The monitoring equipment confirmed what he had suspected after the first day of testing, and the confirmation was more interesting than he had expected.
"Water-type healing, that part I already knew," Sieg said, watching the readout from the absorption integration. The shard had gone in cleanly, taken up by Crawdaunt's body without any visible resistance, and the data coming back was doing something he had not anticipated. "But it's not displacing the Mystic Water."
He checked the readout again. Both the Mystic Water's signature and the shard's boost were present and operating simultaneously. Not one replacing the other. Both active, stacking.
The Water-type output amplification from the shard alone was over twenty percent. Above the ceiling of what elemental items were supposed to be able to provide, according to every reference he had read on held-item mechanics. And it wasn't occupying the held-item slot at all, because the Mystic Water was still in there, adding its own contribution on top.
He sat back and thought about what that meant for Crawdaunt's actual output ceiling.
The second shard he gave to Sharpedo, same process, same clean integration. Same results on the readout. Whatever the shards were doing inside the body, they were doing it at a level the equipment could describe but not fully explain. The energy signature that sat underneath the boost, the part that didn't match any known classification, was still present, still doing something the instruments didn't have vocabulary for.
Kyogre's residual influence, if Sieg's reading of the mythology was right. Which it might be, and which would mean the two shards sitting inside his two Water-types were doing something that no current theoretical framework fully accounted for.
He noted this and moved on. These were Crawdaunt and Sharpedo's problems to grow into, not his to solve today.
The Energy Cube machine had been sitting in the dimensional ring since before the voyage. He cleared the desk, assembled the components, and ran a brief warm-up sequence.
He had Madam Meteor's formula archive to thank for most of what he knew about crafting beyond the basic curriculum. She had been meticulous, her notes written with the kind of specificity that only came from someone who had spent decades finding out what happened when you got things slightly wrong. The archive she had left him was probably the most valuable thing he had received from anyone, in the practical daily sense, because it covered gaps that his formal Junior Breeder training didn't touch.
The basic cubes came first, by habit. He had been making them long enough that the steps required no conscious direction; his hands ran through the sequence on their own while the rest of his attention processed other things. Purify, grind, separate, combine, flavor, form, set. The Krokorok-specific batch came out in a few minutes: warm earth tones, firm texture, the specific composition he had worked out over months of tracking what the Pokémon's body responded to most efficiently.
He lined the finished basics up and looked at the intermediate formula.
Three primary ingredients. Ebony resin for the base, dense, dark, slightly bitter in a way that Dark-type Pokémon found appealing rather than off-putting. The juice extract from dried gloomfruit, which had the right energy resonance, but required careful preparation, or it turned caustic. And blackberry, which was straightforward to work with but needed to be integrated last, or it would chemically destabilize the other two.
Plus, the twenty-something supporting materials each had their own handling requirements.
He set up the workspace properly and started.
The rest of the day went in a direction that he recognized from every serious crafting attempt he had made: total absorption. The intermediate formula operated at a precision level that basic muscle memory didn't cover, which meant every step demanded active attention, which meant time moved differently. Lunch arrived via room service, sat in the hall, and was eventually taken away untouched. He noticed this distantly and didn't particularly care.
The pile of failed attempts accumulated in the corner, the way it always did. Partial integrations. Contaminated batches. Three times where the combination had been correct but the timing was off. The formula wanted exactly the right sequence at exactly the right pace, and anything short of that produced something that the detection equipment dismissed with a flat negative reading.
Several hundred attempts. He lost count past two hundred.
He did not seriously consider stopping. This was the thing about crafting that separated people who thought they understood it from people who actually did: the willingness to run the same sequence indefinitely, treating each failure as data rather than a setback, adjusting the variable by the smallest meaningful increment, and going again. The formula was consistent. His execution was the variable. He just had to find the version of the execution that matched what the formula required.
The lamp on the desk was the only light in the room when the machine chimed.
He looked at the output slot.
The cube that had come through was darker than the basic version in a way that was immediately visible, not just in color but in depth. The black had a quality to it, a faint luminescence at the interior that the basic cubes never produced. He picked it up, turned it over, and ran it through the analyzer.
Intermediate Dark-type Energy Cube. Confirmed.
He set it down and looked at it for a moment.
It was a small thing in the absolute sense, and also not small at all, because it was the first one. The first real step past the threshold he had been working toward since before the Chansey voyage. He was not formally at intermediate Breeder level; the certification required competencies across multiple disciplines, and Energy Cube production was only one of them. But one foot was inside the door, and the rest of him would follow.
He put the cube in the small sample case he kept for firsts and went to collect the team.
The training room was exactly as organized and productive as he expected, which was to say: mostly productive, with one specific exception.
Umbreon and Honchkrow had been running their standard nighttime conditioning. Krokorok had been working through the stance adaptation drills he had assigned. Sharpedo and Crawdaunt, even confined to the facility's pool system, had maintained their work.
Zorua was asleep in the corner of the room with its head resting on a coiled training rope, producing small sounds that were audible from the doorway, mouth slightly open, completely and enthusiastically unconscious.
Sieg looked at it.
Sieg picked it up by the scruff.
Zorua woke up in the grip of someone who was clearly not pleased, processed this information in about half a second, and deployed the only defense mechanism it had that worked on Sieg, which was Illusion.
It transformed.
Not into him. Not into Crawdaunt. Into Umbreon, a near-perfect copy, accurate down to the ring markings, the texture of the fur, the particular way Umbreon held its ears when at rest. It looked up at him from inside the borrowed shape with the expression of a Pokémon that had correctly identified its best available play and was committed to it.
Sieg held the Umbreon-shaped Zorua out at arm's length and examined it with professional attention.
The mimic was genuinely impressive. Better than the Umbreon templates he had seen it produce before, the months of structured observation had built up a reference library that Illusion could now draw on with real fidelity. Adding Umbreon to the confirmed set alongside Crawdaunt and the human template meant Zorua had three solid Illusion targets available, which was a meaningful operational expansion.
None of this changed the underlying situation.
He set it down, waited while it dropped the Umbreon form, and rearranged its expression into the performance of a creature that had been extremely wronged and wanted this documented. The eyes were doing the liquid thing, technically functional tear production deployed as rhetoric.
"The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle," Sieg said. "That's the deal."
Zorua produced a mournful sound.
"And the chocolate allocation for this week is suspended."
The mournful sound became considerably less mournful and considerably more pointed. Both small arms came up in the air in what might have been a protest or might have been an attempt to negotiate through gesture. The eyes went wider. Another sound, this one pitched to communicate the specific injustice of disproportionate punishment.
Sieg waited until the performance had fully concluded.
"We can revisit next week if the training logs look different."
Zorua stared at him.
Sieg looked back.
Eventually, Zorua lowered its arms, turned around with the dignity of a creature that was not conceding the moral argument even while accepting the practical outcome, and went to find its energy cube bowl.
Sieg watched it go and felt something in the vicinity of fond, which he noted and did not particularly analyze.