, around forty; and blue made up the last forty, the two larger colors splitting the wheel almost evenly between them.

It began to spin—colors blurring into a ring of light, slowing by degrees—and clicked to a stop on green.

A heartbeat later, the prize arrived: a full month’s worth of meditation experience, delivered all at once. Spiritual energy stirred and surged inward, flooding into his Beast Taming Space, the accumulated cultivation settling and consolidating as his Space grew. The needle of his progress climbed.

Common Rank 4.

Elias allowed himself a quiet, satisfied smile. A month of cultivation, handed to him for doing nothing more than what he loved—and a welcome nudge forward for a young man who still, by his own cheerful admission, neglected his meditation far more than he ought to. Between the wheel’s gifts and his research, his rank was creeping upward almost in spite of him.

Of course, reading a vine’s mood at all was its own small privilege, and not one most breeders shared.

There was no instrument in the world that could simply measure a spirit beast’s mood. Spiritual energy could be gauged, resonance tracked, status read by the proper devices—but feeling was another matter. To know what a spirit beast actually felt, one needed either a mental-type spirit beast to bridge the gap and relay its emotions, or a rare gift of one’s own—a talent like Elias’s Insight, which laid a creature’s very mood bare before his eyes. It was an advantage few could claim, and one he’d come to rely on more and more.

But it came with a condition, and that condition shaped the next stretch of his work.

Insight only revealed a creature’s mood once Elias had grown close enough to it. With Briar—for so he’d come to call the special vine, after the thorny, stubborn little survivor it was—that closeness had come naturally, through weeks of devoted, doting care. But to test his theory properly, he needed to read the moods of the other vines too. All thousand of them. And a thousand near-strangers would tell him nothing.

So he set about making friends.

Each day, he gathered Holly, Honey, and Hope into his arms and walked among the vines, and the three queens passively radiated their life energy into the rows as they went. Elias, for his part, let his own spiritual energy spread out alongside theirs until the two all but merged—a warm, steady tide of life and presence washing over the whole field. He wanted the vines to know him. To grow familiar with him, fond of him, to feel him as something kind and constant rather than a stranger passing by.

It took a week. A week spent doing little else but bonding—drifting the rows with three queens in his arms, sharing his energy, coaxing a thousand plants into something like friendship. And at the end of it, at last, the talent answered: he could read the moods of the vines.

Then the real testing began—and it unfolded almost exactly as he’d predicted.

The vines had favorites. Each ordinary one, presented with the ten essences, showed a clear flush of happiness in its mood at a particular attribute, just as the theory demanded. But there were differences he hadn’t expected, too—small, fascinating wrinkles that only hands-on testing could ever have revealed.

For one, unlike Briar—whose mood stayed serenely neutral toward the attributes that weren’t his favorites—the ordinary vines had dislikes. Where one essence lifted a vine’s mood, another might plainly sour it, distaste flickering through its feelings at a thing it found disagreeable. None of it showed on the outside; the vines never so much as twitched. But in their moods, read in real time, they were pickier than Briar by far, with strong opinions in both directions.

And then there were the rare exceptions. Most vines had exactly one favorite, plain and singular. But scattered among the thousand, Elias found a handful that broke the pattern: thirteen vines that each loved not one attribute but two, and a single remarkable vine that delighted in three. Lesser echoes of whatever made Briar so special—none near his six, but uncommon all the same, little pockets of broader compatibility hidden in the crowd.

Elias recorded every one of them in his notebook, page after careful page, a private cartography of a thousand small preferences no one in the world had ever thought to chart. And at the heart of it all sat Briar—thorny, stubborn, beloved Briar—the strangest and most special vine of them all.

Now that he understood the matter of compatible attributes, it was time at last for the grafting itself—the hundred flowers the first step demanded.

But knowing a vine’s favored attributes only answered half the question. He still didn’t know what kind of flowers to graft, beyond that they had to match. So he turned his questions to the particulars, and the answer that came back was, for once, refreshingly convenient.

The specific type of flower didn’t matter—only its attribute and its rank. Any flower of the right attribute would serve; what mattered was how potent it was. And the higher the rank, the better the result. Commander-rank flowers, his questioning confirmed, were the finest choice of all—rich enough in concentrated attribute energy to graft cleanly and feed the evolution well.

Once, that would have stopped him cold.

A hundred Commander-rank flowers, spanning multiple attributes, would have been a fortune far beyond a fresh graduate scraping by on Scholarly Points. The old Elias would have agonized over every purchase, stretched every coin, settled for lesser ranks and hoped for the best.

But he was no longer the old Elias.

The Lifebloom Bee Queen evolution was public now, and the copyright payments had begun to roll in—a steady, swelling tide of wealth flowing to the anonymous breeder behind the most talked-about discovery in years. For the first time in either of his lives, money was simply not a concern. He could buy what he needed without flinching, and buy generously.

So, with a small, slightly giddy thrill at the novelty of it, he did exactly that. He spent lavishly—ordering Commander-rank flowers in abundance, across ten different attributes, far more than the bare hundred the step required. If type didn’t matter and only rank and attribute did, then he would simply buy the best of everything, in every element his vines might favor, and never want for a perfect match.

“Huh,” he murmured, watching the order total climb to a figure that would once have made him faint, and feeling nothing but cheerful satisfaction. “So this is what it’s like to not check the price first.”

Holly, perched on his shoulder, buzzed in what was unmistakably approval. A queen, after all, appreciated a breeder who understood the value of buying nice things.

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