This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The vines arrived, and Elias set about planting them across his meadow.

A thousand Evergrow Vines, young and old, took root among the flowers and the hives, and it didn’t take long—a handful of careful questions—for him to map the broad shape of what lay ahead. The vine’s evolution consisted of three steps.

And that, oddly, did not make him happy.

He’d learned that lesson the hard way with the bees. Fewer steps did not mean an easier path. If anything, the opposite was true: the simpler an evolution looked on paper, the more absurd or fiendishly complicated its hidden requirements tended to be. Because a simple path that was also easy would have been stumbled into long ago, by accident if nothing else—and no one, in all the years the Evergrow Vine had been grown and harvested across the world, had ever found its evolution. Three steps meant three deceptively simple doors, each almost certainly hiding something strange behind it.

Forewarned, Elias rolled up his sleeves and got to work anyway.

The planting itself wasn’t the trouble. The growing was.

An Evergrow Vine grew two to three meters in a single day, and a thousand of them grew accordingly. If he neglected them for so much as a day, they would happily swallow the entire meadow—burying his flowers, smothering his hives, and turning his careful workspace into an impenetrable green jungle. Left unchecked, they were less a crop than a slow-motion flood.

Thankfully, he wasn’t managing it alone.

He had Holly, Honey, and Hope—and with the three queens at his side, the problem became almost trivial. They simply directed the rest. At Holly’s crisply organized command, the other queens and their countless workers descended on the overgrowth each day, trimming the vines back the moment they grew too long, harvesting the cuttings, and keeping the whole rampant tangle in disciplined order. Honey coordinated the effort smoothly across the hives; Hope, inevitably, kept proposing more efficient ways to do it, half of which actually worked. What would have been an impossible chore for one tired breeder became, in the hands of an organized hive, simply another part of the daily rhythm.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you three,” Elias admitted one afternoon, watching a column of workers neatly dismantle a vine that had tried to strangle a flowerbed overnight.

Holly, perched on his shoulder, buzzed in a way that clearly conveyed she didn’t know either.

It was while tending the thousand that Elias noticed the odd one out.

Among all those vigorous, surging vines, one stood apart—by far the weakest of the lot. It was thin and brittle, pale and sickly, its growth sluggish where its siblings raced skyward. By every appearance, it was a runt, a poor specimen, the sort of thing one would set aside without a second thought.

Except for one detail that didn’t fit. The delivery records marked it as one of the oldest vines he’d received—and an Evergrow Vine that old should have been long and thick and thriving, not stunted and frail. An old vine this weak made no sense at all.

Elias turned it over in his hands, frowning, weighing whether to simply send it back for a refund.

Then, on pure impulse, he spent his question on it instead. Was there something special about this particular vine?

The answer came back: yes.

That stopped him cold. He hadn’t expected it—had asked half-idly, certain the answer would be no. But there it was. Whatever this brittle, overlooked little runt was, it was special in some way he couldn’t yet see.

So instead of discarding it, Elias gave it the opposite of neglect. He lavished care on the frail vine—feeding it Lifebloom honey, planting it in the richest soil, and asking Holly, Honey, and Hope to have the bees share their life energy with it directly. If this unremarkable scrap of a plant was hiding something, he intended to coax it out.

The research itself, meanwhile, threw him a genuine puzzle—one unlike anything the bees had presented.

With Floria, the first evolution’s new attribute had been clear and singular: Life. With the Evergrow Vine, it refused to resolve.

It would gain Life, certainly—that much was consistent. But when he pressed further on what else it might carry, the answers turned baffling. Would it gain Water? Yes. Would it gain Fire? Also yes. Wind? Yes again. Every attribute he named, one after another, came back yes, which was plainly impossible. A single evolution couldn’t grant every element at once.

Stolen story; please report.

It took him a while to even understand what he was looking at—and the only reason he caught it was that consistency. If just one attribute had been the answer, the others would have returned no. Instead, all of them returned yes. The attribute the vine would gain wasn’t fixed. It was variable—somehow capable of becoming Water, or Fire, or Wind, or any number of others, depending on something he hadn’t yet identified. The evolution didn’t have an attribute. It had a choice of them.

It was, he had to admit, deeply intriguing. And almost certainly connected to whatever made his brittle little runt so special.

