A young man was sitting alone in a dilapidated looking room. The room was in an extremely bad condition, and it looked as if the entire structure could come crashing down at any moment. It was nothing more than an abandoned ruin of an old building.
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, while a discarded plastic crate was serving as a makeshift table, placed just next to him. The man's eyes were fixated on the thing that had been placed on the crate.
An egg. The egg was black in colour and was almost circular in shape. The diameter of the egg was around five inches.
This egg was worth Athar's savings of his entire lifetime. One hundred and fifty thousand F Rank Crystals. This egg, which was of the lowest grade possible, had cost Athar one hundred and fifty thousand F Rank crystals.
Athar was an orphan who had been born and brought up in Nawarin city. As far as Athar was able to remember, he had lived all his life by himself. The abandoned or half destroyed buildings on the outskirts of the town had been his home. He would work as many part time jobs as possible and spend 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 cheapest of the eggs.
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 would start to automatically absorb mana from the environment. And though this should have been a good thing, it was not.
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 poison for 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 start to get accumulated in the body in large and weird manners which would cause mana poisoning and then a certain death.
But humans had a solution to this. If your body was incomplete, then why not take help from an outside trouble. A partner?
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 then process it in a form which suited their nature, and then store it.
But did the humans directly store the mana in any beast? No. A natural beast, which was not a companion of any human, had a core inside their physical body, called the Beast Core, in which the mana was stored.
But the companion beast did not have a core. Instead, whenever the human formed a bond with a beast, a supernatural space would be unlocked inside the consciousness of the human.
It was called the Mindscape or the Beastspace.
This was the shared space in which both the companion beast and the human 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, and the beast had to rely on that only.
There was another method to prevent this mana poisoning. And this method was available for free across every city. And this was to get your mana veins sealed away, permanently.
The path through which mana was absorbed into the body was sealed. And this means that this person would never be a tamer. And such a person was destined to remain at the bottom rung of the society. The easiest but the worst method.
As Athar stared at the egg, lying on the crate, 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 cheapest 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.
Even in the cheapest common category, he had some options. But 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 the eggs belonging to the species of the birds. It had a good chance to give some fine beast and probably a beast that might have great 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. And 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, maybe poison, 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 as he stared fixated at the egg.
At the last moment, he wondered if he was going to regret his decision of choosing a snake over a bird? If he had done the right thing choosing his intuition over the normal common sense?
With a deep sigh, Athar did not wait any further as he placed his palm on the egg and willed the mana accumulating in his body towards the egg.
This was the method of bond formation. One had to feed mana to the egg of the beast only. 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.
Because 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. 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. 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 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 at this as he had been waiting for this. Whenever the bond was established between a human and a beast, the human's consciousness would be pulled into his mindscape or his beastspace for the first time.
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[Thank you for reading. Rate, Review and Comment on my novel. Also send the power stones]