Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 1: I Died Touching Grass

Chapter 1: I Died Touching Grass

There are many noble ways to die.

Sheltering a child.

Storming a beach.

Swinging against impossible odds.

Jin Astor died attempting to break into a stranger’s house at 2 a. m. in order to catch a fictional squid.

Click.

The screen door popped off its hinges.

Jin squirmed through the gap of the darkened house one limb at a time, holding his phone in both hands.

He didn’t look at the room around him.

He looked at the overlay.

[RARE SPAWN DETECTED]

[Astral Leviathan — Spawn Rate: 1 in 1,000,000,000]

Gliding in the air, above the couch, was the rarest creature of Astral Catch AR game, shining in the augmented-reality glory.

Jin’s eyes filled with tears.

Three weeks.

Three weeks he had tracked this spawn point.

Forty-one energy drinks.

One lifetime ban from Starbucks.

One GPS ping brought him here, to these coordinates, which happened to belong to Mr. Henderson’s house.

Small price.

He raised his thumb over the capture net.

The light snapped on in the hallway.

"WHO’S IN MY DAMN HOUSE?"

Jin darted his gaze upward, for no more than a third of a second.

A big man.

Boxer shorts.

A gun in his hand.

Unwelcoming vibe.

He returned his gaze to the screen.

The Leviathan entered its flight animation.

This was the most crucial moment of his life.

Ka-CHUNK.

Oh, thought Jin. Shotgun.

BOOM.

The wall next to his head disintegrated to drywall confetti.

Jin didn’t wait.

Instead, he glided through the room with practiced ease, holding his phone screen with religious devotion.

"Sir," he said, his thumb dragging the capture reticle, "I am mid-catch."

BOOM.

He crashed through the front door shoulder first, spilled outside and kept both eyes focused on the screen.

The net opened with a flash of digital stars.

The Leviathan struggled.

The capture bar rose.

67%.

Jin ran across the yard.

82%.

He jumped over a garden gnome he didn’t even notice and landed in the middle of the street at two a. m.

94%.

"C’mon. C’mon. C’mon."

99%.

The screen turned into white brilliance.

[GOTCHA!]

[Astral Leviathan — CAPTURED!]

"YES!"

Jin raised both fists towards heaven, the most blissful expression on his face.

His soul was complete.

His collection was legendary.

He had, against all odds, accomplished the impossible.

He had also, at this very precise moment, his back turned to a truck running fifty at the residential speed limit.

The driver saw a teenager standing in the road and celebrating catching a squid.

He applied brakes.

Physics refused the request.

Huh, thought Jin.

Headlights.

BAM.

The last thing Jin Astor of Earth felt was overwhelming satisfaction.

He had caught them all with a smile on his face.

The smile passed.

Three weeks ago.

The couch was cheap. The springs were dead.

Jin accepted this.

He stretched sideways across it in the cramped main room of their Outer Ring apartment, scrolling through the phone.

The recycled-air vents hummed.

Rust was spreading in the corner where the condensation pooled.

Somewhere two levels down, a factory horn announced the shift change.

His mother, Elena Astor, was working her mandatory twelve-hour night rotation in Hydroponics Sector Six.

On nights like this, the family measured her presence in ration containers, recorded voice notes and exhausted hours between her shifts.

He had already figured out the basics from the dead boy’s memories.

A week before Jin moved in this body, the boy whose life he had taken stood in the city’s Awakening Ceremony and Awakened his talent.

He got a C.

In one week’s time, every Awakened student would take the Academy Entrance Exam.

Their grades would decide which academy, if any, would accept them.

[Talent: Data Appraisal & Device Link]

[Grade: C]

[Function: Analyze basic beast biology, nutrition, mana condition and compatible device data. Sync to logistics terminals.]

Practically speaking, the talent was short-ranged, slow and unable to take any action on its own.

All it produced was supportive measurement data, with almost no direct application in battle.

In a world overrun with monsters, where the great academies shaped future Tamers, the boy had Awakened the power to calculate stats of beasts.

They laughed at him for a minute.

Jin inherited the memory of that laughter.

He couldn’t care less.

Because the boy’s C-Rank wasn’t the only talent in this body.

Jin remembered the moment of his arrival—the moment when the ceiling stopped spinning and trauma hit him, along with another sensation.

Something completely different from the dead boy’s memories.

Soft chime inside his mind.

