This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

Chapter 878: Chapter 878: Evolution?

At first, there was only darkness.

It wasn’t peaceful—just quiet in a way that felt wrong. No weight. No breath. No body.

Then a voice rippled through the silence.

Kain.

Bea. Of course it was Bea. Her tone sounded faint and distorted, like a voice travelling through water.

And somewhere distant, something pulsed in response.

Pangea.

Even as Kain’s consciousness drifted apart, he could feel it—the living world inside him humming faintly, all its creatures stirring as though something terrible had happened to their god.

“So this is dying,” Kain murmured to no one. “Huh. Bit itchy.”

Bea didn’t answer. She was too busy keeping Kain tethered to reality. He could feel her presence threading through the wreckage of his mind—stimulating nerves, forcing synapses to fire, refusing to let the spark go out completely.

Around him, the battlefield was still. His vision, though fragmented, picked up flickers of movement—Aegis crouched protectively near his body, Vauleth’s wings typically covered in flames dimmed to an ember, Queen’s delicate form trembling as she produced a viscous green jelly that pulsed with life.

All of them seemed unhappy. But none of them were particularly panicked or experiencing the pain that a broken contract would typically bring.

If Abe had been paying attention, that should have terrified him.

Instead, Abe stood over Kain’s fallen headless body, confident that victory was his.

But the battlefield had other ideas.

The air itself seemed to hum around Kain’s corpse—an almost imperceptible pulse that made the surrounding Abyssals twitch uneasily. Abe didn’t notice it at first. His attention was fixed on the sticky residue of blood and brain matter clinging to his arm.

He turned to leave. The plan had gone smoothly enough; the boy had died cleanly, decapitated, his mind destroyed beyond recovery. However, the fluctuations from the battle here would likely be sensed by that foreign girl. She gave him an uneasy feeling, and his instincts said that deceiving her after Kain’s death wouldn’t be so easy. Perhaps it’d be best to fake his death and then follow along from behind as Takeru and the foreign girl continued travelling to the Azure Serpent Kingdom.

But then something shifted.

Abe froze mid‑step. Normally, when he killed, the dying spirit’s essence would sink into him—a bit of power drawn into the fragment of the Abyssal core that sustained him. Killing wasn’t as good as if he converted another into an abyssal, but still helpful nonetheless. Yet this time there was nothing. No energy, no soul. Just… emptiness.

It was as if Kain had no soul at all.

A faint vibration stirred behind him, a resonance that made the hairs on Abe’s neck rise. He turned.

The ground where Kain’s head and body lay shimmered with rippling currents of a strange violet energy. Then, without warning, Kain’s blood began to glow.

Distracted by the glow he didn’t notice when Queen’s royal jelly began to glow so brightly that the green shifted toward gold.

The jelly seeped into Kain’s flesh at the wound, and acted as a catalyst to jumpstart the repair process.

At the same time, Pangea reacted—like the entire planet had decided to shove every ounce of its Source energy straight into him.

He could feel the spiritual plants, spiritual creatures, the dwarves, the elves, and even the normally disobedient Aurem, channelling vitality into the core of his being.

A second later, his blood began to move.

Literally move.

It crawled back toward his body, glowing violet-green as it seeped into the wounds. The fragments of brain matter that had splattered across the dirt shimmered and dissolved, threads of light weaving through the air like liquid auroras before sinking back into him.

Abe’s expression froze.

“What—”

The blood, the flesh, the remnants of Kain’s head—all of it began to coalesce into shimmering filaments, re‑forming the structure of a skull and spine as if time were reversing.

In the violet light, Bea’s presence stirred. Though invisible to Abe, her Pale Thought Field was wrapped tightly around what remained of Kain’s consciousness, protecting it like a cocoon. She had maintained his awareness even after his brain was destroyed, anchoring his soul to what little remained of his body.

In the time it took for Abe to process what was happening, Kain’s body sat up.

Headless.

Abe stumbled backward, eyes wide. His instincts screamed, and for good reason. The corpse he’d just beheaded reached toward its empty neck, then crawled and groped blindly around the ground before finding the missing piece— Kain’s severed head.

The body lifted it and, out of sheer habit, adjusted the angle so that Kain’s now wide-open eyes faced Abe.

“…”

Even more eerie than the scene of the body holding its head, violet light flooded from both his eyes and every orifice of his body, casting an eerie glow that painted the battlefield in surreal colours.

Abe’s jaw slackened. “You—you—”

Vauleth, sensing that Kain was likely going to be okay, went fro defense to offence. The dragon’s flames tore through the remaining Abyssals who had begun to creep toward Kain’s body, reducing them to ash before they could touch him.

