This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Lunch ended the way it always did—too much food, too much noise, and Kyle attempting to claim the last serving of everything before anyone else could reach it. By the time the dishes were cleared and the beasts had been returned to their Beast Taming Spaces or their tank, the afternoon had settled into something warm and slow.

Back in his room, Elias sat on the edge of his bed and pulled out his cellphone.

There was one call he wanted to make before the day got away from him.

It rang twice before a familiar voice answered, dry and unhurried.

“Elias. To what do I owe the honor? Don’t tell me you finally found an evolution theory you couldn’t argue me into a corner about.”

Elias smiled. Professor Aldwin had been his instructor at the breeder college—the one he’d talked his way into years earlier than anyone his age had any business attempting.

That had been the first real gift of his past life. Not the memories of pain, or the hospital, or the long quiet dying. But the years. The maturity. A mind that had already learned how to learn, dropped into a child’s body with nothing but time. While other children struggled through their first lessons, he devoured them. He had tested into the breeder college early, far too early by ordinary standards, and completed the full four-year course.

“Nothing like that,” he said. “My Beast Taming Space formed this morning. I awakened.”

A pause. Then, warmer than before: “Ah. Congratulations, my boy. Right on schedule.” He let the words sit a moment before continuing. “Which brings me, conveniently, to a standing offer. You know the one.”

He did know the one.

Before he’d even graduated, Professor Aldwin had offered to take him on as his personal apprentice. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary opportunity. The professor was a respected breeder with decades of research behind him and connections most students would trade an arm for. Studying under him directly would have set Elias on a smooth, well-paved road toward a comfortable future.

“I’m calling to turn it down, actually,” he said, gently. “Properly this time. You’ve been patient with me about it for long enough, and you deserve a real answer.”

Another pause, though this one felt unsurprised.

“You want to walk your own path,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“I do.” He turned the phone a little against his ear. “It’s nothing to do with you. I just… I have things I want to find out for myself. Mistakes I want to make on my own. If I follow your road, I’ll only ever see as far as you’ve already seen.”

To his credit, the old man laughed—a low, genuine sound. “Spoken like someone who is going to give some poor future rival a great deal of trouble. Very well. The offer’s closed, then. But—” his tone sharpened into something almost fond, “—the line stays open. If you ever find yourself stuck, truly stuck, you call. I’d rather give advice freely than read about my best student doing something idiotic in a research journal.”

“I’d like that,” he admitted. “Thank you, Professor. For everything.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Consider this a graduation-and-awakening present.” There was a soft chime from my phone as he said it. “Five Scholarly Points. Don’t spend them all in one place.”

Elias blinked at the screen. Sure enough, the balance had ticked upward.

Scholarly Points were something only breeder students could earn, accumulated through coursework, examinations, research, and accepted findings during one’s time at a breeder college. They couldn’t be bought or traded for on the open market—they had to be earned, one diligent contribution at a time. In exchange, the official Breeder Association honored them for a wide range of benefits: rare materials, restricted texts, access to research archives, discounts on spirit beast eggs and breeding resources, and more. For a fresh graduate just stepping into the world, five points was a generous gift indeed.

“You really didn’t have to.”

“I know. That’s rather the point of a gift.” Elias could hear the smile in his voice. “Go on, then. Go be brilliant and stubborn somewhere I don’t have to supervise it.”

The line clicked off before he could reply.

He sat there a moment longer, phone warm in his hand, feeling lighter than he had in days.

“I’m heading out!” he called, lacing up his shoes by the door.

“Don’t get lost in some shop for six hours again!” Mom shouted back from the couch, where she’d already sprawled out to nap off lunch.

“No promises,” he echoed her own favorite line, and slipped out before she could throw a cushion at him.

Outside, the world opened up.

The apartment sat on a busy street near the center of the city, and the moment he stepped onto the sidewalk, he was greeted by the everyday miracle he had never quite gotten used to—humans and spirit beasts, living side by side as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

On the road, sleek cars rolled along beside creatures the size of trucks. Great armored beasts with broad, patient backs lumbered down the dedicated transport lanes, ferrying passengers and cargo in the saddled platforms strapped across their shoulders, sharing the avenue with ordinary traffic as casually as buses.

Overhead, the sky was just as busy. People soared past on the backs of enormous, beautiful avian beasts, feathers catching the sunlight in streaks of color, while smaller flyers darted between the towers carrying messages and parcels.

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And everywhere, at street level, the small ones. A woman walked a fluffy, fox-like beast on a leash as though it were a dog. A child trotted past with a palm-sized creature perched on his shoulder, the both of them chattering happily. A pair of round, cheerful spirit beasts waddled along behind their partner, stopping every few steps to investigate something interesting.

Even now, after all these years, after an entire lifetime in this world, he couldn’t help but stop and marvel at the sight.

In his first life, none of this had existed. Animals had been animals. The sky had belonged to birds and aircraft, the roads to machines. To see a child laughing on the back of a creature out of a storybook, to see the impossible folded so neatly into the ordinary—it still struck him, sometimes, as unbearably beautiful.

He let himself look for a moment longer.

Then he set off down the street.

His destination was the closest breeder shop.

It is worth explaining, here, the difference between the two kinds of beast that share this world—because the distinction is the entire foundation on which human civilization now stands.

Demonic Beasts are the wild ones. Born out in the untamed places where Spiritual Energy runs thick and lawless, they are ferocious by nature, territorial, and—most dangerously of all—they hunger for human flesh. To a Demonic Beast, a human is not merely prey but a tonic. Consuming one sharpens their minds and strengthens their bodies, accelerating their growth in a way ordinary feeding never could. It is precisely this hunger that once drove humanity to the edge of extinction, and it is why the outskirts beyond the cities remain a perpetual battlefield.

