Sunday night. In just a few hours, the round of sixteen would start.
Imperial Academy campus, male dorm, Robert Blaze's apartment.
* *
After going on two dates and slaughtering a ton of Gurglocks, Robert stopped by his apartment and prepared for the experiment that would make or break his career as a monster tamer. He should be resting or preparing for the fights of the next day but he was too eager to finally get it done.
Robert sat on the living room rug and called Poochline. The dog, altered by some Life Arch to have white and blue stripes of fur on his back, eagerly answered the call. He took the mixed-breed golden retriever on his lap and soothed him. Full of energy like ten kids drunk on taurine, Poochline refused to remain quiet.
He rubbed the dog's head. "You trust me, right?"
"Woof! (Play with me human)" Poochline woofed.
Robert laughed as the dog tried to lick his face. He gently pulled him down with one arm and pinned his body with the other. The furry tail kept brushing everything it could touch. He then whispered. "Mind blackout."
Being a mortal animal, Poochline's mind was easy to breach. Effortlessly, everything that made Poochline, Poochline became evident to him. Robert spent ten minutes meticulously recreating a copy of the dog's brain, genetic code, and mental patterns in his Mind palace, an imprint that was perfect in every aspect. With that, he could rewrite any dog's mind to turn them into Poochline's clones, ensuring the pet on his lap would live forever.
But that was not what he intended to do with that imprint. Robert released Poochline from his spell. The dog shook his head and stared at him.
"Woof! (I'm hungry)" Poochline woofed.
Robert gave Poochline a treat. "Good boy. I promise you we'll go out and play when I can. In the meanwhile, why don't you ask Freddy to teach you some Taulusian game?"
Poochline zipped toward the kitchen. The apartment had a single room and Freddy was comfortable enough in the laundry.
Robert watched the energetic dog disappear beyond the open door. Poochline had just paid in advance for a lifetime of luxury. The imprint Robert made was valuable enough to him that he could fund the animal shelter for...
Damn. Did he use Camille? No. Despite what Amanda might think or feel, what he did with Camille was all spontaneous. Neither of them forced the other to do anything. The experience enriched both of them.
And it was also without risk. As a Life Arch, it was trivial for Robert to avoid siring children. All he had to do was to use some Life essence to kill his seed before any accidents could happen. He was also immune to mundane diseases and very resistant to magical ones. Even if Camille were carrying some pathogen, which she wasn't, she wouldn't infect Robert, and Robert's body was as free of harmful microorganisms as a sterilized spool of surgical wound dressing.
So, no harm done, no foul. Amanda's issues were her own, he had no commitment to her and acted during his own free time. But he had to admit she was slowly eroding the walls he put in place to protect himself. He believed it was because his perception of her family and the burden of her company weren't so daunting to him anymore.
Anyway. Enough was enough. He didn't set the night apart to wonder about his love life. He needed to work on Poochline's imprint. Robert used his primary talent and went to the liminal void. He checked his artifice timepiece and found he had forty days to spend. Multiplied by three, that was four months in his mind palace.
*
*
Robert made many copies of Poochline's imprint. One of them, he put in a VHS tape, a metaphor for complex data storage he produced, using an ancient device from before the rift cataclysm.
His intent was to separate the smallest portion of the dog's mind that made the animal so empathetic toward humans. To sum tens of thousands of years of evolution into a tiny mental pattern he could imprint over monsters to, if not override, at least attenuate their killer instincts. He also wanted the notions of pack, family, and the defense instincts dogs had to protect their humans from harm.
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If he could do that, it would ease the management of his monsters, making them also smarter in combat, and friendlier in social situations. They would go from mind-controlled tame monsters to pets. Or so he hoped.
Robert cut portions of the dog's pattern and blended the resulting mental pattern with a copy of his Minotaur's imprint. He let the intellect fortress emulate the resulting creature in various situations, trying to gauge the result.
The first couple hundred tries took two months and resulted in the discovery of, as Edison once said, two hundred wrong ways to do it. Robert archived each attempt along an essay on why it went wrong.
