Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 3: The First Sync

Chapter 3: The First Sync

A board creaked under someone’s weight.

Jin reacted before thinking, flattening the phone against his chest. The perception filter covered the display again. To anyone else, it showed an unfinished puzzle game left sitting on the screen.

Arthur was no longer trying to sleep.

Across the room, he had the incubator balanced in his lap while he picked at one taped corner with a small screwdriver. He squinted through the weak hallway light. A crack ran through the casing, not the egg itself, and he was repairing the temperature regulator before the Outer Ring’s night cold found its way inside.

His damaged leg lay rigidly stretched out in front of him.

Elsa sat cross-legged at his side, awake with her phone lighting her face. She wasn’t playing anything. She was reading.

"This says Rock Lizards have to get their first warmth cycle within forty-eight hours," she whispered. "Otherwise, the shell gets too hard. The temperature has to stay exactly at twenty-nine degrees." Her brows drew together. "Dad, is it at twenty-nine?"

"Twenty-eight and a half." Arthur turned the screwdriver. "That’s close. I’ll bring it up."

For a while, only the quiet scrape of metal against the casing filled the room.

"I used to read guides like those," he said at last. "Back when I was your age. Before I got my Ironclad." His smile appeared for a second, small and damaged. "Different beast, but the guides were the same."

Elsa rested her head against his shoulder.

"He’s going to be okay," she said. "Jin, I mean. Even with the C-Rank. Even with..." Her hand moved toward the egg, but she caught herself before calling it trash. "We can make this work. Rock Lizards get underestimated."

Arthur stopped working.

"I used everything I had," he said. His voice broke halfway through. "I bought him a beast people laughed at before he even made it home. And I keep wondering if I should’ve waited. Saved for another year. Found him something that actually had a future."

"Dad—"

"He should’ve had one." Arthur rubbed the heel of his palm against one eye. "He deserved more than a rock."

Jin didn’t move in the darkness across the room.

He could have answered immediately.

Dad. It isn’t a rock. It’s the best thing this family has ever owned. You paid fifty thousand credits for it, and you don’t even know what you found.

His thumb pressed against the phone over his chest.

Then came the rest of it. How would that sound coming from him? What questions would they ask afterward? Why did a C-Rank kid headed for a desk job know something every shelter appraiser had missed?

So Jin stayed quiet.

He watched Arthur repair a broken incubator so a sleeping dragon wouldn’t get cold, all while apologizing for bringing it home.

For three weeks, the hard, cold feeling in Jin’s chest had protected him.

Now it only felt heavy.

[00:54:18]

Eventually, the unit settled into silence.

Elsa fell asleep against the wall with her glowing phone loose in one hand. Arthur placed the fixed incubator back on the table with both hands and checked its temperature twice.

28.9.

Only then did he ease himself down onto the cot in the corner. Every part of the movement was slow and familiar, the kind of careful adjustment made by someone who had to bargain with his own body before it allowed him to rest.

His breaths gradually evened out.

The vent hummed. Blue light from the temperature display washed faintly over the room.

[00:00:11] [00:00:04] [Avatar Respawned. HP: 12/12.]

Jin opened his eyes.

He didn’t rush in this time.

The Baby Lizard came out carefully, keeping close to the cave wall while Jin observed the patrol.

The small slimes moved through the same lazy loops. By now, he knew how far they could hop and how long he had to dodge. He chose the nearest one that had drifted from the group, darted in for a single headbutt to draw its attention, then retreated.

It followed him between two rocks, into a gap too narrow for the rest to surround him.

One enemy. Better ground.

Jin waited for the hop, dodged at the last possible moment, and struck back.

[Slime defeated!]

He repeated the method.

One slime at a time. Pull it away, use the rocks, keep the others out. There was no reckless charge and no attempt to show off. He played slowly and did everything clean.

[Slime defeated!] [Slime defeated!] [Slime defeated!]

[EXP +3] [Coin +1] [Item: Tiny Monster Core x1]

The last slime left something behind this time. A small, pale bead of light rolled out from the splash.

A core.

Jin had no idea what it was for yet, but anything called a core probably mattered. He marked it as useful and moved on.

Clearing the whole patrol took most of an hour. Every fight happened where he wanted it to happen, and the lizard never fell under half HP.

When the final battle ended, the usual sound changed into a higher chime.

[Level Up!] [Little Lizard → Level 2] [HP +2] [ATK +1] [DEF +1] [Passive Acquired: Stone Skin — reduces minor impact damage.]

The gains were tiny. One passive and a few points weren’t going to terrify a slime, much less an entire city.

Still, Jin noticed the difference as soon as the next fight began.

The lizard responded a fraction faster. One hop that would have caught it before scraped across Stone Skin instead.

Zero damage.

The corner of Jin’s mouth nearly lifted.

Earned.

None of those points had come free.

A new window appeared before he could continue. Its glow was a different color from every prompt he had seen so far.

[Synchronization Available] [Push avatar growth to the Real-World Asset.] [ Confirm? ]

Jin stopped.

He hadn’t crossed this part yet.

Until now, everything remained trapped inside the phone. The slimes, the deaths, the level, all of it existed safely behind the screen and couldn’t reach the gray egg resting six feet from him.

Synchronization connected the two.

The moment he confirmed it, this would no longer be only a game.

Arthur breathed steadily from the corner. Elsa remained asleep. The incubator display still read 28.9.

Jin turned his eyes toward the egg.

Then his thumb touched Confirm.

Light filled the Baby Lizard on the screen. A gentle pulse traveled from its nose all the way down its tail.

It should have faded.

Instead, the glow seemed to drain away. It slipped past the borders of the display, left the phone, and moved toward—

The egg shook.

Only once, but hard enough to disturb the moss beneath it.

A tiny sound cut through the silent room.

Tk.

A thin crack appeared across the gray shell.

Arthur woke before the noise had fully ended.

He jerked upright on the cot, forgetting his leg as his gaze snapped toward the incubator.

No one breathed for the next second.

"...Elsa." His voice was rough. "Elsa, get up."

She shifted, blinking herself awake. Then she followed his stare and went completely still.

The crack caught the blue display light, narrow but impossible to deny.

Arthur forced himself to his feet and crossed the room far faster than his leg should have let him. He dropped onto his knees in front of the table.

"It moved," he whispered.

Both palms pressed against the incubator glass, as though the shell’s movement might travel through it.

"Elsa, it moved. The egg’s cracking."

"That’s..." Elsa scrambled over with her phone still in hand. The beast-care guide remained open on the screen. She looked at the shell, checked the text, then stared at the shell again. "That can’t... Dad, this says Iron-tier Rock Lizards don’t react for weeks. Their shells are supposed to stay dormant. It hasn’t even gone through one complete warmth cycle. It shouldn’t be doing this. It can’t—"

The words failed her.

The egg shuddered a second time.

Its crack widened.

Everything Elsa had spent the night reading insisted that what sat before her could not happen.

Arthur looked over his shoulder. His eyes shone, and his mouth moved without producing anything. He needed someone else to see it, someone who could prove the moment was real.

His gaze found Jin sitting upright in the darkness.

Jin lowered the phone from his chest.

First, he looked at the cracking shell. Then he met his father’s face.

"Huh," Jin murmured. "Look at that."

He widened his eyes by just the right amount.

A breath earlier, before he hid the display, the screen had shown him one final message.

He would learn exactly what it meant after morning came.

[00:00:00 — Synchronization Complete]