It was spring, and walking through the jungle was getting increasingly annoying. There was a new treehopper that would not leave us alone. I was almost ready to kill it when I finally realized what was going on.

The smaller treehopper chittered wildly, dropping to the ground in front of us, then running back up a nearby tree, then leaping across branches before landing in front of us, spinning. It dropped its head and lifted its rear, the tail quivering in a way I had learned meant excitement in treehoppers.

“Treepo,” I said after finally figuring it out. “I think this female wants to mate with you.”

Tamed beasts seemed to have no sex drive. Treepo was acting exactly as he usually did, hanging out on my shoulder and only interacting with other treehoppers if they grunted at me, grunting and chittering back to diffuse any attempts to attack me.

I had thought a lot about magic taming versus Earth domestication, but didn’t have anywhere near enough information. I was told that tamers didn’t breed beasts in this world because it wasn’t worth the time and energy raising the babies, since beast children weren’t useful in the way that adults were. Tamers weren’t keeping pets, they were using beasts primarily as tools. If a tool wore out, a tamer could simply tame another adult beast and replace it.

If human civilization in this world advanced, there was a very real possibility of beasts getting displaced and even pushed to extinction, as had happened in my world. Back on Earth, wildlife only accounted for 4% of the world’s mammalian biomass. Humans made up 34%, and livestock made up a whopping 62%.

I didn’t know if this world had oil or fossil fuels, but even without, I could see how magic and magical technology had the potential to usher in true human dominance to this planet. If that were to happen, beasts would be driven away. It would be harder for tamers to find beasts to tame, and breeding would become necessary. Frankly, I was shocked no one had already figured out that selective breeding would lead to more desirable beasts, which would give tamers more wealth and power in this world. Perhaps magic prevented that.

I had an opportunity to learn more here, although I wasn’t sure it was the right choice. Still, my curiosity had a tendency to get the better of me. I pulled a piece of vipis meat out of my inventory, and infused it with some MP, tossing it to the beast who was ineffectually presenting herself to my familiar.

The treehopper looked at the meat, sniffing, then back to me, eyeing me suspiciously. Then she grabbed the meat and ran up a tree for safety, and took a tentative bite. I could see her eyes widen and she gobbled it down readily.

Familiar tamed: Treehopper (Lv 4)

“I wonder how many of those levels she got just from that meat,” I said out loud, crouching down and motioning her over. She ran back down the tree and over to me, and I scooped her up. I scratched her head and she chittered contentedly. Treepo grunted in response.

I placed both the treehoppers on the ground, and took a step back. Both watched me with a relaxed expression. I sat down, and waited to see if they would interact.

Eventually, they realized I didn’t want anything from them, and stopped paying me as much attention. I watched them sniff at each other a bit, then Treepo lay down. The female walked over to a nearby bush and sniffed at the leaves. She no longer seemed to display any desire to mate at all. I appraised her.

Treehopper (Lv 4)

HP: 13/13

MP: 2/2

Status: Estrus

EXP: 13/40

Huh. That wasn’t the first time I had seen status effects, and I was used to seeing them now from my buffs, but that was… new.

“Says here you should still want to mate,” I told the female treehopper. She looked over at me, a soft chitter in response.

I paused. I didn’t want to force anything, because that quickly made me start to feel uncomfortable, but I was curious. The act of taming largely superseded a wild beast’s own desires with magic power, and let the tamer control them with their own force of will. That was already a little uncomfortable from my perspective from life on Earth, and certainly not the kind of relationship humans had with their pets. Humans trained animals, but they still had the freedom to disobey. Taming allowed for a more absolute control, and presumably would allow me to override a beast’s will even more strongly once I advanced the skill further.

I thought about it some more. Maybe it wasn’t that different after all. Thousands of years of selective breeding changed the brain of a dog. Even if it was happy to listen to me and live with me, its pre-domestication ancestor wouldn’t have been. And people still bred dogs, selectively, whether or not the dogs would have wanted to in the wild, in order to create new lives that–if I was being totally honest–were bred to obey humans and serve a purpose for humanity.

I came to a decision, and looked at the pair of treehoppers. “Breed,” I told them.

After a few seconds, I looked away, blushing a bit. There was my confirmation that tamed beasts could, in fact, breed, and only didn’t because of their tamer’s will. I waited for the loud grunting to end before I looked again.

* * *

“Ok, Missy,” I told the content-looking female treehopper. “You already know how to survive out here, and it would be too difficult to bring you into town for this. You’re going to stay out here, return to your tribe, and have your babies just as you usually would,” I explained. “We’ll visit regularly and keep you fed.” I pulled out some more meat, infused it with magic, and fed it to her.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

I wasn’t sure how long the gestation period would be, but based on when I found Treepo, I figured it would be somewhere between two and four months. “My main concern is keeping the babies safe,” I spoke aloud, mostly to myself. “Maybe I can use stone to make the nest more safe from predators…”

I had the female treehopper, who I called Missy, lead us back to her tribe, and had her and Treepo calm the angry chitters and allow the locals to get used to me. I summoned some regular food from my inventory–recent stuff, so it wouldn’t be passively infused–and offered it to them in order to buy some goodwill. I wasn’t sure if they would be nesting here or if they would be moving around, but I would try to keep track of things over the coming months until I knew more. I pulled up my map ability and made note of where we were in relation to Mirut. I needed to level up this ability. It would be nice to be able to mark the map or drop a pin.