Then, for the third month, he got partial successes. His finesse at separating portions of a mental imprint without damaging it or bringing in extraneous concepts improved. He summoned book upon book on psychological analysis and theory, some of them penned by Mental Archs who studied the mind in deeper (and sometimes unethical) ways previously impossible for mortal men.
He got some Minotaur imprints that were pacifists. Those were useless to him. Minotaurs who behaved like dogs. They had too much of their minds swapped. Minotaurs that refused to attack people. He took too much of their aggression and monster instincts.
At that point, he was close to figuring out the right way to merge portions of two mental imprints to create a new creature. But just like a plastic surgeon doing a skin graft, he needed to give the final product time to heal and blend together. Time he didn't quite have. Because the soft and friendly nature of the dog conflicted directly with the rough and violent nature of the monster.
A different approach was to take the dog's mind and make it learn how to move a Minotaur's body. But... some dog behaviors that looked cute in a forty-pound fur ball would prove deadly with an armored six hundred pounds mountain of muscle. Not to mention that the monster was smarter than the dog. Not only move in the new body, but he would also need to train the dog how to wield an ax and think tactically. No. His initial approach was the correct one. He needed to keep the Minotaurs imprint mostly intact.
Robert needed a middle ground. Something to give the Minotaurs the sensibility to adapt and understand a peaceful world. His mind drifted to the warrior-poets of history, weapon masters who used art to temper their more violent instincts.
That was it.
He couldn't just take something out of the Minotaur's mind to replace it with part of a dog's behaviors. He needed to add to it. He needed to make the Minotaurs brainier than what they were now, and then add the elements he wanted while dimming and suppressing the ones he didn't.
Robert worked on a Minotaur imprint to give it more room for more concepts. Then he added the dog imprint, spreading the synapses around to make room for it. The brain kept information stored similar to a holographic image. No single cluster of neurons took care of a behavior or function alone. While specialized centers existed, the entire brain was responsible for everything at the same time. It even had some redundancies built in.
And these redundancies were exactly what was keeping Robert from swapping the imprint sections. Whenever he removed the more conscious and obvious representations of the imprint, the deep echoes remained. And the brain attempted to restore the lost parts from these echoes.
Now, he needed to fill the gap between the dog's friendliness and love for people with something sensible and artistic.
Robert decided to use music. He would add the ability to appreciate art, mostly music, and let that work as the glue between the two imprints.
He took these parts from his own mind. Just the top layer. The idea was that the healing process would involve letting the Minotaurs listen to music and let that acquired taste blend the imprints together.
He created a hundred slightly different variations with some changes in imprint strength and let them run for two weeks. He exposed these Minotaur imprints to different genres of music, trying to see what would come out. Those exposed to more violent and agitated styles had bad results. Rock, country, electronic music, EDM, and even some Latin rhythms were out. The softer ones, like Bossa Nova, nursery rhymes, ASMR, and even the quieter classical pieces had the opposite effect.
But the classical music from masters like Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, or Beethoven? Chef's kiss. They had a mix of fast and slow, excited and relaxing that stimulated the mind.
With only a few days left, Robert had a handful of imprint samples that could lead to the desired result. He used the rest of the time he had to test them in depth, making sure they wouldn't harm the Minotaurs even if they didn't have the desired result. Or cause them to go berserk.
*
*
Back to reality, Robert decided it was time to apply the results of his four months of intense research in the real world. He made sure that Serendipity had no extraneous essence reserves to give him bad luck and worked on the minds of his three Minotaurs one by one. He didn't use the same imprint for all of them. This way, he could measure which was the better one.
These Minotaurs weren't irreplaceable like Cotton or Coal. He could always go and tame more in the Dungeon. It was necessary if he was ever going to use his tame monsters in battle. He had to accept the fact they could die.
After they received the new imprint, Robert gave each of them a music player with the selected songs.
He felt tired. Robert made sure his creatures and Freddy had everything they needed, and went to the liminal void for some R&R.
He had a rough week ahead of him.