Eight days to see the benefit of a Beast Tamer.

  Eight days draining resources, rationing water and food with the precision of someone who needed to keep two colossal creatures alive without letting them recover enough strength to make taming impossible. The margin was narrow — too little and they died, too much and the submission regressed. I had learned the balance on the first day through error, and on the second through calculation.

  Now they were thin. Tired. The fury had given way to something more manageable.

  "Zeus, what's the probabili—"

  [ 78%… 79%… ]

  "Good."

  But at that moment my focus had already shifted. There was another problem in the stable — or perhaps another opportunity, depending on what was inside.

  The egg had begun to crack.

  I stood watching without approaching. Eight days. Zeus had said seventy-two hours — and the gap between that estimate and reality was the clearest confirmation yet that whatever was inside this shell existed entirely outside the system's database. Unknown creature. Unknown incubation. Unknown everything.

  The shell was opening from the inside, under the pressure of something that had taken exactly as long as it needed.

  "Alright, little one… what are you?"

  First dark feathers. Then a small, slender body — for an instant it resembled a Crukoton, but the structure was wrong, the proportions didn't match. It was a strange creature. Crukoton were common.

  The creature raised its head.

  Reptilian eyes. A curved beak with the specific curvature of a predator, not an herbivore. Small bony horns emerging above the forehead in a symmetry that seemed more decorative than functional — but I had learned that nothing in the Oasis was merely decorative.

  "Cockatrice…"

  My heart raced — in the wrong way.

  Rare. Extremely rare. Territorial, proud, with the specific temperament of creatures that had spent enough time at the top of any hierarchy to develop arrogance as a structural characteristic. Said to be distant cousins of dragons. And just as untameable — the Compendium entry was explicit: no confirmed record of taming by humans in any previous cycle.

  My stomach sank.

  "Son of a bitch… he tricked me."

  The anonymous person who had sent the egg knew what was inside. They had calculated exactly this — a gift that seemed valuable enough to generate investment and focus, but that in practice was useless to any Lord who tried to use it. An elegant trap wrapped in a gesture of alliance.

  I had been naive in a way I wouldn't easily forgive myself for.

  While I processed the magnitude of the mistake, the creature — forty centimeters tall, body still damp from the shell — walked to my feet with the naturalness of something that had decided its fate before finishing being born.

  It looked at me. Tilted its head.

  And nestled against my legs.

  "Huh?"

  [ Domestication probability — legendary creature Cockatrice: 100%. ]

  I froze.

  Zeus didn't speak without being prompted. And didn't miscalculate — the system had been designed for precision before anything else. One hundred percent was a number I hadn't seen in any Compendium entry about Cockatrice, because one hundred percent for that creature or for any other specific one shouldn't exist.

  It was still nestled against me. Its head resting on my leg with the weight of something that had decided I was safe before I had decided anything about it.

  "Tamer. Bond it to me."

  The worker approached with the blank expression I had learned to interpret as correct functioning. It cast a luminous rope that enveloped us — me and the creature — in a closed circle.

  And everything went dark.

  My consciousness dropped in a way different from fainting — not a fall, but a displacement, as though the space between one thought and the next had been replaced by an entirely different place.

  Infinite void. No floor, no horizon, no reference of scale.

  From the depths of the darkness, a white light began to grow.

  It took shape.

  A colossal shadow emerged — thirty meters tall, a bird's body with the long neck of a serpent, a reptilian face with those golden eyes I had seen in the small creature but which at that scale conveyed something the small creature's eyes didn't yet have. Ancient ferocity. The kind that comes from existing long enough to no longer need to prove anything to anyone.

  Claws that could hold an entire castle.

  It was the Cockatrice. Not the newborn — its essence. What it was before being small, or what it would be after growing, or what it had been at some prior point I couldn't date.

  It approached without hesitation.

  I couldn't move.

  The colossal creature lowered its head to eye level with me — a movement that should have been threatening and wasn't, that should have intimidated and produced the opposite effect, like recognition.

  And spoke.

  "Daddy."

  My brain stopped.

  "…Daddy?"

