CH33 (397), Failure Is The Mother Of Success

The following period gave me the feeling that I was a material science student, thankfully without the math, and not someone interning at a Pokemon Lab. After looking through the list of materials that our research group was working with, I began looking through the combinations/tests they had done in the week they had been working without me.

The test I got to witness was the third one by that point, even if that was not the third object they had created. The other 6 objects did not even manage to pass the screening phase.

The screening phase involved a structural analysis to prove the object was an entirely new item and not something that has been simply slapped together. After that, the ice energy level and purity got tested by both lab instruments and an ice-type Pokemon. There was a minimum level for both that had to be met.

This screening phase ensured that the Eevee would not be harmed during the tests, or in case the evolution got triggered, even if the last bit was theoretically impossible due to the way evolution worked. Still, that was why our team only went through with the active tests after the object passed through all tests of the screening phase.

What I could say, after reading through the composition as well as the creation process of all 9 objects, was that our team had gone through the most obvious base material choices, which was why they managed to create so many objects in just a week. The work they had to do to use those objects had been minimal.

The base materials I was addressing there were Ice Stone Shards, and Ice Rock Pieces that managed to retain part of the energy of the original. Not the greatest idea in my opinion, but I could understand why they started like that. Testing the most obvious choice(s) made sense after all.

Anyway, after I was done looking through the resource list and the experiment log, I mentally checked which one of the available resources I already had a copy of in Utopia and which ones were missing.

Surprisingly, or not considering we were talking about Oak Labs, I was missing a lot of the materials on the resource list. I would even go so far as to say I only had around 20% of the materials listed and that, even though I kept buying or procuring new stuff whenever I encountered something I did not yet have.

Well, the vast majority of the items I was missing were of the ice type, and I did not have many of those since Kanto was lacking in readily available ice items and areas. Yet, there were still a lot of water-type materials that I was missing.

Frankly, I could not be considered well-traveled, considering that I had not even visited all the main cities of Kanto, much less the many cities, towns, and villages, so it was no surprise that I had not come across them.

Not to mention that the list was not limited to materials from Kanto. That the materials listed on the resource list were ones considered "abundantly"/"readily" available just showed me the difference in ease of access to resources between myself and a Research Lab.

However, I was convinced that this was not really my fault, since, despite many of the materials being abundant and easy to procure even among the ones from Kanto, one had to know where to get them first or that they existed at all.

If I did not come across them on the net or randomly in some notes from my super library, I had no way of knowing they were available in the first place. For example the Frost Cap, an ice-type mushroom that grew in some of the caves inhabited by members of the Dewgong line.

I asked James why that one was listed here if it had such a requirement, but he told me that they had a big and steady supply because quite a few villages along the coast below Azure City had managed to establish working relationships with the Dewgong living there, so they were allowed to collect the Frost Caps in exchange for food or other relatively cheap resources, which allowed those villages to earn some decent money.

I had not known that at all. Looking through my super library could tell me about the use/effect of materials but not always where I could find them unless I was looking through a detailed excerpt on the material available. Most of the time, I also had to know about something first to look it up, unless I was looking through a general list.

Moreover, it was not as if the materials inside my super library were listed super comprehensively, so I had to search for most stuff, aside from the few books that did actually list some materials, but those were obviously not complete by a long shot.

Really, situations like these made me wish I had wished for a more comprehensive search function as well as a compile function for my super library. That would have made finding knowledge much easier and would have ensured that I had all the knowledge my super library possessed on any topic readily at hand.

'Sigh', as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Still, there was no use complaining about it, at least not anymore. Regardless, seeing the large number of materials I had no sample of, that were available for our research, I decided that discreetly borrowing them for a few seconds, whenever I got my hands on them, would be one of my goals for this period.

It was after all not as if I was using or destroying the materials, I was just allowing Utopia to analyze their structure so that it could replicate them. I even went as far as disabling the upgrade feature to prevent the materials from messing with the ongoing research.

Within the week, my group of three theorized and tested the creation of 4 ice-type objects, of which only 1 managed to pass the screening phase, but ultimately ended up failing the actual evolution test. Still, I managed to "borrow" 6 water and 13 ice-type materials during all that, including the Frost Cap, so I was pretty happy about how productive the week had been.

