Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 4: Speedrunning Reality

Chapter 4: Speedrunning Reality

"Twenty-eight point nine," Arthur said.

Ten seconds passed before he repeated it, as though the display might betray him the moment he stopped watching.

"Twenty-eight point nine. It’s okay. The temperature is okay."

He remained kneeling beside the table, both hands curved around the incubator. His ruined leg was trapped beneath him at an angle that looked painful, but he didn’t seem to notice. His attention stayed fixed on the thin crack across the gray shell, like it might decide to close again just to spite him.

Elsa stood close behind his shoulder, the beast-care guide still open on her glowing phone.

"It isn’t supposed to crack yet," she whispered. "It’s only been one night, Dad. The guide says it should take weeks. It hasn’t even completed one warmth cycle."

"The guide could be wrong." Hope made Arthur’s voice thin and unsteady. "Maybe this one’s healthy. Cheap hatcheries mix their stock sometimes. A strong beast can end up in the discount bin. Maybe I..."

The rest never came out.

He wouldn’t say maybe I got lucky. People raised in the Outer Ring knew better than to speak that sentence aloud. Luck had a way of hearing.

Arthur only watched the crack. His thumb rested beside it without touching the shell.

From the dead couch on the other side of the dark room, Jin observed them with a carefully prepared look of sleepy confusion. He had put the expression together thirty seconds earlier.

His thoughts were nowhere near sleepy.

It worked.

The egg wasn’t the important part. That was only proof of purchase.

Synchronization had worked. He had sent two levels of digital growth through a soul-link and into a sleeping stone, and the stone had responded.

The screen had reached into the real world.

Reality had moved.

Something old and hungry opened its eyes inside Jin. It was the same feeling that used to keep him awake at 2 AM grinding mythic spawns. His father knelt six feet away, grateful because he thought he had found a lucky discount lizard.

Meanwhile, Jin had just discovered a cheat code for the universe.

And he still had no idea where its limits were.

"Huh," he said again, keeping his tone mild. "Lucky."

"Get some sleep, Jin," Arthur murmured without taking his eyes off the egg. "You’ve got a big week ahead."

Jin lowered himself onto the couch.

Sleep did not happen.

He waited for the room to settle.

Arthur eventually eased onto the cot, forcing his body through each careful inch. Elsa fell asleep against the wall while still talking. The guide glowed in her loose hand until the phone timed out.

Only the vent remained, humming under the blue light of the temperature display.

28.9.

Jin slipped off the couch and crossed to the corner they called his bedroom. It consisted of a mattress, a shelf, and a curtain. He sat against the wall with the phone held close to his chest.

The perception filter stayed active. Anyone who woke would see a sleepless kid scrolling through an unfinished puzzle game.

Jin opened the dungeon menu.

He didn’t press Enter.

Not yet.

First came the questions.

Most people given a system like this would start grinding immediately. Jin would have done the same once. Then he had watched a speedrunner tear apart a game that took its developers five years to build, finishing the whole thing in one afternoon.

The runner hadn’t beaten it by playing better than everyone else.

He had questioned everything.

He found the rules the game truly followed instead of trusting the rules it claimed to follow.

That was what Jin needed to do.

He began arranging a list in his head.

One. Did game-time match real-time? The respawn timer had counted real seconds, which suggested yes. Combat might still run faster, though. That needed testing.

Two. Did death affect synchronization? He had died once that night, split cleanly in half by a slime, and nothing had happened to the egg until he synced. Death by itself seemed free. Mostly confirmed. But dying repeatedly before a sync might reduce the transfer. Unknown.

Three. What actually crossed over? Levels? Stats? Something else?

Four. Could he keep farming until the rock became a dragon before sunrise, or was there a limit?

Jin lingered on that last question.

Three weeks in a wasteland had taught him one reliable truth: good things always charged something.

There would be a cost.

He simply hadn’t found it.

"Okay," he breathed. "Let’s break it."

This time, he didn’t treat the slimes like enemies.

He treated them like test equipment.

For the first test, he led the Baby Lizard out and isolated one wandering slime. One clean pull. Terrain advantage. No damage. The slime died, and Jin immediately backed the lizard into a safe corner before selecting Sync.

[Synchronization...]

[Confirm?]

He confirmed and looked straight at the real egg.

A faint tremor passed through it. Barely anything.

The crack stayed the same width, but the shell around the fracture seemed a little darker. Sidewalk gray had shifted toward slate.