  The colossal form disappeared. The void disappeared. I returned to the stable with the abruptness of someone being woken in the middle of a dream that hadn't yet ended.

  The small Cockatrice was licking my knee with the concentration of something that had found what it was looking for and saw no reason to stop.

  [ Taming complete. Familiar bonded to Lord. ]

  I stared at it for a few seconds.

  I had assumed that taming meant submission — that the bond was hierarchical, with the Lord above and the creature below, sustained by the system's structure and the conditioning process. That was how it worked with common creatures. That was how I had imagined it would work with the Urskra.

  But she had been born inside my territory. I had been the first being she saw. And what the bond had registered wasn't hierarchy.

  It was family.

  "You… must be hungry."

  She began to jump — with an energy that didn't match her size, strong enough to almost knock me over with the impact of her paws on the ground.

  I took meat from the ring. The smell spread before I finished the movement.

  Her eyes lit up.

  She attacked the piece with ferocity disproportionate to her size — but with pleasure, not desperation. The difference was visible in every bite. The Urskra ate like those who didn't know when they would eat again. She ate like someone discovering that food was one of the best things in existence.

  Something strange happened in my chest. I can't quite identify it — satisfaction, perhaps. The kind that isn't about conquest, but about something smaller and harder to name.

  "Eat as much as you want…"

  While she devoured, I thought of a name. Cockatrice was a category, not a name — and calling a creature by its species was the kind of thing I would do if I didn't care, and I had decided, without noticing exactly when, that I did care.

  "What about Pegasus?"

  It made no technical sense. She wasn't a horse. But she was a mount — or would be, when she grew — and there was something in the word that worked.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She didn't respond. She kept eating as though the world were about to end and she needed to finish everything before it did.

  "Then it's Pegasus."

  Three hours later, she had eaten fifty kilograms of meat — a quantity that didn't correspond to her body size in any equation I could formulate — and was sleeping in the corner of the stable with the serene expression of something completely satisfied.

  I looked at the stable. At the empty egg. At the two colossi in the pit outside.

  "Great… now I have three colossal mouths to feed."

  Survival was over.

  Logistics was beginning.

  ?

  I believed no Lord had reached this point. Let alone at this speed.

  Two colossal mounts in the final stages of taming. A newborn Cockatrice with a family bond. And zero source of protein to sustain any of the three. It was a path completely outside the standard — the kind no manual covered because no manual had assumed it was possible.

  I needed meat. A lot. And I needed it now.

  I went to the market.

  The interface materialized around me. Holograms, voices, the specific noise of a place where resources and information circulate in the same flow. I moved through it with more familiarity than the first time — I knew where the useful counters were, knew how to ignore what was bait, knew that a few side conversations were worth more than the central offers.

  "Filter by Crukoton."

  The list narrowed. Many options for processed meat, very few for live animals — it made sense, processed meat was more profitable per unit of effort. I tried filtering for live males and females for my own breeding. The prices that appeared made me close the filter immediately.

  Then one offer caught my attention.

  Half the average price. Sale in bulk only.

  Whoever sells in volume with an aggressive discount has one of three situations: they need resources urgently, they're too inexperienced to price correctly, or they don't have time to sell in portions and prefer speed over margin. Any of the three was an advantage for me.

  "Accept trade."

  The projection opened to a man in full armor — worn, scratched, without the shine of someone who had resources for maintenance. Someone who survived by fighting, not administrating. He assessed my projection with the expression of someone who had expected a different kind of buyer.

  "I hope you understand I won't give a discount beyond what was advertised."

  He had said that first. Which meant he expected negotiation — that he had prepared room to lower the price and was signaling the limit before I asked.

  "No problem. The price is excellent."

  He blinked.

  "Seriously?"

  There I confirmed it: he had priced below the real regional value. Not just with a bulk discount — the base price was already lower than the local market sustained. Urgency or inexperience. Probably both.

  "I'll pay for everything you have." — I paused a second. — "And I propose a deal: if you find more Crukoton, sell them to me. Same price, plus ten percent performance bonus."

