"Nice weather."
Outside the Beast Management Bureau, Luo Yu looked up at the blue sky and white clouds after finishing his exam, feeling particularly carefree.
"You come out too."
He pushed his bicycle along and summoned the little penguin. July stood in the bicycle basket, and had only just come out when he suddenly pointed in one direction and cried out.
"You certainly have plenty of energy..."
Luo Yu glanced over and saw an old man leaning against the railing on the bridge, fishing. The fishing rod beside him was already bent taut into an arc.
Fishing, was he?
And from the looks of it, he already had a fish on the hook.
Rumble!!!
The old man gripped the rod tightly and heaved with a thunderous burst of strength.
The lake water churned.
His strength was astonishing; he was most likely a strength-type Beast Taming Master. Under his pull, the enormous body of a fish burst out of the water and was flung straight into the air, scattering droplets across the sky.
"Strange Scale Fish..." Luo Yu glanced at it.
[Species]: Strange Scale Fish [Attribute]: Water [Species level]: Low-Rank Ordinary Species [Life level]: Level 5 [Species ability]: Sharpened Scales [Individual talent]: Delicious Flesh (ordinary talent, its flesh is more delicious than that of ordinary individuals.)
Damn, a top-grade catch!
Luo Yu's eyes turned green with envy.
As the big fish came out of the lake, passersby couldn't help stopping to watch.
The old man's expression was grave. The next moment, a Wave Dog that had appeared beside him at some unknown point charged toward the lake, its shadow like surging waves.
Splash!
A spray of water flashed and vanished.
After sinking its teeth into a vital spot on the Strange Scale Fish, it plunged into the lake along with the fish...
"Wuji!!" In that lightning-fast moment, the coordination between the old fisherman and the Wave Dog made July's eyes shine. He kept beating his flippers against the basket, his gaze fixed on the rod that had hauled up the big fish, as if he had seen some peerless divine artifact.
Is this... a human and a pet beast fishing together...? This new era's way of fishing piqued Luo Yu's interest a little.
In his previous life, he had occasionally gone fishing with friends, but his luck had been terrible, and he had hardly ever caught anything good. It wasn't a matter of skill; his luck was simply terrible.
So seeing the old man land a catch made him a little envious.
The Delicious Flesh talent... how tasty would that be?
Wouldn't it taste 10,000 times better than a zombie fish?
"Interesting, but fishing in this world seems pretty dangerous too. Without a pet beast to help, hauling one up would be suicide." Luo Yu didn't linger, since he still had important business to attend to, but July kept looking back at the fishing rod in the old man's hand.
In the basket, the "fishing gene" deep in the little penguin's bloodline memory seemed to have awakened.
After all, a few hundred years ago, Earth Penguins had still eaten seafood, rather than the little underground insects they ate now...
A moment later, the old man's Wave Dog dragged the Strange Scale Fish ashore, and only then did July look away.
"Interested in fishing?" Luo Yu noticed how the little penguin felt and asked.
"Wuji!!" July nodded repeatedly.
"Then when we have money, I'll have a fine fishing rod custom-made for you." Luo Yu didn't stifle July's interest.
Growing stronger and training were bound to be dull, so giving the little penguin a hobby to relieve stress was a good idea too.
Even if it was something as seemingly absurd as a penguin using a fishing rod...
Of course, it was absurd for ordinary penguins, since they couldn't hold a rod, but for a mutated Earth Penguin, it didn't seem impossible.
Because of the change in their habitat, Earth Penguins' original flippers had lost their swimming function and mutated to gain the ability to dig and grasp. Although nothing looked different on the outside, the joint structure inside the flippers had changed completely.
So in theory, he could pick up a fishing rod.
Still, judging by July's size, he probably couldn't use a normal rod.
They could only find someone to make one for him.
"You're a newborn baby penguin. How did you get interested in a pastime middle-aged men use to relieve stress?"
Not long afterward, Luo Yu returned to the research institute. As soon as he got back, he checked whether anything had changed with the two pairs of Ink Fish during the half day he had been away.
"They're mating! They're mating?!"
They seemed to have returned at just the right time. Although there was still no movement between the Dark Octopus and the Eight-Sword Style Octopus, a Breeding Paragon truly lived up to the name, full of charm.
The Mercy Ink Fish was extending a long arm into its mantle cavity, freely releasing spermatophores.
Octopuses could mimic and change color, altering the color of their bodies. This now seemed to have become their way of flirting, as they changed their body colors in a highly rhythmic fashion.
Luo Yu hid by the door and peeked in, not daring to breathe too loudly. The little penguin squirmed, trying to get closer and see what was happening, but Luo Yu sent him back into the Beast-Taming Space.
