This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

With every step of the evolution finally understood, Elias wanted nothing more than to begin evolving every vine he had, all at once.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t. He simply didn’t have enough honey and royal jelly. For all that he now commanded thirty Lifebloom Queens, the hives were still only a few months old, and there was a limit to how much they could produce. He’d deliberately kept their numbers in check, too—if the colony went all out and bred to its full potential, it would overflow the meadow in no time. Restraint now meant a manageable hive later.

His thoughts turned, as they often did these days, to the secret realm.

It would be ready in a few weeks. He knew because Maeve contacted him from time to time with updates on its progress—and, more often than not, a piece of genuinely useful breeding advice besides. Half of it, he suspected, was sincere respect for a talented breeder; the other half was the careful goodwill one extended to a talented breeder with a prosperous future ahead of him. Elias didn’t particularly mind. That was simply how the world worked, and so long as it cost neither him nor his family anything, he was content to let it be.

So, for now, he would take it slow—evolving the vines intermittently, as his supply of honey and jelly allowed. He could always have simply bought the ingredients, of course. But that wasn’t his habit. Why pay for what he could acquire himself, given a little patience? Buying things he didn’t strictly need had never sat right with him. Until the secret realm was done and his operation could expand, slow and steady would have to do.

Beyond the matter of evolving more, there was the far more interesting question of what, exactly, the evolved Hundred Fragrance Vines could do.

So over the first few days, Elias planted the seeds and watched.

They grew with astonishing speed. Each seed sprouted the very next day after planting and shot upward rapidly thereafter, and the ground around them began almost at once to change—growing richer, more fertile, showing clear signs of the transformation each vine’s nature worked upon its surroundings.

Three weeks later—with yet another batch of vines nearly ready for evolution—the newly planted Hundred Fragrance Vines had already caught up to the size of their former selves, and then some. Where an ordinary Evergrow Vine grew two to three meters in a day, these surged four to five, their ranks climbing higher at a frankly extreme pace with each passing day.

And their surroundings had unmistakably changed, each according to its element.

Around the fire vine, the air hung noticeably warmer. Around the earth vine, the soil grew dense and dark and fertile. The water vine left the ground around it moist and dewy; and so on down the line, each vine quietly reshaping its little patch of meadow to suit its own nature.

The poison vine was, predictably, the troublesome one. Elias and the bees had to handle it with extra care, and he could always tell when a worker had ventured too close—the poor thing would start moving frantically, buzzing in agitation at the itch the toxic air left on it. He kept that one well apart from the rest, and well apart from anything that might wander near it.

But overall, to his mild surprise, the environmental changes weren’t nearly as extreme as he’d braced for. He reasoned it was the Wood and Life attributes doing their quiet work—tempering and balancing the harsher elements, keeping each vine’s influence gentle rather than overwhelming. A creature of the matching attribute would thrive especially well in such a spot, of course. But it wasn’t as though beasts of other attributes couldn’t survive there; the vines reshaped their surroundings, but they didn’t poison them against all other life. Save, perhaps, for the actual poison one.

The next experiment was to test the vines’ tolerance for their favored attributes.

This time, there was no mismatch. Where the unevolved Evergrow Vines had so often shown a preference that didn’t match their affinity, the Hundred Fragrance Vines had affinity to spare—outstandingly so. When Elias set fire to the fire vine, it did nothing at all but make the vine happy; it came through entirely unscathed, in fact absorbing the flames wholesale, drinking them in as easily as sunlight.

Then, for the sake of thorough experimentation, he severely damaged one of the vines—and witnessed something genuinely magical.

The ruined remains swiftly withered away to nothing—and in their place was left a single seed. The very same seed he’d first seen at the end of the evolution. The vine, brought low, had simply reverted to its dormant seed-state, dropping all the way back to its Common Rank 3 beginning, ready to grow anew. Not death, but retreat. A plant that, pushed to the brink, folded itself back into a seed rather than perishing outright.

He turned next to the Split skill—and found it had changed along with everything else.

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Where the unevolved vine’s cuttings had simply grown into new, separate vines, the evolved Split did something different: it created a clone of the vine itself, an exact copy rather than mere offspring. He tested it again and again, and a clear rule emerged—the higher the vine’s rank, the more clones it could produce at once.

The clones, he found, were expendable in a particular way. If a clone perished, nothing happened to the original; it simply lost a copy. But if the main body died, the same magical scene played out as before—every clone withered and died along with it, the whole network collapsing back into a single seed. The clones lived and died by their source. Kill a copy, and nothing was lost. Kill the original, and they all returned to one.

But the most important results, for Elias, were the flowers and fruits—the very reason he’d chased this evolution in the first place.

