"Xiao Yu, keep up the good work. From now on, if you need anything, just tell Yuwan—no need to stand on ceremony."
Meanwhile, having seen more medical inkfish with his own eyes at the Luo Yu Research Institute, Yu Lei felt utterly reinvigorated.
The weariness of days spent working late into the night was swept away in an instant.
Right now he wished he could skip straight ahead a few years and witness Jingyue Island's flourishing medical field.
"Okay." Luo Yu nodded.
"Xiao Wan, I'll leave this place to you. I'm going to report this to the island lord first."
Yu Lei patted Luo Yu's shoulder, then turned to Yuwan.
"No problem." Watching Director Yu Lei go, Yuwan said, "Uncle's off to claim credit with the island lord. He'll probably carry on about 'a discerning eye for talent' again."
"The Director is your uncle?" Luo Yu asked, having overheard.
"Mm. Why?" Yuwan smiled at him. "He's just my uncle. Who knows—at this rate he might want to take you as his godson."
"Nothing, nothing." Luo Yu laughed. "That's great..."
Phew...
Only once everyone else had gone and it was just her and Luo Yu did Yuwan pat her cheeks and finally feel she could breathe again.
What a surreal day this had been.
She looked at Luo Yu with a complicated expression. This boy she had once taught swimming lessons—was he really such a freak of talent?
The world of geniuses was, as she'd suspected, beyond her.
She had heard of plenty of other geniuses, of course—young scholars on the Canglan Continent, for instance, who had worked out evolution paths for Monarch Species—but those people were all far away from her. Luo Yu was someone genuinely at her side.
"Alright... let's get down to business. About the institute—how do you plan to expand it?" Yuwan took out paper and pen and asked.
Luo Yu thought for a moment. "I want to put the wasteland behind the institute to use and build an inkfish farm and a breeding base."
"It doesn't have to be huge. Just build it to a ten-thousand-inkfish standard."
In his judgment, researching inkfish evolution meant the number of samples absolutely could not be small.
Ten thousand might not even suffice, but there was no need to go much bigger either... it wasn't as if inkfish only ever went in and never came out.
Ten thousand... Yuwan looked up at the sky.
Thank goodness inkfish had no intelligence, caused no destruction, and were easy to raise...
If it were ten thousand Wave Dogs, Luo Yu could go occupy a mountain and crown himself king.
The two of them then spent a long while drawing up plans around the Luo Yu Research Institute.
Since this was a matter of extremely high priority, a construction crew arrived that very day and officially broke ground.
Luo Yu got his first taste of what "Beast Taming speed" meant.
With special abilities lending a hand, plenty of jobs that looked troublesome to him were handled by Beast Masters and mutated beasts—apparently more effective than technology.
"They work fast." When Yuwan came by the next day, Luo Yu couldn't help saying it.
"Time is money, and money is time," Yuwan said. "The Director told their foreman: work too slowly, and they could forget about getting a single project on this island from now on."
"Oh, right—a big batch of inkfish will be in place very soon. Jingyue Island's farmed inkfish are mostly concentrated in the hands of a farmer called Wang Defa."
"He's the island's aquaculture king and the richest man in Shuiyue Village, with leases on many farms—inkfish among them. But the inkfish-farming craze arrived fast and died fast, so the whole lot ended up stuck on his hands."
"The Beast Management Bureau bought his inkfish farms at a low price. Something over two thousand are still alive; once your farm here is built, they'll be transferred to you."
Two thousand!!
At those words, warmth surged through Luo Yu's heart.
Over the following days, he supervised the work from start to finish, and the institute was expanded at breakneck speed, exactly as he intended.
During this stretch, the Dark Octopus and the Eight-Blade Style Octopus finally got around to laying their eggs.
But once the eight eggs came out, Luo Yu felt nothing but mental fatigue.
Of those eight eggs—never mind any possessing the dual talents of "Dark Affinity" and "Eight-Blade Style"—there wasn't a single one that had inherited even one talent on its own!!!
Eight eggs from parents who between them carried two advanced talents, and every single one was an ordinary-talent individual.
"After all that anticipation, too. Without a Breeding Exemplar involved, this simply won't do," Luo Yu said helplessly.
Without a Breeding Exemplar, getting offspring with both "Dark Affinity" and "Eight-Blade Style" at the advanced level would probably take a dozen, even dozens of matings before one might appear... What self-respecting octopus could stand up to breeding and egg-laying at that kind of frequency?
Meanwhile, on the other front, it took less than a week.
In the wasteland behind the institute rose four enormous farming ponds, far larger than the small backyard pond, ringed by wire fencing—plus a marine life breeding base covered by an enclosed greenhouse.
The two sites stood side by side, connected to the institute's backyard.
