“Join a Gym?” Tai went quiet when he heard that. He actually thought it over, but after a while he could only smile bitterly and shake his head. “That won’t work. No Gym in the Orange Archipelago is going to make an enemy of Team Rocket over one kid. They all just want to keep their heads down.”

“Who said anything about a Gym in the Orange Archipelago? I’m talking about the Cinnabar Gym on Cinnabar Island in Kanto. Its Leader is Blaine, an old-school Fire-type Elite Four–level trainer. Protecting one child would be nothing to him.”

“You know Blaine?” Tai stared at him again. He had assumed Rai was just a League mole, but now Blaine was in the picture too. Any trainer who came out of the training camp knew the names of the League’s heavy hitters. Learning who not to provoke was practically part of graduation.

“Don’t look so shocked. I know Lance too. Want me to introduce you?” Reiji smiled mysteriously. As an undercover man, he loved borrowing other people’s prestige. And really, if he said he knew Lance, nobody could call that a bluff.

“Fine. I believe you…”

Forget Lance for the moment. If it was Blaine’s Gym instead, then maybe this really could work. For now, Tai was willing to believe him. The real problem was how his sister would get into Blaine’s Gym in the first place.

“That part’s easy.” Reiji thought of the Indigo Plateau Conference. Once it was over, he planned to invite Amber to the Orange Archipelago for a trip. Blaine would almost certainly come with her, and once he did, there would be plenty of time to arrange the rest.

“There’s no rush. As long as you’ve made up your mind to come over to my side, I can get your sister into the Cinnabar Gym.”

“Good. I’ll remember that. How do I contact you?” Tai let out a quiet breath. His sister’s future had been settled, which meant the biggest thing weighing on him was gone. Everything after this would be much simpler.

He was risking his life for someone either way. If he had a choice, he wanted to stand in the light instead of walking Team Rocket’s road all the way into the dark. Especially when Team Rocket had been treating him like disposable cannon fodder from the start. He had never felt much loyalty to them.

“The phone’s out. Team Rocket might be monitoring it, and I can’t contact you first anyway. If you want to reach me, come to Mikan Island. I’m a trainer at the Mikan Gym. Or you can have Haunter deliver a message.”

“Got it.” Tai silently fixed the address in his memory. Right now, he was still just a nobody. Team Rocket probably wasn’t paying much attention to him yet.

Once he got back to the Orange Archipelago, he would have to keep himself hidden as much as possible. If he was forced to stand out, Team Rocket would tighten the leash, and when that happened, they would definitely go after Komai.

Still, with Reiji as a fallback, he could send his sister away at any time. As long as she made it into a Gym, he would have nothing left to fear.

“All right, that’s enough for now. If there’s nothing else, I’m logging off.” Reiji yawned. Getting dragged awake in the middle of the night had done nothing good for his mental state.

“Uh… do you know any way out of the mess I’m in right now?” Seeing that Reiji was about to leave, Tai immediately swallowed his pride and asked how he could speed up the mutation of his Muk and Haunter.

His life was riding on this. There was no room for embarrassment when the price of failure was death.

“That?” Reiji looked at him. “Your training method’s gone off in the wrong direction.” Since Tai had brought it up himself, and since they had already laid everything on the table, Reiji didn’t mind giving him a few pointers. Tai was even willing to send his sister over. Honestly, Reiji had only met him twice, and he still had no idea where all that trust came from.

Still, trust deserved something in return. “Muk and Haunter aren’t Pokémon that fear poison. They are poison. Poison is their natural state. If you want to force a mutation in something like that, then you need to raise the dosage.”

“Raise the dosage? But the books say that if the toxin is too strong, Muk could split apart. It might even lose consciousness completely.” Tai had considered that before. If Muk broke apart from a toxic overload, he would lose it for good.

“Muk might split. Haunter’s a cloud of gas. It’s already basically formless. Even if it does split, how hard would it be to pull itself back together?”

Reiji spread his hands helplessly. Haunter was gas. Even if it dispersed, it could just gather back into one mass again.

“What about Muk, then?” Tai had read that Muk couldn’t handle being pushed too hard, so he had never really thought about Haunter’s side of it. Now that Reiji had pointed it out, the answer suddenly felt obvious. He could test that part right away.

