This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Elias had his work cut out for him.

The first thing he did was get the lay of his new world. A map of the secret realm laid it out plainly: at the very center sat a single great island, and on that island stood his laboratory. A river encircled the island entirely, ringing it like a moat—flowing north, curving around, and coming back down to the south, with bridges built across it for crossing. Beyond the river stretched flat, fertile land in every direction, open and waiting.

It was a small world, in the truest sense: walk far enough in any one direction, and you would simply circle the whole of it and arrive back where you started. Five hundred hectares in all—modest as worlds went, but vast as a private estate, more land than he could have dreamed of owning in the outside world.

And it was a living world, too, not a static box. An artificial sun hung overhead—fixed in place rather than crossing the sky like the real one, but it dimmed and shifted into a moon on schedule, casting proper moonlight when night came. There were clouds, and a blue sky above them, and from time to time those clouds gathered and let down rain. Which meant, to Elias’s great relief, that he wouldn’t have to water five hundred hectares by hand. The realm tended to itself, at least in that.

His first instinct was to plant Hundred Fragrance Vines throughout it, here and there across all that fertile ground.

But he thought better of it. For now, at least, he didn’t want his secret realm leaning toward any single attribute—he wanted it to stay neutral, balanced, open to whatever he might one day choose to raise there. A realm saturated in fire or poison or any one element would only ever suit beasts of that element. Better to keep it a blank, fertile canvas a while longer. So the bulk of his Hundred Fragrance Vines would stay dormant as seeds, or be kept to limited growth, until he’d decided what he truly wanted this world to become.

There was, however, one vine perfectly suited to a world of no single attribute—one that embraced them all at once.

Briar.

It was finally time to get to work on the special vine.

Back in his laboratory, though, Elias didn’t go straight for Briar. He worked up to it—starting with the rarer vines first, the ones with two and three favorite attributes, both to refine his method and to steel himself for the hardest of them.

The first loved fire and metal. For that one, he used molten metal—a searing liquid that satisfied both elements at once—and watched, satisfied, as it worked perfectly.

The second loved light and earth. He began by flooding it with relentless light until it dried to the very brink of death, then buried it deep in the dark earth—and cheered aloud when that, too, succeeded.

The three-favorite vine loved water, poison, and metal. After some thought, he settled on poisonous metal submerged in a tank of water—all three elements delivered together in a single brew—and that succeeded as well.

Three down. His method was sound. Which left only the hardest, the strangest, the most beloved of them all.

Six attributes. One vine. His first contracted beast.

There was no single elegant solution for six; he’d had to plan a sequence, a careful chain of near-deaths strung one after another, satisfying each favored element in turn while keeping the vine just this side of gone. He took a breath, steadied himself, and began.

First he plunged Briar into complete darkness, deep enough to leave it withering. Then he switched it to blazing, total light, until it dried and cracked and was all but destroyed—yet still, somehow, alive. He cut it with blades of wind, opening grievous wounds. He steeped it in boiling water. And finally, while it still steamed, he buried it deep in the cold ground.

Under all of it, at last, Briar died—ecstatic to the very end, joyful through every torment, exactly as the others had been.

And the instant it died, Elias felt it.

A vast, sudden emptiness. Something simply… gone, torn out of him, a hollow where a presence had been. It was like waking to find part of your own body missing—an arm, a leg, something so constant and natural you’d never once imagined being without it, never even noticed you were carrying it until it was suddenly, horribly absent. The contract had broken. Briar was gone.

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Elias had a hard time digesting it.

He’d known it would happen—had confirmed, weeks ago, that the contract and the vine would both return after the evolution. He’d known. And still the loss of it hit him far harder than he’d braced for, that abrupt, aching hollowness sitting heavy in his chest.

Holly, Honey, and Hope came to him at once, drifting close, pressing near his face and his hands, humming soft and low—they could feel their keeper’s distress, and they gathered around to comfort him the only way they knew how.

But even through the emptiness, Elias caught something. Faint, flickering, almost too small to sense—the tiny, stubborn will of Briar, still there. Still holding on, somewhere in the ruined remains. Not gone. Only waiting.

That was enough to move him. Gently, carefully, he dug up Briar’s remains and eased them into a vat he’d prepared beforehand—honey and royal jelly, the same life-rich mixture as the others, though for Briar he added a little extra royal jelly. He couldn’t help himself. It was his first contracted beast; a touch of favoritism was only natural. And besides, he reasoned, Briar had always needed more energy than any other vine, even before its evolution, hungry as it was for its six compatibilities. The extra was practically justified.

He sealed the vat, and settled in to wait—and to bear the strange, quiet emptiness until his friend came back to him.

Three and a half weeks passed.

The earlier batch of vines had finished their evolution by then, but Elias chose to keep them in seed form for now, dormant, until he’d need them. There was no rush.

And today, at last, the rarer ones bore fruit. The two-favorite vines and the three-favorite vine had finally completed their evolutions, and their seeds were unlike the single-element ones—marbled and mingled, each a swirl of its favored elements bound together, beautiful in their blended hues.

More striking still were the numbers. Where the single-attribute vines had reached a potential of Commander 9, these climbed higher—the two-favorite vines reaching Potential Ranks of Lord 1 to 3, and the three-favorite vine soaring all the way to Lord 7. More attributes, it seemed, meant more potential; the broader a vine’s elemental nature, the higher it could ultimately rise.

Which boded very, very well for the vine that loved six.

Briar, for its part, needed more time than any of them.

It drank down the honey and royal jelly faster than every other vine combined, draining the vat again and again, demanding more and more life energy to knit its six-element nature back together. Elias refilled it tirelessly, and waited, and bore the emptiness in his chest.

Two more weeks passed before it was finally done.

And when Briar emerged, it took his breath away. The seed it had become was no single color, nor even a marbled few—it was a brilliant, shifting rainbow, every hue at once, shimmering with an inner brilliance that caught and scattered the light into a hundred soft colors. A jewel. A small, radiant world unto itself.

And the moment it formed, Elias felt the connection return—the contract snapping back into place, the hollow in his chest filling all at once with the familiar, beloved presence of his first friend. The emptiness vanished. Briar was back.

Joy surged through him, sharp and bright, and he laughed aloud with the sheer relief of it. Then, eagerly, he looked at Briar’s status.

Name: Briar

Race: Hundred Fragrance Vine

Type: Plant

Attributes: Wood, Life, Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Light, Dark

Current Rank: Common Rank 3

Potential Rank: Lord Rank 10

Mood: Content

Skills:

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