This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

"You look like you lost a fight with your alarm clock and it got the last punch." Gabriel said to Kain while wincing at his dishevelled appearance.

Kain's appearance was nothing short of a disaster, the kind of soulcrushing exhaustion that would cause anyone to confuse Kain with an undead creature rather than a human.

Dark circles framed his eyes, so deep and shadowed they almost looked like he had dual black eyes.

His usually sharp and composed gaze was dulled, the whites of his eyes bloodshot with tiny red veins crisscrossing now yellowed parts of his eyes.

His normally sunkissed skin was pale, bordering on having a sickly green tint, with a slight sheen of sweat that hinted at the hours of work he'd been putting in lately.

His hair was an unkempt greasy mess, sticking up in random directions and his chapped lips were surrounded by a faint shadow of stubble on his jawline, as though he'd completely abandoned any form of basic grooming.

His clothes matched the rest of him. They were rumpled and slightly askew, with his shirt untucked on one side and covered in wrinkles.

The way he moved didn't help either—sluggish and unsteady, like his limbs were operating on borrowed energy—adding to the illusion of him being undead.

His shoulders slumped, his posture a complete betrayal of his usual confident demeanor. Even his voice, when he spoke, carried the unmistakable rasp of someone who hadn't slept properly in days.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

All in all, Kain looked like a walking embodiment of burnout—someone who had pushed far beyond their limits and was now paying the price in every visible way.

However, sleeping was easier said than done. Even with the best spiritual plant teas to soothe his mind, or even stooping to using Bea to forcefully put him to sleep, his sleep was always restless.

And the reason for his insomnia was completely the infuriating puzzle that was the different elemental reactions.

Even if after much training, Kain was barely able to get the spiritual creatures to infuse similar amounts of energy into their silk, he couldn't add even amounts of each silk.

All of the elements interacted with more than one other element, and it wasn't at a 1 to 1 ratio.

Water could extinguish fire, but when the energy of fire is large enough it can cause water to evaporate. Therefore, for a perfect balance between them, more fire-attribute energy is needed.

However, if only things could be so easy and stop there.

Kain found that in the presence of the natural/plant attribute, the fire element would receive a slight boost, while the water element present in the silk would be slightly suppressed making balance between the 3 elements more difficult.

In fact, the majority of the interactions between the plant, water, fire, metal, and earth attributes almost perfectly matched those described in the Chinese 5-elements pentagram.

But, unfortunately, Kain wasn't working with only 5 elements—he was working with 8.

And those extra 3 elements—wind, light, and dark—were completely screwing with his mind!

Tossed into the perfectly nice 5 element pentagram, they wreaked complete havoc.

The wind element at low levels could boost the fire element, but at high levels would suppress it.

Similarly, the combination of the water and wind attributes are often used in fusion skills to create ice, and so in the presence of the wind attribute, the fire suppressing effect on the fire attribute may strengthen.

Moreover, achieving balance between the light and dark attributes, which Kain had hoped would stand alone, was also difficult since Kain noticed that they also interacted with the other elements.

For example, in the presence of the fire element, the light element in the silk would be slightly boosted.

Every time Kain thought he'd finally had everything figured out, a new interaction between the elements would be uncovered so that, until now, Kain still hadn't managed to find a perfect balance among 4 elements even once.

'This is impossible…' Kain thought as tears unconsciously dripped from his face and smeared the words written on his research notes.

"I think… I might have shot myself in the foot…" Kain had employed 5 research assistants to avoid memorizing the necessary knowledge of the Pathfinders on his own, and instead to "cheat" and take a "lazy" way out.

But now, in the process of fulfilling his "payment" to the new assistants, he was working so hard he wasn't sure if just memorizing the content on his own would have been more exhausting.

"Kain, maybe you should take a break. If your Fanclub members saw you now, they'd probably immediately turn their back on you," Gabriel said with a slight sneer, though the concern in his eyes was evident.

Kain waved him off, too drained to muster a witty retort. Instead, he buried his head in his hands, his ink-stained fingers rubbing against his temples. "A break won't solve this, Gabriel, because whenever I do close my eyes, all I see are numbers and equations. I swear these damn elements are conspiring against me!"

Just when Kain would think he'd perfectly balanced even just the minimum of 4 elements, something else he didn't expect would pop up and ruin everything!

However, the more difficult it was to get it to work, the more Kain was determined to succeed. Something was telling him that an evolutionary form with such difficult to meet conditions must result in an incredibly special creature.

'It definitely must!' Kain said in determination, otherwise he may kill something if all of his hard work only resulted in a creature with a strength slightly higher than their current forms.

As he prepared to get back to work and test his next idea, Gabriel watched with a mix of admiration and exasperation. "You're going to kill yourself with all this overwork, you know."

"Probably," Kain replied, his voice dry. "But at least I'll die a genius."

However, in Kain's obsession with living up to the "genius" moniker, he was forgetting about something very very important—it was now the time for the first Ranking Tournament of his second year as a College student.