[This is NOT a fairy-tale beast-taming world!!! A brutal world, ferocious beasts, the uncanny, and a touch of Lovecraftian horror]
My name is Yang Yu. I used to be a spiritual-matter trash can.
As I waited to die in the Imperial Court's transport pod, a bone fragment of unknown origin embedded itself in my chest. At the moment I was on the verge of mutation, I wrote the first rule on that bone:
Spiritual matter may not contaminate this body.
From then on, all spiritual matter stopped working inside me.
My first contracted beast was Su Wang, a top scholar from the Imperial Court. To study the truth about spiritual matter, she willingly mutated and turned herself into a humanoid anomaly. The only reason she bound herself to me was to figure out why I was immune to spiritual matter. She said she wouldn't dissect me. But after every battle, I find another diagram of my chest cavity on her clipboard.
My second contracted beast is a broken blade. It won't behave, so I made a rule for it too:
The blade must cut. If it doesn't, it breaks.
It behaves very well now.
Su Wang says the bone fragment is a blank vessel for rules. After each evolution, I can write a new rule on it.
The first rule: spiritual matter is ineffective.
Next, I want to write a rule that will make all trash cans stop being trash cans. But Su Wang wrote in her report: The more rules you write, the farther you drift from being “human.”
She crossed out the word “specimen.”
She didn't replace it. That line was left blank.
