The fourteenth day of their journey north. Cloudy.

Today was seven days since Gastly fell asleep, and Haunter had finally woken up.

Today was also his seventh day holed up in the villa, focused on training his Pokémon.

Today was his ninth day on Mandarin Island.

And it was the thirty-fifth day since the Pokémon Egg had gone into the incubator.

Thirty-five days already, and there was still no sign of it hatching. Today also happened to be the end of Eevee’s normal incubation window.

But ever since the Egg started absorbing electricity, Reiji had completely given up on the idea that it might be an Eevee. There was no way this thing was an Eevee anymore. The most likely outcome was an Electric-type Pokémon, yet the fact it still hadn’t hatched was what puzzled him the most.

In another five days, it would hit the incubation period a pseudo-legendary needed. He really didn’t believe this Egg belonged to a pseudo-legendary species.

If it still hadn’t hatched by then, he’d stop expecting anything from it at all.

In the end, it was just a brown Pokémon Egg. There was no way this was the egg of some Legendary, right?

If a bunch of Pokémon Hunters really had that kind of busted luck, why would they be going after Pidgeot’s baby? They could just sit on this Egg and raise whatever came out.

Back when he took the Egg, he’d felt a thin layer of dried salt crusting the shell. That meant the Pokémon Hunters had picked it up at sea on their way to Fairchild Island, so even they didn’t know what species it was. There was no way he could.

He’d started incubating it half out of curiosity anyway. He hadn’t expected to still be incubating it more than thirty days later. Even after renting the villa, he’d kept the incubator plugged in just so this electricity-hungry Egg could draw as much power as it wanted.

It had now been seven full days since he plugged the incubator into the villa’s power. For the first five days straight the Egg had guzzled electricity without stopping, and only then finally calmed down. He had no idea how much of the villa’s power bill it had eaten.

Not that it mattered. Utilities were baked into the rent. He had no intention of staying here for a full month anyway, so he’d just treat the unused rent as paying for the electricity.

The reason he wasn’t planning to stay a whole month was simple: Haunter had woken up—woke up right in the middle of breakfast, in fact. That meant it was time for the evolution research to resume.

This time Haunter had slept for a full week. Once Haunter woke, Reiji had it devolve back into Gastly and spit out all the Poison-type items it still had in its body: the Toxic Orb, the Black Sludge, and three Poison Gems.

The result was that both held items had dropped down to around Level 22–23, and all three Poison Gems had hit zero purity—dulled into colorless scrap stones.

After digesting that much poison, Gastly’s change was impossible to miss. Even without opening its panel, you could tell at a glance that something was drastically different.

Gastly’s face, once pitch-black, had turned a deep violet. Reiji had the distinct feeling he’d just created something outrageous.

[Gastly (Shiny)]

[Type: Ghost + Poison]

[Gender: Male]

[Potential: 60.34%]

[Level: 13.61%]

[Ability: …]

That was Gastly’s current status. It had become a Shiny Pokémon, and the proficiency of all its Ghost-type, Psychic-type, Dark-type, and severe poison moves had gone up.

In fact, every move Gastly knew had increased in proficiency, and by more than its level had risen. He had no idea if this counted as artificially forcing out a “born gifted” talent.

Originally, Gastly had just been an ordinary one. Its only special trait was the ability to evolve and devolve freely. Now he’d somehow pushed it all the way into shiny territory.

Finding a Croagunk with ridiculous Poison potential was one thing. Running into a shiny Shelmet with Hidden Power was another.

But Gastly had gone even further off the rails: its Ghost, Psychic, and Poison moves were all ahead of its level, and there were no side effects at all.

Then those poison items had gone and turned it shiny on top of that. This really did feel like he’d struck pure gold.

Once he’d sent the rest of the team off to do their usual morning drills, Reiji took Gastly back to the storeroom and restarted the evolution experiments. The Elite Four tier was nowhere near this Gastly’s ceiling.

This time Gastly would be ramming into the Champion threshold. Reiji had no intention of using Poison-type energy for the push; he planned to break the threshold with Ghost-type energy, and use Poison-type and Psychic-type energy to keep raising Gastly’s potential.

But overdose on Poison and Gastly would get drunk. He needed to find the right dose—enough Poison-type energy to raise its potential without making it black out.

After shutting the storeroom’s wooden door, he dug all the remaining evolution resources out of his backpack and took inventory.

If the energy Gastly had already burned through to reach the Elite Four tier was, say, ten million, then he planned to throw the remaining fifty million straight into Gastly, and see if that was enough to push its potential up to Champion level.

He didn’t even want to imagine how much energy it would take to go from Champion to full Mega Evolution. That number was beyond him. His rough estimate was at least a hundred million.

For now, he just had to see whether what he had on hand would be enough for the next stretch. Champion and beyond was too far out to worry about yet.

The Dusk Stone still had 30% purity left. He had seven Ghost Gems. The Spell Tag was at Level 35. There were still over two thousand boxes of Life Energy Pokéblocks, which he could always trade for other resources later.

The Twisted Spoon was sitting at Level 34. He had six Psychic Gems and over nine hundred boxes of Psychic-type Pokéblocks.

The Toxic Orb was Level 22. The Black Sludge was Level 23. He had seven Poison Gems and, counting the Croagunk’s venom, seven kilograms of toxic liquid.

Looking at all that, he could see that held items in general had the worst conversion efficiency—Poison items not included. Poison items worked absurdly well on Gastly, and he still didn’t really know why.

In contrast, the Spell Tag and Twisted Spoon were terrible value.

So his plan was to take a thousand boxes of Life Energy Pokéblocks plus the Spell Tag and Twisted Spoon and march them over to that greasy fat guy, and trade the lot for other Pokémon resources.

A thousand boxes of Life Energy Pokéblocks came out to 5.6 million Pokédollars. The Spell Tag and Twisted Spoon had dropped in level, and Reiji wasn’t sure whether Gastly could recharge them to raise their rank again.

If it could, he’d use those two items to swap for more Dusk Stones and Ghost Gems. Those were critical if Gastly was going to cross the Champion barrier.

Going off his earlier calculations, he’d realized that one Dusk Stone and seven Ghost Gems probably weren’t enough. Gastly would need a lot more Ghost-type energy.

Judging by the cost of crossing into Advanced-level and into Elite Four potential, the resources burned to hit Elite Four were already more than four times what Advanced had taken. Champion level would only demand more, not less.

To get Gastly up to the Champion threshold, he’d need at least two Dusk Stones and fifteen Ghost Gems. And that was the conservative estimate.

To give himself some safety margin during the evolution attempts, he’d need another Dusk Stone and ten more Ghost Gems on top of that.

In other words, he still had to buy two more Dusk Stones and eighteen Ghost Gems. Added to the one Dusk Stone and seven Ghost Gems in his bag, that would barely be enough.

If the Spell Tag, Twisted Spoon, and that thousand-box bundle weren’t enough to cover the cost, he’d throw in another five hundred boxes of Life Energy Pokéblocks and five hundred boxes of Psychic-type Pokéblocks to make up the difference.

Once the math was done, he turned back to the resources he still had left and decided to see if they could at least push Gastly’s potential up to the “quasi-Champion” mark.

“Gastly, let’s start with a basic evolution–devolution cycle,” Reiji said, letting Gastly gorge itself on Pokéblocks before beginning the next round of experiments.

(End of Chapter)

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