This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

With the gains Kain received from delegating some of the more menial labor tasks, Kain became more and more determined to find a shortcut for the immense amount of knowledge to be learned as a member of the Pathfinders.

"An architect builds the vision, not the walls. The conductor waves the baton, he doesn't—"

"Blah, Blah, Blah. How many high sounding sayings are you going to come up with just to excuse your laziness." Gabriel interrupted when Kain was in the middle of writing his post.

This idea came to Kain once he realized that in addition to being a student dual enrolled in both the Beast-Taming and Evolutionary Planning faculties, he also had an honorary title of 'Research Professor.'

This title was given to him a long with the lab and comes with absolutely no real power, salary, or right to teach any classes—but most students wouldn't know that.

Combine that with Kain's immense popularity and while some upper-year and graduate students may be resistant to working for him, many newbie freshmen and even some second-years may not be.

In fact, when Kain sees the eyes glowing with admiration when he occasionally passes a first-year, he becomes much more confident in his plan.

Then when he thinks about when he was just starting in College back on Earth and most lower-year students would gratefully do all the tedious low-skill grunge work in the lab for free just to be able to put the prestigious sounding moniker of 'research assistant' on their resumes, Kain was even more confident in his decision.

He couldn't extract the necessary information he needed from the minds of his fellow Pathfinder—but couldn't he extract it from the minds of some 'assistants.' Heck, he may not even have to pay them!

Kain could barely sit still at the idea of this brilliantly crafted shortcut and immediately began to write a post on the College's public job board, ignoring Gabriel's snide remarks from the side.

The ad was simple but intentionally crafted to sound prestigious:

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Creator of the New Evolutionary Form Kain Newman Seeks Assistants

Field: Ancient Languages and Histories

An unparalleled opportunity to work with Kain Newman, Evolutionary Planner and Research Professor at Dark Moon College. Applicants must have a strong foundation in ancient scripts, forgotten civilizations, or historical linguistics.

Requirements:

-Enrolled in Academic Departments specializing in ancient languages or history.

-Strong analytical skills and attention to detail.

What's in it for you?

-Work under one of the youngest and most innovative minds of our time.

-Exclusive insight into the collaborative intersection between history, linguistics, and evolutionary planning.

-Letters of recommendation for exemplary contributions.

Apply today! Positions are limited.

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Satisfied, Kain submitted the ad. He leaned back in his chair, smirking. "There. Let's see how many bright-eyed underclassmen I get to exploit—err, guide."

The response was almost instantaneous. Kain's phone pinged with notifications within the hour, quickly becoming overwhelming. He skimmed through the applicants, his eyebrows rising higher with every message.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

First-years? It was to be expected. Second-years? The ideal candidate in his mind, and likely the highest-level he'd be able to recruit.

But what really startled him were the upper-year students and even graduate students expressing interest. Many of them had already published research papers or contributed to major academic projects. Some messages even included professional portfolios with glowing recommendations from professors.

Kain tapped his chin in thought, reviewing the unexpectedly high-quality pool of candidates. "What's going on?" he muttered. "These are way overqualified…"

It didn't take long for him to discover the truth once he engaged in further communication with these high-level applicants.

The older students weren't applying out of pure academic interest, or really out of any expectations of Kain making a breakthrough in the field of History and Linguistics.

However, in him they saw an opportunity. An opportunity to potentially request the services of one of the most notorious, and expensive, Evolutionary Planners—a field with enormous demand and limited experts.

After all, although all of these students were in an Academic Department, many of them were also beast-tamers. They either just had lower-grade affinities, preferred being an academic student, had a strong aversion to the fighting required of enrolling in a beast-taming department, or simply couldn't afford the resources required to raise a high-quality contract capable of keeping up in the beast-taming department.

But even if they had no interest in fighting, that didn't mean they would want their contracts to go further.

The feedback provided by a stronger contract will also increase their own strength and cultivation speed—extending their lifespan and increasing their mental strength.

However, for most beast-tamers that would choose to enroll in an Academic department, most of their contracts wouldn't have the highest potential. Many of them may not even have known evolutionary forms, making seeking the help of most evolutionary planners useless.

But, Kain was one of the few planners to come up with a widely used evolutionary form—not to mention the new forms of his own contracts and the story of Yara the mutant lizard which has spread, which all demonstrated that it wasn't a fluke that he could come up with new forms.

Rumours of Kain's supposed 'gift' that allows him to more easily sense the hidden evolutionary conditions of a spiritual creature, also increased their hopes in Kain being able to help them.

However, to seek the services of a planner at Kain's level to come up with a new evolutionary form would probably bankrupt even a smaller noble family—it was completely out of the means of these applicants.

