Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 6: Patch Notes

Chapter 6: Patch Notes

The Rift kept pulsing violet in the corner of the screen.

0.8 kilometers away.

Dormant.

Impossible.

Jin stared at it for a very long time.

Then he closed the panel.

Not dismissed. The game didn’t give him that option. The notification only folded itself back into the interface, shrinking to the corner where it continued glowing like a coal that refused to cool.

He stopped looking at it anyway.

Zero point eight kilometers, his mind supplied. Close enough to walk. The government hasn’t found it. You could—

"No," Jin whispered to himself.

He had already died once because he walked toward something on a screen.

Now he had a soul-fatigue meter he had pushed into the red without understanding it. He had an egg that hadn’t finished incubating. His avatar was a Level 2 lizard whose current definition of a serious opponent was one oversized slime.

Whatever waited inside a Rift, and whatever the System meant by downloading it, that problem did not belong to Level 2.

Later.

When the rock had become a dragon.

Jin placed the violet ember into the most valuable category in his head: do not touch yet.

Then he opened Mossy Hollow.

Reality could keep its hidden disaster for a while longer.

He had grinding to do.

"Look at that," Elsa breathed. "Seriously, look."

Morning again.

The unit smelled like recycled air and synth-paste. Elsa crouched beside the table, her face barely six inches from the incubator. Her phone was in one hand. The other hovered over the glass as if she wanted to stroke the egg through it.

"It’s shining," she said. "Dad, it’s metallic. Yesterday it was only dark, but now..."

She tipped her head. Light from the ceiling crossed the slate shell in a narrow silver streak.

"It looks like armor."

Arthur glanced over while tying his work boots.

That expression returned to his face.

The slow smile.

"I see it," he said quietly.

"Rock Lizards don’t shine."

Elsa was already scrolling through her phone.

"There has to be something about it. Wait, here. ’Unusual shell coloration in Iron-tier.’ People on the forum say it can mean high mineral density." Her eyes lifted, burning with excitement. "High mineral density means strong defense. Dad, we got a good one. We pulled some freakishly good beast out of the discount bin."

"Maybe we did."

Arthur avoided the word luck. He had apparently decided not to provoke it again.

The smile remained.

Across the room, Jin sat cross-legged on his mattress with the curtain half open. He angled his phone toward the incubator and viewed the egg through its camera.

This wasn’t for his family.

It was for him.

A pale overlay settled across the shell, hidden from everyone else by the perception filter. Jin compared each line to the values he had memorized two nights earlier.

[Real-World Asset: Grey Rock Lizard (bound)] [Incubation: 31% → 47%] [Ambient Mana Absorption: Low → Low-Moderate] [Shell Density: +12%]

Two nights had raised incubation by sixteen points.

The increase in density was measurable.

The egg hadn’t stumbled into good fortune.

It had received an update.

Everything Jin had sent through the soul-link had remained there. Every piece of training stacked onto the last.

Cumulative, he confirmed as the conclusion settled neatly into place. Nothing fades. It all stays banked.

Elsa noticed him watching.

"Are you Appraising it again?" Hope sharpened her voice. "What does the data say? It’s healthy, isn’t it?"

"Really healthy," Jin said.

Technically, it was the most honest thing he had told anyone all week.

Once the others left, Jin didn’t enter the dungeon.

He took out a notebook.

It was old and battered, with half the pages already covered in the original Jin’s schoolwork. Even the handwriting felt unfamiliar, though Jin was slowly getting used to making the same shapes.

He found an empty page near the back, clicked his pen, and printed a heading across the top.

WHAT ARE THE RULES.

He drew two lines beneath it.

At heart, he was still the sort of person who once maintained a spreadsheet for mythic spawn rates.

Then he began listing what he knew.

Growth is cumulative. CONFIRMED. (Sixteen points overnight. Banks permanently.)

Different actions → different growth types. (Fighting = instinct. Gathering = vitality. Dodging = agility. Bracing = hide.) Mostly confirmed. Need cleaner tests.

Does HOW I win matter, or just that I win?

His pen stopped.

Two nights earlier, he had fought badly. He took damage and forced his way through fights. The previous night, he cleared the same kind of enemies without mistakes.

He thought the cleaner runs had transferred more growth.

But he hadn’t measured them properly. He had been exhausted and too caught in the farming rhythm to track the difference.

Test it, he wrote. Win ugly vs. win clean. Compare sync output.

Does eating in-game matter?

Jin considered the herbs. He had gathered around a dozen, but all he ever did was leave them in Inventory until synchronization converted them into "trace bio-essence."

What would happen if the lizard actually ate one?

Does damage transfer?

If the avatar was badly wounded without dying, would the real egg suffer anything?

