Chapter 1: Condition Met
Thrown out of the heavy iron gates of his family’s estate, Terrence Lee hit the wet, uneven road of Suran City with a dull thud.
He slid forward onto the rough asphalt, a sharp, burning sting shooting through his palms as protruding gravel bit into his flesh. The harsh, metallic scent of wet earth and exhaust fumes filled his nose a second before the taunts began from above.
"Don’t you dare ever set foot near this gate again," Lucas Lee spat.
Terrence’s eighteen-year-old younger brother stood at the top of the polished marble steps, looking down at him like a foul stain on an otherwise immaculate carpet.
At just sixteen, Lucas had awakened Beast Taming Talent.
In an apocalyptic world where a person’s awakened affinity to the Beast Taming determined whether they lived as nobility or died as rift fodder, having zero affinity by age eighteen made Terrence worse than useless—he was a parasite leeching off the prestigious Lee family name.
Terrence pushed himself up slowly, his fingers trembling slightly as he brushed the wet grime and dead leaves off his soaked garments.
He raised his chin, his gaze settling on his brother. His eyes were cold, hollow, and utterly devoid of fear or grief.
He had already processed his sorrow weeks ago in the dark silence of his attic room. Now, only a terrifying, numb clarity remained.
"Don’t worry," Terrence replied, his voice chillingly steady despite the faint, bitter smile tugging at his lips. "I don’t recognize the Lee family as my origin anyway."
Veins bulged along Lucas’s neck and forehead. "How dare you! At your absolute demise, stripped of your clothes and inheritance, you’re still acting prideful when you have nothing to your name?"
Terrence didn’t bother answering. He simply turned his back on his brother, letting his silence slice deeper than any insult, and began walking down the winding drive toward the city perimeter.
’I’m never going back to that hell,’ Terrence thought, clenching his scraped hands into tight fists as the rain washed the blood from his palms.
’It’s their mistake letting me walk away alive. Every indignity, every beating, every night I went hungry while they showered Lucas with beast-feeding elixirs... I will remember it. I will take everything from them. Every single bit.’
Suran City was a sprawling metropolis enclosed by fifty-foot walls of reinforced steel and mana-dampening alloy.
Beyond those walls lay the Fringe—a dense, untamed forest wilderness infested with F-Rank wild beasts. To normal citizens, venturing out there without a contracted beast was nothing short of suicide.
Moreover, the environment there was similar to a C-Rank Dungeon Rift. The density of mana was high, due to the fact that this foliage stretched for kilometers, with abandoned settlements scattered throughout the middle of it.
But Terrence was far from a normal civilian. Knowing his awakening was long overdue, he had spent the last three years obsessively studying monster taxonomy, anatomical blueprints, and survival manuals, searching in vain for a bypass to the world’s strict talent rules.
’If I can’t tame a monster with the talent,’ Terrence reasoned, stepping past the final unmanned outer checkpoint, ’I’ll force one to submit through raw strategy.’
The air outside the city gates immediately felt heavier, thick with the stagnant stench of rot. Towering, mutated oak trees stretched toward the ash-gray sky, their gnarled branches blocking out the faint sunlight.
’The air in the Fringe was said to be similar to that of a C-Rank Dungeon. I am walking into a grave, but I have nowhere else to go.’
CRACK.
Terrence froze mid-step, his boots sinking an inch into the muddy trail.
The distant, comforting hum of the city’s defense barrier was gone, replaced entirely by the ominous rustle of dry, mutated underbrush.
He crouched low, his eyes scanning the thick fog rolling off the forest floor. His fingers wrapped around a thick, fallen oak branch nearby.
It was heavy, armed with a jagged, splintered tip that he had hastily broken off. Raising the makeshift spear, he pointed it toward the sound.
The bushes parted with a wet, tearing sound. A small, stooped silhouette stepped into the clearing.
At a glance, it possessed the physical frame of a human toddler, but its warty, olive-green skin, bulging yellow eyes, and yellowed, needle-like fangs made its grotesque nature unmistakably clear.
