Others contract with strange beasts through talent; he does it through smell. In the third year of the apocalypse, Chen Mo encounters an S-rank Riftclaw Wolf in a collapsed tunnel. The records say it slaughtered three outposts, but what he smells is fear: cowering, trembling, afraid of the dark. He has no knife and no ability to form contracts, so he pushes over his last half-brick of nutrition. The wolf follows him, though no one at the outpost believes it was willing. From then on, with a single precise reading of an emotion, he can make an opponent slip up in seconds and turn the tables against stronger foes. But the farther into the wilderness he goes, the more he realizes something is wrong: the minerals underground in Silent Valley radiate calm, while the golden-tier beasts imprisoned in an underground laboratory radiate despair and hope at once. And the three centuries of stability in the beast-tamer system were bought by castrating the emotions of strange beasts. He has learned to understand them, and now he bears their debt. Each time he understands them, the price grows. And when the first dark-tier strange beast sends a question through their resonance: Humans, what are you yourselves?
