Inkfish Evolution: Water Demon Beast!

"Dominion?!" "This talent..." Dominion—an advanced talent. A born leader whose bloodline exerted a certain suppressive effect on weaker kin of its kind... It looked unremarkable. After all, leaders like this existed among many mutated beasts. Take the queen of a bee swarm, for example. Or in a wolf pack, a "wolf king" would sometimes emerge. There were orcas, ants, lions too... On other species, this talent was actually worth something. But on an inkfish, it looked more than a little useless. Because inkfish had next to no intelligence. Even if a leader's intelligence stood out, higher than the rest, how was it supposed to command a crowd of dim-witted underlings? And yet the first moment Luo Yu laid eyes on this talent, the keen instincts of a biological scholar told him there was more to it. A leader... could be seen as the core of a group. And inkfish, of all things, underwent fusion evolution... "Could inkfish evolution be tied to the Dominion talent?" Surely he hadn't stumbled onto the key to inkfish evolution this quickly? Many scholars had studied how to make inkfish evolve, and every attempt had ended in failure. So Luo Yu had long suspected that the vast majority of inkfish simply lacked the aptitude to evolve. Only inkfish with a specific talent had the qualification to complete it. The trouble was, he had handled too few individual inkfish before to know which crucial talent it was. Now, though, he suddenly felt that this Dominion talent resembled the one in his conjecture. Come to think of it, maybe that was exactly it: the inkfish's evolved form, the Water Demon Beast, had to take a Dominion-talented inkfish as its core body, coordinating the school through it—only then could the evolution from inkfish to Water Demon Beast be completed! Otherwise, how was a rabble with almost no intelligence supposed to climb from the bottom of the food chain to mighty Monarch-tier demon beasts? Someone had to take the lead, obviously. Of course, this was just irresponsible wild guessing on Luo Yu's part. Maybe Dominion-talented inkfish had nothing to do with evolution at all. But research, by definition, meant bold conjecture and bold attempts. "Then here comes the question again: if a Dominion-talented inkfish is the key to a school's evolution..." "why, when the farming magnate Wang Defa was raising this very school, did none of them evolve?" Suppose it was the core of evolution—yet in all that time it had failed to evolve together with the school around it, which suggested talent probably wasn't the only condition. So, as expected: either Dominion-talented inkfish had nothing to do with evolution, or it was merely one of the conditions. "And if there are other conditions, what are they?" Luo Yu stroked his chin and studied the school of inkfish again. A few minutes later, he suddenly froze. "A born leader whose bloodline suppresses weaker kin... but what if its kin aren't weaker?" "This Dominion-talented inkfish is only level 1—and the remaining 2,000-odd inkfish here are all level 1 too." "They're the same level!" "And this Dominion inkfish looks utterly average in its development. Even some ordinary-talented inkfish are bigger than it is. Ordinary talents like 'Thick Hide,' 'Strongman,' and 'Agile' let those individuals develop splendidly." "By comparison, the Dominion inkfish has no advantage in development whatsoever." "There are hardly any individuals in this pond 'weaker' than it. If anything, it looks like one of the weaker ones." "So even with a leader's aptitude, surrounded by individuals bigger and stronger than itself, it can't rule at all." An idea took shape in Luo Yu's mind: if the Water Demon Beast required a Dominion-talented inkfish as its evolutionary core, might it be that the fish truly had to be the boss of its school? No individual around it could be stronger. Otherwise—if it wasn't even the boss of the school, what gave it the right to be the core? Why would an inkfish stronger than you submit to you and take you as its core? Say you had a leader's aptitude. Talent was talent, and reality was reality. Nature was cruel; strength reigned supreme. In a true one-on-one, this Dominion-talented inkfish might well get beaten silly by an ordinary-talented inkfish. "Worth a try." Luo Yu dug out a hand net and began intervening manually, scooping the Dominion-talented inkfish on its own into a freshly dug empty pond. Then he hunted out other malnourished inkfish whose development was even poorer than its own, penned them in with it, and made it the best-developed inkfish in a pond of a few dozen. The Dominion inkfish, once an invisible nobody in the school, turned bold in its movements the moment its surroundings changed. That was simply how creatures were: surrounded by stronger individuals, they cowered and fawned. Surrounded by weaker ones, they started strutting their stuff. Still, Luo Yu watched for a long while, and nothing changed afterward. Well, fair enough... since when was evolution that easy? "Assuming all my assumptions so far are right, what other condition does evolution still need?" Luo Yu pondered. As a rule, ritual evolution demanded an external stimulus. The Golden Koi, for instance, challenged a waterfall dense with Water-system energy, letting its spirit complete a metamorphosis and thereby driving the sublimation of its life tier. So under what circumstances would a school of inkfish be forced to gather and evolve into a single stronger individual??? Luo Yu snapped his fingers. A crisis!!! Only a crisis could unite a