Beastforged Bond

My muscles screamed in agony as I pressed my palms firmly against the ground.

Beads of sweat trickled down my temples, and I failed to suppress the pained groan stuck in my throat as I pushed my body upward, finishing the push-up. It was only my second push-up before the strength in my arms faded.

Face-first, I collapsed to the ground, gasping for air. A distant voice reached my ears, trembling—filled with concern—and someone grasped my shoulders to turn me onto my back. The voice rang louder in my ears, but it took a few seconds before I could see my mother’s blurry frame.

I smiled grimly. She had come to watch my miserable workout again. I really didn’t want to listen to her complaints. Luckily, my heart drummed wildly against my chest, tuning out most of my mother’s words.

“Mom… I get it. I shouldn’t be working out…” I said between a few heavy breaths. My back was drenched in sweat and my arms hadn’t stopped trembling yet either. “But you know as well as I—”

There was no need to finish the sentence. Mom knew what I wanted to say.

She pressed her lips together and inclined her head a little, eyes wet and filled with sadness.

“I know, and I get it. But… do you really have to—”

“Yes, I have to do this,” I interrupted her. It wasn’t the first time she tried to stop me from working out, and I highly doubted it would be the last.

Not that she’s wrong. I grimaced.

Mom’s worries were reasonable. I didn’t want to suffer through this either, but I had to—and we were both fully aware of that.

I scrambled to my feet, trying not to mind my trembling arms, fetched the skipping rope to my left, and started to jump. My coordination wasn’t too bad in comparison to my physical strength, but my stamina was running low after no more than ten successful jumps. Still, I did not stop and prevailed, gasping for air once more. Cold sweat poured down my temples, and my heart was racing louder and faster than before, but it wasn’t until I jumped thirty times that my body finally gave out.

I wanted to keep going, to push myself harder than the day before—or the weeks before, for that matter—but I could not afford to faint. Not again.

It’s okay to go beyond your body’s limit, but make sure to stay awake, or your hard work will be for naught.

That reminder was enough to make me slump back to the ground. Struggling to retain control of my shaking body, I shifted on the ground until I sat cross-legged. My heart was still racing, the sound reverberating through my entire body as I closed my eyes to refine my World.

Emptiness stretched out before my closed eyes. It seemed to stretch infinitely, filling my mind with… nothing. Other than a small, semi-translucent sphere. It was indistinct and small, barely noticeable if one didn’t know it was there. But so was the core of my World; a mere speck in the sphere’s center.

As pathetic as my World was, it was nothing new to me.

There was no time to waste pitying myself, so I focused on the minuscule, golden particles swirling through my World. I latched my mind onto the only mesmerizing thing in my World and guided the golden particles toward the center of the sphere. A faint headache crept up the back of my mind as the golden particles threatened to resist, but my World did not generate enough soul energy to overwhelm me mentally. I squashed all resistance with raw willpower and pushed the particles into the core of my World, strengthening and refining it.

It felt like eons until the last golden particle entered the core, but no more than a minute could have passed before I completed my task. Yet, I didn’t leave. I stayed seated, my eyes shut tightly, and waited.

Only a few seconds of silence passed before a minuscule golden particle flickered into existence in my empty World. My lips formed into a thin smile as I pushed the golden particle—a mere trace of soul energy—back into the core of my World. That was my gain. The reward I had been granted for pushing my body to the cusp of collapsing.

The effect was… lackluster. It truly was. For anyone else, that is. Research showed that hardly anyone bothered pushing their bodies to the limit like I had done before refining their World. It wasn’t necessarily dangerous, but it was considered a waste of precious time.

Not for me, though. I didn’t know anyone with a World like mine—one as tiny as mine.

Or a crippled body.

I grimaced and opened my eyes to see my mother standing beside me with a glass of water and a sandwich. She smiled at me, but it was forced. The smile didn’t meet her eyes.

Mom was pitying me after all. Feeling guilty for giving birth to me.