Spirit Beasts are something else entirely. They are not born wild—they are made. Crafted by breeders through painstaking work, spirit beasts are created by taking the powerful bloodlines of Demonic Beasts and weaving them into ordinary animals, or by generations of careful selective breeding of different Demonic Beasts. The end product retains the strength, attributes, and spiritual gifts of its fearsome ancestors—but sheds the wildness. A spirit beast bears no hostility toward humans and feels no hunger for human flesh. It can be safely contracted, raised, trusted, and loved.

Every creature Elias would see today was the fruit of that work. The transport beasts on the road, the flyers in the sky, the little companion perched on a child’s shoulder—all of them descended, however distantly, from demonic beasts that would have eaten the people who now adored them. Breeders had taken nightmares and patiently, stubbornly turned them into family.

He had always thought it was the most quietly heroic work in the world.

And it was the work he intended to spend his life doing.

The first shop he came to specialized in combat-oriented beasts.

It wasn’t a shop in the cramped, shelved sense of the word. Like most of the larger breeder establishments, it was built around a vast enclosure—a sprawling stretch of managed wilderness behind glass and ward-lines, where the beasts could live in something close to their natural habitat. Combat-oriented beasts, in particular, needed room to move.

Through the viewing glass, a meadow rolled out under the afternoon sun. A pack of Wood Wolves ran along it in loose formation, their pelts a deep mossy green that rippled like grass in the wind, faint veins of vitality glowing beneath their fur as they wheeled and chased one another in what was half play and half training. Above them, an Autumn Eagle cut a slow circle through the sky, its broad wings the burnished red and gold of falling leaves, scattering motes of amber light with each lazy beat.

Further back, where the meadow gave way to a stand of dense trees, he could make out the slow, deliberate shapes of Treants moving among the forest—massive bark-skinned spirit beasts that looked like walking oaks, tending the smaller plant life around them with an almost gardener-like patience.

He approached the front desk and politely asked if he might observe for a while. The staff member—a tired-looking woman who brightened at the words “breeder college graduate”—waved him through with an amused, “Take your time, just don’t tap the glass.”

So he did.

He slowly roamed the length of the enclosure, drinking in every detail. The way the Wood Wolves shifted their weight before a turn. The particular angle of the Autumn Eagle’s primary feathers as it caught a thermal. The faint difference in bark-texture between the older Treants and the younger ones. He noted the things he could see and quietly wondered about the dozen things he couldn’t—the growth curves, the evolution thresholds, the hidden potential coiled inside each one.

Old habits. The notebook in his head never quite stopped writing.

The next shop dealt in ornamental beasts—companions kept not for battle or labor, but simply for their beauty.

Stepping inside was like stepping into a garden that had decided to come alive. The air was warm and bright and full of song. A flock of Leafsong Sparrows flitted overhead, their wings shaped and veined like living leaves, filling the space with a clear, layered chirping that genuinely sounded like music—each bird a slightly different note in an ever-shifting chord.

Leaf Butterflies drifted lazily between the displays, their broad wings indistinguishable from real foliage until they moved, scattering soft green light wherever they passed. He watched one settle on a flowering branch and vanish completely, perfectly camouflaged, until it stirred again and gave itself away.

But the centerpiece of the shop, without question, were the Spring Deers.

They moved through the open central garden with a grace that made the whole room feel quieter. Slender and pale-coated, they carried themselves like something out of a painting—and from their antlers grew flowers. Real, living flowers, blossoming in soft pinks and whites and gentle yellows, curling along the branching antlers like a crown that bloomed and renewed itself with the seasons. As they walked, the occasional petal drifted free to settle on the grass behind them.

They were, he thought, almost absurdly beautiful. The kind of beast a noble might pay a fortune for simply to have it grazing on their estate.

He lingered there longer than he’d meant to.

The last shop was his favorite, though most people would have called it the least impressive.

It sold common beasts. The everyday kind. The workhorses of civilization that nobody wrote songs about.

Ironclaw Moles shuffled through troughs of loose soil, their oversized front claws built for tireless digging—the beasts that carved foundations, dug wells, and laid the underground bones of every building in the city. In a glass tank along the wall sat a row of Raincloud Toads, plump and placid, each one capable of summoning a small, gentle rainfall over a patch of crops, indispensable to farmers in dry seasons. And in a workshop-style pen near the back, a pair of Ironjaw Beavers gnawed and shaped lengths of timber and stone with mechanical precision, their reinforced jaws able to fell and fashion wood and stone faster than any saw—a staple of every construction crew worth its wages.

There were dozens more. Sturdy, modest, unglamorous creatures bred for a single useful purpose.

These were the most common and widely seen spirit beasts of all—the ones woven so deeply into the fabric of daily life that people stopped noticing them entirely. They tilled the fields and watered the crops. They hauled cargo and delivered parcels. They raised the buildings, dug the tunnels, and carried the burdens that kept a city of millions running.

Everyone marveled at the great combat beasts and the radiant ornamental ones. Almost nobody spared a thought for the humble mole that had dug the basement beneath their feet.

But he did.

Because a world wasn’t built on legends. It was built on a thousand quiet, ordinary creatures doing a thousand quiet, ordinary jobs—and on the breeders who, generation after generation, had made each of them possible.

He watched an Ironclaw Mole surface, blink its small eyes at him, and burrow happily back down into the dirt.