Aegis slammed his stone limbs into another group, crushing them underfoot. Together, they formed a ring around Kain.

Kain’s consciousness, with the help of Bea, finally stabilized. He could feel everything. The texture of the soil, the warmth of Vauleth’s flames, the psychic hum of Bea’s presence. His spirit, freed from the confines of his damaged flesh, reached instinctively inward… and touched Pangea.

The planet within him responded.

He felt the awareness of the world—plants, beasts, the flow of Source Energy across its surface. Dozens of life forms flared in his senses: regenerative plants, and unusual organisms capable of restoring lost limbs and organs. For a moment, his dying body reached out to them, calling instinctively for aid.

Kain realized that if ever neared death, his mind would instinctively scour and use Pangea for whatever existed that may help him. Almost like a backup emergency warehouse.

But he never needed to use this function.

With Bea and Queen stabilizing his initial injuries, the later surge of Source power from within his own core and Pangea began knitting his form back together. His body was not healing in the traditional sense—it was being reconstructed, atom by atom, by Source energy. If anything, it felt even stronger.

More perfect.

Kain’s body, now half‑ethereal from the light within, began to move. The sight was grotesque yet majestic—muscles and sinews glowing faintly as they reattached, bone regrowing from violet light. And currently the head held before his chest was being lifted, as if to be reattached.

Abe’s composure cracked. “You… you’re still alive?”

Kain tilted his head in his hands slightly, as though studying the traitor. His mouth moved, the words echoing from both the severed head and the body itself, as if his voice carried directly through the energy linking them.

“I was just lying there, thinking about it,” he said evenly. “And I finally understood. You were acting from the start, weren’t you? You’re the one behind it all. Including why no member of the Rising Sun Royal Family could escape. It’s strange, a long royal line with demi-god level protectors left by their ancestors…yet none could escape?”

Abe took an involuntary step back. That voice shouldn’t exist—his vocal cords were shredded, his brain mush.

For a man who prided himself on logic, the sight was intolerable.

He lashed out.

Abe’s body warped as abyssal energy surged through him, his arm lengthening into a blade of black armor resembling the exoskeleton of his insect contracts. In one motion, he charged and struck—no hesitation, no wasted words. His strikes tore through Kain’s torso, slicing deep enough to rip through soul and body alike.

The blows hit. Each one landed with perfect precision, enhanced by years of battle. For a moment, the battlefield seemed to freeze.

Then Kain spoke again.

“Physical attacks don’t work on me anymore.”

Abe froze. His arm—the same one that had cut Kain—was burning. Not with flame, but with the same violet energy spilling from Kain’s wounds. The corruption crawled up his flesh like liquid light, searing nerve and essence alike.

Meanwhile, the ’deadly wounds’ he caused to Kain spilled some violet light rather than blood, before disappearing entirely.

Panicked, Abe hacked off his own limb. The pain was staggering, but he endured it, eyes wide with disbelief.

He hit the ground, snarling. “What are you?”

Kain placed his head back upon his shoulders. The light within him pulsed brighter, fusing flesh to flesh. When his eyes opened again, they were fully violet, alien and cold.

He could feel the truth of it now—the Source within him didn’t just sustain life. It was life. He could exist as pure energy if he willed it. A body was optional—a vessel for convenience.

It was a disconcerting realization, even for him. The thought carried absurd implications. Without a body, he wouldn’t need to eat, sleep… or breathe. But there were other, less practical consequences too.

His mind drifted—momentarily—to a beautiful white figure. A bodyless existence would certainly complicate certain… ahem, fun activities. The somewhat lustful thought was ridiculous under the circumstances, but the absurdity grounded him.

He tried to shake his head to dispel the image—but without a proper neck, all he managed was a twitch of his face.

Abe saw it all—the grotesque, impossible regeneration, the faintly amused glint in Kain’s glowing eyes—and for the first time in years, he felt true fear.

Kain took a step forward, now holding the head above his neck, each movement accompanied by the low hum of Source energy reshaping the air itself. The battlefield’s Abyssals disintegrated wherever that light touched them.

Abe backed away, summoning shadow and corruption to cloak himself. He tried to slip into the darkness, to vanish into the shadows using his own abyssal power.

But the violet light was already spreading across the ground—consuming shadow, devouring corruption, erasing every trace of the Abyss it touched.

And in that final instant before escape, Abe realized the truth: this wasn’t a simple resurrection.

It was evolution.

Why did this foreigner seem even stronger now?!