"What are they...?" Luo Yu asked, eager to learn.
"Do you mean the stones on them, sir? Those are 'Electric Crystals,' a type of ore that can store electricity. It's bad for Thunderbolt Shrimp to accumulate too much lightning in their bodies, but releasing it at random is dangerous. These Electric Crystals are very good at drawing the electricity out of their bodies and promoting their metabolism," explained the clerk who had come to attend to him.
Really...
But Luo Yu vaguely remembered that Electric Crystals containing large amounts of electricity were supposed to be the raw material for Radiant Crystal Lamps, the lighting devices now used in every household once the crystals were processed.
They're using the Thunderbolt Shrimp's special abilities to charge the Electric Crystals, aren't they?
He now had reasonable grounds to suspect that a little extra lightning in a Thunderbolt Shrimp's body did no harm at all. The clerk's explanation might be just like "donating a little blood helps your metabolism and gets rid of toxins"-pure nonsense!
This time, Luo Yu again left the Thunderbolt Pet Beast Shop after spending very little time inside.
Clearly, the Thunderbolt Pet Beast Shop didn't have the exceptional individual he was looking for either.
"Oh no. I'm not going to spend all this time looking and fail to find a single one, am I?"
Holding the map, Luo Yu felt his heart sink. In the end, he decided to check out the pet beast breeding houses, where he could adopt a Low-Rank Ordinary Species for free.
The sensory-type pet beast Dripping Waterfall Spider, the combat-type Wave Dog, and the utility-type Green Water Turtle... as long as its talent was strong enough, a Low-Rank Species would do.
Luo Yu searched from one establishment to the next.
The variety of talents was dazzling.
Yet... after making the rounds, Luo Yu felt as though he had eaten several more zombie fish.
He discovered that an advanced talent and two talents seemed to be the ceiling for Common Species.
These shops had no shortage of pet beast young with advanced talents or even two talents, but he hadn't seen a single one with anything better!
He had visited every pet beast shop and breeding house in Mirror Moon Town, large and small, only to see a bunch of pet beasts with all kinds of talents working on production lines...
Dripping Waterfall Spiders were spinning silk for textiles, Green Water Turtles were accelerating crop growth, and Wave Dogs were practicing hauling cargo over water... He was really out of options.
"Sigh..." Luo Yu let out a long sigh.
Was it really so hard to find a pet beast with a top-tier talent?
Individuals with higher talents were even rarer than he had imagined... or perhaps they simply didn't exist?
He admitted that he had made things sound too simple at first.
Still, if he had a cheat but only contracted a pet beast with an advanced talent, Luo Yu couldn't help feeling shortchanged. Beastmasters could break contracts and switch pet beasts, but the contract cooldown lasted at least a year, which was rather long.
Besides, Luo Yu felt he wouldn't have the heart to abandon a contracted pet beast he had raised for so long.
"What should I do? Catch one in the wild?" Luo Yu stood on the street, lost in thought.
If he couldn't buy one... he could only try his luck in the wild and see if there were any high-quality wild individuals.
But although there were more mutated beasts in the wild, their average aptitude... was certainly inferior to that of young bred by pet beast shops.
Of course, if there were enough of them, it wasn't impossible to take a gamble.
"That's the only way, then. But isn't it a little late now?"
Luo Yu looked at the sun sinking behind the mountains, and his stomach suddenly rumbled.
With evening approaching, he finally realized he was so hungry he felt dizzy, and the wilderness at night was no place for an ordinary person like him. He might fail to find an exceptional pet beast and end up as an extra meal for a wild mutated beast instead.
"I need to get something to eat..."
Luo Yu muttered, "I went hungry for so long in the apocalypse, and after transmigrating, all I've eaten is a bag of crab roe bread. I haven't even had a hot meal... Beast taming has led me astray."
After looking around, Luo Yu spotted a restaurant called the Immortal Delicacies Seafood Restaurant.
"Tsk..." But after weighing his purse, he ultimately couldn't bear to eat out.
If it had been called the "Affordable Seafood Stall" instead of the "Immortal Delicacies Seafood Restaurant," he might have gone in.
"I'd better do it myself. Work with your own hands and you'll have plenty of food and clothing. Most importantly, it saves money."
In the end, Luo Yu turned into a farmers' market, planning to buy some food.
As an apocalypse gourmet, he was highly skilled at cooking. Even with things that weren't ingredients, he could make them taste decent. Cumin insoles and salt-and-pepper belts, for example, were delicacies in the apocalypse...
After picking out a few kinds of mushrooms at the farmers' market, Luo Yu walked up to a shop with a sign reading "Lin's Game Shop" and looked it over.
He planned to nourish his fifteen-year-old body and treat himself.
"What can I get you?" The owner, who was cleaning up behind the chopping block, looked up and called out to him.
"I'll have a look first," Luo Yu said.
"Sure. Let me know if you see anything you like. I guarantee fair prices."
Luo Yu reserved judgment on whether the merchants of this era had a conscience.
Still, to the naked eye, the meat hanging in the shop looked quite fresh.
As Luo Yu was looking, a middle-aged man dressed as a hunter came in from the back and stood beside him.