He needed that answer before sending the lizard into a truly dangerous fight. A cheat that injured the real beast whenever its digital body took damage was very different from one that offered consequence-free practice.

The soul-fatigue bar.

Jin underlined that entry three times.

What increased it?

How quickly?

What happened at 100%?

He possessed one piece of evidence: several hours of hard grinding resulted in shaking hands, unnatural hunger, and a headache that felt like his skull was splitting.

That wasn’t enough information.

Unfortunately, testing the upper limit was also the experiment he least wanted to perform.

He tapped the pen against the notebook.

Most players would have simply played.

They would grind until the egg hatched and decide that was enough.

But most players had never watched someone dismantle a game by refusing to trust what its tutorial claimed.

Tutorials lied.

They always lied.

The real mechanics lived between what the System explained and what it actually allowed. Jin planned to stay inside that gap until every part of it belonged to him.

He clicked the pen shut.

"Right," he said. "Science."

For the next hour in Mossy Hollow, Jin focused on improving rather than gaining strength.

He stopped rushing enemies.

At the cave entrance, he left the Baby Lizard still and watched the slime patrols until their patterns were fixed in his head. The lazy ones hopped every two seconds. The slightly larger slime crouched for half a second before lunging.

Once he understood the loops, Jin drew them away one at a time.

He led each slime into the narrow passage between the two large rocks. Only one enemy could reach the lizard there.

Then he killed them without losing a single point of health.

Clean.

Precise.

Almost dull, at least for someone who had once dodged a shotgun.

[Slime defeated!] [No damage taken.] [Slime defeated!] [No damage taken.] [Slime defeated!] [No damage taken.]

He handled the entire patrol that way, retreated to his usual safe corner, and synchronized.

[Combat Instinct: +3]

Jin compared the result with his notes from the rough session.

That night, he had defeated about the same number of enemies while absorbing hits and forcing bad fights.

The reward had been +1.

Clean execution gave three times as much Combat Instinct.

He leaned back.

It doesn’t care about the kill.

Jin opened the notebook and wrote slowly.

It’s rewarding the SKILL. Take no damage, perfect the pull — the data’s CLEANER. Worth more.

The best strategy wasn’t reckless speed.

It was good play.

The Engine was quietly forcing him to become a better tamer, and the more skill he showed, the more it paid him.

Jin almost respected that.

He found the herb at the rear of the cave.

It grew in a patch of moss he had ignored before, a little plant with three pale leaves that gave off a faint glow. The prompt above it wasn’t the same color as the ones over the mushrooms.

[Gather: Glimmer-Leaf (Beginner Medicinal)]

Jin gathered it.

Instead of leaving it in Inventory to become "trace bio-essence" during the next sync, he opened the Baby Lizard’s status and searched for a use option.

There it was.

A tiny button he had never needed before.

[Feed to Avatar?]

He pressed it.

The Baby Lizard sniffed at the shining leaf, swallowed it whole, and released a tiny glowing burp.

A message passed across the screen.

[Glimmer-Leaf consumed.] [Avatar metabolism enriched (temporary).]

Nothing obvious happened.

The lizard didn’t gain a level.

None of its stats changed.

Jin nearly dismissed the result.

Still, the point of the experiment was to record everything, so he synchronized and immediately looked toward the incubator.

This time, the egg reacted differently.

The silver readout across its shell flickered.

Ambient Mana Absorption had slowly risen from Low to Low-Moderate over two days of training.

Now it jumped.

[Ambient Mana Absorption: Low-Moderate → Moderate]

One herb had done that.

Not a fight.

Not dodging practice.

Food.

Jin stared at the result.

Then he opened the notebook and carefully wrote what might be the most important discovery of the week.

The avatar’s NUTRITION feeds the real beast’s BIOLOGY.

What the digital lizard consumed, the real egg processed.

He sat with that answer for a few seconds.

Then another realization followed, dry and slow, and nearly made him laugh.

His public talent.

The useless, humiliating C-Rank joke that had caused three hundred classmates to laugh at him.

Data Appraisal: calculate beast dietary requirements.

For a boy who wanted to become a tamer, it was supposed to be the most worthless talent in the shelter.

For someone secretly feeding magical herbs to the digital ghost of his beast, it was the perfect explanation for impossible growth.

Why is your trash lizard developing so quickly?

Jin could hold up the phone with its harmless puzzle game and answer plainly.

I optimized its diet. C-Rank Data Appraisal. I run the numbers.

Every word would be true.

People would believe him because it was painfully boring, and no one investigated the boring explanation.

His talent wasn’t an obstacle he needed to hide.

It was the hiding place.

"Huh," Jin said to the empty unit, almost delighted. "I take it back, C-Rank. You’re not useless. You’re a disguise."