I spent the rest of the day with the tribe before saying goodbye to Missy and heading home. I had planned on scoping out locations to trap a ramhog, but as usual, got swept along in another one of the many things that I found interesting in this world. There were so many mysteries and so much to discover. The more I learned, the more questions I had.

* * *

Questions kept on piling up. Treepo stood on top of the dead ramhog, looking triumphant, as I stared at his updated appraisal.

[Treepo] Treehopper (Lv 10)

HP: 36/36

MP: 7/7

Status: none

EXP: 100/100 [MAX]

I had never seen an experience bar full, so to speak. Whenever the amount of experience necessary to level up was hit, the level immediately rolled over and reset to zero. Displaying 100/100 should have been an impossibility, but here it was. I tapped the [MAX] tag next to it, and a tooltip appeared.

Growth conditions not met.

“What does that mean,” I muttered. Treepo bounced off the ramhog corpse and ran up to me, headbutting my legs softly, pushing his snout into me as a sign of contentedness. “You’re maxed out, bud,” I said to my familiar with a sigh.

I knew humans could level beyond 10, which was a good thing because if I hadn’t known that I would be getting even more nervous about my own growth. Did humans have growth conditions too? Would I get stuck at level 10 until I achieved something? Is age an aspect? If so, that would really suck. I didn’t think that was the case, though. This seemed different.

I dismissed my menus and stored the ramhog, sighing again. Now I needed to butcher this down to either cure or wrap for sale. I deliberated, not for the first time, if I should spend a skill point trying to get Bosh’s butchery skill, wondering if that would make this easier. It might even unlock new abilities in my metasystem and let me butcher magically in my inventory. Level 9 was really close and I would be advancing both 4-point magic and also my inventory skill, but I would still have 5 SP to spare. It might be worth it.

* * *

“My grandfather used to tell me stories about an unusually strong oxalire he saw when he was a kid,” Forn told me. “I think he was full of it, personally.”

I had asked the farmer-turned-sailor more about taming beasts and whether or not he knew anything about beasts growing or changing in any way. I couldn’t talk about levels and experience, since the people of this world didn’t seem to know about that, but it was clear even without a stats menu that humans and beasts grew and had the potential to get stronger over time, and it should be obvious to an attentive tamer if a beast suddenly changed dramatically. I figured a great tamer would also be able to tell if their familiar’s growth had suddenly stopped. I was just worried it would be dismissed as aging or some kind of basic biological growth cap. I had never seen a human with a level in the triple-digits, so it could be that human potential caps at level 100. It would matter if I was going to pursue growing to my absolute limits.

I wanted to know if Forn had ever heard of a tamer developing any sort of rare or unusual beasts. Most tamers were simple farmers, and beasts of burden probably didn’t have much potential to level up. As far as I knew, there were no combat tamers. Forn told me that most tamers he knew as a farmer tamed a beast called oxalire which were used to drive plows, so I asked if all oxalire were the same or if he knew of any that were special.

“How did he describe it?”

“He used to say it was bigger than a regular oxalire, with a shorter and darker color coat, closer to black than the usual brown. He’d say that the horns were bigger, and bent forwards instead of the usual outward-facing horn. The most outrageous thing was that he said the tail had spikes growing out of the end of it. Could you imagine? Wouldn’t want to be plowing behind a beast with a spiked tail,” he laughed.

From the description of a regular oxalire, I had gathered that an oxalire was pretty similar to a musk ox, with horns like a longhorn cattle, but with thicker legs and a long, thick tail which touched the ground behind it. If what his grandfather had said was true, it might be possible for a beast to evolve into something more powerful. At best this was hearsay and rumor and at worst pure fiction. I glanced at Totter.

The gremline had grown to level 8, but I had no idea if he had been close to level 8 last time I saw him and only gained a small amount of EXP since, or if he had gained nearly all of the 150 EXP needed to grow from a fresh level 7 to just shy of level 9. The difference between those two would tell me if this familiar would hit level 10 in the next year or two, in which case I might be able to learn more from Forn, or if it could take much longer.

“What happened to the oxalire?” I asked.

“I think gramps said that it ran away from the farm it was on,” Forn said, trying to recall this vague story from childhood.

I had been wondering if the growth potential limit had to do with my tamer skills or had to do with Treepo. If it was my own limit, I would have to advance my taming skill. If this oxalire did evolve in some way, but then ran away, then the tamer probably didn’t have a sufficiently advanced taming skill to keep control over the beast, which could mean that the tamer didn’t need the advanced skill to evolve the creature in the first place.

I glanced at Treepo. I might need to put those skill points into taming, after all. If he naturally met his growth conditions, I might lose control over him.

Totter had sussed out that Treepo was hiding in my pack almost immediately, so I had to confess to Forn that I had learned to tame and tamed a treehopper. The sailor didn’t seem that surprised–kids learned to tame young on farms, so it wasn’t that unusual to him–and didn’t even ask me any questions about how I encountered a treehopper, because he either didn’t care or didn’t know that they weren’t within the town limits. After telling Totter to behave, the pair of familiars playfully chased each other around a pile of crates.

I thanked the man, not wanting to hold him up any further as the other sailors who were unloading the cargo had started to shoot some glances over at us. I handed him some of the cured meat I had in my pack to thank him for his time. “Sure,” he had said, accepting the meat. “Us tamers have to stick together,” he said with a wink.