This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

It wasn’t as though the three weeks had been entirely fruitless.

Elias had made progress—just not enough to do him any good. He’d managed to confirm that the second step was tied, somehow, to the vines’ favorite attributes. That much was certain. The trouble was that he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was meant to do with that fact.

He tested everything he could think of. It wasn’t about the attribute-saturated spiritual energy of the essences—he checked, and the answer was no. It wasn’t the grafted flowers. It wasn’t the growing conditions, the climate, the soil. The favorite attribute mattered, the questions insisted, but none of the obvious ways of applying it were correct. He had a key and no lock to put it in.

To pass the time productively, he ran a small experiment on the side—one he’d been curious about anyway. Would the offspring of a vine share its parent’s preference?

The Evergrow Vine could reproduce by seed, but seeds were slow, agonizingly so. Farmers rarely bothered; instead they simply cut a section of an established vine and replanted it, though even that succeeded only about one time in ten. With the bees’ help, however, Elias’s success rate was far better than any farmer’s—and from his cuttings, a hundred and forty new vines took root and grew.

He read each one’s preferences as they matured, and the answer was clear: the offspring did not inherit their parents’ tastes. Every new vine had its own favorite attribute, different from the vine it had been cut from. Even the cutting taken from one of his rare double-preference vines came up ordinary, with just a single favorite of its own. Preference, it seemed, was something each vine simply was born with, unique to itself, owing nothing to its parent.

It was a genuinely useful finding—and his talent agreed. The moment he’d consolidated the knowledge, the wheel of fortune surfaced in his mind once more.

It spun, and landed on green: another month’s worth of meditation experience, flooding into his Space and settling neatly into place. His cultivation ticked upward again.

Common Rank 5.

“At this rate,” he murmured, faintly amused even through his frustration, “I’ll rank up entirely by accident.”

But a free rank did little to soothe the deeper frustration. The second step still loomed, unsolved, and Elias had reached the point where staring at it any longer would do more harm than good.

So he decided to go home. He left Holly, Honey, and Hope behind to maintain order in the laboratory—a duty the three queens took up with great seriousness—and set off.

Sulking along the streets, hands in his pockets, Elias slowly began to notice something that stopped him short.

There were Lifebloom Bee Queens among the crowds.

Not many—just here and there, the occasional shimmer of green and gold drifting at a contractor’s shoulder—but enough to notice, where weeks ago there had been none at all. And wherever one appeared, people turned to look: with envy, with curiosity, with the simple novelty of seeing something new and wondrous made real.

As he walked, snatches of conversation drifted to him from all sides, and every one of them was about his bees.

Someone marveled at the profits to be made from the healing honey. Someone else swore that an old man on the very brink of death had been pulled back to life after contracting one. A pair of breeders grumbled about how many had tried the evolution and failed, wasting their bees. A merchant complained that Amberwing prices had climbed a hundredfold and were still rising. And again and again, threaded through all of it, came the same fascinated question—who? Who was the anonymous breeder behind it all? Theories flew. Some said the government itself wanted to find and honor them, for putting affordable healing within reach of anyone at all, common folk included. Others said it was the military that sought them most eagerly—for a healing spirit beast that could be raised in numbers, meaning wounded soldiers on the frontline who would otherwise have been lost were saved, a gift worth more than gold to those who held the line against the demonic beasts.

It was novel, and deeply strange, to walk through it all unrecognized.

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Because the truth was that Elias hadn’t known. He’d been so utterly buried in his vines that he’d half-forgotten the Lifebloom evolution had even been released. The money, yes, he’d been distantly aware of—it had been flooding in like a river—but he’d handed all of that off to his parents to manage, mostly to his father, and put it out of his mind entirely. To see the change with his own eyes, walking and breathing through the city, was something else.

And despite everything—despite the stuck step and the sour mood—a small, quiet pride warmed him as he listened. The old man pulled back from death. The healing now within ordinary reach. He had done that. That had been the whole point, all along.

He carried that small warmth the rest of the way home.