“When I say raise the dosage, I don’t mean dump in more than Muk can take all at once. Increase it in stages. Keep increasing it in stages until the Pokémon falls asleep. That’s the most it can handle. Once it falls asleep, it starts digesting the toxins.”

“And Muk’s case is different anyway. Grimer lines reproduce by splitting. That means your whole approach is off. It shouldn’t be about feeding it poison. It should be about merging poisons. Better yet, merge in toxins refined by other Grimer. Let your Muk digest and purify toxins that another Grimer has already processed. That’ll speed the mutation up a lot.”

“After all, Grimer understands Grimer better than anything else does. There won’t be any rejection, and it’ll know exactly which part of another Grimer’s body is the richest stuff. Especially a black Grimer. Those are even more toxic.”

“If your Muk can absorb the toxins from a black Grimer, it should finish mutating very quickly.”

“A black Grimer…” Tai sighed. Reiji had definitely opened up a new line of thinking for him, but finding one was another matter entirely. “That’s easier said than done. I had Haunter search every sewer in the city, and it didn’t find a single one.”

“Then your luck really is awful. I found one as soon as I got here.” Reiji smiled. He wasn’t trying to show off. His Pokémon were just that capable.

“Yeah? Then your luck’s amazing.” Tai had nothing left to say besides that. He was already close to giving up on finding one.

“And even if you can’t find a black Grimer, why not make one yourself? If you’re too scared to risk your own Muk splitting, then use the Grimer in the sewers. There are tons of them. Just keep pushing toxins into them hard enough. Any Grimer that survives could mutate. Then your own Muk can absorb toxins from those black Grimer later.”

“…You can do that?” Tai paused. The more he thought about it, the more workable it sounded. He was reluctant to gamble with his own Muk, but wild Grimer were a different story.

There were Grimer everywhere in this place. Sometimes a single chunk of sludge falling off one was enough to produce another. Add in all the industrial pollution, and the whole area was basically the perfect breeding ground for them. Grimer were worth next to nothing here.

If he set up a brutal survival-of-the-fittest cycle and kept feeding the process, sooner or later a few black Grimer would come out of it. Once he had those, he could use them to train his own Muk.

And honestly, it wouldn’t even cost much. Toxin crystals were common in the sewers. Grimer were common too. All it really took was time.

“I’ve got a naturally mutated Grimer on hand. Want it?” Reiji finally got to the point. After talking that long, even his throat was starting to dry out.

“How much?” Tai had been waiting for that line, but he wasn’t stupid enough to ask whether Reiji was just giving it to him.

The last two Pokémon had been payment for silence. This time, money made more sense. Free things were always the most expensive in the end.

He already owed Reiji once. His sister’s future would put him even further in debt. He had no intention of piling more on top of that.

“Two million. Call it a friendly rate.” Reiji paused for a moment before naming the price. He hadn’t even checked the mutant Grimer’s potential. It was fine to sell it casually. Something like that was only worth a few million anyway.

“Done.” Tai agreed without even thinking about it. A naturally mutated Grimer was expensive in a place like this. Two million really was a bargain.

“When you wake up, you’ll see a Poké Ball outside the window. That’s the Grimer.” While he spoke, Reiji had already sent Darkrai to make the delivery.

Then, without changing expression, he asked casually, “That Team Rocket black market… it wouldn’t happen to be the power plant where you work, would it?”

“That’s right. You saw me, didn’t you?” Tai nodded and admitted it. Since Reiji had guessed that much, there was no point hiding it. “We usually work there in power plant uniforms, and it really is a functioning power plant. The black market is hidden underneath it.”

“I’m going there tomorrow to take a look. If you see me, you’ll recognize me immediately.” Reiji smiled. He had no idea what kind of good stuff the place might have, but he did have a batch of hot merchandise to move. A black market visit sounded perfect.

“All right. I’ll pay you then.” Tai wasn’t trying to dodge the debt. He knew better than that. If he was going to follow Reiji from now on, then this was the bare minimum of trust he had to keep.

“Good enough. We’ll talk again then.” Reiji could feel the conversation winding down. Dawn was still a long way off, and both of them still had half a night left to sleep.

Not a bad night’s work. Two million earned, and a Team Rocket inside man added to the board. Things were starting to get interesting.