I suppressed a wince and accepted the water, taking a big gulp. Mom loved me. I knew she loved me, but that made it worse. She considered herself responsible for my physique—for my World—even if none of it was her fault. She never wanted me to end up like this. But… did that change anything?

“You don’t have to coddle up to me like that, Mom,” I muttered once the glass was empty. Her gaze made me uncomfortable as her eyes lingered on me intrusively. “Won’t you be too late for work?”

She checked her watch, and the smile slipped from her lips. “...I wanted to stay until your father is back.”

My parents rarely saw each other these days, and it was all my fault. Though they would never say that out loud, I knew better. My condition had worsened in recent months, and not even the Bastion’s doctors knew why. Sure, they had some theories: one being that my body was reacting adversely to the ether treatment… which the doctors had prescribed initially. The doctors had been certain my body lacked ether. That my ‘unique’ condition could miraculously be solved by absorbing a little bit of ether.

And the only affordable method to do so, for normal people, was etherstones. Not that they were actually cheap. It was just that they were more affordable than the other options. Etherstones were still expensive enough to put my parents into debt—just like all the hospital bills from the hundreds of examinations that had been performed on me since I was born.

The etherstones had worked. I reminded myself as dark thoughts resurfaced.

Using the etherstones had been simple. I drained them—emptied them until the stones crumbled to nothingness before I even realized what I had done. And my condition had improved thereafter. For a few weeks, everything had been fine. My physique improved, and I finally felt… normal. For the first time in my life, I was certain everything would improve. That everything would be fine.

Sadness filled me at the reminder of my foolishness. It rushed up to me and sloshed through my very being as fragments of my parents’ happiness resurfaced. They’d been overjoyed at that time. I saw them truly happy for the first time since I could remember. The weight on their shoulders was no more, even though the debts had piled up.

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And it was all for naught. We were foolish to think happiness would last. My condition diminished again, and it was worse this time than ever. But the worst was not my failing body. Seeing the beautiful smiles on my parents’ faces cease—guilt and sadness replacing them—was the worst.

Staying strong was hard, and dark thoughts resurfaced—they still did—but how could I give up now, after everything my parents had sacrificed in the hope of offering me a normal life? I wanted to give up. Nobody understood me or what it meant to be cursed with a body and World like mine. All I wanted was to be normal. To enjoy my childhood and play with other children. To do just about anything other teenagers would do at my age.

But if there was one thing a few weeks of living a normal life had taught me, it was that I had an option. That there was a way to become normal.

At last, we found a solution to my problem. However, for that, I had to gain full access to ether.

I needed a Soulkin.

And that required a larger World. A World that could host a beast.

Thus the training—months of hard training to refine my World, to grow it. But the results were below average, to put it nicely. Without good techniques to access, I could only try my utmost and grind my body to the bone. Maybe that wouldn’t be necessary if I had full access to ether—but alas, I didn’t have that luxury.

And even now, my World was not ready to bear the weight of a Wild beast. Even the weakest Wild would put my World at risk of breaking. That wasn’t something I could risk—not with my condition’s continued deterioration.

A beast egg—the egg of a weak Wild, to be precise—was my only chance at survival. My only chance at a normal life. But my parents did not have the means, nor did I meet the requirements to fulfill the Beast Temple’s quota.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, eyes fixed on the weeds sprouting through the gaps in the cobbled ground.

A flick to my forehead forced me to look up. To look at my mother. She smiled again and her lips parted, but a ringing interrupted them. She retrieved her phone, and I caught a glimpse of the screen. Dad was calling.

“Honey! Where are you? We have been waiting—... Who are you?!”

Mother tensed up, and the white of her knuckles became visible as she gripped her phone tightly.

Her face cycled through countless emotions, and my stomach sank as the color drained from her face. I couldn’t hear anything, but I knew something had gone wrong.

“Y-yes. Of course. We... we are on our way!”

Mother ended the call, barely able to control her shaking form. Tears welled up in her eyes as she turned to him.

“Your father is in the hospital. We have to go. Now!” she said anxiously.

“What?!” My mind went blank, and my body’s complaints were all but forgotten.

