The audience in the Liuyundu Stadium was left with a complex aftertaste following the match between Silver Wolf and the mysterious "Part-Timer."
It wasn't that the battle lacked excitement. On the contrary, the two had engaged in a fierce, high-speed collision of wits that far surpassed the technical level of the earlier rounds. Silver Wolf's desperate, aggressive surge at the finish was a sight to behold. Yet, the atmosphere felt... bizarre. It was like watching two grandmasters play a high-stakes game of chess, only for one to reveal halfway through that they were actually playing "Go," and the other to win by flipping the table.
Fortunately, the scheduled semifinal between Fu Xuan and Welt Yang was set to begin immediately, providing the perfect distraction to sweep the strangeness under the rug.
In the contestant lounge, Silver Wolf wasn't celebrating her victory. She was hunched over her holographic interface, her fingers moving in a blur as she frantically tried to bypass the "Part-Timer's" network firewall.
"What the...?" she muttered, her brow furrowing. "This feels... wrong. This encryption logic..."
She had cracked thousands of systems across the galaxy, but this particular wall had a specific "flavor." It was elegant, logical, and incredibly stubborn.
"Wait," she froze, her eyes widening as she recognized a recursive sub-routine. "Why is there a Screwllum-grade firewall on a fruit shop employee's signal?"
Silver Wolf was tracking a real-world holographic broadcast signal, which shouldn't have touched the deep-space network databases of the Genius Society. Unless... the "Part-Timer" wasn't just a fan. He was an insider.
"I'll see who you really are!"
Her competitive streak had turned into a full-blown investigative obsession. Is he Screwllum's protégé? An illegitimate AI experiment? Her wicked sense of humor flared up. I just wanted to meet an online rival, but I might have stumbled into a Genius Society scandal.
She pushed deeper, following the signal's leap-frog path across the stars until it reached its final destination: Herta Space Station.
Silver Wolf's fingers snatched back from the keyboard as if it had turned white-hot. She immediately terminated the connection and scrubbed her local logs.
Elio had been very specific in his last prophecy: The Space Station is the nursery of the future. Do not alert the mistress of the house before the Curio is ready.
"Deep breaths," she whispered, wiping cold sweat from her forehead. "Elio's script shouldn't be that fragile... I hope."
Inside the master control zone, Screwllum was currently calibrating the algorithmic weight of the Simulated Universe. Suddenly, his monocle flickered with a crimson warning light. His personal firewall had been breached.
He prepared to initiate a counter-trace, but the intrusion stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The hacker had vanished into the digital void.
"Screwllum? Why have you stopped?" Herta asked, her puppet-body tilting its head. She was busy adjusting the occurrence rates of specific Curios and didn't appreciate the interruption.
"My apologies. Someone just bypassed the secondary firewall I installed for the internal network. However, they withdrew the moment they gained access."
"Hmph. Was it that Stellaron Hunter girl again?" Herta sighed. Since she had completed her own puppet sequence, she viewed time as a secondary resource and had grown accustomed to Silver Wolf's periodic "testing" of her patience. "It's been a few months, hasn't it? I'll have to find a way to lock her out of the station permanently soon."
Screwllum's internal clock provided the exact data. "To be precise: two months, fifteen days, and three system hours since her last attempt. However, based on past behavioral data, Silver Wolf does not 'withdraw' once she breaks a wall. She usually leaves a digital graffiti tag or attempts to download my memory core."
Screwllum pulled up the entry logs. His mechanical eyes whirred. "Fascinating. She wasn't attacking the station. She was tracking a return signal... from Stephen."
"Stephen? Why would she be tracking that recluse?"
Most of the galaxy knew that Herta and Screwllum were the faces of the Simulated Universe. Very few knew about Ruan Mei, and almost no one outside the inner circle knew about Stephen Lloyd, the 84th member of the Genius Society. He never left his home planet and certainly never visited the station.
Herta waved a hand, and a communication window appeared. A projection of a young man—the real face behind the "Part-Timer" avatar—appeared before them.
"Stephen! Why is a Stellaron Hunter hunting you?" Herta demanded.
Stephen Lloyd looked up from a crate of digital fruit, looking more confused than frightened. "A hacker? Oh... did she beat me? Why is she tracking me? Does she want to meet... offline?"
The word "offline" sent a visible tremor through the young genius. It wasn't that he feared Silver Wolf's skills; he just lived in perpetual terror of actual human interaction.
"Beat you?" Herta's brow climbed. "You were fighting a Stellaron Hunter?"
"Conclusion: They were playing a game," Screwllum interjected, his logic processors connecting the dots.
"It is a game," Stephen said, his eyes suddenly lighting up with an uncharacteristic spark. "But I prefer to call it a masterpiece of competitive ecology! It's called Pokémon. The battle logic is sublime, the attribute depth is staggering, and it allows for a level of strategic expression I haven't seen in centuries!"
Once the floodgate of his passion was opened, the socially anxious Stephen couldn't stop. He spent the next ten minutes enthusiastically explaining type-matchups, the beauty of the Ditto transform mechanic, and how he had used holographic projection to attend a tournament on the Xianzhou Luofu.
Herta stared at him, bewildered. "So... you lost a video game to a criminal, and now she's obsessed with finding you?"
"I think I frustrated her with my Ditto strategy," Stephen admitted, looking sheepish. "I wasn't trying to lose, but I also didn't want to win too much and draw attention. It seems I failed at the latter."
"No wonder that girl hasn't been bothering my servers lately," Herta shook her head, dismissing the communication window. "She's found a digital nursery to play in."
Herta turned back to the Simulated Universe, but Screwllum remained motionless, staring at the data packets Silver Wolf had left behind.
"Screwllum?" Herta prompted. "Is there a problem?"
"A realization," Screwllum replied.
"The game Stephen describes... it utilizes a Path-based projection to simulate 'Soul' in the Pokémon. It is a bridge between pure code and sentient emotion. If a Stellaron Hunter and a member of the Genius Society can both be captivated by it..."
Screwllum's mechanical heart hummed with a rare curiosity. "Perhaps, Madam Herta, we should investigate this Arceus Studio. This 'game' may hold the key to the sentient evolution I have been seeking for my people."