  The silence that followed was revealing. He had entered the negotiation prepared to concede and had received expansion instead of pressure. Too surprised to process quickly.

  "Sure… I mean… I'll think about it. Add me. We can negotiate in the future."

  He left too quickly to be casual.

  "Doesn't even know how to pretend." — I laughed to myself.

  Two tonnes of Crukoton for two hundred combined units of iron, stone, and wood. I had lost an entire day of raw materials — but gained food security for weeks and a supplier with incentive to return. Time is power. And I had bought time.

  The ring absorbed everything effortlessly — two tonnes of meat kept fresh in a space that didn't physically exist. Without the ring, the entire operation would have been impossible. It was the most quietly essential resource I possessed, and the most dangerous one to possess.

  ?

  The barracks had finalized while I was at the market.

  A solid structure — smaller than the main castle, but with the presence of something designed for a specific function, not for appearance. Reinforced gate, walls that communicated resistance before any analysis. The evolved castle's internal spaces had doubled from four to eight, but the barracks had immediately occupied two of them, leaving three available.

  I had already known that. It was the calculated cost.

  "Let's see the knights."

  A mount without a knight was waste — I had reached the point of having mounts and needed the complement. The available options were two: light armor knight and heavy armor knight. No mounted archer, no variations. The barracks at the initial level was limited by design.

  "Zeus. Characteristics of the heavy armor knight."

  [ Heavy armor knight: full plate, closed helm, primary weapon — halberd. Long reach. Maximum impact force against large-bodied creatures. ]

  The image the system projected was exactly what I needed for what I was planning. Long reach for creatures with colossal structure, impact force that compensated for what the Urskra would lose in mobility. Perfect in theory.

  "Materials?"

  [ Level 3 Worker + mount + 50 raw ore + 50 wood. ]

  Expensive in every dimension — materials, a worker, a mount, and still the need to evolve one of the houses to unlock a level 3 worker. Cascading costs, none of them small. But what it produced in return was real shock force, the kind that changed the outcome of battles against creatures I couldn't face directly.

  "Zeus. Upgrade the houses."

  Higher-level workers would be necessary for practically everything I planned to do from here on — the knight was just the first item on the list. On paper, the math didn't close: the upgrade cost more than building a new house and delivered only fifty percent more collection per worker. Building another house was cheaper and delivered one whole additional worker. Any Lord thinking short-term would choose the house over the upgrade. But quantity created noise. Fewer workers with more individual capacity meant fewer variables to manage, more flexibility to reallocate, and more precise control over what happened at each point of the territory. A lean kingdom responded faster than a crowded one. I was running a marathon. A hundred meters didn't interest me.

  [ Initiating upgrade. ]

  The taming hadn't finalized yet — I couldn't invoke the knight before that. But time was running in the right direction.

  That was when Morgana spoke.

  "Lord."

  I stopped.

  "The female and the cub are approaching."

  I looked at the map. Two red dots in motion — straight toward the territory, without deviation, without hesitation.

  "She came back…"

  It wasn't a surprise. I had calculated she would return — it was the expected behavior of something that had left the male behind. What wasn't in the calculation was the timing. Too early. If she attacked now, if she fell into the pit, if she struck while the two were still in the taming process, she could undo two days of work in minutes.

  "Lord… they're approaching quickly."

  I closed my eyes for a second.

  "Damn."

  I dismissed the Tamer immediately — it was the most expensive resource I had in the field and the hardest to replace. I climbed the palisade.

  What I saw caught me off guard.

  The female was weak. Visibly thinner than when she had left — and the cub worse still, with the movement cadence of something that had consumed reserves it didn't have. She hadn't hunted. With a cub to protect and without the male to coordinate, hunting efficiency had fallen below the point where the risk was worth it.

  She had stayed put and waited.

  And now she was advancing — heavy step, slow, determined — with the hunger visible in every movement and the cub pressed to her flank.

  She stopped before the palisade. Raised her head. The tower bolts arrived and she didn't dodge — she simply rotated her body to interpose her own mass between the projectiles and the cub, absorbing the impact with the indifference of something that had decided this wasn't the relevant problem.