Soreness and exhaustion lost their meaning as I jumped up. “Is Dad fine?”

“I... t-the man on the phone said that he would survive... p-probably.”

Probably? My mother was shaking, but so was I.

The worst possibilities formed in my head, and I failed to contain them. They got worse as images of my father flashed through my mind and fear gripped my heart.

“Let’s go!”

***

I barely remembered rushing to the hospital. My body wanted to fail me—but not this time. This time, I had more important things to take care of. My physical well-being was of no importance. My father’s life, however, was.

We ran past doctors and moved around nurses who were carrying Healtor Pythons, Moas Rabbits, and other beasts I recognized as Soulkin with healing attributes. We reached Father’s room after what felt like an eternity. The door to his room was already wide open, and my mother dashed inside, sobs resounding the moment she entered.

I couldn’t keep up with her and was desperately gasping for air when I reached the door. My lungs felt like they were on fire, and my throat tightened, making it increasingly difficult to draw breaths. But I did not collapse, even as my body screamed at me, cursing me for abusing it.

“Mathias! What happened to you, dear?” Mother squealed, crying bitterly as she reached the sick bed.

A doctor stood before the bed, glistening light emitting from his hands, engulfing the bed.

“You must be his family,” the doctor concluded calmly as he turned to my mother. He regarded her from head to toe and turned to me after a moment. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the doctor, but it was definitely not to see a glimpse of disdain in his eyes.

“I’ve stabilized his condition for the time being. If you wish to provide him with more advanced treatment, you will have to fill out some forms with one of the nurses. But I recommend basic treatment for... Mr. Mathias Savier.”

Why does it feel like he was going to say ‘for the likes of you’? I scowled and drew a few more deep breaths. My lungs were still burning, and there was no use in getting angry at the doc. It wasn’t like others hadn’t looked at us like that before.

“Thank you! Thank you very much!” Mother turned to the doctor, tears streaking down her face, flooding him with words of gratitude and blessings of great fortune.

I stepped through the room, weaved around them, and reached my father. My hair stood on end, and I shuddered involuntarily as I looked at the bloody mess before me. Bandages drenched in dark blood covered my father’s upper body. I had never seen this much blood, and it all belonged to him.

My eyes darted to a small bag that contained his clothes, torn—were those claw marks?—and dirty.

“What did you do, Dad?” I muttered, reaching for his hand.

“We do not know what happened. However, the man who brought him in said that he found Mr. Savier outside the dome.”

Mother gasped and jerked toward Mathias. “Did you do something stupid again, honey?”

My heart sank further. “Did he go out as a porter again? But he...”

The last time Father left the dome to work as a porter for a group of Blessed, he was scammed, made fun of, and toyed with. And injured.

I wanted to ask why he did that, but I knew better. My eyes lingered on Father, and I tuned out my mother and the doctor as they continued to talk farther from the sickbed. Mathias stirred, and his eyes fluttered open.

“He’s—...”

I stopped mid-track as a rough, trembling hand held onto mine.

“Dad... I need to inform the doctor!”

However, my father shook his head, a grim smile blooming on his exhausted, blood-drained face. His lips parted, and he mouthed something, but I had to lean closer to understand what he was saying.

“A-Adam... my p-pocket...” he voiced weakly before his head slumped back onto the cushion.

“Pocket?” I looked quizzically at him, but Father only nodded, which seemed to cost him a tremendous amount of energy—energy he needed to recover.

Uncertain what he wanted me to do, I walked around the sick bed, which seemed to be the right call. My father’s eyes glimmered and shifted toward the bag with his belongings. Still unsure of what I was searching for, I reached inside and began to feel around. To my surprise, it didn’t take long before my fingers closed around something small and rough, hidden in one of the pockets.

Retrieving it, my eyes landed on a clump of mud the size of his thumb. No—it was harder than mud. Was it a gemstone clad in mud that got my father excited?

But before I could ask anyone, something deep within me moved. I froze and focused on the sensation.

My World... is stirring. I realized, my eyes flicking back to the object resting in my hands.

It was not a clump of mud.

It was an egg.