P.S: Extra chapter since it's my birthday. Comment if you share the same birthdate with me!!
The moment Julian slid into the testing capsule, his absolute top priority was checking the newly upgraded AI system. He wanted to see just how smart these digital creatures had become.
The quickest way to test it was to interact with a Pokémon directly and try to push its buttons. Julian called out a Pikachu and began messing with it—kneading its cheeks, squeezing its middle, and gently squishing it.
He watched the little mouse's face change in real time. First, Pikachu looked relaxed and comfortable, closing its eyes. Then its brow furrowed slightly. As Julian kept squishing, the expression shifted to pure discomfort, and finally, a flash of genuine anger crossed its face. Before Julian could laugh, Pikachu unleashed a bright crackle of a Thunderbolt, blasting him right in the chest.
Since it was just a game, Julian didn't take any actual damage, though the electric shock left his character stiff and paralyzed on the grass for a short bit.
Reviewing the little encounter, Julian smiled. The previous versions relied strictly on flat, pre-programmed animation loops, but this was entirely different. The emotional reactions felt incredibly organic. The Pokémon didn't just passively sit there and take whatever the player did anymore; they had gained their own distinct little tempers.
Julian decided to push the testing a bit further. He made a few ridiculous faces at the screen, and Pikachu perfectly mimicked them right back. Then he tried shouting a few highly unconventional, messy combat commands. Instead of glitching out, Pikachu processed the strange instructions and executed them flawlessly.
If someone had dropped Julian into this room without any context and told him this Pikachu possessed a genuine soul, he wouldn't have questioned it for a second.
Of course, it made perfect sense from a technical standpoint. As long as you feed an artificial intelligence a massive database, it can analyze any situation and pull the exact right reaction from its library. Even if it wasn't "true" living consciousness, and every movement was just the result of raw data sorting... who could argue that this wasn't a real form of logic?
Curious about the tech, Julian opened the backend files of the quantum matrix.
The moment the screen loaded, a staggering wall of text, variables, and code streams flooded his vision, making his head spin. He scrolled down for five continuous minutes without ever hitting the bottom of the registry. Realizing he was staring at a literal ocean of compressed data, Julian chuckled and closed the window.
Now he fully understood why these digital pets felt so incredibly lifelike. With a massive database of that scale backing them up, they could easily sound more human than actual humans.
Still, Julian noted a distinct line separating this AI from a real person. Humans don't just rely on logic; they are driven by genuine, unguided emotion. These new Pokémon could replicate fear, anger, or shyness perfectly, but those responses were still calculated reactions chosen by the server to match the player's behavior.
True, unpredictable feelings were a different story. For instance, the deep, fiercely obsessive affection Ash's Bayleef showed in the old anime series was something a logical database would never naturally create on its own—unless a developer manually wrote that exact behavior into the code.
But for a commercial game, that wasn't a flaw at all. This tier of artificial intelligence was already indistinguishable from a real living creature to the average player. The next stage of development wouldn't be about chasing true organic emotions anyway; it would focus on tracking a trainer's personal gameplay habits, allowing the AI to naturally fall into perfect sync with its owner over time. After all, if a digital creature gained both independent logic and real human emotions, it wouldn't be a game feature anymore—it would be an autonomous machine.
While Julian was deep in the backend code, Yanqing had entered his own private testing world. Finding himself completely alone without Julian's teasing eyes watching his every move, the young swordsman completely let himself go.
He happily called out a massive crowd of soft, adorable Pokémon, kneeling on the grass to pat their heads and squish their cheeks with a bright smile. Then he summoned a fiery Rapidash and went for a wild, thundering gallop across the plains. He called down a magnificent Pidgeot to practice his mid-air sword-riding balance, and ended his session by locking steel in a fierce, high-speed duel against a wild Scyther. He was having the absolute time of his life.
Unfortunately for the lieutenant, Julian possessed master-tier developer privileges, allowing him to remotely view any active testing screen on the server.
Watching the young Cloud Knight laughing and cheering as he swung his sword against the bug-type, Julian shook his head, a mischievous grin spreading across his face. He quickly hit the capture key, saving a perfect high-definition screenshot of the boy's joyful face to his device.
I definitely need to drop this file into Jing Yuan's mailbox later, Julian laughed to himself. Look at how incredibly repressed this poor kid is back home. Leaving him cooped up in those military offices isn't healthy for his youth at all.
After checking on the boy for a bit, Julian reoriented his focus to test the brand-new Coordinator Contest System.
This part of the expansion was incredibly complex. It didn't just deal with standard elemental numbers; it mapped different move variations, visual particle effects, crowd scoring criteria, fashion styles, and condition metrics. It felt like Julian's team had built a completely separate game inside the Pokémon engine.
