Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 10: The Cost of Standing Out

Chapter 10: The Cost of Standing Out

"Jin... what have you done?"

Arthur spoke softly, and that made it worse.

When fear got hold of his father, he never raised his voice. He simply froze, like a man who had already lost something precious once and expected it to happen again.

Jin glanced at the monitor. A thin green heartbeat line moved steadily across the display.

Four days ahead of schedule.

The actual explanation filled his chest, huge and impossible to use.

Option one: explain that an EX-Rank soul talent is running a phone game in my head, and I’ve been changing his egg remotely between slime battles.

He considered that route for half a second.

Then there was option two.

The dull explanation.

"I changed the schedule," Jin said.

Arthur stared at him. "You changed—"

"The heat, humidity, feeding times." Jin yawned. He didn’t need to fake that part. "Appraisal picked up something in the density curve a few days ago, so I adjusted the cycle. It’s growing faster. Nothing else."

For a moment, Arthur said nothing.

A long, unsteady breath finally left him. It sounded like he had put down a burden he hadn’t realized was on his shoulders.

"Nothing else," he echoed, almost laughing. "Boy, you nearly killed me."

"You dragged me out of bed at three in the morning," Jin said. "Call it even."

Arthur gave a rough huff. One hand messed up Jin’s hair before he turned toward his room. His crippled leg scraped behind him as he went, and he never glanced back.

Jin waited until he disappeared.

Then his attention returned to the incubator.

A green indicator blinked on the side panel. Slow. Regular. He couldn’t remember noticing it before.

Four cheap factory-printed words lit up beneath it.

NETWORK STATUS: TRANSMITTING

Jin watched the light blink.

"...Right."

He opened the incubator controls and dug through the settings. The transmission function sat behind a mandatory safety-reporting seal. Switching it off would trigger a tampering alert immediately, which would cause more trouble than letting a single strange heartbeat report go through.

Besides, the data was already gone.

He sorted the problem into annoying and irreversible, then waited to see who the network would send.

Someone knocked at nine.

Arthur had already gone to the warehouse. Elsa sat bent over a worn training manual at the table, quietly repeating combat forms as she studied. She rose and opened the door.

A man in a gray Association field coat stood outside with a scratched silver case in one hand. A registration badge hung from his collar. Real metal. Nobody in the Outer Ring owned things like that.

"Incubation Inspector," he said, sounding tired before the conversation had even started. "Automated anomaly flag. Lizard egg, unit 4471-G. This the address?"

Elsa stiffened.

Apparently, Arthur had passed his panic down to her.

"Is there a problem?" she asked. "The egg... did we do something wrong?"

"Can’t say until I check, miss." He wiped his boots and entered without waiting for permission. "A flag only means something came up. Most of the time, it’s a bad sensor."

Jin stayed in the corner with his phone. His thumb drifted over a tutorial menu.

Surveillance state. The incubator reported us.

He remained where he was.

The inspector didn’t waste time.

His silver case went onto the table. He opened it and took out several tools Jin couldn’t name: a wand for reading density, a narrow probe that attached to the shell mount, and a flat scanner he moved across the egg with the care of someone searching the ground for explosives.

Figures scrolled over the scanner.

The inspector studied them with the weary speed of a man who had repeated the same task ten thousand times.

Nine seconds later, that boredom vanished.

His hand stopped.

A frown formed as he tapped the scanner and passed it over the egg again, more slowly this time.

"Shell hardness..." he murmured. He placed the probe against the egg and watched the gauge rise. The frown only grew. "No. That’s not..."

Elsa twisted her hands together in her lap.

After recalibrating the wand, the inspector checked the mana density for a third time. The device gave a quiet green chime to confirm the result.

He stared at the reading as though the number had insulted him personally.

"That’s impossible."

The word settled heavily in the cramped apartment.

Jin kept working his thumb across the screen. Draw the slime toward the rock. Let it attack. Move aside. He listened with only half his attention.

