Chapter Five: A Place to Begin
The days that followed settled into a rhythm Elias loved—study by day, questions each morning, and a notebook that grew thicker by the page.
He learned everything he could about Amberwing Bees. And, one careful question at a time, he learned the things no book could ever have told him.
The first answer simplified his whole task. There was only a single evolution path available to the Amberwing Bee that could reach at least King level and that he could actually afford—just one. Where he had feared a tangle of branching possibilities to sort through, there was instead a single clear road. One path. One target. It made everything that came after far simpler.
The second answer nearly knocked him off his chair.
After the first evolution, the bee would undergo an attribute change. That much he might have guessed. But the attribute it would gain—that he never could have predicted.
Life.
The rare, coveted Life attribute, added to a common little honey-bee. He read the answer in his mind three times over to be sure he hadn’t imagined it.
He’d been winging it, in all honesty. Once his questions confirmed the basic, ordinary attributes weren’t the answer, he’d simply kept asking and trusted the path to reveal itself. The Amberwing Bee already carried the Wood attribute, and Wood and Life harmonize beautifully—so in hindsight it made a certain elegant sense. But foreseeing it? No. That had been pure, fortunate surprise.
To understand why this mattered so much, one had to understand attributes.
Spirit beasts could be born to any number of them—Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Wood, Metal, and a long list of rarer ones besides. And not all attributes were equal. Not in the sense that one was inherently stronger or better than another—a skilled tamer could make nearly any attribute formidable—but in the sense that some were simply far rarer, far harder to find, and far more difficult to obtain.
Life was one of the rarest of all. And the single most sought-after.
Part of its appeal was the feedback it gave its contractor: slower aging, an extended lifespan, the quiet promise of more years. That alone made it precious. But the true reason the whole world hungered for Life-attribute beasts was simpler and more practical than vanity.
They healed.
Life-attribute beasts excelled at healing in a way no other attribute could match—their restorative skills outclassing those of any other lineage, gentler and stronger and more complete. And healing was needed everywhere, wanted by everyone, in every corner of a world that still sent its people out to bleed against demonic beasts. A good healer was never short of work, never short of value, never short of people grateful to know them.
Elias thought of his father.
He had told the story more than once. The only reason he’d been able to contract Amia, his rare Life-and-Water Sparkling Jade Guppy, was his Enhanced Healing talent—and even then, securing her had cost his family a small fortune. Life-attribute beasts simply did not come cheap. They came rarely, and dearly, and only to those who could prove they were worth the investment.
But that single, expensive contract had changed everything for him. Thanks to Amia, Elias’s father had become one of the most popular and sought-after healers in the entire district—his services in constant demand, his reputation solid, his family comfortable. One rare beast had built a life for all of them.
That was how precious the Life attribute was.
And to think Elias had stumbled onto a path to it—on a common honey-bee, of all things—for his very first research subject. Sometimes he wondered whether some kindly fortune was watching over his second life. Whatever the truth of it, he knew enough to be grateful, and lucky, and to get to work.
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With that surprise behind him, a few more questions let him confirm the shape of the work ahead.
The first evolution would require four steps in total. Four conditions to be met, four pieces to put into place before the humble Amberwing Bee could shed its form and rise into something greater—something carrying the rare gift of Life.
Four steps. He could work with four steps.
And by the time he had wrung every truth he could from his questions and every fact he could from his books, he knew, with the quiet certainty that only comes after thorough preparation, that the time for reading was over.
It was time to put theory into practice.
Elias returned to the Breeder Association.
This time he didn’t linger over the catalogue or wander the listings. He went straight to what he wanted and rented a laboratory for one year—a meadow-and-flowerfield environment, chosen deliberately, the perfect habitat for a colony of Wood-attribute bees and the flowering plants they depended on.
Fifty Scholarly Points. The registration and procedures were handled within the day, brisk and efficient, and before he quite knew it the key was his.
And so, with equal parts excitement and anticipation, he stepped into his own laboratory for the very first time.
Temporary it might be—his for only a year—but in that moment it felt like the whole world had been handed to him.
The first thing to greet his eyes was the laboratory proper: spotless and fully furnished, clean and white and modern, every surface gleaming and every instrument in its place. It was a breeder’s dream made real, the kind of workspace he’d imagined a thousand times over the years and never quite believed he’d stand in. One door led off to the living quarters—a small but genuinely comfortable room with a bed, a kitchen, a bathroom. Everything a person needed, and nothing they didn’t.
But what truly seized his attention—what stopped him where he stood—was the window.
A massive, floor-to-ceiling pane of reinforced, one-way glass took up an entire side of the laboratory. And through it, he saw a sky.
An artificial sky, perfectly made, complete with a warm artificial sun—and beneath it, stretching away farther than the building’s outer walls could possibly contain, a vast meadow thick with wildflowers. The space inside was clearly, impossibly larger than the space outside. The spatial expansion the listing had promised was no exaggeration. A modest door had opened onto something the size of a private field.
He let himself through into the meadow.
The illusion was complete. The moment he stepped onto the grass, it was as though he’d walked outdoors—the scent of grass and turned earth and blooming flowers drifting up to meet him, warm and green and alive. Somewhere a breeze he couldn’t see stirred the petals. The artificial sun lay gentle on his skin.
And in that moment, he did something entirely unlike his careful, methodical self.
He lay down in the grass and flowers, stretched out flat on his back, and looked up at the wide, impossible sky.
Then he laughed—helpless and bright and overflowing, the way he almost never did in front of anyone. All those years of study, of notebooks and theories and quiet patience, of a boy in a hospital bed who once had nothing but time. All of it had been leading here. All of it was finally, finally about to take shape.
He lay in his meadow under his sky and let himself be happy.
Afterward, there was only one thing left to do before the real work could begin.
He went home to pack.
It didn’t take long—just the essentials, clothes and notebooks and a few treasured books—but saying goodbye took rather longer.
His mother and Kyle wore matching looks of fierce pride, the kind that tried very hard not to look like worry. “Go on, then, genius,” Mom said, ruffling his hair one more time. “But you’d better visit. Often. I mean it.”
“You hear that?” Kyle added, throwing an arm around his neck. “Often. Or I’m coming to drag you out of that fancy lab myself.”
His father said the least and meant the most, the way he always did. He pressed a generous bundle of food into Elias’s arms—far more than any one person could reasonably eat—and then pulled him into a tight, wordless hug that lasted a long moment before he let go. “Take care of yourself,” he said quietly. “Eat properly. Come back when you can.”
Even the beasts gathered to see him off. The Eiren, the Snowfall Owl, inclined her head in solemn farewell. The Koda, the Boxing Monkey, clasped his hand in his enormous one and shook it with great ceremony. The Rime, the Ice Sprite, circled him twice, scattering a few wistful snowflakes, and Amia pressed close to the glass of her tank, blowing a slow, soft stream of bubbles—a little sad, all of them, but happy for him all the same.
“I’ll visit,” he promised, and he meant it with his whole heart. “Often. I promise. It’s not goodbye—it’s just down the road.”
And with his family’s warmth at his back and a laboratory of his own waiting ahead, Elias Arkwright set out at last to begin the work he had been born—twice—to do.