Chapter 597

Ludger didn’t stop with “sit” and “lay down.”

That was just control. Useful control, but still surface-level.

What Shera had said mattered more: understanding. Reading feelings through mana. Hearing instinct without words.

So Ludger tried the direct approach first.

He moved around the dire wolf in slow circles, copying its posture and micro-shifts the way he’d copied his masters in sparring yards. He lowered his center of gravity. Rolled his shoulders the way the wolf did when it prepared to spring. Tilted his head, slowed his breath, tried to match the rhythm of its alertness.

He even mirrored its pacing, short steps, pause, sniff, listen, like he could trick his brain into syncing with whatever lived behind the animal’s eyes.

Then he tried reading its body language. Tail position. Ear flicks. Eye focus. Jaw tension. Weight distribution. The subtle twitch of muscle before movement.

It helped him predict what the wolf

would

do. It didn’t help him understand what it

felt.

The wolf wasn’t a human with obvious tells.

Its instincts were layered, territory, hunger, caution, irritation, curiosity, all braided together in a way that didn’t translate cleanly into gestures. In the end, Ludger had to admit something irritatingly obvious: If Shera’s art was real, it wasn’t just “training.” It was

mana.

He sat down, cross-legged, and the dire wolf, already exhausted from resisting his nonsense all day, rested beside him with a wary calm.

Ludger reached out and scratched the creature’s neck slowly, fingers sinking into thick fur. The wolf’s ear flicked. Its eyes half-lidded for a moment, then reopened, watching the world while tolerating the contact. Ludger stared at its profile, thinking.

Summoner.

That was what Shera had called it.

But what he was doing right now, taming, bonding, reading, imprinting, felt less like summoning and more like… mastery. Relationship. Discipline. Command earned through persistence and proof.

Beast Master would be a more appropriate name.

Except the System didn’t name things based on what sounded right.

It named things based on whatever logic it followed, some internal taxonomy that didn’t care about his preferences. And if the System decided this path was called Summoner, then maybe that was the truth. Or maybe Shera was wrong.

Maybe her family called it summoning because that was how it looked from the outside, flash of light, creature arriving, while the real class name was something else entirely.

Ludger kept scratching the wolf’s neck, eyes narrowed, and let the thought settle into a practical conclusion: Body language wasn’t enough. If he wanted this art, he’d have to do it the hard way.

He’d have to reach through mana, through the same invisible channels he’d learned to control, and touch the wolf’s instincts directly. And that meant he was about to step into a different kind of bond.

One the wolf would feel. One the System would notice. One Shera’s family had been guarding for five hundred years. Ludger believed he already had the answer. He just hadn’t liked it.

He stopped trying to “understand” the wolf with his eyes and hands and decided to do it the way Shera had described, through mana.

He sat still, one hand resting on the dire wolf’s neck, the other palm hovering above the ground. Then he triggered the simplest, laziest sensing tool he had.

Mana Pulse.

A ripple of awareness spread outward from him, not a visible wave, but a pressure in his perception, like the world had briefly become a map made of currents. The clearing answered immediately.

Thanks to the weather and the changes he’d forced into the terrain, the mana signature here was messy but readable.

He felt earth mana in the hardened lines beneath the soil, stable, heavy, stubborn, like bone.

He felt water-attuned mana everywhere, thick and restless, bleeding out of the snowline beyond the clearing and hanging in the air as cold humidity. Even with the snow gone nearby, the north was still a wet world, ice and melt, frost and condensation, all feeding that same quiet current.

It was interesting. It was also useless. Not for this. Because none of that told him what the wolf felt. None of that told him why it tolerated him, where its instincts bent, where they hardened, where fear lived, where aggression started, where trust could even exist.

He needed the wolf’s mana. Ludger narrowed his focus. He pulled the broad Mana Pulse inward, like tightening a net until it became a thread. The ambient currents faded into background noise. And then he tried to listen to the wolf.

At first, it was faint.

Not because the wolf had little mana, but because Ludger’s control over

that kind of sensing

was sloppy. Mana Pulse was at a low level. He’d neglected it. It had always been “good enough,” and Ludger had a bad habit of leaving “good enough” alone until it betrayed him and because he had more interesting skills to master. This was it betraying him.

After expanding his range as much as possible, Ludger compressed it by maintaining the mana he was using. Then he slowly began to feel it.

The wolf’s mana felt like a dense, living knot, warm under the cold, layered with instinct, constantly shifting in small currents. But the details blurred, sliding away the moment he tried to isolate them.

Ludger exhaled through his nose, annoyed.

Fine.

If the skill was weak, he’d compensate the same way he always did. More mana. More repetition. More force.

He pushed more power into Mana Pulse, carefully, but undeniably, flooding the technique until his perception sharpened by sheer volume. It wasn’t elegant. It was a pressure hack.

The wolf’s ear flicked as Ludger’s mana brushed closer to its core. It tensed slightly, then settled again when Ludger didn’t squeeze, didn’t tug, didn’t demand. He just… listened harder.