Text only he could see, surfacing through the trauma in the way that made it seem like it had waited three weeks precisely to reveal itself to the newly awakened soul.

[A foreign soul has anchored.]

[Awakening secondary talent...]

He thought he was hallucinating.

He spent the first few days trying to prove it—the dead boy’s brain couldn’t have just Awakened.

It did.

It Awakened the other talent along with the boy’s useless public C-Rank.

The thing that emerged from Jin’s transmigrated soul right after his arrival.

He spent three weeks learning the talent’s name.

It only called itself one thing.

He still didn’t tell anyone about its existence.

Not sure he would ever need to.

"Forty-one," panted his sister.

Elsa was lying on the floor doing push-ups.

Brown hair was sticking to her forehead.

Fourteen years old.

Built like she was prepared to take a fight to the wasteland personally.

"Forty-two. Jin. Are you listening."

"Mm."

"There was a Tide warning on the boards today."

Down.

Up.

"Lost half of their scouts in Sector Four last month. Half, Jin. Those are the people who can fight."

"Tragic."

"So when I make Rank Two—" her arms trembled "—and get a real beast, you’re going to learn how to run at least, because I am not carrying your body to a respawn point which doesn’t exist."

Jin tapped a slime in the corner of his screen.

It disappeared.

Small chime.

"Already an expert runner," he said.

"Dodged a shotgun once."

"What?"

"Nothing. Forty-three’s looking weak."

Elsa fell down onto her face with a groan of pure sibling despair.

The door hissed open and Arthur Astor limped in.

The limp was the sort that came from a leg that no longer works in the way leg normally does—former Rank 2 Ironclad Tamer’s body, ten years after the beast he shared with it bled out in the ambush.

The warehouse coveralls hung from him like rags.

His eyes had that particular exhaustion of the man who manages inventory for the gods and eats none of their food.

He was carrying something in his arms.

An incubator.

Battered and secondhand, with a corner taped over.

He set it on the table as if it could shatter, or maybe he could.

Inside, on a layer of synthetic moss, was an egg.

It was gray.

Not the interesting kind of gray.

Not stormcloud or steel.

The kind of gray you use for sidewalks.

It had a faint pebble texture, as if someone got tired of creating a rock partway.

"Jin," said Arthur quietly.

"Happy Awakening."

Elsa jumped up.

Jin lowered his phone by half an inch.

"It’s—" Arthur’s jaw worked. "It’s a Grey Rock Lizard. Iron-tier."

The room fell silent.

"I know," he said, fast, in the ensuing silence. "I know what they say about Iron-tier.

I know what they’re already saying about your grade.

I heard the Kowalski boy in the lift this morning, heard how— "

He didn’t finish his sentence.

He put a hand on the incubator lid.

"It cost us fifty thousand credits," he said. "Everything we had."

"Your mother agreed," he quickly added. "We both did.

She wanted you to have a chance."

Elsa made a sound.

"A Rock Lizard has decent defense. If you incubate it slowly, train it carefully, it might eventually reach Rank Two. " Arthur wasn’t looking at Jin now.

"Then you could apply for the license of logistics handler. A desk.

A safe desk, inside the walls, where you never have to—"

His voice broke on that word he didn’t say.

Outside.

"I’m sorry it isn’t more," he said finally. "I’m sorry it’s a rock."

Fifty thousand credits.

The family’s entire savings spent on a sidewalk that might one day provide his son with a chair.

Jin looked at his father’s ruined leg, and at the gray egg.

He felt, distantly, that he should feel something major.

Elsa got there first.

She jumped on her feet, her fists clenched, her eyes burning with that specific rage of the person who refuses to let the universe win.

"It’s a great egg," she declared.

"Elsa—"

"No. Listen." She pointed to the incubator.

"Rock Lizards have the best base defense in the whole Iron bracket. Everybody knows that.

We’ll train its hide.

We’ll train its stamina.

I’ll do drills with it myself, every day, before my own training—"

"You don’t have to—"

"And when those academy candidates will laugh at your C-Rank and your ’trash’ beast during the entrance exam, we’ll make it tanky enough that nothing in the test can crack it.

Then they can choke on their own words."

She took some deep breaths.

"We’ll survive this. All of us. I swear it."

She turned to her brother, blazing with determination, expecting him to catch fire.

Jin considered the egg thoughtfully.