Thinking about it this way, Kain wasn't sure of who technically would be taking advantage in this arrangement…

Gabriel looked over Kain's shoulder and remarked, "I didn't expect the title of 'genius Evolutionary Planner' to be so powerful, nor for them to believe it. What part of you looks like a genius?"

Kain puffed his chest out slightly in pride, and chose to ignore the latter sentence.

He didn't care about the ulterior motives, and he also recognized the potential. These upper-year students would pick up the material far faster than the inexperienced first-years. Not to mention, Kain is planning to just absorb everything that they will learn, and the likelihood of their being errors in the knowledge of these more experienced students was much lower.

Moreover, even if they came to him with some pretty advanced evolutionary planner requests, Kain had the System to help him and would also benefit greatly if he could come up with some more widely useable evolutionary forms. And considering he's about to launch a new product with his identity as a Planner, a newly created form and boost to his image as a 'genius' would be just the publicity he needed for the FMT pills to take off!

It was a trade-off, but he didn't see any disadvantages in it for him.

Over the next few days, Kain interviewed applicants, narrowing down the list. The sparkly-eyed freshmen were enthusiastic but lacked the depth of knowledge he needed.

The older students, meanwhile, were much more knowledgeable and professional, and although they unfortunately didn't flatter and admire him like the freshmen did—they still held great respect for him as a planner.

Ultimately, Kain chose three graduate students and two fourth-years. Each had a solid background in different ancient languages or civilizations, and all had specific requests regarding his potential services as an Evolutionary Planner in exchange for their assistance that Kain felt he could meet.

Many of the students' requests were even quite interesting to him and lit his enthusiasm for research. In the end the assistants Kain hired, as well as their requests from him were:

1. Rivian, a graduate student, was a tall man with dark brown hair tied back into a loose ponytail, piercing green eyes, and a constant air of quiet focus. He specialized in Ancient Verdarian and Eldrathic and the Verdant Epoch civilization—a long period of time of relative peace when the Verdaris City-State was without question the strongest of the time and could have even expanded into an Empire if they'd had the ambition. Meanwhile, in addition to Verdarian, which was spoken by most citizens of Verdaris, Eldrathic was the common tongue spoken by all city-states of that period—both were must have languages for Kain to learn.

Considering that the Tree of Life he currently possessed likely was last seen in the Verdaris city-state, it was a no-brainer for Kain to hire him.

As for his request, Rivian was bound to a gold-quality Leafwing Moth, a spiritual creature thought to be a dead end in evolutionary potential. He wants Kain to discover an advanced form for it.

2. Elera Ash, a female graduate student with short blonde hair and amber eyes specialized in the Celestial Ascension Period, which was an important period for the Celestial Empire because it corresponds to the time period just before the founding of the Empire when the 5 individuals who eventually founded the empire were the most active. Out of interest in the beautiful supposedly extinct elves, she also picked up Ancient Elvish as a hobby, which is one of the languages Kain must learn.

Elera has a silver-quality Moonlit Otter that does have a known gold-quality form after evolution, but for some reason it is unable to evolve. Similar to Yara, Kain suspects that it may be a mutant, although he'd need to see it in person to determine the details.

3. The final Graduate Student was Dravis Norrik, a stocky man with a thick beard and eyes that gleam with intensity. However, despite his intimidating build, his voice is extremely calm and soothing. He specializes in studying the Warring Periods, a chaotic era right before the Celestial Ascension Period marked by fragmented city-states and tribes that were frequently broken by strong wild spiritual creature battles and fights with one another. This period was among the least stable and filled with the most human deaths. He also knows the common language of this period, Myrthali, as well as several other less commonly spoken languages.

As for his request, he'd actually somehow managed to get a contract from a relic of the Warring Period to a Raging Steel Boar, which was often used as a war mount during the Warring Period. However, the method of its evolution has been lost in time, so he was hoping the receive Kain's help.

The two fourth-years consisted of one boy and a girl each, and Kain also made sure that their knowledge did not overlap greatly with any of the graduate students.

Their knowledge, unfortunately, isn't as in depth as the graduate students, but thankfully neither of their requests were particularly difficult either and could probably be accomplished by planners other than Kain but would cost quite a lot.

Neither of them required the creation of a new evolutionary form, just a detailed plan on how to increase the probability of their contracts evolving into the rarer, less-likely form.

Both of their requests could probably be completed by Kain within a couple of days, but he, of course, won't hand over the finished plans until he also got what he needed.

"Welcome aboard, students. Now, let's see how much I can squeeze out of you." Kain said with a cruel smirk, already mentally preparing the catalogs of books for each to read. Now that he had helpers, why should he stop at just 'learning' the introductory knowledge of Pathfinders?