There were quite a few mountain hunters on Mirror Moon Island... Most were beastmasters who had been weeded out by the sea. Beastmasters with real ambition all chose to head out to sea. After all, the resources in the ocean were far more abundant than those on land.
This hunter seemed to have come to sell something.
"Old Lin, I picked up a bird egg today. Want it?"
He was carrying a sack, and he exposed a white bird egg with black markings inside it...
"An Earth Penguin egg?" The butcher paused. "You picked it up?"
The hunter looked pleased with himself. "Sure did."
"I was wondering about it myself. Don't Earth Penguins nest and lay their eggs underground? How did this one end up aboveground?"
"Anyway, you set the price. You don't see these often, and I hear they taste pretty good too? You can sell it to someone in town for a high price and take them to the cleaners..."
"Huh?" Luo Yu's gaze also fell on the black-and-white egg, and he wondered if he had misheard.
Fuck, what's going on? A penguin egg?
Are you two still asleep, or am I?
In this heat, there are penguins on the island? You've got to be kidding me.
Sure, there are tropical penguins, but you're trading the egg of a species as rare as a penguin as food?!
Luo Yu recalled that before the apocalypse, there had indeed been several thousand penguins across aquariums and polar parks in this land.
By now, these penguins had evolved into roughly four species.
The vast majority had evolved into Water Penguins, which wielded water-type power. They were excellent swimmers, more agile underwater than even some Superior Species sea beasts.
Some had reverted to their ancestral form as Wind Feather Penguins, wielding wind-type power and returning to the skies. Not only could they fly, but their swimming ability hadn't deteriorated much either.
Others had mutated into Ice Wing Penguins, wielding the power of frost. Their wings of frost could slice through rock with ease.
All three were positive mutations and evolutions... and all were Mid-Rank Ordinary Species.
But one group alone had mutated disastrously, awakening earth-type power and the special ability to dig holes. They had settled underground... and lived on the little bugs in the soil... They were a Low-Rank Ordinary Species.
In the previous era, penguins had been extremely rare, protected animals,
but after the apocalypse, humans themselves had nearly become rare animals, so nobody had the mind to protect other species.
The sole value of mutated beasts was to make human civilization rise again through their sweat and to develop humanity's new technology tree with their special abilities.
That was also what Luo Yu had seen today... Even when mutated beasts were to be sold as merchandise, they couldn't remain idle. They had to keep creating value and help human capital expand.
Species potential had become the only standard by which humans judged mutated beasts.
Rare and cute-could you eat that? It seemed they really could only be eaten as "food."
Water Penguins, Wind Feather Penguins, and Ice Wing Penguins were doing all right. Each had its own abilities and could maintain a certain presence in this great age of sailing.
But the Earth Penguin, a "landlubber" that was no good at swimming and couldn't fly either, was undoubtedly an inferior species. Its former halo had long since faded, and its reputation was worse than that of a wild duck by the roadside.
After all, no normal person setting sail would take along a flightless bird that could only dig holes... They would be too busy looking down on it.
After sorting through this information, Luo Yu understood why a penguin egg had appeared here. It was an unfortunate egg too.
But the next moment, information actually began to appear over the penguin egg he was staring at, leaving Luo Yu stunned.
"This is..."
Before long, the butcher and the hunter completed their deal.
The penguin egg was bought for 200 Alliance Coins.
After the hunter left, Luo Yu suddenly spoke. "Mister..."
"Will you sell this Earth Penguin egg for 250?"
The butcher looked at Luo Yu in puzzlement. "Sure... Take it if you want it."
"I've never had one before. I'll take it home for a taste." Luo Yu chuckled, took out 250 Alliance Coins, and scooped the egg into his arms.
It wasn't that he really wanted to eat a penguin egg, but...
Fuck, I finally pulled gold!
It wasn't among the young carefully bred in those pet beast shops...
It was at the food market!
The bearer of a top-tier talent was actually a bird egg being traded as food!
So I... can see information about mutated beast eggs too! I don't have to wait for them to hatch!
A top-tier talent! The creature inside this egg had a top-tier talent!
And not only did it have a top-tier talent, it had two talents!
Luo Yu's emotions churned. As he gazed at the egg, the talent section of its data panel shimmered.
Luo Yu could even faintly hear a heartbeat like the pulse of the earth!
"I finally found you, but...?"
[Species]: Earth Penguin (egg form) [Attribute]: earth [Species rank]: Low-Rank Ordinary Species [Life level]: level 0 [Species ability]: Digging [Individual talents]: 1. Intelligent (ordinary talent, smarter and wiser than ordinary individuals.) 2. Walking Volcano (top-tier talent. Influenced by the earth's veins, naturally possesses an exceptionally deep resonance with the earth and can use its body as a medium to transform the earth's vein energy into astonishing heat; when the energy condenses to its utmost, everything around it will turn into churning lava. Once cooled, the lava will become new land.)
The talent did look top-tier enough, but... why the fuck was it a top-tier earth-type talent?!
What was this? This was the great age of sailing. Was he supposed to reclaim land from the sea...?