They were magnificent. Bigger, more fragrant, and more nourishing than any the Evergrow Vine had ever produced, brimming with quality. More remarkable still, each vine could bud the very flowers that had been grafted onto it at the moment of its death—as though the grafted blooms and the vine’s own nature had fused together at the genetic level, the vine now able to grow its borrowed flowers as its own.

The bees were beside themselves with joy. The richer flowers meant richer nectar, and honey production climbed accordingly—and best of all, the blooms held an abundance of life spiritual energy within them, a perfect, tailor-made feast for a hive of Lifebloom Bees. It was, for the colony, very nearly paradise.

There was a catch, of course; there always was. As the quality of the flowers rose, their duration fell. The blossoms lasted only a few days at most, and even when picked and carefully preserved, they lasted mere weeks before fading. The vines bore fruit just as quickly—maturing and ripening in only a handful of days—and Elias had to admit those fruits were, without exaggeration, the most delicious things he had ever tasted in either of his lives.

But they spoiled just as fast. Even chilled, the fruit began to turn within a week. So most of it went to good use as fertilizer—feeding the very vines that bore it—and the rest he gifted to his family, where the lion’s share vanished promptly into Kyle’s bottomless stomach, who declared each delivery the best thing he’d ever eaten and demanded to know when the next was coming.

All of this, however, came at a cost to the sanity of three particular queens.

Holly, Honey, and Hope had managed the meadow with practiced ease back when it held only flowers and ordinary vines. The Hundred Fragrance Vines were another matter entirely. Each one had a temperament to match its element, and together they made the meadow into something between a garden and a very polite riot.

The fire vine ran hot in every sense—overeager, dramatic, prone to flaring its warmth whenever it wanted attention, which scorched more than one unlucky bee’s wingtips and sent them tumbling off in indignant smoking spirals. The water vine wept dew everywhere, turning the soil around it into a perpetual puddle that the younger bees insisted on splashing through. The wind vine stirred up little gusts that scattered Holly’s carefully organized work crews to the four corners of the meadow the instant she’d arranged them. And the lightning vine had developed a delinquent streak, crackling tiny sparks at passing bees purely, it seemed, for its own amusement—Hope, of course, adored it, and kept sneaking off to get zapped until Holly hauled her back by sheer force of disapproval.

The light vine was its own particular menace. It cast drifting motes and dancing glimmers of soft radiance through the air around it—and the bees, helplessly, could not resist them. Whole work crews would abandon their duties to chase the little floating lights in dizzy, looping circles, like kittens after a sunbeam, utterly deaf to Holly’s increasingly exasperated commands. No amount of discipline could compete with a shiny thing that moved.

And the dark vine was the precise opposite problem. It pooled deep, soft shadow around itself, and bees that wandered into it simply… vanished from sight, swallowed up so completely that Honey was forever conducting frantic head-counts, certain she’d lost half the colony—only for the missing workers to come ambling back out of the gloom minutes later, perfectly fine and entirely unbothered, having apparently decided the cozy dark was an excellent place for a nap. It gave the poor queen no end of grief.

The bees, for their part, treated the new vines as the single most exciting thing to ever happen to them. Workers organized impromptu contests to see who could nap in the biggest flower. A cluster discovered the fruit ripened faster if they huddled around it humming, which may or may not have been true but which they committed to with religious devotion. Several developed strong opinions about which vine’s nectar was superior and conducted loud aerial debates about it.

Through it all, the three queens labored heroically to keep order.

Holly issued crisp directives that lasted exactly until the wind vine undid them. Honey shuttled tirelessly between feuding work crews and squabbling vines, smoothing tempers on both sides until even she looked frazzled. And Hope, who was supposed to be helping, kept getting distracted by the lightning vine, or proposing wildly ambitious reorganizations of the entire meadow that Holly shot down on sight.

Elias watched the three of them droop, one evening, in a row along the edge of his desk—three exhausted little queens radiating the unmistakable aura of management at the end of its rope—and bit back a laugh.

“Rough day running the kingdom?” he asked.

Holly turned her head away with regal dignity. Honey gave a tired, beleaguered buzz. Hope had already fallen asleep mid-sulk.

“That’s what I thought,” Elias murmured, and gently nudged a drop of honey within each queen’s reach as a peace offering. “For what it’s worth—I couldn’t do any of this without you three. Even Hope.”

Hope, asleep, buzzed faintly in what might have been pride.

And so the weeks passed in a happy blur of research—vines and clones and flowers and fruit, experiments by day and notes by night, the meadow transforming a little more with each batch.

It was in the middle of all that busy, contented work that the call finally came.

The secret realm was ready.

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