"This is an Iron-tier Grey Rock egg," the inspector said, each word slower than the last. He sounded like he was trying to argue with his own equipment. "Logistics filler. Their developmental curve is fixed. They’re reliable and dull. That’s why people use them."

He lifted the scanner slightly.

"This one is four days ahead. The shell density is beyond anything this grade should have. Its mana saturation..." His mouth tightened, and he stopped. "What supplements did you give it?"

Elsa started to answer.

Arthur would have answered for her, but he wasn’t home.

The apartment did it instead.

Cracked walls. Recycled-water smell. One light that still worked.

Jin spoke from the corner.

"Supplements."

The inspector faced him.

Jin gestured around the room with one hand, taking in all of it.

"We used the rest of our savings to buy the egg," he said. "Supplements aren’t happening. We can barely pay for the water before they recycle it."

Elsa released a quiet, bitter breath in agreement.

For the first time, the inspector properly looked around.

His expression changed as he did the math. Suspicion didn’t replace his earlier confusion. If anything, he seemed offended by what he was seeing.

No supplements. A worthless Iron-tier egg. A cheap slum incubator drawing rationed power.

And somehow it was doing better than certified nursery units in the Inner Core.

The facts refused to fit together.

So, like every witness faced with broken numbers, the inspector searched for the least interesting answer available.

He pointed at Jin. "You’re listed as the handler. You awakened during last month’s public ceremony."

Jin nodded once.

"C-Rank Data Appraisal."

"That’s me."

Relief loosened the inspector’s entire body. It was as if a sealed door had suddenly opened. He rushed to arrange the impossible into something understandable, speaking as he worked it out.

"You optimized the incubation cycle," he said. "You used Appraisal on the development data, found the curve, then adjusted the environment around it."

Jin met his eyes.

There were plenty of answers he could have given.

He picked the briefest one that sat close enough to the truth.

"Yeah."

That single word solved everything.

The inspector breathed out and began nodding. His tension faded while the universe returned to a form he could record on official paperwork.

"Explain the process," he said. There was no accusation in it now. He sounded like a professional who had found something worth learning.

Jin obliged.

"Temperature matters most," he said. "Normal incubators keep it flat. I don’t. It runs warmer during absorption periods, then cooler while the egg rests. That way, it doesn’t waste energy resisting the surrounding temperature. Humidity follows the shell density. Every time density rises, I lower humidity by two percent. Feeding happens between the growth periods instead of on a fixed timer, so the egg isn’t getting food when its body can’t use it."

He lifted one shoulder.

"It’s still the same egg. I just cut down the calories it wastes."

Most of that explanation had been invented on the spot.

The schedule, however, existed.

When the inspector opened the incubator log, he found every small temperature cycle, humidity change, and split feeding Jin had described. None of those adjustments could explain the egg’s impossible development by themselves. Put together, though, they created a documented answer that was far easier to believe than a miracle.

The egg wasn’t actually advancing because Jin had adjusted the heat.

It was advancing because a digital lizard had avoided a slime attack the previous night, moving a number from 0.7% to whatever it had reached now.

The inspector had no reason to examine Jin’s soul. People didn’t investigate souls without cause.

What he had was a plain explanation that matched the evidence. It matched extremely well, because Jin had built it for exactly that purpose.

The inspector entered it into his report.

"Most people with C-Rank Appraisal never realize they can use it like this," he said. There was almost respect in his voice. "They sit behind a desk, calculate beast diets, and spend the rest of their lives doing that. You put the talent to work."

He shut the silver case with a click.

"I’m closing the anomaly report. The sensor is working. The egg is simply being handled properly." His gaze moved once around the apartment. "That’s uncommon in this district."

At the doorway, he stopped.

"You could have a good future at a logistics depot, kid," he said, meaning it as encouragement. "Reliable work. Inside. Safe."

Then he left.

The door closed behind him with a click.