Home, however, was nearly empty.

The only ones there were Kyle and Koda, his brother sprawled across the couch with the Boxing Monkey beside him. Elias glanced around at the quiet apartment and asked where their parents were.

“Date,” Kyle said, around a mouthful of chips.

It was, Elias reflected, entirely on brand. For all that they had two grown sons, his parents had somehow kept their romance alive and constant through the years—still affectionate, still stealing away for evenings together like a couple half their age. It was, frankly, a little much to witness sometimes. But a home full of love, however embarrassing, was infinitely better than one in disarray—even if Kyle, who had endured a great deal more of their parents’ doting than Elias had, couldn’t always be brought to agree.

“They’re disgusting,” Kyle added, with feeling. “Fifty years. Fifty. Anyway. Sit down, you’re just in time to lose.”

So, with just the two of them, they did what they’d always done—they played video games, like old times.

Which mostly meant Kyle dragging Elias into it while Elias cheered enthusiastically from the sidelines, being—by his own honest admission—spectacularly bad at games that required fast hands. Kyle played; Elias heckled, strategized uselessly, and celebrated his brother’s victories as though they were his own. Koda refereed by stealing chips. It was loud and ridiculous and entirely without purpose, and both of them had a wonderful time, which was the only thing that mattered.

After a few hours of that, and a truly heroic quantity of snacks, Kyle paused the game and glanced sidelong at his brother.

“Alright. What’s eating you?”

Elias blinked. “What?”

“Something’s on your mind. Has been all night.” Kyle shrugged, setting down the controller. “You think I can’t tell? Known you your whole life, genius.”

And he could tell. That was the thing about Kyle. He went around insisting he wasn’t the smart one—that was Elias’s job, he’d say, the books and the research and the remembering—but it wasn’t remotely true. Kyle’s intelligence simply lived somewhere else: in people, in situations, in the unspoken currents between them. He read a room the way Elias read a status screen. He played the fool and the loud one because it suited him, but underneath it he noticed everything, and cared more deeply than anyone Elias knew.

Elias had always been quietly and profoundly grateful to have him as a brother.

So he told him. He set down his own controller and laid out the whole frustrating tangle—the second step, the favorite attributes, the key he couldn’t find the lock for, the weeks of beating his head against it. Kyle listened the whole way through, patient and unhurried, not interrupting once.

When Elias finally ran out of words, Kyle was quiet for a moment. Then he shrugged.

“I mean… if they like something, why not just give it to them?” He gestured vaguely with a chip. “Like—I like food, right? So I stuff myself full of it. Why don’t you just do that? Let ’em have a whole bunch of the thing they like.”

It was offered carelessly, half as a joke, the sort of thing Kyle tossed out a dozen times an evening.

Elias went very still.

Give them what they liked. Not apply the attribute through the energy, or the flowers, or the conditions—just… give it to them. Let each vine take in an abundance of its own favorite attribute, directly, freely, the way Kyle stuffed himself with food he loved.

He used his question before the thought had even fully formed.

And the answer came back: yes.

“Kyle.” Elias was on his feet, his frustration of weeks evaporating in a single bright instant. “Kyle, that’s it. That’s actually it!”

“What’s it?” Kyle said, bewildered. “What did I—”

He didn’t get to finish, because Elias had already seized him in a fierce, delighted hug, half-knocking him off the couch. “You’re the best. You’re the actual best, do you know that? I have to go—I have to get back to the lab—”

“You’re leaving? You just— we’re in the middle of a match!” Kyle called after him, indignant and laughing all at once, as Elias was already snatching up his things. “Typical! Abandoned for a vine! At least tell me what I said!”

“Later! I’ll explain later! Thank you, Kyle—really!”

And he was gone, out the door and off toward the laboratory, leaving his brother sprawled half off the couch with a fistful of chips and a slow, fond grin spreading across his face. Koda patted his knee consolingly.

“…Genius little brother,” Kyle muttered, shaking his head. “Couldn’t even finish the level.” But he was still grinning.

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