An F-Rank Goblin. A stray beast that had escaped an unmanaged dimensional rift deep in the wilderness.
The goblin hissed, a string of thick, foul-smelling drool dripping from its lower jaw onto the moss.
Driven by pure, unadulterated hunger, it dropped to all fours and lunged forward, its long, clawed toes tearing up chunks of damp soil as it gained speed.
Terrence’s knees wobbled. The air in his lungs felt ice-cold as a wave of instinctual terror spiked through his chest.
This wasn’t a static diagram in a dusty library book. This was his first real encounter with a man-eating monster.
He forced his heels to dig deep into the mud. Calculate the speed. Measure the angle. Aim for the soft tissue of the eye.
Five feet. Three feet. Two feet.
"Die!" Terrence roared, lunging forward with every ounce of weight left in his lean frame, thrusting the splintered wood straight at the creature’s face.
SLIDE!
The sharp tip caught the edge of the goblin’s eye socket, tearing through tough green skin and popping a blood vessel, but the angle was off.
It missed the brain entirely.
The beast shrieked in pain, tumbling violently through the air and rolling across the dirt before sliding to a stop against a tree root.
Terrence stumbled backward, his breath coming in ragged gasps, his chest heaving as his heart hammered wildly against his ribs.
He was alive, but the adrenaline rush was already fading into bone-deep fatigue.
The goblin scrambled back onto its feet, its single good eye dilating until it turned a deep, blood-red hue.
It spat out a mouthful of yellow bile, its primitive mind utterly consumed by feral rage.
It locked onto Terrence, no longer charging in a straightforward line. Instead, it began to bounce from side to side, its movements becoming an unpredictable, erratic blur of green.
’What the—’
Before Terrence could adjust his stance to track the sudden movement, a green shadow blurred past his right flank.
SLASH!
"Agh!"
Terrence gasped as a blinding, white-hot agony ripped across his right ribcage.
The goblin’s filthy, jagged nails had shredded through his thin linen shirt, carving three deep, burning gashes into his flesh. Warm blood poured down his side, soaking his trousers.
His vision swam instantly. Cold sweat mixed with the falling rain, stinging his eyes as his legs finally gave out.
He crashed heavily down onto one knee, clutching his bleeding torso, his breath shuddering out of his throat in weak, shallow gasps.
The goblin cackled, a wet, guttural noise of triumph.
It crouched low, tensing its powerful hind legs to pounce once more, its blood-stained claws aimed directly at Terrence’s exposed throat.
’Is this really where it ends?’ Terrence thought numbly, watching the monster leap toward him as if time itself had slowed down to a agonizing crawl.
’After everything... I die in the mud like an abandoned dog?’
Then, the universe seemed to fracture.
The rain stopped falling. The airborne goblin froze mid-flight, suspended three feet off the ground like an insect trapped in hardened yellow amber.
The wind died down, and the ambient rustling of the forest vanished into absolute, suffocating silence.
A blinding, golden orb of light materialized inches from Terrence’s face.
It expanded instantly, flattening out into a sleek, glowing rectangular window that flickered with ancient, high-dimensional energy.
[Condition Met: Zero Natural Affinity to World-Standard Beast Taming Talent.]
[Requirement Verified: Host has survived a fatal physical strike through sheer willpower.]
[Finally, a suitable Host!]
[Initializing System Architecture... Syncing Core with Host’s Soul...]
[Affinity Confirmed: BEAST SUPPLIER SYSTEM TALENT!]
A sudden, overwhelming surge of liquid warmth erupted from the center of Terrence’s chest.
It rushed through his veins like molten gold, instantly cauterizing his bleeding ribs, flushing out the deadly goblin venom, and burning away the paralyzing numbness in his limbs.
[First-Time User Package Unlocked!]
[Deploying Starter Beast Unit to Protect Host...]
Terrence’s eyes widened in sheer disbelief.
Directly beneath the frozen, mid-air goblin, the shadows clinging to the damp forest floor began to bubble and boil like liquid pitch.
A low, throat-rattling roar echoed from the deep darkness, vibrating through the ground and promising an absolute, violent slaughter.