"I'll defend the Ink Fish's privacy to the end."
"You go back to sleep. When you wake up this time, it'll be time to start training..."
After watching for a while, Luo Yu withdrew, deeply moved. All the trouble he had gone through to prepare a room for them had not been in vain.
"Under suitable conditions, an ordinary female Ink Fish will lay eggs 30 days after mating."
"I wonder if a Breeding Paragon individual will be any different... maybe she'll be faster..."
Laying the eggs would take roughly a month, and hatching them would take another month.
So even at the shortest, Luo Yu would need two months to obtain preliminary results from the breeding experiment.
That was also why Luo Yu hadn't chosen to breed his first pet beast himself. It took too long, and the wait was hard to bear.
Of course, some bred quickly, but he couldn't very well contract a fruit fly or an aphid...
Still, if he was lucky, his Eye of Data might be able to tell the little octopuses' talents just by looking at the eggs... as with the penguin egg.
But even if he could see them, it would be no use. He would still have to wait for them to hatch before they could become actual breeding results.
It was worth mentioning that although ordinary octopuses reproduced only once in their lives and died afterward, the situation was very different for Ink Fish because of their bloodline mutation.
As long as they had enough nutrition and suitable surroundings, mutated Ink Fish could mate and lay eggs multiple times. They were now a different species from ordinary octopuses.
But compared with ordinary octopuses, which could lay many eggs at once, mutated Ink Fish laid far fewer. Each time, they could probably lay fewer than ten eggs with tenacious vitality, a certain weakening.
Holding Researcher Luo Shui's various research materials on Ink Fish, Luo Yu studied them frame by frame. These mutated creatures could no longer be viewed according to the old biological common sense...
That day.
In a conference room at the Beast Management Bureau.
Five people of different ages and genders sat at the table, but they all had one thing in common: every one of them wore a white research coat.
Click.
The conference room door opened, and Yu Lei, director of the Beast Management Bureau, entered and sat at the head of the table.
"Sorry to keep everyone waiting." After setting down his documents, Director Yu said, "Before we begin this meeting, there's something you all know about already, right?"
"Scholar Luo Shui and his wife unfortunately encountered a maritime disaster and have passed away."
The five researchers present nodded silently. They had already heard about it.
"However, their son, Luo Yu, submitted an application to the Beast Management Bureau, hoping to inherit his father's research institute and continue studying Ink Fish."
"To that end, he took the breeding qualification assessment, and his results were outstanding. So I approved his application."
He looked at the heads of several biological research institutes on Mirror Moon Island who were present and asked, "One interesting thing is that Luo Yu has contracted an Earth Penguin."
The researchers didn't look baffled as ordinary Beast Taming Masters would have. Instead, they fell into thought.
"An Earth Penguin... does he know something?" an elderly woman researcher asked.
She was a researcher on Mirror Moon Island who specialized in crossbreeding pet beasts.
"When that grotto was discovered, the couple weren't on Mirror Moon Island. By rights, they shouldn't have had any chance to tell their son at all," an old man said immediately afterward.
The elderly scholar mainly studied the origin of the torrential rain. Whether the rain that had caused Earth's mutation was the work of an alien civilization or a natural product of the universe had long been a subject of inquiry for many scholars.
"Chen Zhuo, you were closest to Scholar Luo Shui. Were you the one who let it slip? By the way, your son took this breeding assessment too, didn't he? Did he fail?" A thin, pale-faced middle-aged researcher put the questions to one of them. He was a scholar who studied zombie sea beasts.
"I signed a confidentiality agreement. How could I possibly leak it? I didn't even tell my own son," Researcher Chen Zhuo, who bore a strong resemblance to Chen Bo, said mildly, ignoring the latter question.
Chen Zhuo was a thoroughly mainstream researcher who studied the relationship between humans and mutated beasts. What enhancements humans could give mutated beasts, and what enhancements mutated beasts could give humans in turn, concerned humanity's evolution.
"Could it simply be a coincidence?" the last researcher, a mature woman, asked. She specialized in marine ecology.
"It probably is a coincidence. He may simply have discovered that the Earth Penguin had exceptional talent." Director Yu said, "In any case, now that he has inherited the institute, he should be able to join that research project as well. I wonder if any of you have objections."
The five shook their heads, seeing that the director intended to nurture the young man.
"Since none of you object, I'll have Yu Wan explain the matter to him in detail," Director Yu said with a smile.
"From now on, like all of you, he'll be the head of a research institute. At the next meeting, he may have to report his research results alongside you. You're all his seniors, so remember to be a little more accommodating to the newcomer. Even if his interim research results are relatively basic, give him a little more recognition..."