The open-air ponds suited large-scale inkfish farming, while the enclosed greenhouse was fully equipped—a natural incubator for inkfish breeding.
Once the Director gave the order, execution was terrifyingly efficient. As soon as the breeding base took rough shape, inkfish came pouring in from every direction on the island that very afternoon and were released into the giant ponds.
"But with this many inkfish, can you actually look after them all?"
Yuwan stood beside Luo Yu. "Shouldn't you hire an employee dedicated to feeding them? There's an old hand at the original inkfish farm—want him?"
"At the current number, feeding alone is still well within what I can manage; it won't waste much energy," Luo Yu said. "That said, once the expansion is done, I will indeed need some staff. The old farm hand is out of the question, though—I want 'elites.' Once this busy stretch is over, I plan to hold a recruitment fair. At the very least, only people who've passed the Breeding Qualification Examination get to work here."
Yuwan nodded. "Fine. Whatever you need, you can always come to me—after all, Uncle told me to take good care of you. So then, Researcher Luo Yu, when will you have time? The farm and breeding base are more or less built now—when do you want to go see the beast-fighting arena? The appointment letter came through ages ago. I can take you to the arena's medical office to get familiar with the place, so the inkfish can start their internships smoothly later."
"Tomorrow. Today I want to look over these newly arrived inkfish first," Luo Yu said.
More than two thousand inkfish would keep him observing for a good while.
Before long, everyone with no business there had left.
Luo Yu brought the little penguin and stood before their loyal army of inkfish.
"Wuji!!!"
Seeing this many inkfish, July was already sick of the sight and could muster no interest in fishing.
Wild fishing, where the prey was unknown, really was more fun.
"Let's see what we've got..."
Luo Yu, by contrast, eagerly set about observing the two-thousand-odd inkfish.
The ordinary-talent ones he simply wrote off.
The advanced-talent inkfish, though, seemed a little scarce—only eleven, of all things.
By the rule he had worked out—advanced talent being a one-in-a-hundred aptitude—there ought to have been at least twenty before this batch counted as up to standard.
This drop rate was a bit low...
But fortunately, the eleven advanced-talent fish carried eight different talents—a true gathering of worthies, greatly enriching the genetic diversity of the Luo Yu Research Institute's inkfish.
The eleven talents were as follows. "Dark Affinity," that old friend, set aside for now.
"Ice Element Affinity" x2.
[Individual Talent]: Ice Element Affinity (advanced talent; possesses the aptitude to comprehend and master ice-type special abilities.)
Like "Dark Affinity," a thoroughly mainstream elemental talent. It reminded Luo Yu of the image a certain divination prodigy had once shown him: an inkfish gripping eight white blades of ice...
Presumably, only a fish with both the "Eight-Blade Style" talent and the "Ice Element Affinity" talent could pull that off... He could try breeding a pair for it later.
"Gu King" x2.
[Individual Talent]: Gu King (advanced talent; can strengthen its own venom by devouring other inkfish's ink sacs.)
A talent much like "Kin Devouring"—except "Kin Devouring" raises its own life level, while this one raises its own venom.
"If only both talents could be gathered onto one inkfish... What a pity that Iron-Pincer Shrimp and inkfish can't crossbreed."
"Is there really no surgery that can strip one life form's talent and graft it onto another...?" Luo Yu sighed.
[Individual Talent]: Spirit Overload (advanced talent; possesses powerful spiritual power, with the aptitude to awaken telekinesis.)
A rare psychic-type talent...
[Individual Talent]: Berserker (advanced talent; after taking injury, all attributes rise sharply as it enters a frenzied battle state.)
The talent looked good, but unfortunately, unless an inkfish evolved into a Water Demon Beast, its base stats were too low—going berserk would be wasted anyway.
[Individual Talent]: Water Element Immunity (advanced talent; immune to water-element damage no higher than its own level.)
A phantom god of infighting.
[Individual Talent]: Danger Sense (advanced talent; possesses a powerful sixth sense, able to sense danger's arrival in advance.)
Could he watch its condition to forecast natural disasters like earthquakes and storms, and take shelter early?
[Individual Talent]: Super Antibody (advanced talent; completely immune to ordinary-grade and king-grade zombie viruses.)
In this era, humans and mutated beasts all had a measure of viral resistance. Even a bite or scratch from a zombie sea beast would no longer infect them and turn them into zombies.
That held only for ordinary zombie sea beasts, though. Some king corpse beasts on par with the Monarch Species carried viruses that could still infect even fairly fragile life forms and turn them into zombies.
[Individual Talent]: Dominion (advanced talent; a born leader, whose bloodline exerts a certain suppressive effect over weaker members of its own kind...)
Reading this, Luo Yu felt he had glimpsed something extraordinary...
Chapter 21