Chapter Forty: A World of Wings
The evolution was a success—a true new species, drawn from a common ornamental butterfly—and his talent rewarded it accordingly.
The grand wheel of fortune surfaced in his mind, the one that came only for a genuine new evolution, rich with its bands of green and blue and the slim slivers of purple and gold. It spun, colors blurring into a ring of light—and clicked to a stop on blue.
Blue. The reward poured into him at once: a full year’s worth of meditation experience, an enormous surge of accumulated cultivation flooding his Space and settling into place. He felt his foundation deepen, his energy swell—and his rank climbed not one step but two, carrying him clean from Elite 6 to Elite Rank 8 in a single rush. He swayed with the force of it, breathless, grinning. A year of cultivation, handed to him for doing the work he loved most. He would never get over how absurdly fortunate his talent could be.
Just like Briar before it, the special bugger took longer than all the rest.
By the time Valentine’s cocoon showed any sign of stirring, every other butterfly had long since hatched—thousands of them, spilling out of their crimson shells and into the open air of the realm to flutter among the flowers. They set about getting to know the world they’d been born into, and the bees who had lived there before them, with the bright curiosity of new things discovering everything for the first time.
Not all of them made it, though. For all his care, around five hundred never hatched at all—cocoons that stilled and went cold, the small lives within them slipping away in the dark before they could ever emerge. It was a grief Elias had braced for and still felt keenly: another five hundred creatures he’d carried so far, only to lose at the final threshold. He mourned them quietly, as he mourned all the ones he couldn’t save, and reminded himself, again, of the many thousands who had lived. The number didn’t make the losses hurt less. It only made them bearable.
Mostly, for those who survived, it went peacefully. Mostly. The butterflies did develop one habit that caused friction—a fondness for sneaking sips of the bees’ hard-won honey, which the bees took grave exception to. More than once a squabble broke out over a raided comb, and more than once Holly, Honey, and Hope had to swoop in to mediate, smoothing ruffled tempers on both sides and brokering the peace between bee and butterfly. But they always managed it, and on the whole the two populations settled into an easy, if occasionally larcenous, coexistence.
And the realm had never been more beautiful.
The addition of the butterflies transformed it into something out of a dream. By day, the fields filled with drifting rainbow light—thousands of crystal wings catching the artificial sun and scattering it into shimmering color that hung in the air everywhere one looked. Strangely, the light never hurt his eyes; it only made the whole world feel more magical, a meadow lit from within by living prisms.
And at night it was lovelier still. When the false sun dimmed to a soft moon, the butterflies caught that gentle silver glow instead, their wings reflecting it in muted, dreamy shimmers across the dark fields. Day or night, his world had become a place of impossible beauty—flowers below, rainbow wings above, and Elias in the middle of it, quietly marveling that he’d built such a thing.
While observing the butterflies, Elias made an interesting discovery.
Their Blood Clones skill, he noticed, was maxed out—every last butterfly had it at the full Level 10. And yet the number of clones each one could produce was different from butterfly to butterfly. That puzzled him, until research turned up the reason, and it was an elegant one: the number of clones a butterfly could make depended entirely on how many clones it had been divided into during the larval surgery.
A larva he’d cut into eight could make eight clones. One cut into sixteen could make sixteen; one cut into thirty-two, thirty-two. The division on the surgical plate had set the ceiling, each butterfly’s power literally shaped by his own hand on the blade.
There was more. He found that the numbers weren’t fixed forever—they grew with rank. Once a butterfly reached Commander rank, its clone count increased: eight became twelve, sixteen became twenty-four, thirty-two became forty-eight. The starting number rose by half again. And when he spent a question on it, he learned the pattern would continue—the clone count climbing further with each major rank the butterfly ascended. A creature that started at eight clones might, in time, command a small army of them.
Most telling of all, the clone count tracked directly with potential. The more clones a butterfly could make, the higher it could ultimately rise—the division on the surgical plate having set not just its power but its very ceiling. A butterfly cut into eight carried a Potential Rank of Lord 1 to 3; one cut into sixteen, Lord 4 to 7; and one cut into thirty-two, Lord 8 to 10, the very heights of the Lord realm. Every stroke of his blade, Elias realized, had quietly decided how far each creature could one day climb. The ones he’d divided most were the ones destined to rise highest—which boded extraordinarily well for Valentine, divided into a full sixty-four.
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With that knowledge consolidated, the familiar wheel of fortune surfaced in his mind. It spun, and landed on green: one month’s worth of meditation experience, settling neatly into his Space. His cultivation consolidated, as it so often did, almost by accident.
