A week later.
I was sitting on a comfortable sofa, finishing healing my bloodied shoulder. On the armrest sat a satisfied Pikachu, munching on a fragment of a Lightning Spirit Seed. What had happened, you ask?
It turned out that either my Pikachu had inherited the personality of his original counterpart—who despised staying in a Poké Ball—or that a bare rock in the middle of the ocean was exceptionally boring. I leaned toward the latter option.
In short, he started whining to me through our spiritual connection that he wanted to sit on my shoulder and eat treats. And since we had only recently formed a contract, I had no idea how a refusal might affect our relationship.
I had to figure out how to fix the situation. My Novice-level Summoning element reserve, at the peak of the second tier, was clearly insufficient to keep him in our world indefinitely. And Pikachu wasn't willing to wait for me to break through to the Intermediate level. I had to take a risk.
I decided to steal Hu Yi's Accelerated Recovery talent. She was a peer of mine and a fairly talented girl, though she didn't quite reach the level of national team participants.
Her talent wasn't overly conspicuous. If I calculated the timing of how long my reserves would take to recover without the talent properly, no one would be able to detect it.
I hadn't wanted to take it earlier because Hu Yi's father was far too concerned with her safety and had assigned three Advanced-level mages to guard her.
On the one hand, I understood the man; rumor had it he had lost his fertility and she was his only heir.
On the other hand, why assign a trio of Advanced-level mages to protect a sixteen-year-old girl? Who on earth would want to attack her? Well... besides me.
Since I had spent the entire previous month gathering information on all the talented individuals I was interested in, I didn't need to develop a plan to steal her talent from scratch.
Six days of tracking her daily routine and her guards' positions were enough to find a moment when one guard was cornering a young school teacher in a storage room, and the second had stepped away to make a phone call. I only needed to deal with the third.
My first attempt at an attack failed. The guard possessed an artifact that protected against spiritual attacks, and he managed to sound the alarm. I had to slip away into another parallel world.
On my second attempt, I simply rushed up to him with a fourfold speed boost and struck the back of his head with a steel pipe. I hit a newly activated artifact armor.
Holy crap, did this dad spend his entire family fortune equipping his daughter's guards?! I had to retreat to my world and figure out how to spirit his ward right out from under his nose without killing him.
On my third attempt, I blinded the guard with a flash of light element right in the eyes, grabbed the girl at fourfold speed, and bolted, weaving through the school corridors. Then, locking myself in the basement, I stripped her of her talent.
The well-rehearsed procedure took less than thirty seconds, but the guard smashed down the basement door and managed to graze my shoulder with a wind blade right before I slipped back into my world. If I hadn't been standing right next to his charge, he would have hit me much harder.
When I finally finished healing my shoulder, my phone rang from an unknown number. Having a rough idea of who was calling, I answered and immediately fired off before the other person could get a word in:
"No, how many times do I have to send your phone sex hotline on a long walk?! Stop calling me! If I stop talking right now and a sexy female voice answers me again, I'm hanging up! Stop trying to corrupt a young man in his prime with your perversions!"
"..." Tang Yue was taken aback by this and didn't dare speak, afraid I'd hang up.
"Come on, Teacher Tang Yue, I'm joking. What do you need?" I quickly steered the conversation back to normal before she decided I was a lunatic and hung up. I didn't want to lose my future ticket to the National Team.
"...You've got some weird jokes. How did you even know it was me?" the young woman inquired.
"Intuition." Well, what else could I say? Mysterious men are more attractive to women. Not that I was planning to flirt with her, but still.
"...Fine, drop it. I have a favor to ask, details not over the phone. Can you come to a small town south of the Yangtze River, just north of Hangzhou?"
"And what's the payment for this favor?" I didn't agree immediately.
"What do you want for your help?" Miss Judge tried to probe my appetite.
"I want all the resources and treasures we acquire while fulfilling your request. And a headpat from above." I made a very profitable offer for her since she didn't know about the Fire Spirit Seed we would find. Let her think I foolishly missed out on my share.
"Deal!" That was suspiciously fast consent, Teacher Lady. You really need to learn how to lie. "I'll text you the address right now, I'll be waiting for you there tomorrow at 12:00." She quickly hung up before I could change my mind.
"Well, Pikachu, it's time for us to set off on our first adventure!" Reading the text message, I threw my hand up, addressing the blue rat that had just finished eating its lightning seed fragment.
"Pika-pika! (Lead us, road of adventure!)" it hopped joyfully.
As Pikachu and I rode in a taxi through the small town of Yamen, I couldn't help but notice the cracked soil and abandoned fields. Even the river the town was built on had dried up. Clear signs of a Fire Spirit Seed gestating.
When we passed by a pet outfit shop, Pikachu tugged on my T-shirt and pointed at it with his paw. His eyes even sparkled; he wanted to go in that badly.
Sighing, I asked the taxi driver to pull over and wait. Five minutes later, we were back in the car. The driver stared with wide eyes at a life-content Pikachu dressed in a detective outfit complete with a magnifying glass. I probably shouldn't have told him we were going to conduct an investigation.
Finally, we pulled up to the hotel. It was a standard two-story building with a sign that read "Yamen Hotel"—that's what a lack of competition does to you, absolutely zero creativity.
Walking inside with Pikachu on my shoulder, who was busy examining everything through his magnifying glass, I saw Tang Yue sitting by the window. She was dressed in a pink office lady suit. The top two buttons of her white blouse were unbuttoned, revealing the clean, white skin of her neck.
Seeing me, she walked over and opened her mouth to say something, but noticing Pikachu in his detective outfit on my shoulder, inspecting her through his magnifying glass, she froze in a stupor.
"Don't mind him, this is my spatial summon, he's a bit playful. Now, can you explain why you called me here?" Addressing her unspoken question, I steered the dialogue in the right direction.
"I don't recognize this creature, what species is it? He's so cute!" Tang Yue ignored my question and stared with stars in her eyes at a proud Pikachu puffing out his chest. Women...
"He's an elemental lightning creature, you can call him the Prince of Lightning. I gave him the name Pikachu," I introduced the blue rat. "So, what about the case?"
"The Prince of Lightning!? You lucky dog! Ahem, let me introduce myself properly. As you know, my name is Tang Yue, but I'm not just a regular teacher—I'm a member of the Magic Court." Seeing no exaggerated reaction from me, Tang Yue looked a little disappointed.
"I'm here to apprehend a dangerous criminal, but he's already slipped away from me once and remembers my appearance. That's why I want you to tail him. I'll follow you from a distance, and when it's time to capture him, I'll approach you using shadow magic. Your job is simply to follow him so I can conserve my shadow element reserves," Tang Yue explained the situation.
"I'll understand if you refuse; after all, this Chao He is a dangerous criminal. The number of mages he's killed is approaching a hundred. Among them are even a few Intermediate-level ones." Noticing my expressionless poker face, Tang Yue gave me a chance to back out. She probably only just realized that sending a recent high schooler to tail an experienced killer wasn't the best idea.
"Don't worry, Teacher Tang Yue, I won't refuse. But for the added difficulty, I ask for an increased reward: the privilege of calling you by your first name." I smiled at her. The better our relationship, the higher the chance I'd get invited to the Totem Snake event.
"...Agreed," she consented, blushing slightly. Apparently, she was too ashamed to call upon other court colleagues because she had already let the criminal slip away once, and besides me, she had no one else to turn to.
"Well, Pikachu? Shall we go catch a criminal?" I glanced sideways at the blue rat.
"Pika-chu! (Gotta catch 'em all!)" He hoisted his magnifying glass high.
The hunt begins.