Jin opened the avatar status.

Little Lizard Level: 2 ATK: 4 → 4 DEF: 6 → 6 [Combat Instinct: +1]

None of the main numbers had changed.

A new line sat beneath them.

Combat Instinct: +1.

Jin narrowed his eyes.

It isn’t only EXP.

For test two, he avoided combat.

The lizard walked to a cluster of mushrooms and gathered from it. Herb after herb until it had collected six.

Then Jin synced again.

He watched the result.

[Vitality: +1] [Item Acquired (transferred): trace bio-essence]

A different activity produced different growth.

Gathering improved vitality rather than instinct.

Test three took ten full minutes. Jin attacked nothing. Instead, he had the lizard dodge while three slimes chased it in circles.

Late dodge. Late dodge. Slip through the gap. Keep moving.

His thumbs began to ache before the slimes finally gave up.

He synced.

[Agility: +2]

[Dodge timing recorded.]

For the fourth test, Jin opened the controls again and found a defensive crouch he had ignored earlier.

[Harden].

He activated it over and over, letting weak slime hops strike the lizard’s braced hide. Twenty hits in total.

Then Sync.

[Hide Density: +1]

[Passive ’Stone Skin’ reinforced.]

Jin lowered the phone onto his knee and looked up at the ceiling.

The answer came together all at once.

Simple. Perfect.

The game isn’t rewarding me. It’s recording me.

Every kind of action created its own growth data. Combat developed instinct. Gathering improved vitality. Dodging increased agility. Bracing strengthened the hide.

The avatar wasn’t merely gaining numbers.

Its body was learning.

Synchronization took those learned skills and fed them into the real beast one drop at a time.

Jin wasn’t leveling up a pet.

He was training one inside a place where it could repeat the same lesson a thousand times without bleeding, then sending all that practice into reality.

The possibilities spread through his mind.

Real tamers had to train their beasts in the wasteland. One mistake could kill the beast, and usually the tamer along with it. Progress was slow because both of them only had one life.

Jin could train his inside a cave.

Free respawns. No permanent risk.

Then he could export the result.

That’s the loop, he thought. Fight. Train. Sync. The rock keeps getting stronger. Forever.

He lifted the phone again.

"Okay," Jin murmured.

For the first time in three weeks, something alive had entered his voice.

"Now we farm."

So he did.

Jin ran Mossy Hollow with the routine focus of someone working a shift, except this work was the only thing he had ever loved in either of his lives.

Pull a slime. Force it onto bad terrain. Kill it. Gather while moving between fights. Practice dodging whenever there was room. Use Harden against every hit. Sync at regular intervals.

Combat Instinct rose.

Agility followed.

The hide grew denser.

Across the room, the egg slowly darkened and smoothed, each change too slight to wake anyone.

Jin stopped tracking the time.

That was the first warning, though he was too deep in the pattern to recognise it.

The headache came next.

It began as a dull pressure behind his eyes. Soon it sharpened, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. The edges of the phone screen blurred.

He blinked hard.

Nothing cleared.

Then hunger tore through him.

It wasn’t ordinary hunger. This felt wrong, a hollow shaking emptiness that made no sense for a kid who had eaten synth-paste at dinner. His fingers trembled against the phone. His mouth had dried out completely.

Jin frowned as his thumb slowed.

A notification appeared in a shade of gray he had never seen.

[Soul Fatigue Increasing]

[Synchronization Load: Moderate]

Nothing else followed.

No tutorial. No advice. No helpful explanation.

Only a cold status update for a meter Jin hadn’t known existed, filling somewhere inside him.

He leaned back against the wall.

His heart pounded. His eyes stung. The room tipped slightly before correcting itself.

There it is.

A hollow laugh almost escaped him. He was exhausted, but some part of him felt relieved.

Of course there was a cost.

Nothing free had ever existed.

The game wasn’t actually running on the phone. The phone was only glass. Whatever powered it came from Jin himself.

From his soul.

Apparently, his soul had a stamina bar just like everything else, and he had sprinted straight into the red.

Can’t abuse it, he noted, placing the fact beside the others. It isn’t endless. There’s a tank. It drains. And when it reaches empty...

He had no idea what happened after that.

In a rare moment of good judgment, Jin decided four in the morning during a school week was not the time to find out.

He closed the dungeon.

The fatigue meter lingered for another moment, then disappeared.

Jin placed the phone face-down on his chest.

For the first time since his afterlife began, Jin Astor chose to sleep.