His mood was the opposite of usual today. Shen Qi called out toward the Little Sheep's passenger seat.
"Come on out. No one should be paying attention to us over here."
Click.
The door opened, and Chansey shifted her round, ball-shaped body out of the vehicle.
[Shen Qi is so gentle.]
"We're helping each other. I look forward to working with you."
"Jili!"
With a happy cry, Chansey opened the Little Sheep's rear hatch, revealing a space without any unnecessary seats, already packed full of cargo.
Chansey got to work, and Shen Qi joined in, taking a glance at the game screen along the way.
"Crazy Quack" scenario completion: 28%.
It had risen from 25% to 28%, but not because of Shen Qi's gentle behavior just now.
It had already gone up when Chansey showed him the eggs in the refrigerator and Shen Qi said he would eat them all.
In this difficult scenario, if he refused the massages or didn't eat the eggs, the completion percentage wouldn't rise even if Chansey praised him as "gentle" a hundred times.
With Chansey helping, the difference in efficiency was enormous. Unloading that might previously have taken dozens of minutes was finished in less than twenty.
"Jili!"
Once the work was done, Chansey quickly hopped back into the passenger seat. She really seemed unwilling to linger at the Luxury Resort.
Shen Qi returned to the driver's seat and started the engine.
With Jili handling a large share of the physical labor today, he didn't need to rest before driving again as he usually did.
On the way back, Shen Qi took a detour to Island 5 to pick up a small packet of tea a friend had sent for Dev.
The altered route took the Little Sheep past Island 5's Pokémon Center.
In the games, every island had a Pokémon Center for treating injured Pokémon, and they also served as ordinary medical facilities.
In the real Pokémon world, Island 6 lagged behind in every respect and had little worth developing. Naturally, it had relatively few Trainers, so there was only a regular hospital, not a Pokémon Center.
As they passed the Pokémon Center, the previously cheerful Chansey fell silent again for a while.
"Do you... have bad memories of the Pokémon Center too?"
[Yes... I worked there too.]
(The next chapter, Chapter 26, was blocked. I don't know why either. I only wrote about an unexpected encounter with a Psychic Storm. It was restored and then blocked again; it keeps getting blocked.)
Chapter 26: Storm
"We're almost there."
[Almost there~]
After returning from Island 5, Chansey was noticeably more relaxed.
It seemed her experience working there really hadn't been pleasant.
If he had the chance in the future, he would learn more about what had happened.
Shen Qi briefly glanced toward the passenger seat. Chansey was resilient and even-tempered; asking about her painful past wouldn't lower his completion percentage.
Still, even if it wouldn't drop, he needed to respect her. He couldn't start digging relentlessly as soon as he learned the broad outlines.
The path to winning Chansey over was difficult, but he was making steady progress. There was no rush.
"Jili!"
Suddenly, Chansey sat up from her comfortable, half-reclining position, her expression a mixture of confusion and wariness.
"What's wrong?"
Shen Qi focused his attention on their surroundings.
Everything looked normal on the road ahead of the Little Sheep. They were on the outskirts of Ruins Valley at night, still on a regular road illuminated by streetlights.
[There was a very strong fluctuation in type energy.]
"Huh?"
Having only just mastered Normal-type Energy Perception, Shen Qi hadn't noticed anything unusual at all.
The next type of Type Energy he had a chance of sensing was Grass-type. At a slightly greater distance, it would take a powerful Grass-type move for him to feel anything.
[Psychic-type... such powerful Psychic-type energy.]
"Psychic-type... I haven't had much contact with it. No wonder I couldn't sense it."
Chansey wasn't sure what had just happened, but she thought Shen Qi would have been able to feel it too if they had been a little closer, or if the energy fluctuations had been a little stronger.
"Me?"
[Yes...]
The Psychic-type energy fluctuations were so powerful that they violently disrupted the other types of energy in the surrounding space, including Normal-type.
It could practically be called an energy storm.
Otherwise, Chansey wouldn't have grown so cautious after sensing just a few distant aftershocks.
"Do you know which direction it came from?"
[I'm not sure.]
Chansey shook her round body.
It was like ripples spreading over water. Without a bird's-eye view, how could someone clearly identify the center from a few faint ripples felt along the edges?
At most, she could give a rough direction: toward the center of Ruins Valley or out at sea.
The center of Ruins Valley...
Shen Qi grew wary. They had already entered the Ruins Valley stretch of road and were about to leave the course where Lilligant had competed in the amateur race. There were no longer any streetlights around them.
"Maybe tonight we should just..."
Before he could finish, the phone in his pocket began to ring.
He instinctively reached for it, then his hair stood on end and his hand froze. The Little Sheep came to a stop too.
Chansey gave him a concerned, questioning look, but Shen Qi's movements remained stiff.
This is my phone, but that isn't the ringtone I set!
Pulling out the ringing, vibrating phone, Shen Qi distinctly heard static in the ringtone, as though it were a corrupted audio track.
The information on the screen was nothing but a string of garbled characters. There was no contact name or phone number, only a jumble of strange symbols.
He reached to reject the eerie call, but the red hang-up button seemed to be nothing more than an image. It didn't function at all.
"Should I answer it?"
[Don't be scared.]
Chansey took out an egg. [Have an egg to calm your nerves.]
"There's really no need!"
Shen Qi gathered his courage and pressed the answer icon, only to find that, just like the hang-up icon, it didn't respond at all.
He couldn't end the call or answer it. All he could do was let the strange, static-laced ringtone keep playing.
"Maybe I should force it to shut down..."
Just as he made up his mind, the garbled caller information gradually turned into words.
Amid the garbled symbols, two words became legible:
Run... now...
Having worked at both the Pokémon Center and the Luxury Resort, Chansey could read human writing. The eerie sight startled her too.
They stared at each other for several seconds before the ringtone vanished. There was no trace of the incoming call in the call history, either.
"Maybe we should..."
Boom-
A thunderous roar like a giant dragon's bellow erupted in the distance.
Since entering Ruins Valley, Shen Qi had already been through this more than once.
Something felt wrong → he came up with a new plan → another strange event interrupted him the moment he spoke.
[It's a Psychic-type energy storm!]
Chansey hurriedly hugged Shen Qi, and then the Little Sheep rocked back and forth in the sweeping gale.
Hardly any wind entered the vehicle, yet Shen Qi felt that the air was in utter turmoil.
The Normal-type energy he could perceive was being churned up. A peculiar energy was wreaking havoc, and although it lay outside his perception, its sheer intensity forced it into his sensory range.
Amid the extreme discomfort, Shen Qi seemed to catch a hint of how to sense that energy, but his mind was being tugged so violently that he couldn't tell whether he was excited or slightly deranged.
The Little Sheep overturned. Thanks to Chansey holding him tightly, Shen Qi was cushioned and wasn't injured in the fall.
[Eat this. It'll perk you up.]
A huge egg was shoved into Shen Qi's mouth, its astonishing elasticity allowing half of it to squeeze inside.
Shen Qi bit it in half.
"Are you trying to choke me to death?"
As he chewed instinctively, an unbelievably complex taste shot straight to the top of his skull. It actually broke the agonizing deadlock of forcibly sensing a new kind of energy, effectively replacing one form of torment with another.
Fortunately, Shen Qi had experienced the torment of eating eggs before. It was better than having unfamiliar energy yank his mind around at random.
Waves of air swept past, and a faint trace of pink still lingered in the distant sky.
That was the glow formed by gathered Psychic-type energy, just as Normal-type energy was gray and Grass-type energy was green.
"Heave-ho!"
Before you continue