The elders left without being told twice — not after that roar.
Chen Lian stood by the window until the courtyard settled back into silence. "That wasn't for them," he said. "My beast doesn't do that unless something in me finally cracks loose. Hasn't happened since your mother died."
Chen Yuan didn't say anything clever. There wasn't anything worth saying.
"Sit," his father said. "There's something I should've told you before you went into that cellar alone."
Chen Yuan sat.
"A Beast Space isn't only fed by the bond itself. That's the slow way — a trickle, year after year. There's a faster way, if the elements align. Concentrated sources of the right nature can do in one night what months of training can't."
"Mine's wood."
"Old wood. Deep-rooted, living wood." His father nodded toward the east wall. "The grove out there is older than this clan's founding. If your space is still as small as I think, one night among those trees could do more than a season in the training yard."
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"Because I didn't know if you'd survive the bonding at all," Chen Lian said. "No use explaining how to run before I knew you'd stand."
That night, Chen Yuan walked past the training yard, past the outer wall, into the old grove where the trunks grew wide and the air felt thick with something patient and green. He sat at the base of the oldest tree and closed his eyes.
The Beast Space answered immediately — hungrier than it had ever been in the yard, the sapling straining upward like it recognized something it had been waiting for.
"Careful," he murmured. "Don't go wild just because we found the good stuff."
The vitality came in like something remembering how to breathe — not pulled from his own tired reserves, but offered, root reaching toward root reaching toward the small dark cave inside him. Partway through, he noticed his knuckles had stopped aching. The raw, split skin from days of hitting the training post was smoothing over, faster than any rest should manage, like the same vitality feeding the sapling was spilling over into him too.
The cave stopped being small. Stone gave way to grain and bark and green growing things. The sapling split into a slim young trunk, and around it, smaller shoots broke through where there had only been bare rock a moment before.
Outside, in his hands, the rough egg rock finally answered. It didn't shatter — it split, quiet and unhurried, a single clean crack running its length, and from it came a soft green-gold light.
Chen Yuan opened his eyes to find the cave gone. In its place: a small forest, barely a few trees deep, canopy and root and quiet light where there had only been broken stone and one stubborn sapling. He flexed his hands. The skin across his knuckles was smooth, healed, like the last few days of training had never happened.
He sat there a long moment, palm against the split rock, feeling something he hadn't let himself feel in a long time.
"Well," he said quietly. "Guess we're not just a rock with a plant anymore."
Somewhere in the small forest now living beneath his ribs, something stirred — not a voice yet, but the first real sense that something in there was waking up.