Summer's Advance Guard

A Thursday in early July.

Despite being dizzyingly busy, I still made time to visit Ritto Training Center in Shiga Prefecture that day.

Though she still seemed immature compared with Baozuo and even Chongli of the same generation, under Northern Hemisphere racing regulations, Moon Leap, born in 2026, was already considered a two-year-old as a foreign-bred horse.

Her projected debut was in the three-year-old maiden over 2,600 meters on the Fukushima turf in the third week of April next year. Until then, she would remain at Nishiken Farm for quite some time, continuing to strengthen her ridden training and correct her temperament.

Thanks to the high standard of Training and early breaking provided by New Zealand's farm on the seller's side, Moon Leap, despite being Southern Hemisphere-bred, had reached a remarkably advanced stage in both physical development and training progress.

Though temperament-wise, she was still troublesome enough to qualify as a difficult horse.

—I was once again glad that the scouting had revealed her distance aptitude. At least it spared us many unnecessary detours in planning her debut and future campaign.

Then came the official naming.

The employees who had all agreed on the issue of a "late debut" now argued fiercely over this.

Southern Hemisphere-bred horses really were hard to understand—

That feeling surfaced again.

In the end, the faction supporting the "Radiance" generation naming convention unexpectedly prevailed, and Moon Leap's official racing name became the one Zepp proposed: "Voyageuse."

The feminine French form of "traveler."

—Most crucially, there was the issue of choosing a stable.

In fact, I had already tried contacting several trainers I knew while I was still in Australia.

However, the stables of those newly licensed trainers had all been booked up early, and even the breaking farms were completely overwhelmed.

Naoki Hori and Matoba