"We gave up everything for today."
The wife's voice shook.
Tears fell in drops onto her worn apron.
"So that our Ren could seize a chance at a good school. So that his Plant would evolve to the Bronze grade, maybe even higher, and he could live a better life than ours."
There was a reason that school was expensive.
Eight years of intensive training, abundant resources and connections, and secret techniques for evolving a Beast.
All of it would lift even an ordinary Beast one stage higher.
They had wanted Ren to walk the city's main streets without bowing his head any longer.
Had even a Common Plant come out, there would have been a chance of rising to Bronze stage 2.
If that had happened, he would have gained an 80% rise in vitality and a 40% rise in physical ability, and he could have worked in a kitchen incomparably better than theirs and lived a better life than his parents.
But with a Spore.......
"And now Ren can't even step back."
The wife clutched the contract in trembling hands.
"The money is already paid, and the law is clear. Because of the 'Compulsory Tamer Education Act' passed last year, a child with a Beast must complete a basic education. Breaking the contract is...... impossible."
"If only I hadn't fallen ill....... We could have saved more and bought the boy a brown egg. If it weren't for those damned medicine costs....... I should have been the one to die......."
"Don't say that! It isn't your fault. Ren wouldn't want to hear such things either."
The wife wiped her tears and took her husband's hand in hers.
"Maybe...... choosing the most expensive school was our own greed." the husband murmured in a low voice.
"What on earth have we done......."
They had wanted Ren to live a better future than their own.
But now that he had gained a Spore, it was all over.
Ren's father sank deep into his chair.
"Eight years....... For eight years the other children will evolve their Beasts and grow stronger, while our son....... In the end, our foolish hope took away even the boy's last chance."
There was no need to say more.
The Spore was a Beast that could not evolve.
There was no research technique for it, no possibility of opening a new evolutionary path, and no secret training method of any kind.
Countless people had already tried, and even those with richer and more powerful backing had failed.
There had been one 'success' in all of history, but he was recorded only as the worst failure of all, a man who squandered an astronomical fortune to gain a useless 20% of strength.
After that day, the Spore became a byword for failure.
Whatever Ren learned at the academy would be of no use to him.
Every moment of his would be a torture that endlessly reminded him of what he could never have.
Eight years.
That meant years of mockery, days to be spent as a laughingstock.
With a Beast that could not even evolve, what on earth could he learn at an academy that taught Tamers how to evolve their Beasts?
The grief-sunken eyes of the father were groping back toward some moment in the past.
To the days when Ren had, for a while at least, shone a light into their lives.
"Do you remember that day?" he asked, looking somewhere beyond the candlelight.
"That year, when the mana surge wiped out the medicinal herbs and the kingdom told us to pay remedies as tax? When I went out into that forest to find a cure for mana poisoning...... and found that plant you ate, we thought we had been blessed."
The wife nodded and held his hand tightly.
It was not something she could forget.
They had wanted a child since around the age of twenty, but for nearly thirty years their hope had been broken again and again.
While their friends built families, they alone were left behind.
They lived frugally and dreamed of a happy household, but the one thing no amount of saving could buy was the one thing they longed for: a child.
Nearly one million crystals.
For people of their class it was a sum almost beyond imagining.
The couple had thought of using that money to treat their infertility, but by then it was already too late.
But that venture into the outer forest......
"That plant I found, the one I took for a hundred-year-old premium sweet root......." the husband went on in a low voice.
"When you ate it, I...... I thought I had killed you. You were so pale, so cold."
"And a week later, I felt as if I had gone back to twenty."
The wife smiled sadly.
"And the year after that, we conceived a child without even trying."
"It was a miracle."
But in that moment, the muffled sobbing coming from Ren's room took the words from them both.
Their little miracle, the child who had come to them just as every hope was disappearing and had brought them so much happiness, now stood before a cruel fate.
"It's as if the Dragon Lords are mocking us." the wife murmured.
"They gave us a child when it was already far too late, and now......."
"They mean to make us watch the boy suffer, no doubt."
The husband gripped his wife's hand hard.
The nearly burned-out candles flickered, casting shadows over the contract on the table.
In the next room the ten-year-old boy was crying quietly, and beside him the small gray Spore drifted by his pillow, an endless reminder of his fate.
The celebration feast prepared with so much love went cold on the table.
The old couple quietly shed tears as they looked upon the cruel fate their life's miracle had run into.
***
Ren lay on his bed.
The tears on his cheeks had already dried, and his sorrow was slowly turning into anger.
The Spore still drifted at his side, and its ash-gray glow only stoked his temper.
To be told to go to the academy in this state was a cruel joke.
