Taming the Beast World with a Frying Pan-Chapter 121: The Root of Blind Faith

"You have to trust me."

The words hung in the lavender-scented air, heavy and suffocating.

Ren raised a skeptical eyebrow, looking from the glowing blue root in Vex’s hand to his uncharacteristically solemn face.

"You make it sound so easy," she muttered, crossing her arms.

Trust him? Ren didn’t trust this tricksy fox as far as she could throw him—and considering he was a six-foot-plus wall of muscle, that wasn’t very far. He had done nothing but give her reasons to not trust him.

"Why?" Ren asked, her voice sharp. "Why do I need to trust you?"

Vex stepped closer, the neon blue veins of the root pulsing in his grip.

"Because," he said, his voice dropping to a serious, almost clinical tone. "I need both you and Kael to drink the sap from this root. No questions asked."

Ren bristled immediately. "Excuse me? Drink a glowing mystery juice? No questions asked? That sounds like the start of a series of very bad decisions."

"It is the only way," Vex insisted. "This is the Root of the Silent Void. It is an extremely rare, psychoactive tuber found only in the deepest, darkest trenches of the underworld forest."

He held it up to the light.

"The plant’s properties are... temperamental. It reacts to intent. It only works if the user is unaware of what it can do. If you know the mechanism, your mind will subconsciously fight the effects, and the cure will fail."

Ren blinked. "That... makes absolutely no sense."

But then again, nothing in her life currently made sense. A few months ago, she was whisking béchamel sauce for French royalty and worrying about her business loans. Right now, she was standing in a hollow tree, wearing a leopard-skin dress, arguing with a three-tailed fox man about magic vegetables.

Her instinct was to scream for the System.

But she stopped herself.

If she asked the System, it would tell her everything. And if Vex was telling the truth—for once in his miserable, chaotic life—her knowledge could kill Kael.

She couldn’t risk it.

Ren looked at the fox. He wasn’t smirking. He didn’t look smug or mischievous. The annoying twinkle of amusement that usually danced in his orange eyes was gone, extinguished completely. His face was stone cold serious.

It was a look so foreign on his features that it actually unsettled her more than his teasing.

Ren looked at Kael’s sleeping form. She didn’t have the luxury of time to debate the scientific method.

"Fine," Ren breathed out, her shoulders slumping. "I’ll drink the weird plant juice."

"Good," Vex nodded, not relaxing an inch. "You also need to listen and follow each of my instructions very carefully."

Ren nodded, swallowing the lump of fear in her throat. She watched him pull a stone mortar and pestle from the wooden chest.

"Have... have you administered this cure before?" she asked quietly.

Vex froze. His hand hovered over the root. He remained silent for a long, agonizing moment, staring at the glowing veins as if contemplating whether to tell her the truth or not.

"I did," he admitted finally, his voice low. "Not too long ago. But it was unsuccessful."

Ren’s eyes widened. The air left her lungs. "Unsuccessful?"

She hadn’t even considered the possibility that this was a gamble.

"What happened?" she whispered.

Vex began to crush the root, the blue sap oozing out like neon blood.

"It is my own theory," he explained, working rhythmically. "The Feral Madness is driven by an overload of primal emotion—rage, hunger, instinct. It is a flood that drowns the rational mind. I believe the cure is not to suppress the emotion, but to overpower it with a stronger one. Love. Hate. Lust."

He looked up at her.

"At the beginning of Stage 3, the madness peaks. Usually, the beast is lost. But if they can shift back to beastman form during this stage... it means they have focused on something. An anchor."

He gestured to Kael.

"I have never actually witnessed a beast shift back at Stage 3. Until Kael."

Vex’s eyes bored into hers.

"My theory is correct about the anchor. You are his anchor. His obsession with you is the only thing tethering his soul to his body right now. If we can induce a feeling stronger than the madness, we can pull him back."

Ren felt a heavy weight settle on her chest.

"But you said... you tried it before," Ren pressed. "And it failed."

"Yes," Vex sighed, pouring the sap into a small wooden bowl. "You are not the first to try to cure Kael."

Ren’s brow furrowed. "What?"

"Vara," Vex spat the name out with distaste. "She came to me a few weeks ago. She brought me all the treasures of the Tiger Tribe. She wanted me to cure him."

Ren’s blood began to boil.

"He was only at Stage 1 then," Vex continued. "And he was under the effects of the slow-acting poisons she was feeding him. I told her it couldn’t be done. At Stage 1, the madness isn’t ripe enough to be anchored. There is nothing to grab onto."

He shrugged, a glimpse of his mercenary nature shining through.

"But she was stubborn. And annoying. And I had nothing to gain from convincing her otherwise. So, I took the treasures. I helped her administer the cure."

Vex paused, looking at the blue liquid.

"It was unsuccessful, of course. Because it was too soon. It only worsened his condition, accelerating him toward Stage 2."

Ren’s hands curled into fists at her sides, her nails digging into her palms until they stung.

Vara.

It was all her fault.

Ren hated Vara with her entire being. A dark, cold rage settled in her gut, heavy and sharp.

’I swear,’ Ren thought, her jaw clenching, ’if Kael survives this, I am going to find that witch. And I am going to exact revenge. I don’t care if she’s a tiger and I’m a human. I have a frying pan and a lot of repressed anger.’

Vex stood up, holding the bowl of glowing blue sap. He walked over to her, blocking her view of Kael.

He looked her dead in the eye.

"So, I will ask you one more time, Little Rose," Vex said softly. "Do you trust me?"

Sirens were going off in Ren’s head.

There was no certainty. Vex’s method was a theory—a hypothesis that had already failed once. He was admitting, right to her face, that she and Kael were essentially guinea pigs in a magical, high-stakes experiment.

But she had no time to consider otherwise, and she had gone through so much to get here. Even risking her relationship with Syris.

With a deep breath that rattled in her chest, Ren looked him in the eye.

"I trust you."