After three weeks of patient questioning, he finally pinned down the first step.

It required two things: materials, and something more besides. The materials, at least, he could define—he had to graft a hundred different types of flowers onto the vine, each one matched to it in some particular way.

And there, precisely there, he got stuck.

Matched how? A hundred specific flowers out of the countless thousands in the world—there had to be a rule deciding which ones. Naturally, his first thought was affinity. He’d seen exactly that principle with the bees: how a creature resonated most strongly with the spiritual energy of particular flowers, its body tuned to drink deepest from those it suited. So he assumed the same held here, and set about testing it the same way—bringing out his resonance meter, presenting the vine with flower after flower, measuring how it reacted to each, looking for the ones it took to best.

Then he checked his theory against his talent. Were the hundred flowers determined by the vine’s spiritual affinity?

The answer came back: no.

Elias sat back, the resonance meter humming uselessly in his hand, and stared at the stubborn little vine.

Not affinity, then. The most obvious answer, the one that had served him so well before, was simply wrong—and whatever the real rule was, it was something else entirely. Something he hadn’t thought of yet.

“Of course,” he murmured, almost fond in his exasperation. “Why would you be easy?”

The vine, naturally, offered no hints at all.

Two weeks passed, and Elias made no progress at all.

Two weeks of grafting trials and failed theories, of resonance readings that led nowhere, of staring at a hundred-flower puzzle that refused to give up its logic. The first step sat before him like a locked door he couldn’t find the key to, and for the first time since the bees, he felt genuinely, frustratingly stuck.

It was in the middle of that slump that Maeve called.

Her news was all good. The Lifebloom Bee Queen evolution had been thoroughly verified—confirmed authentic and reproducible—and the Association was fully prepared now to manage the commotion its public release would surely cause. The secret realm, too, was coming along smoothly; the work was on schedule, and it would be ready before long.

It was everything he’d been waiting to hear. The culmination of months of effort, the reveal that would reshape the world’s understanding of what a common beast could become.

And, honestly, Elias didn’t react the way he should have.

He thanked her, warmly and sincerely—he did mean it—but his heart wasn’t fully in it, because his mind was still snared on a stubborn little vine and a puzzle he couldn’t crack. A breakthrough that should have had him over the moon barely registered through the fog of his frustration. Maeve, perceptive as ever, seemed to find his distracted gratitude rather amusing, and let him go with the air of someone who knew exactly what a researcher in the grip of a problem looked like.

So there he was, a little while later, sulking to his bees.

It was a habit he’d fallen into—talking through his troubles aloud to Holly, Honey, and Hope, who listened with what was either genuine attentiveness or extremely convincing politeness. As he grumbled, he tended to his special vine, the once-sickly runt that had become, under weeks of devoted care, utterly unrecognizable. It was as thick as his arm now and as green as any of its healthy siblings, transformed by Lifebloom honey and shared life energy into a thriving, robust thing.

He poured a measure of honey-mixed water around its roots—its favorite—and, almost out of habit, glanced at its status to see how it was getting on.

Race: Evergrow Vine

Type: Plant

Attribute: Wood

Current Rank: Common Rank 3

Potential Rank: Common Rank 3

Mood: Content — thriving, well-tended, and quietly attached to its caretaker

Description: A fast-growing fodder plant cherished by farmers and herbivore breeders, prized for its sweet, nourishing vines and the rich fertilizer they yield. Hardy and humble, it rarely flowers and is seldom given a second glance—yet this particular specimen, nurtured back from frailty with patient care and life essence, has grown unusually robust and healthy.

Skills:

• Fast Growth — Lv7
• Delicious Vine — Lv6
• Nutritious Vine — Lv6
• Nature’s Fluid - Lv5
• Photosynthesis — Lv5

He could see its mood now—Content—where before he couldn’t. A small thing, but a telling one: his Insight revealed more as his closeness to a creature deepened, and weeks of doting care had clearly brought him and this little vine close indeed.

And then, looking at that status—the same status he’d read a hundred times before—it hit him.

“Eureka!”

He shot upright so fast that Holly tumbled off his shoulder with an indignant buzz, and the answer rang through him bright and certain, the way the best answers always did—obvious, in hindsight, and hidden in plain sight the entire time.