Chapter 6
His first close encounter with a Pokémon.
Feebas acted like a total slacker. It did not even care what was happening around it.
The chubby boy worried that Feebas might suddenly attack and kill someone, so he warned, "There's actually something wrong with this Magical Beast. I suspect it might have a problem with its brain."
Lu Li: "..."
Compared with a normal Pokémon, Feebas certainly did not seem very bright.
He had not expected Feebas to be useful at this stage anyway. What he wanted was to evolve it. Only once it became a Milotic would he truly have what he needed to survive in this world.
Of course, that depended on the evolved Milotic accepting him as its Trainer. If it refused, everything he had invested would go down the drain.
But Lu Li also knew that he had to gamble: on Feebas being able to evolve, and on it listening to him after it did.
Of course, his immediate gamble was whether he could raise Feebas properly.
Jun Shutong was a woman of action. After agreeing to Lu Li's request, she quickly sent someone over with a bed.
"When it's mealtime, Little Lei will call you over the walkie-talkie," Jun Shutong said.
The Little Lei she mentioned was the chubby boy.
After setting the fish tank on the floor, Lu Li took out another packet of fish food.
Feebas ate pretty quickly. It finished the entire packet in just a few minutes.
Fortunately, the Aquarium had plenty of fish food, and the Water-type Pokémon had not discovered it yet.
Most Water-type Pokémon did not have a particularly keen sense of smell, so it was perfectly normal that they had not found the fish food in the cabinet.
At six in the evening on the third day after the Pokémon arrived.
Fatty Lei called him to hurry over for dinner.
Upon receiving the message, Lu Li covered the fish tank securely with a box before turning to leave the room.
He hurried to the camp and found that quite a few people were already waiting in line.
Everyone lined up obediently. No one tried to cut in.
Jun Shutong's camp had one rule: absolutely no arguments, because loud quarrels would attract Magical Beasts.
Jun Shutong's words always carried weight. After all, no one dared gamble with their own life.
That was why the survivor camp still maintained a basic level of order. Of course, it all depended on Jun Shutong keeping everyone in line.
As for why so many people obeyed Jun Shutong, a woman, that was naturally because she held the Old World's ultimate argument in her hand.
A handgun might not necessarily kill a Pokémon, but it could certainly kill a person.
Since the Human Federation was the only government in this world, the capitalist overlords at the top feared that the people beneath them might rebel, so gun restrictions were extremely strict.
The camp's food was not very good, mainly because the ingredients were poor. The cooks, however, were quite skilled, all at least professional-level chefs. After all, they had previously been head chefs at the restaurants in the mall.
Lu Li carried his plate over and sat across from the chubby boy, then wolfed down his dinner.
He noticed that the chubby boy had a little more meat on his plate than he did. Still, considering that the boy was something of a team leader in the camp, it was only natural that he received slightly better treatment.
At that thought, Lu Li discreetly glanced at the old man and the brat a short distance away.
The brat's little face was scrunched up miserably, but he did not dare make a sound. All he could do was shovel rice into his mouth with his spoon. Beside him, the old man leisurely picked up food with his chopsticks, occasionally looking up to remind him, "Eat slowly."
After dinner, Lu Li returned to his room.
With the water and power cut off, the mall became pitch-black as soon as night fell.
Lu Li dragged the coffee table beside the bed, set the fish tank on it, and started playing his fish-feeding game.
He noticed that Feebas usually had dull eyes and a groggy, vacant look. But whenever there was food, its eyes instantly lit up, becoming lively as though it had suddenly wised up.
If there was a reason Pokémon had descended upon this world, then the emergence of Trainers was inevitable too. Lu Li had been pondering one question lately.
What role did Trainers play for Pokémon?
Now Lu Li had a bold hypothesis: they awakened the emotional templates of Wild Pokémon.
At present, Lu Li did not have a particularly favorable impression of this world's Pokémon, because they felt like wild beasts that possessed tremendous power.
But the Pokémon in the anime were different.
The Pokémon in the anime had emotions and desires just like humans, and their feelings were somewhat purer.
So Lu Li decided to tentatively explore that direction first. After all, putting these ideas of his into practice would not cost much.
Success would be ideal. If he failed, all he would lose was a little time and emotional investment.
The room was pitch-black. Lu Li could only tell whether Feebas had eaten the food by the bubbles it released when it opened its mouth.
He played this little interactive game for a full hour.
After using up eight packets of fish food, Lu Li fell into thought.
He found that these Pokémon seemed impossible to satisfy. Feebas had already eaten at least ten times its own body size in food, yet it still was not full.
It was a very strange phenomenon, and Lu Li wanted to understand why.
But without a control group, he could only come up with hypotheses in his head.
His first hypothesis was that the food on Teran Star provided little nutrition for the Pokémon that had arrived, so they could only compensate through sheer quantity.
His other hypothesis was that these Pokémon had mutated during their arrival, turning their stomachs into bottomless pits that could never be filled.
But Lu Li leaned more toward the first explanation.
He thought of the hunt he had witnessed that day. If the second explanation were true, Pidgey should have been catching Caterpie nonstop rather than hunting only once or twice a day.
Unfortunately, Feebas was not an omnivore, nor could it stand up to a Caterpie. Otherwise, he could simply feed it a Caterpie and see whether that filled its stomach.
At around eight that evening, Lu Li decided to go to sleep.
It was pitch-black at night, and he could not waste his phone's battery. There was nothing he could do, so naturally, he could only go to bed early.
The morning of the fourth day after the Pokémon arrived.
Lu Li got up at 5:30 a.m. The first thing he did was prepare to wash up, but he soon realized something rather depressing.
This was not his home. He did not even have toiletries, let alone the means to wash his face and brush his teeth.
With no other choice, Lu Li went back to his feeding game and waited for breakfast.
He played until eight, then showed up at the camp right on time.
He lined up for food.
Since he did not really know anyone else in the camp, he sought out Fatty Lei again.
Upon seeing Lu Li, Fatty Lei greeted him with a smile. "Morning, Lu Li."
"Good morning." Lu Li smiled, nodded, and sat down.
As he ate, Fatty Lei said, "Remember to come see Sister Jun with me after breakfast. Looks like she has something for us to do."
Lu Li asked, "Just the two of us?"
"Of course not. Everyone young and able-bodied has to go, apart from the children and the elderly."
After scraping his plate clean, Fatty Lei added, "Oh, right. If you want to brush your teeth, you can use the restroom. I'll take you to pick up a set of toiletries in a bit."
Puzzled, Lu Li asked, "Didn't the mall lose its water and power?"
"The public restrooms still have water. They use the water from the tank on the mall's roof. I don't know how much is stored there, but I doubt it'll last very long, so use it sparingly while we still have it."
Lu Li said with some concern, "Wouldn't that be too wasteful? There are a lot of people in the camp, after all."
In an apocalypse, not washing up was merely unhealthy; it would not kill you. But running out of water too soon really could cost people their lives.
"There's nothing we can do about that. There are too many people in the camp, and some of them are just shortsighted. They still think the Federation will send someone to rescue them, so they haven't even considered what'll happen when we run out of water."
Fatty Lei's tone carried a trace of frustrated resentment. He genuinely felt that there was no future in banding together for survival with some of the vermin in this camp.