Unlike standard battles where a winner is decided by clear, objective health bars, the Contest track relied heavily on abstract concepts like grace, beauty, and coolness. This was the exact reason Julian had stubbornly held this feature back until the third-generation AI could clear the processing hurdles. A low-tier server simply wouldn't have the intelligence required to judge an aesthetic performance.
Even so, back when he had first drafted the proposal, Silver Wolf and Stephen had teased him mercilessly over the comms. Julian had merely provided the creative blueprint, leaving those two tech geniuses to do the heavy lifting, writing the algorithms and re-tuning the core AI to understand human style. The sheer workload had been monumental.
But thanks to their tireless efforts, the finished product ran beautifully. Julian spent an hour testing the stages and walked away thoroughly satisfied. There were a few minor, tiny bugs here and there, but nothing that disrupted the actual fun of the show.
He did note one hard limitation, though: if the studio wanted to host an official, high-stakes galactic tournament for the Contest track down the line, they would still need to recruit real, living people to act as judges. In the realm of pure art and emotion, an AI could never truly replicate the gut feeling of a human spectator.
The Underwater Exploration System, by comparison, was a much simpler mechanism to test. Aside from checking the spawn mechanics for sunken treasure chests, Julian spent his time analyzing how the environment artists had constructed the deep-sea trenches.
The ocean floor was breathtakingly beautiful. The design teams hadn't just relied on basic water textures; they had woven native, glowing sea flora from the Xianzhou waters alongside some of the most striking coral designs harvested from distant out-world planets. With thousands of colorful Water-type Pokémon and schools of aquatic creatures swimming through the currents, the deep sea felt vibrant and alive. It was a massive leap forward compared to the empty, barren oceans of the first two generations.
Meeting the Mind Behind the Screen
Having verified that all the core features of the third generation were running stable, Julian immediately pinged Cai Xing's office, instructing her to begin organizing the regional Closed-Beta phases for the player base. The second generation hadn't required a beta run because the upgrades were minor, but a massive overhaul of this scale required live consumer feedback before the official launch.
Of course, Julian's own validation work was far from finished. He had merely run a quick lap around the surface mechanics; diving deep into the code to ensure every single route ran smoothly would take at least ten days to half a month of continuous play.
But before he could bury his nose back in the software, he had a high-priority meeting to clear. He pulled up his message board and fired a quick text to Stephen:
"Whenever your fingers are free from your keyboard, drop by my testing room in the Storage Zone. There is a grand commercial matter our departments need to discuss."
Julian went back to his game. Since Stephen was residing right here on the space station, he could simply project his digital avatar straight to Julian's coordinates within a single system tick—saving the developer from having to navigate the facility's massive layout.
He lost track of time as he happily explored the routes, until a sharp notification chimed across his visor, indicating a guest had cleared his room boundaries.
Julian uncoupled his consciousness from the capsule, his eyes blinking open to find a figure standing near the console. Sure enough, it was Stephen—and yes, the boy was still stubbornly cloaked inside his flat, animated anime avatar.
Julian let out a loud sigh, leaning back against his chair with a feigned expression of deep, professional displeasure. "Come on, my friend. I have already traveled across light-years to reach the Herta Space Station, which is basically half your home turf. Do you still plan to hide behind a cartoon screen? Our relationship has cleared the validation checks; keeping your real face locked behind a firewall isn't right, is it?"
"Tch," a clear, youthful voice grumbled from the speaker lines. "I knew the second your starskiff docked, my office would absorb this exact complaint."
It wasn't the first time Julian and Silver Wolf had pestered him to drop his filter, but Stephen had always ignored their messages with a casual shrug. But just as Julian said, they were standing inside his own facility now, and given how close their creative synergy had become, he couldn't keep his profile encrypted forever.
The digital anime avatar flickered and dissolved, unmasking his authentic, real-world appearance.
Standing before Julian was a small, young boy with soft, fine features that hadn't even begun to clear the marks of childhood. Judging by the baseline contours of his face, his biological age sat somewhere around thirteen or fourteen years old.
Julian's brain quickly recalled the old historical notes from the Simulated Universe records, which mentioned that the boy had first encountered the trailblazers while hiding quietly behind the long coats of Madame Herta or Ruan Mei. The data balanced perfectly; the prodigy was literally just a kid. As for why an elite genius of his caliber chose to retain a naturally short stature... for a mind capable of rewriting the laws of physics, altering a basic growth gene was hardly a difficult task. He simply preferred the comfort of his youth.
Julian stared at the short kid for three silent seconds, before bursting into an absolute, unvarnished roar of pure laughter.
"As expected! You are literally just a little brat, hahaha!" Julian cackled, pointing a finger at the boy.
"What is your emergency problem with being a kid?" Stephen huffed, crossing his small arms as a sharp scowl crossed his tender face. "Don't forget that your multi-trillion-credit studio still has to beg this exact 'kid' to handle your high-end server configurations!"
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