Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 7: The Lizard Learns

Chapter 7: The Lizard Learns

Naturally, Jin pushed too hard.

That was what he did.

He was three synchronizations into a clean farming run. Combat Instinct kept rising, the egg’s readings continued creeping upward, and then the whole room tilted beneath him.

It stayed crooked for half a second too long.

When everything settled back into place, the edges of his vision dragged and blurred like wet ink.

His stomach clenched. This wasn’t ordinary hunger. It was a savage, hollow need that had nothing to do with food. His fingers had turned cold around the phone, trembling just enough for him to notice. Behind his right eye, a dull spike of pain drove inward.

A gray message appeared without concern.

[Soul Load Increasing...]

Nothing else followed.

No percentage. No visible meter. No cheerful warning telling him to rest.

Only confirmation that something inside him was filling, followed by the System’s usual silence.

Work it out yourself.

Jin shut the dungeon at once.

He remained still against the wall, breathing slowly until the room stopped moving. The spike behind his eye eased into a heavy ache.

When his hand steadied enough to write, he opened the notebook.

Faster than last time, he noted. Or I started the run already partly drained. Doesn’t fully reset overnight?

The question from that morning was still there.

What happens at 100%.

He underlined it again.

He didn’t know the answer, and he had no intention of discovering it by mistake.

His cheat came with a stamina bar. That bar was his own soul, or whatever part of him the Engine was using. Every other resource in the system could be gathered, farmed, duplicated, or recovered after death.

The boy holding the phone could not.

Can’t sprint it, he wrote. Pace it. Five days till the exam. Slow and steady wins the rock.

He placed the phone face-down beside him and waited for his soul to catch its breath, whatever that actually meant.

Arthur came home late and left early.

The warehouse had trained him into that rhythm.

The following morning, Jin woke to his father moving through the unit in darkness. As he had every day that week, Jin kept his eyes partly closed and watched.

Arthur dressed without turning on the lights. He checked the temperature display.

28.9.

Then he paused beside the table.

He always paused there now.

The slate-dark egg rested beneath the glass, carrying a faint silver sheen across its shell.

Arthur believed everyone else was asleep.

He put two fingers against the incubator, barely touching the glass, and bent close.

"Morning," he whispered to the egg. "Look at you. Getting strong."

Silence.

Then Arthur spoke again.

"I’m sorry it had to be you."

Jin went still behind the curtain.

"You should’ve had a better beginning than this," Arthur murmured. "A proper hatchery. A real tamer waiting for you. Not a..."

His voice caught.

"Not a desk-job kid, a cripple, and fifty thousand credits scraped from the bottom of everything."

Arthur swallowed.

"I wish I could’ve bought something better. For him. For you."

His thumb shifted slightly against the glass.

"I wish his future didn’t have to depend on a..."

He stopped before saying trash lizard.

"On a long shot."

Slowly, carefully, Arthur straightened. His damaged leg forced him to negotiate each movement. He checked the temperature one more time, because habit had become worry and worry had become ritual.

Then he left to bleed for the shelter.

The blast-door sealed softly behind him.

Jin remained motionless in the dark.

He had heard every word.

His father had apologized to the egg.

Arthur was apologizing to the most valuable thing any Astor had ever possessed because he believed he hadn’t been able to offer enough. He couldn’t know what sat inside that shell. The truth was buried behind a perception filter, hidden under the skin of a puzzle game, protected by a lie Jin kept choosing not to break.

Something shifted inside Jin’s chest.

That cold, flat armor he had built from a truck, a promise, and three numb weeks moved again.

He didn’t swear some enormous oath.

He had done that once in another life. That vow had been about escaping everything, and it had rested on a lie too.

This promise was smaller.

Quiet enough to carry.

I’ll make sure he never says that again, Jin thought as he stared into the darkness above him. Not the strongest. Not the whole world. Just this. Dad never apologizes for that egg again. Ever.

That’s the quest.

He didn’t put it in the notebook.

Some things didn’t need ink.

The wall-screen activated during breakfast.

