This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange - Chapter 802: The Forgotten Contract

Chapter 802: Chapter 802: The Forgotten Contract

Kain didn’t even try to sleep.

Queen’s insistent buzz tugged at the back of his mind—eager, bright, impossible to ignore—until he finally exhaled, slipped into the star space, Pangea, the Mountain that was now a physical manifestation of the System and finally to Pangea’s System Laboratory.

Instead of the sterile white cube from the beginning, after the System integrated with Pangea, the Lab now blended cold efficiency with the Mountain’s transcendent architecture. A domed ceiling arched overhead, its surface a mural of star maps crossed with genetic diagrams. The benches were rich, dark wood that thrummed faintly with power; the instruments retained their sleek forms but carried antique accents. Crystal terminals hovered above the tables, ready to throw schematics; along the walls, glowing glass tubes held micro‑specimens that Kain had collected in System incubators. At the heart of the room, the Evolution Simulator waited like a sealed glass chrysalis.

A low chime answered his steps as an automation woke. From the right, his Versatile Experimental Research Assistant—VERA—glided into view. Her familiar rounded, egg‑sleek body that shimmered with pearlescent silver, thin circuit‑filigree glowing pale gold along her shell. VERA’s eyes lit up seeing Kain return for the first time in a while.

VERA: “Welcome back, Planner Kain.”

“Evening, VERA.” Kain said before proceeding to boot up the Evolution Simulator. But looking at the cost for evolution (a mere 1 SP) rubbed at the bridge of his nose, glancing at his current balance of only 2 SP—and winced. SP was… leaner than he liked. Creating the Dwarves had taken a gouge out of his balance. And unfortunately, Source Points (SP), while they stretched much further than the previous Genetic Points (GP) did (i.e. 1 SP being equivalent to 100 GP), they were also much harder to accumulate. With a resigned sigh that his current SP net worth was about to be cut in half, he lifted a hand toward the Start Simulation button—then hesitated. “Any unread notifications?”

VERA: Yes. You muted routine alerts previously. Opening notifications.

A cascade of golden prompts unfurled in Kain’s vision

System — Hidden Task Complete:Blueprints Adopted (Cumulative) — Your publicly available evolutionary plans have been used 100,000 times across the network.

Reward:2000 SP.

System — Achievement:National Tournament Phase One — Champions (Contributor Share).

Reward:300 SP.

System — Achievement:National Tournament Phase Two — Champions (Contributor Share).

Reward:400 SP.

System — Achievement:National Tournament — Overall Champions (Contributor Share).

Reward:500 SP.

System — Achievement: Represent the College in the Overall *Top 5 *

Reward:200 SP.

Kain stared for a heartbeat, then laughed under his breath. “I mute you for a few weeks and you turn into a benevolent banker.”

The pitiful balance surged upward. Poor a minute ago; wealthy the next. Kain was almost moved to tears.

“Alright. Let’s do this.” He queued the Amber‑Entombed Scarab of Khepri as the evolutionary Base Material and fed it to the simulator while selecting Queen as the creature to be evolved. Queen’s presence flared in his star space, a bright flicker of delight as she too watched through her connection with him, what her new form may be. An artificial light of evolution appeared in the hologram before a projection of a slightly larger wasp queen appeared along with the System description—

—and a score stamped at the bottom of the description.

★

Kain’s smile stalled. “…What?”

The sim’s description wasn’t bad. In fact, the projected form looked elegant and potent: increased life‑attribute output, refined brood governance, sustained field healing, the introduction of a more intense toxin in her children. Not a bad evolutionary direction at all.

Just… not the rating he expected. Especially not when both Aegis and Bea had 5-star ratings before evolving.

His fingers flexed in confusion. He had felt the pull when he chose that shard of amber in the Broken Gallery. A white thread had linked the amber to him —an unmistakable mark of opportunity according to the Threads of Destiny. Queen herself was so excited she practically vibrated in his mind. And yet the simulator sat there with what was the equivalent of a solid B+ on the report card.

Kain called up the Threads of Destiny again. Subtle filaments unfurled across the lab’s white air. They converged—sure enough—on the amber within the sim cradle: a clean white thread from the beetle to him, to Queen. Opportunity. A great one. No error there.

VERA’s eyes brightened.

VERA: “Analysis available. The simulator evaluated host‑only evolution. Flag: Dual‑Entity Contract. Your primary bond is to EVE, the symbiont nested within Queen’s abdomen. Queen’s life‑attribute and all‑female brood are emergent effects of EVE’s influence. A host‑only upgrade creates asymmetry and does not access the full potential of the contracts.”

“In plain terms,” Kain said, “I’m not actually evolving my own contract.”

Kain felt a pang of guilt. He’d let EVE slip into the background—no voice, no buzzing requests, no personality tugging at his attention the way Queen did. She’d been almost entirely dormant since the early days, never once pushing a thought across their link, and somewhere along the way he’d started treating Queen as his contract and EVE as an afterthought—when, technically, EVE was his primary bond.

Worse, half of what made Queen ’Queen’ came from EVE’s quiet work: the life‑attribute came from EVE; without her, like all pre‑evolved Vespids (Vespirae), Queen’s bloodline would have been wind‑only. Not to mention her children’s impossible all‑female uniformity (since only female wasps have combat capabilities while male wasps are workers, this is a huge boon), the way her hive healed and thrived beyond normal Vespids. Without EVE’s presence riding in Queen’s abdomen like a second heart, none of those miracles would exist. Realizing how easily he’d forgotten the partner that made it all possible left an ache in his chest.

VERA: “Correct. Optimal outcome requires co‑evolution: Base Material (Host) + Base Material (Symbiont), provisioned in a single protocol cycle. Without a suitable base for EVE, the simulator predicts partial expression and long‑term instability—e.g., host–symbiont desynchronization under sustained load, life‑attribute leakage instead of storage, trait anomalies particularly with respect to the all-female offspring, healing ability collapse after prolonged combat, and a higher risk of the evolution failing entirely. But despite all of that, the potential of the creature is still great and the Domain predicted to be realized is particularly strong. Hence an optimistic 3.5★.”