The next eight years were vivid before his eyes.
While the other children evolved their Beasts and learned new powers, he would have to just sit there with a creature that could not even grow.
Perhaps he too would end up like the 'rotted ones'.......
No!
He couldn't do that.
Ren loved his parents, and his parents loved him.
He needed something else to take his mind off it.
His eyes turned to the small bookshelf beside his bed.
One book, his favorite, worn out from countless readings.
《The Wandering King's Second Contract》
Ren's fingertips brushed over the worn cover.
On that cover was drawn the legendary hero who had achieved the impossible.
According to the story, he had found a mysterious medicinal herb deep in the outer forest and formed a second contract.
Of course, it was only a story.
In recorded history the only ones who had succeeded at a second contract were the King and a few dozen legendary figures, and none of them had ever revealed the method.
But Ren was still a child, and he wanted to cling to that thread of a possibility.
He looked out beyond the window, at the forest stretching endlessly behind the outskirts.
'What if the herb in the story...... really exists?'
But the thought faded as fast as it had risen.
Even his father, with a fully grown Iron Plant at his side, had gone into that forest just once and come back half a corpse.
His father had a full 40% increase in vitality, physical ability that raised an adult man's strength and speed by 20%, plant control that sensed danger, and years of experience besides.
Ren, by contrast, had nothing but a useless Spore, a child's brute strength, and the pitiful effect that strengthened it by a mere 10%.
How could someone who could not even properly lift a single heavy sack of flour in the kitchen survive in a forest swarming with monsters?
As though it had sensed his despair, the Spore blinked faintly.
"Why did it have to be you?"
Ren whispered bitterly to his Beast.
"Out of all those low odds...... why did you have to be the one born?"
The only thing that came back was silence.
From the dining room his parents' worried conversation drifted faintly to him.
He could not bear it any longer.
To be the cause of their pain, the wretched end of all their hope and sacrifice, it was horrifying even to imagine.
But the moment the contract was formed, it became a shackle for life.
The Spore would never leave his side until the day he died, a ceaseless reminder of his failure.
'What if.......'
Ren's eyes turned again out the window, to the darkened forest.
It was dangerous even to think about.
If he set foot in the forest with a Beast this weak, he would plainly be dead of mana poisoning within three days.
He thought of the contract with the academy and the years of suffering that would follow.
Dying in an attempt to change his fate, or living as a laughingstock for eight years.
Which of the two was truly the more terrible choice?
'My parents...... maybe I can make them happy again.'
Ren opened 《The Wandering King's Second Contract》 again.
There was a legend passed down from long ago.
The story that any Beast at all, if it found the right training method and trained hard, could become a dragon.
People did not doubt that belief.
The book recorded that the Wandering King had discovered countless medicinal herbs along with secrets beyond counting.
The place Ren was looking for was the heart of the dragons' territory, a forbidden land where dense mana rose thick enough to see.
The Wandering King had crossed back and forth between the lands of each Dragon Lord over the course of months.
The Red Dragon, whose scales burned like the desert sun, was the ruler of all fire-line Beasts, and in his land even the smallest lizard breathed fire.
The Blue Dragon, with his magnificent fins, governed the abyss of the sea, and the Green Dragon, who covered the deep woods, reigned as lord of the forest.
In the endless sky there was the White Dragon, and in night and shadow the Black Dragon.
The book carried a particularly detailed illustration of the Articulate Dragon, whose land was full of giant insects and strange creatures clad in exoskeletons.
Each evolutionary lineage and each egg color symbolized one of the dragons.
Scholars denied the connection, of course, but to a child like Ren that hardly mattered.
Ren's finger stopped on the page that had always fascinated him.
The Dragon of Decay.
Ruler of fungi, of spores, and of every creature that takes decay as its food.
He was a being who fed and created the lives belonging to his lineage, and who reigned above them.
'At least the dragons respect their own subjects. Not like humans!'
Ren muttered bitterly, looking down at his wretched Spore.
But the dragons and their territories lay far from human cities, and there was good reason for that.
Humans had settled where the mana was so thin that the great Beasts avoided it.
The Beasts had never had the slightest interest in such places to begin with.
Ironically, that was humanity's only shield.
The only things that roamed the plains near the city were the weakest creatures, driven out by the strong.
Even those were rare.
Unless they were wounded or dying, they did not dare leave the forest.
Without mana, hunger came quickly, and death could not help but follow.
The mana left in human lands was nowhere near enough to survive on.
Even so, they were lethally dangerous, because they were mad with the hunger that a lack of mana had shaped in them.
Like starving beasts, they attacked anything that moved in front of them.