A young man was sitting alone in a dilapidated and battered room in an old run down building. The room was in a bad condition. The paint had peeled off. Cracks had formed on the years old walls.
Apart from a worn out and cracked lamp hanging on one of the walls, there was no source of illumination in the room. It was an abandoned ruin of an old building. It looked as if the entire structure could come crashing down at any moment. But for the man occupying the room, the building was his sanctuary.
The man was eighteen years of age. He turned eighteen exactly today.
He had dark black hair and equally dark eyes. He was six feet tall. The man was bare chested, and the ripped muscles on his chest and abdomen showed the brutal training he had been through in the past few years.
The name of the young man was Athar VonCruz. He was sitting on a half broken wooden chair. A discarded plastic crate was serving as a makeshift table, placed just in front of him. The man's eyes were fixated on the thing that was placed on the crate.
It was an egg. The egg was black in colour and was almost circular in shape. The diameter of the egg was around fifteen centimetres.
Athar had spent all the savings of his life to buy this egg. One hundred and fifty thousand F Rank Crystals.
This egg, which was the cheapest and of the lowest grade possible, had cost Athar one hundred and fifty thousand F Rank crystals.
Athar was an orphan. He was born and grew up in Nawarin city. As far as Athar was able to remember, he had lived all his life by himself.
He did not have a clear idea how he survived his toddler years but he could recall living on his own from when he had been six or seven years of age. The abandoned or half destroyed buildings on the outskirts of the town had been his home.
He worked as many part time jobs as possible and spent the barest minimum of the money he earned from it.
He had been saving, little by little, for the past decade. And after crushing himself with all sorts of work for a decade, he had barely saved enough to buy the lowest grade egg.
This world was a world that relied on beast taming. A world where humans formed bonds with beasts. The rules governing the world were a strange bunch of rules. And mana was the foundation of the world.
As soon as a child turned eighteen years of age, the body of any human automatically started to absorb mana from the environment. And though this should have been a good thing, it was not. It was a bad, deadly thing.
As I said, the rules governing the world were a strange bunch of rules. And probably the strangest bunch of rules was that the human body was incomplete in a certain manner.
The human body in itself had the ability to absorb mana and then process it, but it did not have the ability or a place to store the mana.
Strange? Yes, it was strange.
Therefore this automatic absorption of mana but no place to store it became a death nail for humans. Mana was like a poison to the incomplete body of humans.
A man who had just turned eighteen and did not have the ability to store it. What would happen to him?
The mana would get accumulated in the body in strange and weird manners. And it would cause mana poisoning followed by certain death after some time.
But humans had come up with a solution for this problem.
If your body was incomplete, then why not take help from outside. A partner who could give you the ability to store mana.
And the partners or the companions in this case were the beasts.
Unlike the humans, the monsters or the beasts had the ability to absorb mana from the environment. They could process it in a form which suited their nature, and then store it inside their body.
But could the humans directly store the mana in any beast? No. A magical beast, which was not a tamed beast of any human, had a core inside their physical body, called the Beast Core, in which the mana was stored.
But the tamed beast did not have a core. Instead, whenever the human formed a bond with a beast, a supernatural space was unlocked inside the consciousness of the human.
It was called the Mindscape or the Beastspace. This was the shared space in which both the tamed beast and the tamer stored and shared their mana.
And most importantly, the beast after forming the bond with a human lost its ability to absorb mana. It was only the human who would absorb the mana. The beast had to rely on the mana present in the Mindscape only.
There was another method to prevent this mana poisoning. And this method was available for free across every city. To get your mana veins sealed away, permanently.
The path through which mana was absorbed into the body was sealed. This also meant the person would never be a tamer.
And in a society which valued, almost worshipped strength, such a person was destined to remain at the bottom rung of the society. It was the easiest but also the worst method.
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Athar continued to stare at the egg lying on the crate. He took a deep breath and an expression of resolve formed on his face.
With the limited money he had been able to save, he had no other option but to buy the lowest grade egg.
This was the egg of the Common or Non Magical Grade Beast. Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold and the so called the Legendary Grades were the further higher grades of the eggs. But each of these was only a distant dream for Athar. Or maybe even in his dream, he could not have afforded these eggs.
In the common grade, he had some options. All the options were of low level beasts. Insects, worms, flies, common birds.
Unless and until someone was looking for a specific beast for a specific purpose, most of the people who could afford only Common Grade eggs would buy eggs belonging to the species of the birds. A flying beast.
It had a good chance to give some good beast and probably a beast that might have good future potential.
But Athar had chosen neither of them. He had chosen snakes. Of course, it was the most common of snakes.
Athar, for the past decade, other than working his part time job, had done only one thing. Train.
He would run. He would lift weights. He would mimic sword movements. He would do everything he could think of to enhance his physical body. He had pushed his physical body to a very high limit.
He had known from the beginning that he would not be able to afford a high level beast. He, therefore, had honed his body to a very high degree.
If he could add a few of the skills possessed by a snake like agility, flexibility or maybe poison to his own arsenal, he could significantly increase his combat power. He could have done the same with birds but his intuition had screamed at him to choose a snake.
"Just be an elemental snake," Athar muttered.
His eyes remained fixated on the egg. At the last moment, he wondered if he was going to regret his decision of choosing a snake over a bird? He questioned his decision of going with his intuition over common sense and general knowledge?
He took a deep sigh. He did not hesitate and did not wait any longer and placed his palm on the egg. He willed the very small quantity of mana accumulating in his body towards the egg. The mana reacted to his intentions and creeped towards the egg.
This was the method of bond formation. One had to feed mana to the beast egg.
A human could form the bond only before the beast hatched from the egg. If the egg cracked and the beast emerged on its own, without the supply of mana from the human i.e. if it hatched normally, no bond could be formed any further.
As soon as the beast emerged from the egg, it would naturally absorb the mana from the surrounding, which would lead to the beginning of the formation of the beast core inside its body. And once a beast had started to form its beast core, the contract could not be established.
The egg continued to absorb Athar's mana for a few moments before it cracked open into two. Inside the cracked space of the egg, a small snake was curled into a ball.
At the very first moment, Athar was extremely disappointed to see the snake.
He had been expecting, or rather hoping, a fiery red coloured snake, a fire elemental one. Even a brown coloured one, an earth elemental snake would have been fine.
But it was the most common of snakes. He doubted if the snake could even give him a single good skill to use. The scales of the snake were dark black in colour and after fully stretched, the snake was not more than a foot long.
The snake slowly opened its eyes, and Athar was surprised, almost shocked to see the eyes of the snake. They were dark red in colour.
And common snakes did not have such eyes.
Athar was about to wonder more about his snake when he found his vision blurring and he felt his consciousness was being pulled somewhere else.
He did not panic. He had been waiting and expecting this feeling.
Whenever the beast taming bond was established between a human and a beast, the supernatural space, Mindscape or Beastspace was created and the human's consciousness was pulled into his mindscape for the first time.
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[Thank you for reading. Rate, Review and Comment on my novel. Also send the power stones]