crowd of weak lives. In the wild, a school running into a crisis was completely ordinary. In that situation, the school with a powerful leader was the one most likely to pull together and fuse-evolve to withstand the danger! "His cheap old dad, Luo Shui, had apparently tried this before—using a crisis to see whether a school could be pushed into evolving." "In the end, that too had ended in failure." "The failure was only natural. After all, not one inkfish at the research institute had possessed evolution aptitude." "But this time there's a Dominion-talented inkfish present—and its life fluctuations right now are utterly those of the school's boss. Could a crisis experiment actually succeed?" Might extreme conditions stir some change in the school? Luo Yu's heart began to pound; he felt he had seized hold of the key. Should he... manufacture a crisis for these fish by hand and see?? If the evolution worked, he'd have it made. That was a Monarch Species—many a medium-sized island had no stable channel for producing one. "Go." Luo Yu called July straightaway, ordering the penguin to jump into the pond and put some pressure on these inkfish. However... July promptly began to drown. The inkfish hadn't even attacked, and the penguin was already flailing in panic. "Damn it." "Goo-goo gah-gah!!" The little penguin looked positively aggrieved. Floating in the pond, it began heating the water... and entered its voice-change period. But the pond was far too big. It did absolutely nothing. "Looks like I'll do it myself." Luo Yu rubbed his temples, resigned. He promptly fetched a wooden club, leapt into the pond, and began herding the inkfish with it—every stroke sent up waves upon waves. Provoked, the inkfish fought back with Ink Spray. There was some force to it, but Luo Yu's physique was hardly something a mob of stunted inkfish could match. Did he think all those needles stuck into him for so long had been wasted? Strength! Defense! The five senses! His current body was in no way inferior to that of a Trainee Beast Master with a Strength or Defense talent. The ink washing over him was nowhere near enough to stop his assault. "What is this, a tickle? Then evolve, if you've got the guts!" Luo Yu's eyes had gone red with the frenzy. The next moment. Time itself seemed to freeze. A jaw-dropping scene unfolded. Thrown into chaos, the school seemed to have had some trait of theirs roused: they quit spraying ink, and then—eerily—these inkfish turned their own bodies into black ink, converging on one of their number! The Dominion inkfish, of all of them. On the bank, the little penguin stared wide-eyed, having no idea what Luo Yu had done. Luo Yu was startled too. Truth be told, he hadn't held out much hope—the whole thing had been idle fiddling. Experiments, after all, were about trying many things. But... A one-shot success? Was it really supposed to go like this? The club dropped from Luo Yu's hand. He could only gawk. "Wait!!" Something suddenly occurred to him. Wasn't the Water Demon Beast savage? Why else would "demon" be in the name? Surely it wasn't just a homophone of "ink-wash," was it? Inkfish he could handle. But a Water Demon Beast... "July, save me!" July had no idea what was going on, but it instantly flung out its fishing rod and hauled Luo Yu from the middle of the pond onto the bank. By then, the ink in the pond was converging like mad. The Dominion-talented inkfish was swallowed whole, leaving only a mass of dense black, churning like waves! At that spot, the ink kept compressing, solidifying; the outline slowly stretched long, until at last a colossal body gradually took shape! A... giant octopus that somehow wasn't all that giant, its body even slightly misshapen? It didn't quite match the Water Demon Beast of the descriptions. "Woo!!!!!" This "Water Demon Beast," as though it had gathered the fury of every inkfish from moments before, locked its crimson eyes on Luo Yu. But the next instant, the beast abruptly went blank—and like something coming apart at the seams, it split open with a great splash, dropping into the pond like raindrops... scattering every which way. Luo Yu froze too. This was... a failed evolution? It wasn't as if he'd pressed "B" to cancel it. Watching the inkfish revert to their original forms, Luo Yu sank into thought. Failed evolution... apparently, this sort of thing did occur among evolution phenomena. Take the Coiling Wind Worm's evolved form, the Coiling Wind Pupa: at level 11 it should evolve smoothly into the Gale Butterfly, but in practice it wasn't so simple. Now and then there were cases of failed "shell-breaking"—a Gale Butterfly wrapped in worm silk that never managed to burst free of its cocoon, and the evolution failed. Such cases were rare, though, and mostly they came down to some flaw in the individual about to evolve... Luo Yu looked at the inkfish in the pond, and understanding dawned. Their "flaw" was levels far too low—every last one of them underdeveloped! His conjecture had struck true: confronted with a common enemy, they had managed to evolve into the Water Demon Beast. But each individual was far too weak to bear that enormous evolutionary power, and in the span of an instant, they scattered back into their old shapes. "In other words, for the evolution to take, the school's average level can't be too low either, huh..." Just as well it failed... Luo Yu had only just remembered that this Dominion inkfish was his one and only. If the evolution had succeeded, where would he have found the next one? "Breeding. He had to breed—and breed hard!"