This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

When Elias burst back into the laboratory, Holly, Honey, and Hope were thoroughly confused by his early return.

Confused, but delighted—they swarmed up to greet him, buzzing their pleasure at having their keeper back sooner than expected. Elias greeted them only half-mindedly, distracted, his thoughts already racing far ahead of his hands. He went straight for his instruments, gathering the tools for making fire, and began searching the meadow for a vine that favored the fire attribute.

The three queens trailed after him, exchanging the bee equivalent of puzzled glances. Their keeper had a particular look about him—the wide-eyed, humming intensity of a man who had just had an idea and could think of nothing else. They didn’t understand what he was doing. But they followed dutifully all the same, ready to help however he needed them to.

He chose fire for a simple reason: of all the attributes, it was the most direct, the easiest to apply in concentrated, unmistakable measure. If he was going to test a wild new theory, he wanted to start with the bluntest tool he had.

He replanted his chosen fire-favoring vine in the laboratory proper, away from the meadow and its thousand flammable siblings—and, sensibly, kept a fire extinguisher close at hand, held ready by a cluster of bees who could deploy it the instant he needed.

First, the status. He checked the vine’s mood and found it Disturbed—unsettled by being uprooted and moved, as anyone might be. Reasonable enough.

Then he brought fire to it.

Slowly, carefully, he held a small flame near the vine and watched its mood through the contract of his attention. Disturbed shifted to Neutral. Neutral warmed, by degrees, to Content. He recorded every flicker of it as it happened, writing and watching at once, and drew the flame closer, and closer still, tracking the steady climb of the vine’s feeling with mounting fascination.

And then the vine caught fire.

Holly, Honey, and Hope reacted in an instant—they’d been poised for exactly this—and unleashed the fire extinguisher at once. The flames died.

So, unfortunately, did the laboratory’s visibility, because it was the bees’ very first time using the thing and they did not, it turned out, know when to stop. The extinguisher kept going. And going. By the time anyone managed to wrestle it off, a substantial portion of the pristine white laboratory had vanished beneath a thick, billowing layer of foam.

There was a long, foam-muffled silence.

“…Well,” said Elias. “That’s one way to do it.”

Holly emerged from a foam drift looking deeply affronted, as though the extinguisher had personally betrayed her.

Then came the considerably less glamorous part: cleaning it all up.

But even elbow-deep in foam, scrubbing his ruined laboratory while three sheepish queens helped ferry away the worst of it, Elias couldn’t stop turning over what he’d seen. Because in the instant the vine had caught fire—the moment the flames truly took hold of it—its mood hadn’t spiked with pain or fear.

It had been happy.

Genuinely, unmistakably happy, in the very moment it began to burn.

He scrubbed foam and thought about that, and a strange, uneasy suspicion began to take root.

With the mess finally cleared and the vine slightly singed but alive, Elias tried again—this time with the bees properly briefed on the extinguisher, instructed to fire only on his explicit command and to stop the instant he said so.

Once more, he brought fire to the vine. And this time he let it build.

The flames grew, and as they grew, so did the vine’s mood—Content brightening to Pleased, Pleased climbing higher still, the feeling swelling in lockstep with the fire. He fed it more. The blaze spread up the vine, and the moment the flames reached the fire-attribute flowers grafted along it, the whole thing erupted into roaring flame.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

And the vine’s mood, in that instant, hit a peak Elias had never seen from it—ecstatic, rapturous, utterly overjoyed.

“Now!” he called, and the bees doused it.

But it was too late. When the smoke cleared, all that remained was charred, blackened ruin. Elias checked it, already knowing what he’d find—no status appeared at all. The vine was dead. Burned away entirely.

He stared at the charred remains, deeply conflicted. By every sign he trusted, this was the right path; the questions had pointed here, the moods confirmed it. And yet he’d just watched the vine burn to death—ecstatic, the whole way down. The last thing it had felt, in the heart of the flames that killed it, was pure, undiluted joy.

So he tested the others. All nine remaining attributes, each on a vine that favored it, methodically and without flinching, because he had to know if the pattern held.

He sliced a wind-favoring vine apart with blades of cutting air. He crushed an earth-lover and buried it deep under packed soil. He drowned a water-favorite, holding it under until it stilled. He worked metal filings through the dirt around a metal-lover’s roots. He poured corrosive toxins over a poison-favoring vine, soaking it root and stem. He scorched a lightning-lover with crackling arcs. He sealed a dark-favorite away in absolute, lightless black. He flooded a light-lover with blazing, relentless radiance until it dried and withered. He froze an ice-favoring vine solid, by slow, patient degrees.

Some took moments. Some took far longer. But every one of them told the same story.

As each vine endured the attribute it loved—even as that attribute, in its extremity, began to destroy it—its mood stayed content, even pleased. And in the final instant, the moment each one died, every single vine felt the exact same thing the fire-vine had felt: pure ecstasy. An overwhelming, rapturous joy, in the breath before the end.

Elias set down his instruments and looked over the ruin of his experiments—the charred, the frozen, the drowned, the withered—and felt a deep, unsettled chill.

“Is this really the answer?” he murmured.

The next day could not have come soon enough.

The instant his question renewed, Elias spent it—and to his genuine surprise, the unsettling theory proved true. The second step of the evolution was, plainly and bizarrely, to kill the vine using its own favorite attribute.

It was a deeply strange thing to have confirmed. But after a moment, Elias simply… accepted it, with a small, helpless shrug. He lived in a world where humble bees became Lord-potential queens and souls were reborn across worlds; where Spiritual Energy turned animals into monsters and let plants feel joy. The world was already bizarre beyond reason. A vine that had to die in ecstasy to be reborn into something greater was, frankly, not even the strangest thing he’d encountered that month. Why question it?

And besides—this was an evolution. A death that was a doorway. If the second step was to kill them, then there had to be a way to bring them back, or, more likely, they weren’t truly dead at all—merely transformed, paused, waiting in some state for whatever came next. He was suddenly very glad he’d kept each set of remains as intact and tidy as he could manage, charred and frozen and withered though they were. Whatever the third step asked of them, he hadn’t thrown away his materials.

Then a thought dawned on him, and he turned, slowly, to look at Briar.

The vines with two favorite attributes, and the rare one with three—those he could puzzle out somehow. A death by two elements, or even three, was a complication, but a manageable one. He’d find a way.

But Briar.

Briar loved six. Six different attributes, all at once. How in the world was he supposed to arrange a death that satisfied all six favorites of a single stubborn vine? Burn it and drown it and freeze it and crush it and electrocute it and plunge it into darkness, somehow all together, all at once, in a way that left ecstasy rather than mere destruction?

Elias pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long, fond sigh at the little vine that had caused him so much trouble and would clearly cause him a great deal more.

“You really are a handful, aren’t you,” he told Briar.

Briar, contracted and content, radiated cheerful affection back at him, blissfully unaware that Elias was contemplating the logistics of its joyful demise.

Still, Elias didn’t rush off to begin.

Tempting as it was to charge straight ahead, he made himself stop and think first—because there was still the third and final step, and he wanted to understand it before he started killing vines in earnest. More than that, a particular worry had begun to nag at him.

If the second step killed the vine, then whatever emerged from the third step—whatever the evolution finally produced—might not be the same vine that went in. And that raised a question with real consequences. What would happen if someone contracted such a beast? Would the bond carry over, or would the creature that emerged be someone new entirely, a stranger wearing the old vine’s shape? With Briar contracted to him, the answer mattered enormously. He had no intention of losing his strange little friend to its own evolution.

It was exactly the sort of thing he needed to know before he took another step.

He would have to ask tomorrow.

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