This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Elias settled Briar—now a small, radiant seed—into the soil of the secret realm, surrounded it with plenty of honey water to nourish its growth, and felt, for the first time in weeks, his mind truly relax.

The past stretch had worn on him more than he’d let on. Through the whole of Briar’s evolution he’d been quietly anxious, certain something would go wrong—spending question after question, day after day, simply confirming that all was well, that his first contracted spirit beast was safe, that nothing had slipped. It had been a low, constant hum of worry beneath everything else.

Now, with Briar—the seed itself—safely planted and thriving, that hum finally went quiet. And for the first time in a long while, he had the luxury of spending his daily question on something other than Briar—on other spirit beasts, other possibilities, the wide world of research he’d set aside while he fretted over one stubborn vine.

But that could wait a little longer. First, it was time to go home and see his family. It had been far too long.

Home was exactly as he’d left it, which was to say: warm, cozy, and extremely loud.

His mother and Kyle were both back from the outskirts for once, and the whole family was together under one roof—which meant the apartment was full to bursting with noise and life. Kyle had the volume up too high on something; Koda sat nearby, calm and watchful, occasionally reaching over to keep Kyle from knocking a drink off the table; Selena was recounting some misadventure from their latest expedition with the dramatic flair of someone who knew she had a captive audience; and Damien, calm in the middle of it all, was cooking enough dinner to feed twice their number, the kitchen rich with the smell of it.

Elias slotted back into the chaos as though he’d never left, and let the warmth of it wash over him. There was a particular comfort to it that no laboratory could offer—the easy, bickering, bottomless affection of people who simply loved one another and didn’t need to say so. He and his father cooked; the others ate everything in sight; Kyle challenged him to a rematch of the game he’d abandoned weeks ago and trounced him soundly; and for a few hours, Elias was simply a son and a brother, and nothing more complicated than that.

It was over dinner that he mentioned, almost in passing, that he’d researched another evolution.

The family congratulated him warmly, of course—his mother ruffling his hair, Kyle thumping him on the back hard enough to make him cough, his father giving him that quiet, proud smile that always meant more than words. And then they simply went back to their food.

Because they weren’t breeders, none of them. They had no real sense of just how absurd it was for someone to discover a second evolution this soon after the first—how it simply was not done, how a breeder might labor a lifetime and never manage one, let alone two in a handful of months. To them it was wonderful news, certainly, but the kind of wonderful they’d come to expect. Elias had always been special; of course he’d done something remarkable again. That was just Elias. And whatever else they didn’t fully grasp about his work, they knew with absolute certainty that he would never lie about a thing like that. So they congratulated him, and meant it, and thought no more of it.

Elias smiled to himself and let them. If any professional breeder had been sitting at that table to hear it said so casually—another evolution, passed like the salt—they’d likely have been struck dumb with shock, or sick with envy, or both. But here, among his family, it was simply a nice bit of news between bites of dinner. He found he much preferred it that way.

Later, back in his own room, a different sort of warmth settled over him.

The room was spotless—tidy and well-kept, clearly looked after even through the months he’d spent away at the lab and the meadow. Someone had been caring for it in his absence, dusting and airing it, keeping it ready for him. Such a small thing. It made his chest feel tight and full all the same.

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Settling at his familiar desk, he fell back into his old habit: searching for his next project. He asked whether a given common beast possessed an evolution path capable of reaching at least King level, while remaining affordable to the breeder he currently was—all his criteria folded into a single careful question, the way he’d learned to.

And to his genuine surprise, the very first beast he tried came back yes.

First try. He blinked at it, half-disbelieving. He couldn’t say whether it was his improved finances broadening the field of what he could afford, or whether it was the permanent luck increase from the wheel of fortune finally making itself felt—but either way, the odds had clearly tilted in his favor. He’d gone looking for a needle and found it sitting on top of the haystack.

And it was a lovely one, too.

The Crystal Butterfly—a famous ornamental spirit beast, beloved the world over. An Illusion-attribute butterfly, ubiquitous as decoration at parties and celebrations, kept just as often as a simple pet for the sheer beauty of it. Its wings were like flawless clear crystal, refracting any light that touched them into countless dancing rainbows, and through its illusion-attribute nature a single butterfly could seem to become many—a whole shimmering flock of itself drifting and wheeling through the air where only one truly flew.

Elias smiled, turning the idea over with pleasure. After the humble bee and the humbler vine, there was something delightful about a beast everyone already adored.

“So,” he murmured to himself, “I wonder what surprise you’ll give me.”

For the next several days, he let his research breathe and simply stayed home, spending real, unhurried time with his family—the kind of time he’d let slip while buried in his work, and had missed more than he’d realized.

He didn’t neglect the secret realm, of course. Every single day he went to water Briar and check on its progress, and every day it was doing wonderfully, growing strong and spreading green. He could have visited less often, in truth—Briar needed no such constant attention. But he felt a little guilty, putting his first contracted spirit beast straight to work filling an entire world the moment it had finished evolving, and the daily visits were as much to ease his own conscience as anything. Briar, for its part, radiated nothing but contented delight every time he came, which only made him visit all the more.

In between the family time and the daily visits, he worked out the Crystal Butterfly’s evolution—and, true to form, it came in six steps.

The attributes of the first evolution proved especially stubborn to pin down. It took a great deal of trial and error, question after question, before he finally narrowed them to two: Blood, and Fighting.

An odd pairing, he thought. Blood was a genuinely rare attribute—not coveted the way Life was, but uncommon all the same, seldom seen. Fighting, by contrast, was among the most common attributes in existence, tied to anything physical at all: crushing and piercing and slashing, and beyond even those, extending to force and sound and vibration, the raw mechanics of impact in all its forms. A rare attribute and a ubiquitous one, paired together on a delicate ornamental butterfly. Strange. But then, the strangest pairings were exactly where the undiscovered evolutions hid; he knew that better than anyone by now.

He also learned that the evolution began at the egg stage—and that single fact shaped his entire approach.

Because he knew it started from the egg, Elias decided not to buy any eggs yet. Not until he was ready. An egg would hatch within weeks of coming into his hands, and he had no intention of acquiring a batch of them only to fumble about experimenting while the clock ran down, ruining one egg after another in trial and error. That was precisely the kind of waste he refused to commit if he could avoid it.

And he could avoid it. He had his Omniscient Questions. Rather than buy living eggs and learn the steps by trial and error upon them, he would take the slower, patient road first—spending his daily questions, working out every one of the six steps in full from his talent alone, mapping the entire evolution before a single egg ever entered his lab. Only once he knew exactly what to do, start to finish, would he buy the eggs and begin—so that when he did, he could carry each one cleanly through to evolution rather than squandering it on guesswork.

It was the difference, to his mind, between a researcher and a butcher. His researcher’s heart wanted to rush straight in, to seize an egg and begin that very hour—but he made himself be patient. He had no wish to ruin spirit beasts’ lives and evolutions for the sake of his own impatience, not when his talent could simply hand him the answers if he was willing to wait for them. He would do it right, and gently, when the time came.

Besides, he had other matters to see to first—one in particular that had waited long enough.

It was time to release the evolution method of the Hundred Fragrance Vine to the world.

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