Bond Master

The Cultivation Blueprint (2)

Ren pulled a clean sheet of academy parchment toward himself, dipping his quill into the inkwell to log the first anomalous breakthrough of his report:

[Observations on Volden Shackle-Hound Cultivation: The entity exhibits a distinct behavioral affinity for Mountain Gooseberries. While the fruit offers minimal direct physical reinforcement, its concentrated ambient Mana serves as a powerful metabolic stimulant and aromatic seasoning when combined with a raw, high-density monster meat diet, drastically increasing digestion speed and nutrient absorption efficiency.]

Once Grim had completed his feeding frenzy, his obsidian coat gleaming with a faint purple sheen as the fresh wave of nutrients settled into his muscle fibers, he curled up contentedly beneath the mental image of a thick ironwood desk. Ren watched him through the soul-link for a moment before projecting a secondary query.

By the way, Grim... why exactly do you keep referring to Sergeant Corvina as 'the evil uniform-woman' in your thoughts?

The hound’s mental image flattened its ears, letting out a low, telepathic huff of pure indignation.

[Every single time that creature enters our domain, she demands that we exert our physical forms and exhaust our vitality reserves, yet she never arrives with a fresh kill or a single scrap of meat in her hands. What else could such an entity be classified as, if not entirely evil?]

Ren let out a quiet chuckle, shaking his head at the absolute simplicity of the beast's logic. To a newborn predatory magical creature, the universe was divided into remarkably stark columns: entities that provided immediate nourishment, and entities that demanded energy output without a metabolic reward. The profound, telepathic soul-bond they shared ensured that Grim was boundlessly loyal and protective toward Ren, but that instinctual affection clearly did not extend to the severe military instructor who ran them through grueling agility drills.

Alright, fair enough, Ren conceded, smiling as he scribbled down notes on his behavior chart. Let's map out your environment. Where within this vault or this suite do you feel the most secure and comfortable when you need to stabilize your energy?

Grim shifted his weight, his nose twitching as he pointed his snout toward the dense, aromatic foliage bordering the eastern corner of the balcony.

[There. Beneath the low, spreading canopy of the ironwood tea trees. The oil within those specific leaves gives off a sharp, bitter fragrance that masks our physical scent and dampens our kinetic vibrations from potential predators. It is an excellent hunting tree. It feels like home.]

Ren spent the remainder of the long afternoon conducting a methodical, step-by-step interview with his bound companion, translating Grim’s raw instinctual preferences into a highly structured, academic report. Once the behavioral sections were completed, he turned his attention to the second stack of textbooks, searching for references to external supplements, medicinal drafts, or alchemical elixirs that could actively enhance practitioners who utilized [Rend]-type abilities.

The primary hunter compendiums offered very little research on specialized beast-tamer feedback loops, but the secondary martial arts grimoires were incredibly thorough. Because basic variations of a rending strike were common milestone techniques taught to standard physical warrior classes throughout the Golden Dragon Nation’s military academies, the institutional alchemists had spent decades perfecting specific medicinal compounds designed to drastically increase a human warrior's capacity for explosive, localized power output. The core question lingering in Ren's mind was whether these human-centric supplements could be safely routed through the soul-bond to benefit a contracted beast.

Neither Ren nor Grim could determine the answer by simply reading the surface-level warning labels, so Ren pushed the warrior texts aside and opened the advanced, copper-rimmed alchemy manual. That volume proved significantly more productive.

As his eyes scanned down the complex listings of regional potions, focus elixirs, and anatomical treatments, he finally locked onto a highly promising formula: the Greater Elixir of Primal Might. According to the runic recipe, the potion wasn't derived from standard flora; it was refined by infusing raw, high-grade monster blood with the pulverized dust of a concentrated Strength-Attributed Focus Gemstone—a rare mineral that naturally radiates a massive, continuous field of dense physical force. When a human vanguard warrior consumed the draft, the localized gemstone radiation provided a long-duration burst of muscular density and cardiovascular endurance.

The focus stone was the exact catalyst Ren had been searching for. Grim didn't require a temporary, artificial potion to grant him a brief burst of physical power—he wasn't a brutish gorilla or a heavy land-beast that relied on raw mass. He was a Shackle-Hound, a predator whose lethality depended on the density of his bone structure and the sharpness of his armor plates. If Ren could acquire a raw, unrefined fragment of that Strength Stone, the continuous physical radiation inside the Confinement Vault could provide a permanent environmental stimulus, forcing Grim’s skeletal armor ridges to harden and expand at triple their natural speed.

Encouraged by the breakthrough, Ren continued his frantic search through the alchemical indices until he discovered a secondary, equally vital resource: an Aligned Kinetic Mana Stone. Unlike the natural gemstones found in deep mountain rifts, these specific catalysts were synthetic storage devices meticulously constructed by high-tier academy Mages to store massive reserves of purified kinetic and shadow Mana.

Because Grim’s primary abilities revolved around the physical binding of energy and the deployment of [Bone-Plate Rend], his system was hardwired to absorb ambient Mana of that exact property. If he could keep an active Kinetic Stone within his mental habitat, the hound could slowly and effortlessly siphon away the pure, stored Mana to fuel his internal evolution without needing to wait for Ren to naturally regenerate his own soul-force reserves.

Ren sat back in his chair, tapping his quill against his chin as he reviewed the completed parchment resting before him. He had successfully outlined the Four Foundational Pillars of Grim’s accelerated cultivation blueprint:

1. High-Nutrient Predatory Flesh seasoned with crushed Mountain Gooseberries (Daily Dietary Base).

2. Refined, Mana-Infused Monster Blood (Metabolic Accelerator).

3. A Raw Strength-Attributed Focus Gemstone (Skeletal Armor Hardener).

4. A Synthetic Kinetic Mana Storage Stone (Internal Energy Catalyst).

It was a bold, highly unconventional cultivation strategy that completely bypassed the conservative, slow-paced methods detailed in the first-year student manuals. If Sergeant Corvina could actually verify his logic and approve the requisition forms to secure all four resources, Ren was absolutely certain he could push Grim out of the Common Grade and force a true breakthrough into the powerful Awakened Tier within the next few weeks. He carefully folded the parchment, sealing it inside his pneumatic registry envelope, ready for the morning inspection. The blueprint was drawn; it was time to see if the academy had the stomach to fund it.