“Then I’m off.” Tai was already itching to test the training method Reiji had just given him.

But the moment he stood up, he froze. How exactly was he supposed to go back? This was a dream.

“I—”

He never got the rest out. Darkrai kicked him straight out of the nightmare group chat. Tai shot upright in bed, drenched in sweat, eyes snapping to the streetlamp outside the window.

His whole body was soaked. His shirt clung to his chest and back. He pinched himself hard enough to hurt, looked around at the familiar furniture, and only then realized he was really back.

He went to the window and saw the Poké Ball resting on the sill. That was when he finally accepted it. He really had been dreaming. He really had met Rai, who had vanished for over two months, and the two of them really had talked through all of that. It had all been real.

But this wasn’t the time to dwell on it. He opened the window at once and brought the Poké Ball in from outside. The instant he did, a foul stench hit him in the face. Reiji clearly hadn’t used a special odor-blocking ball for the mutant Grimer.

The smell caught him completely off guard. He ended up carrying the Poké Ball to the bathroom with one hand while pinching his nose shut with the other and breathing through his mouth.

Once inside, he immediately released Weepinbell and the black Grimer, then had Weepinbell knock the Grimer out and slice off a few pieces of black sludge from its body.

After that, he released his Muk and let it absorb the black sludge on the floor. Muk’s body slowly flowed over it, engulfing it little by little. The reaction was immediate. The section that had absorbed the sludge turned black as well.

“It works. Weepinbell, cut off some more.” Tai had Weepinbell keep going while Muk continued absorbing it. Only when the black Grimer had been reduced to about the size of a small bowl did he finally tell Weepinbell to stop.

Muk absorbed every last piece of black sludge that had been cut away. By the time it finished, roughly a quarter of its body had turned black.

So the method worked, and the effect was incredible. At this rate, Muk would finish the transformation within a week and be able to withstand even stronger toxins afterward.

With that black Grimer in hand, plus the others he planned to cultivate himself, Tai was confident he could push his Muk to quasi–Elite Four tier within three months.

As for the black Grimer that had been carved down so much, it had shrunk badly. He would need to take it to a dump and let it gorge on trash so it could build itself back up. No reason not to recycle it.

That black Grimer was basically a battery for Muk. Let it devour garbage, refine toxins, and bulk its body back up. Then cut away the purified black sludge again and let Muk absorb it. A perfect loop.

Tai laughed out loud. That strange mystery man really was his lucky star. One casual suggestion had slashed the time Muk needed to mutate. And he would need more black Grimer. Starting tomorrow, he could begin catching wild Grimer and force-breeding them until more appeared.

“And Haunter too.” Tai returned the black Grimer to an odor-blocking Poké Ball, then released Haunter and fed it every toxin crystal it had gathered, along with the toxin crystals Muk had produced.

This time, he was going to push Haunter to the limit and force the change through. What he never expected was for Haunter to flare with brilliant light after swallowing a little over a hundred toxin crystals.

It was evolving.

Even Haunter itself looked startled. When the light finally faded, Haunter was gone, and in its place stood a Gengar as black as ink.

The newly evolved Gengar only managed a couple of confused cries before its body wobbled and collapsed onto the bathroom floor, where it fell fast asleep.

“This… was the poison too strong? Or was it too many toxin crystals?” Tai stared at it in disbelief. “It really fell asleep. He called it exactly.”

Not only had Gengar dropped into a deep sleep, it had also completed the transformation Tai had been dreaming about the whole time. It had become a black Gengar. The darker the color, the deadlier the poison.

Since Gengar was asleep, he returned it to its Poké Ball and decided to wait until it woke up before collecting any more toxin crystals. Instructor Viper had warned him before that Gengar’s toxicity had no upper limit. The real danger was accidentally poisoning himself.

He had bought that Haunter through one of Viper’s channels, and with a pretty generous discount too. That alone showed how highly Viper thought of him. But appreciation was one thing. This was not a ship Tai intended to go down with.

At most, he felt a little gratitude for the way Viper had looked after him. As for Team Rocket, who had treated him like disposable bait, he felt no attachment at all. They were nothing but a stepping stone. Now he had a new boss, and maybe one day he could wash himself clean.

That future really was something to look forward to.

Living in the light with his sister…

Yeah. That sounded good.

[End of chapter]

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