"Yeah," he said. "Nice rock."

Elsa’s face fell.

"Elsa, pass the charger."

The thing about being considered useless is that nobody pays attention to you.

While Elsa hid her face in her hands and Arthur slumped into the chair, Jin simply tilted his phone casually, changing its position.

The camera was now aimed at the egg.

"Oh, " muttered Elsa through her fingers, lighting up despite herself. "Are you Appraising it? Good.

See if it gives some data about it— "

They thought it was his C-Rank.

Of course they did.

A boy who could measure a lizard’s lunch and pointed his phone at his new lizard.

What else would it be.

It wasn’t the boy’s talent that answered.

It was the other one.

The talent that didn’t have a single mention on any Association chart, that had never existed in this world until his dead gamer’s soul brought it with him—the one that Awakened in secret three weeks ago and was waiting this whole time for him to point it at something worth scanning.

Behind the harmless puzzle app skin—behind the perception filter which made his soul’s projection look like something you downloaded to entertain yourself on the train—the real thing woke up.

[Mythic Sovereign Game Engine — ONLINE]

[Soul-bound talent. Grade: EX.]

[Scanning local asset...]

A reticle appeared over the gray egg.

Reality seemed to thin where the reticle touched it, as if the System was reading the egg’s essence through shell, stone and its lineage with a calm it did not have to earn.

[Asset Identified: Grey Rock Lizard (Iron-tier)]

...

[Surface data discarded. Scanning deep structure.]

Jin’s thumb stayed motionless.

[!]

[Hidden Bloodline Detected: Sub-Dragon (Mutant)]

[Dormant. Suppressed under Iron-tier shell.]

[Game Optimization Potential: S]

That final grade belonged to the Engine, not to the Association.

It was the potential the bloodline had in case of perfect optimization; the boy’s Iron-tier shell was its current state, accessible to everybody else.

Jin checked the three lines again, slowly.

The sidewalk wasn’t a sidewalk.

His father had spent the last of the family’s money on a fifty thousand credit gray rock, and had been robbed blind.

But not in the regular way.

Jin’s expression didn’t change in the slightest.

[Bind Real-World Asset to Engine?]

[Bound assets sleep safely in reality.

A 1:1 digital avatar will be generated for combat, training and respawning.]

[Yes / No]

His thumb tapped before the prompt even appeared.

[Yes]

[Extracting genetic data...]

[Spawning avatar in BEGINNER DUNGEON: The Mossy Hollow...]

The puzzle-app skin faded.

The screen filled with a dim cartoon cave, mushrooms glowing in the darkness and mist on the ground.

And in the center, blinking up at him, sat a tiny digital lizard.

Stubby legs.

Big eyes.

Tail nub.

Level 1 and clearly offended by it.

[Avatar Generated: Baby Lizard]

[Lv. 1 | HP 12/12]

[Quality: Iron ... (Locked) ... (???)]

Jin’s lips twitched.

The first real twitch in three weeks.

Then the warning appeared, and he read it the way some people read good news.

[NOTICE]

[AFK / Auto-Battle Feature: LOCKED]

[Reason: Avatar level below threshold.]

[Manual clear required.]

[Note: Combat EXP accelerates real-world incubation.]

Manual.

He had to play it.

His family’s survival.

The chance to overturn a C-Rank’s fate before the entrance examination.

The escape from a draft and a wasteland and a wall full of dead scouts.

All of it was locked behind tutorial dungeon he had to grind by hand, his two thumbs and the data-slimes.

Three weeks of nothingness flowed out of him in a single breath.

"Finally, " Jin said softly. "Some real gameplay."

"What was that?" asked Elsa lifting her head.

He didn’t answer.

He sank down deeper into the springs of the dead couch, put his feet on the table and aimed the phone where nobody would see it.

Across the room, his father mourned his fortune he considered wasted.

His sister prepared to fight the world alone with her fists.

Neither of them knew that the quiet boy on the couch Awakened twice.

Jin’s baby lizard waddled toward the first glowing slime.

His thumbs started moving.

Tap.

[Slime takes 1 damage!]

The slime hopped to attack.

Jin swiped to the left.

The lizard rolled and dodged it by a pixel.

He almost smiled.

"Okay, little guy, " he breathed, finally showing some emotion—not at any monster, not at any wall, just at the screen.

"Let’s get to work."

[EXP: 1 / 30]