  She looked at me.

  It wasn't hatred. It wasn't defiance. It was something I couldn't classify with any category I had for animals — and that I recognized immediately in people.

  [ Two new creatures detected. Domestication probability: 89%. ]

  I almost lost my balance.

  "Zeus, cease the tower attacks."

  But then I saw the wound.

  On her back — wide, deep, with edges that didn't correspond to any creature I had encountered in the territory. Not the teeth or claws of a common predator. Something larger. And the wound hadn't been made to kill — it had been made with surgical precision to wound without ending.

  "Did something enter the territory?"

  No. The map was clean. The wound had been made outside — and she had fled here.

  "She realized I didn't kill the male."

  The Compendium said Urskra were stupid. And they were — on unstable terrain, in a weight trap, in any situation that required rapid processing of a new variable. But what she had done wasn't stupidity. It was calculation with the available tools.

  She had identified the only place where the male was still alive. And had gone there.

  "Tamer, finalize the process with all the Urskra." "Zeus, how long?"

  [ High submission detected. Three hours to finalization. ]

  Three hours.

  I looked at the map. No hostile presence within the monitoring radius. But for her to have given up waiting and risked approaching with a cub and an open wound, whatever had attacked her was strong enough to make every alternative worse than asking for help from the Lord who had imprisoned her pack.

  "I hope to tame them before whatever did this comes back."

  ?

  When night fell, the process had been completed.

  With the Tamer's effort, with Morgana's healing on the wounds that confinement had aggravated, with four hundred kilograms of Crukoton distributed in sufficient quantity for hunger to stop being the dominant variable. The four Urskra were in the stable — submissive, exhausted, but alive, breathing with the cadence of something that had reached the end of a long process and hadn't yet processed what was on the other side.

  I ran my hand along the female's flank. She was breathing with difficulty in her sleep.

  "You're safe now." — I murmured.

  It was the first time I had said anything like that to anything in the Oasis and fully believed it. They were my responsibility now — not a resource, not a tool. Responsibility.

  Morgana was analyzing the healed wound with the concentration of a healer who had found something she couldn't classify. I observed from the side, trying to put together the pieces that didn't fit.

  "I can't tell what did this." — she said, finally. — "The mark is deep, wide, but not fatal. Whoever did this could have killed her. They seemed to prefer not to. Why?"

  Yes.

  Why.

  My blood went cold.

  The question had arrived at the right place, and the answer arrived with it — not gradually, but all at once, with the specific clarity of a conclusion that had been available all along and that I had been looking at without seeing.

  "Damn…"

  "Zeus, do I have the material to upgrade the palisade?" "Yes." "Upgrade it now."

  My voice came out too loud. Morgana stared at me.

  "Lord, what's happening?"

  I stared back.

  "You said it yourself. The wound doesn't make sense."

  I processed aloud, because organizing the reasoning into words made each step harder to ignore.

  A common creature would have killed — it was the standard behavior of a predator satisfying a need or eliminating a threat. A territorial creature would have pursued — the female had fled, and territorial creatures don't let prey escape into another territory. A stupid creature would have persisted — without the capacity to calculate that wounding and releasing produced a better result than wounding and killing.

  But the bite came from above. Larger than an Urskra.

  And it had been surgical.

  "Tell me, Morgana… how many creatures taller than an Urskra are intelligent enough to mark a prey and wait for it to return to its pack?"

  The color drained from her face.

  She had arrived at the same answer before I finished the question.

  There was only one category of creature that attacked this way — not to kill, but to mark. A wound calculated not to be fatal. Prey released to return to the group. And then waiting — patient, intelligent, cruel in the specific way of something that had learned that killing one was less efficient than using one to find all of them.

  "A chimera." — she said.

  The silence that followed had physical weight.

  "Yes." — I confirmed. — "A chimera."

  I looked at the stable. At the four Urskra sleeping. At the wound on the female that had been made with intent and calculation by something I hadn't yet faced — and that had just discovered where I was.

  The female had been marked before arriving here.

  Which meant the Chimera didn't need to find me.

  It already knew where we were.