Again. Another pulse. And another.

Each time, Ludger fed the skill more mana than it deserved, forcing it to respond, forcing it to catch up, forcing it to learn because the System loved nothing more than repeated stress applied in a consistent direction.

He could almost

feel

the skill stretching. Not in his muscles. In his perception, like a sense organ being trained to stop being useless. The cost was immediate. But he didn’t stop. Because now, finally, the wolf’s mana started to resolve into something clearer. A pattern. A rhythm. Not words. But feelings with shape.

Tension spikes like needles. Calm as a broad, slow current. Irritation as sharp vibration. Hunger as a pull. Pain as a jagged discoloration in the flow.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed.

There you are.

He kept pulsing, kept feeding mana into the technique, leveling it the hard way, by brute repetition, until the ambient world blurred completely and all that existed was the living current beneath his hand.

If Shera’s art began with “understanding beasts through mana,” then this was the first real step.

And Ludger took it the only way he knew how:

By forcing the door open, carefully enough not to break it, then walking through before it could close again.

Ludger dug into his backpack and pulled out a strip of dried meat. He held it out slowly, not like an offering to a pet, but like a practical transaction.

The dire wolf’s nose twitched. Its head angled forward. It didn’t lunge, it had learned, over the last day, that rushing Ludger tended to result in irritation and enforced pats.

So it sniffed first. Then it took the meat from his hand, careful in a way that surprised him. Teeth touched the edge of his glove, then withdrew. The wolf chewed, swallowed, and stared at him like it was deciding whether this made Ludger “less annoying” or “more suspicious.”

Ludger offered another piece. Then another. After a while, the creature shifted closer. Its posture loosened. Its breathing slowed. The tight tension in its mana current softened into something broader and warmer.

And then it began to lick his hand. Slow at first, testing. Then more confidently, rough tongue dragging over leather and skin where the glove didn’t fully cover. It left moisture. It left scent.

After a few minutes, Ludger’s hand smelled faintly of blood, meat, and wolf breath.

He ignored it. He’d worked with worse. He kept his eyes on the wolf’s mana instead, because that was the real test.

He could feel it clearly now, gratitude wasn’t a word, but it had shape. The animal’s intent had shifted from

tolerate and escape

to something closer to

accept and stay.

The current of wariness was still there, but it wasn’t a blade anymore. It was a fence.

And yet… No System prompt. No click. No new class. Ludger frowned faintly.

So it’s not enough.

He could sense the beast. He could feel the emotional texture in its mana. He could even influence the situation by feeding and staying calm. But the class wasn’t unlocking.

Maybe he needed to refine his senses instead of simply enhancing them with more mana. He was pushing volume when what he needed was clarity. Less force. More precision. A cleaner connection.

Still, a part of him had a sinking feeling: This wasn’t how he would unlock the class. Not by brute taming. Not by feeding. Not by reading gratitude. This art was about pacts. Imprints. A deliberate thread formed with consent, not a gradual softening of aggression.

He was thinking that when the door of Shera’s hut opened. Shera stepped out, wrapped in layers, eyes narrowed against the cold. She approached slowly, watching Ludger and the dire wolf with the wary look of someone witnessing a method they didn’t approve of, but couldn’t deny was working.

She stopped a few paces away.

For a moment she just looked at the wolf licking Ludger’s hand, then at Ludger’s calm posture, then at the faint pulse of mana that still rode under his skin.

Finally, Shera spoke.

“It seems you did it,” she said.

Her tone was flat, no praise, no warmth.

Then she added, almost grudgingly, “Not in a skillful way.”

The dire wolf’s ear flicked toward her voice, but it didn’t move away from Ludger. Shera’s eyes narrowed further.

“But,” she finished, “you did it anyway.”

Ludger didn’t look up immediately. He kept his hand steady so the wolf wouldn’t interpret a sudden movement as change in intent.

Then he glanced at Shera, expression calm, and said, “I’m adapting.”

Shera snorted.

“That much is obvious,” she replied.

Shera watched the wolf a moment longer, then nodded once as if she’d decided the boy had earned the next step.

“This should work now,” she said.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. “Work… how?”

“You can feel the dire wolf’s feelings,” Shera said, almost dismissive, “but that isn’t the pact. Feeling is the door. You still have to walk through it.”

She pointed at the wolf with two fingers.

“Make the pact,” Shera continued. “Imprint your mana.”

Ludger’s jaw tightened slightly. “What do I have to say?”

Shera shrugged.

“That’s for you to decide.”

Ludger stared at her, unamused. “Helpful.”

Shera didn’t care. She kept explaining in that blunt, practical tone that made everything sound both simple and impossible.

“The beast can’t understand your words,” she said. “Not like people do. But it understands your feelings.”

She tapped her own forehead.

“If you put your forehead against the animal,” Shera said, “and then say what you want from it… it should work.”

Ludger frowned.

“That’s not very clear.”

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