Next came the testing of their abilities—and they were, Elias quickly learned, far more dangerous than their delicate beauty suggested.
The wings came first, and the wings were the heart of it. Sharper than ever now, those crystalline wings could slice through the leather hide of Elite- and even Commander-rank materials with ease, cutting where an ordinary Crystal Butterfly’s wings had only ever dazzled. And their edges were serrated, finely toothed, so that the wounds they opened bled all the more freely—beautiful blades made cruel.
That was only the beginning. The butterflies could converge their spiritual energy onto their wings, sharpening them further still, honing those crystal edges into something keener than any natural blade—and then the clones would swarm, a whole shimmering flock of identical butterflies descending on a single target at once, each one slicing with energy-honed wings. A single butterfly was lovely. A swarm of them was a storm of blades.
They could feed in battle, too. Through their blood skills, the butterflies could draw the blood straight out of a target’s wounds, pulling it from the cuts they’d opened and drinking it down to nourish and strengthen themselves—every wound they made a meal. And most striking of all, they could self-destruct: a clone could shatter its own crystalline wings in an instant, exploding into a spray of countless razor-sharp shards, a suicide burst of crystal shrapnel that turned each expendable copy into a final, devastating blow.
Their other abilities, by contrast, were the gentler arts inherited from their ornamental ancestors—though no less useful for it.
Their flight, their Prism Veil, their Rainbow Refraction—these were skills an ordinary Crystal Butterfly had always possessed, and they made the creatures as elusive as they were beautiful. Their graceful flight was mesmerizing to watch and maddeningly hard to catch, all drifting, unpredictable loops. The Prism Veil made it difficult to pick out the true body among the shimmer. And the Rainbow Refraction scattered light into dazzling, distracting color that drew the eye away from the butterflies themselves, hiding the real among the illusory.
Beauty to confound, and blades to kill. Elias turned the combination over with a researcher’s deep satisfaction. An ornamental party decoration, reborn as something that could enchant a room one moment and carve through Commander-rank hide the next. He could only imagine what the world would make of that—if it ever learned of it.
And all the while, one cocoon remained—the largest of them all, holding the one he was waiting for most.
Then, through the bond, Elias felt it: the moment of Valentine’s hatching, a stirring in his soul that pulled him to his feet. He hurried to the cocoon and arrived just in time to watch it split, and Valentine climb free at last.
It was a little larger than the others—its body fuller, its great hand-sized wings broader—but otherwise Valentine looked much the same as the rest of its kind: the same flawless crystal wings, the same drifting rainbow. And through the bond, Elias felt its joy surge bright and immediate as it spread its new wings and made straight for him, latching onto his neck in the old familiar way, settling against the warmth there with a contentment that flooded down the bond and warmed him through.
But something was different. Elias felt it at once, in the texture of Valentine’s presence in his soul. It had matured. It was the same hungry, devoted creature it had always been—that hadn’t changed and never would—but there was a new steadiness to it now, a patience and an understanding that the wild, gluttonous larva had never had. It knew things now. It had grown up.
“You’ve matured, haven’t you?” Elias murmured, reaching up to gently brush a fingertip along one shimmering wing. Valentine leaned into the touch, radiating warm, blissful affection—and made no move at all to bite him, content simply to be near, exactly as the interlude of its own quiet thoughts had promised.
“Still my obsessive little thing, though,” Elias added fondly, and Valentine pulsed agreement against his neck, utterly unrepentant. That part, he knew, would never change. He wouldn’t have wanted it to.
And as Valentine hatched and the contract settled fully into place, the feedback of it washed back through the bond and into Elias—the rush of a newly evolved beast lifting its tamer along with it.
By the time it faded, Elias had reached Elite Rank 9.
He smiled, a little wryly, at the quiet climb of his own cultivation—riding the coattails of his beasts and the fortune of his talent both, growing stronger almost in spite of himself. Between the wheel’s gifts, Briar’s relentless rise, and now Valentine’s, his rank kept creeping upward without his ever sitting down to truly earn it. He wasn’t about to complain. A stronger body meant longer hours and clearer focus, and that meant more research, more discoveries, more overlooked creatures lifted into wonders.
Which was, in the end, the only thing he’d ever really wanted. He glanced around his realm—the rainbow wings, the flowers, the bees and the butterflies and the vine warm at his throat, Valentine nestled content against his neck—and felt, quietly and completely, like the luckiest person in two worlds.