Elsa was stirring synth-paste when the announcer’s painfully cheerful voice filled the unit.

"—five days remaining until the Academy Entrance Examination."

The screen showed teenagers training inside a bright Inner Core gymnasium. Polished beasts stood beside them, shining beneath clean white lights.

"Across the shelter, candidates are entering their final preparation phase. Scouts from the elite academies have begun observing registered applicants—"

Elsa slowed her stirring.

She glanced at the curtain, then returned her eyes to the broadcast.

"—as a reminder, certification is not guaranteed. The combat threshold remains the same for all talent grades, and historically the majority of C-Rank candidates do not advance to a licensed Tamer track."

The announcer didn’t repeat the percentage.

There was no need.

Four percent.

Everyone in the Outer Ring knew it.

Elsa jabbed the mute control.

"Five days," she said.

Maybe she was speaking to herself. Maybe to the egg. Maybe to Jin behind the curtain.

Her jaw tightened in the familiar way that meant she was preparing to fight the universe again.

"Then every day matters. The egg’s ahead of schedule, and you’re going to be ahead too. I don’t care what grade they stamped on you."

She returned to stirring with far more force than the synth-paste required.

Behind the curtain, Jin adjusted the countdown in his head.

Five days.

The boss timer kept moving.

Late that night, after the others had gone to sleep, the lizard did something new.

The unit was dark except for the temperature display. Jin was farming almost automatically, his thumbs following the familiar rhythm of pulling, dodging, and punishing openings.

A slime came at the Baby Lizard from an angle Jin hadn’t been watching.

He noticed too late.

His thumb moved toward the dodge button.

The lizard was already out of the way.

It stepped sideways on its own, a quick, neat shuffle that carried it beyond the slime’s path before Jin’s thumb reached the glass.

Before he had issued any command.

Jin froze.

The slime flew past.

The Baby Lizard turned and smashed its head into the creature, bursting it into scattered pixels.

Then it looked back.

Not toward another enemy.

Toward the camera.

Toward him.

Its oversized obsidian eyes held Jin’s gaze for half a second.

After that, it raised its tiny chin.

Only a little.

The movement wasn’t part of any animation set Jin had seen. It looked pleased with itself.

More than that, it looked like it wanted him to notice.

A single message appeared.

[Combat Instinct Synchronization: 3%]

Jin read it three times.

Until now, he had treated synchronization like a transfer of numbers.

Stats.

Shell density. Vitality. Mana absorption. Physical improvement.

His entire notebook was built around the body.

But the lizard’s sidestep wasn’t a stat.

Jin hadn’t commanded it. The backward glance and that tiny lift of its chin weren’t numbers traveling through the soul-link.

It had learned something.

The avatar wasn’t merely a digital body collecting gains for Jin to export. It was learning from every drill.

The timing of a dodge.

The patience to wait.

The pattern hidden inside a slime’s hop.

Three percent of that learning had crossed the link and settled into a beast that hadn’t even hatched.

Jin wasn’t only strengthening it.

He was teaching it.

And the avatar was passing those lessons into the egg.

The possibilities spread wider than anything in his stat charts. Wider than the medicinal herbs. Maybe even wider than the violet Rift notification still waiting in the corner of the interface.

Real tamers spent years building instinct into their beasts. They trained in a wasteland where one mistake could kill both beast and handler.

Jin could repeat the same lesson a thousand times inside a harmless cave.

Then he could download the result into reality.

Three percent at a time.

The beast would not merely be strong.

It would be trained.

Smart.

Jin looked across the room.

The egg sat under the glass, dark as slate and edged with silver. Incubation had reached 47% and was still rising. Somewhere inside that shell, it already carried three percent of the reflexes earned by its digital ghost.

He looked back at the phone.

The Baby Lizard waited for his next input. Its chin remained faintly raised while it watched him watching.

A smile slowly pulled at one corner of Jin’s mouth.

It was the first real smile he had worn in a long time that had nothing to do with a number increasing.

"...You’re learning," he murmured.

On the screen, the little lizard blinked its obsidian eyes once.

Almost as if it agreed.