Ma Lou suppressed the shock in his heart and kept reading.
At the end of the foreword, the notebook's author had added an important hypothesis!
[Regarding the raising of exotic beasts, I once discovered some interesting clues in ancient texts.]
[Exotic beasts are not unchanging. Their growth depends heavily on the intake of external energy.]
[It is said that in ancient times, the owners of exotic beasts fed them all manner of elemental ores to continually strengthen them, even breaking through the limits of their bloodlines.]
[But I once had a bold hypothesis...]
[What if we fed them not ores matching their innate attributes, but elemental crystals of an entirely different kind?]
[Could this external intervention cause mutations as they grow, creating entirely new, even unpredictable branches of development?]
[Unfortunately... exotic beasts have become exceedingly rare in this world. Even if I devoted my entire life to it, I might never personally verify the truth of this rumor.]
[I shall leave this hypothesis, with its endless possibilities, for future explorers to test!]
"Holy shit!"
The instant Ma Lou read those words, he sprang straight out of his gaming chair!
"Feeding them different elemental ores can produce different evolution branches?"
"Isn't this a fucking pet-catching game, Wasteland edition?"
"They even implemented mutation-based evolution?"
Ma Lou kept scrolling down the post.
Most of the remaining images introduced exotic beasts through a mixture of text and hand-drawn illustrations.
Beside each beast were detailed records of its habits, and even the author's proposed methods for raising and feeding it!
Ma Lou was utterly stunned.
He sat blankly in front of his computer, feeling as though his brain no longer had enough processing power.
"This game..."
"How many fucking kinds of gameplay did they stitch together?"
Sure enough, the comments beneath the post had descended