Also, at the end of the week, everyone unanimously decided to stop using Ice Stone Shards and Ice Rock Parts during their object design. Not because it did not work, since two of our teams actually managed to produce working evolution triggers, but because the total cost of the materials used, ended up being nearly as high as the cost of the original trigger.

They failed to lower the cost no matter how many times they tried, so they decided to search for a complete alternate. My group had forgone those two materials from the get-go seeing how the other two were already working with them, so that decision changed nothing for us.

However, that was not the only reason I called this a productive week. No, part of the reason I felt like that was that Hashirama/Venusaur had completed his second round of limit-breaking on Kyoday.

It had been 1.5 years since Hashirama reached the (high) silver stage, and it would probably take him close to another year to finish his limit-breaking, but 2.5 half years was a pretty good time for what he was doing so I would not mind it, even if it really took him another full year to finish his limit-breaking.

Besides, others had come close to breaking through to the next stage, so I would get to witness a lot of breakthroughs within that year. Aside from the obvious ones such as Manami/Lapras and Hera/Pidgeot, who had not been too far behind the Sinister Six, there were a few others who I believed could finish their limit-breaking before the next "term" so to say since my internship was tied to the school system's schedule.

That was only considering this term, so there was no need to mention those that would probably break through during the terms after that. Yes, I would truly get to see many of my Pokemon breaking through before Hashirama did the same.

Anyway, on Arcday of my second week, I had the brilliant idea to ask James why I could not see any Pokemon blood among the list of materials. I mean I could understand why no Pokemon parts were listed since I could imagine the repercussions for said species in case one of the objects using a certain species' part proved to be successful.

Ruthless people would probably start mass-hunting the species for the part used to create the evolution trigger. Well, the same could probably happen with the blood, but that could be avoided by keeping the blood part a secret and procuring it from a farm capable of professionally drawing the necessary blood.

I mean, it was not as if there was no such business already since I knew that "blood farms" and businesses dealing in "body parts" already existed.

However, James made it clear that it was a "global" policy for all labs that any projects that could be applied on a large scale were forbidden from using Pokemon blood or body parts. The only exception were things that could be quickly regrown without any problem such as feathers or wool, or parts that the Pokemon shed naturally.

Blood did not fall under that category because it had to be drawn from inside the body and because losing it could weaken the Pokemon's health or even cost the Pokemon's life if it lost too much blood.

The professor triumvirate of Oak, Rowan, and Magnolia had pushed that policy through centuries ago and ensured that anyone that broke it was faced with severe consequences. According to the trio a Pokemon Researcher was held to higher standards.

So, researchers and firms that were working with blood and body parts during their research did exist, but there were no Pokemon Professors among them.

It was after all not as if we did not need the previously mentioned farms/groups since we did. Even labs made use of them since they did have to feed the Pokemon staying at the lab after all, and the labs researching a Pokemon's diet also needed them for their research.

Still, it was obvious what James was trying to say. Don't use any Pokemon blood or body parts in any research project that might result in mass-huntings due to the profit involved in the research project.

When James said that everyone else around us nodded, showing that this policy was common knowledge and that it had become a natural fact for all of them. Kinda like "fire is hot", "ice is cold", and "Mikail is handsome". Just things everyone knew to be true.

Still, that kind of made me glad that I had not tried to use my way of slowly causing a variation in some of my Pokemon to write a research paper or anything like that since I was not only breaking that "don't use blood or body parts" rule during my project, but I was trampling it while it was down.

All the supplements used during my Magikarp as well as Rattata studies contained blood, and a great part contained body parts, so I was not sure if that disqualified them from the global research scene, but I could take a good guess.

I mean, I doubted that it could be considered a large-scale project simply because it was much, much easier to let the successful cases breed after some point than it was to keep inducing the variation. Still, just to be on the safe side, maybe it was better to look into vegetarian alternatives before I published anything in that direction. If I wanted to publish anything like that in the first place.

I could keep the research for myself and simply act as the sole distributor after all, at least until others had a high enough number to start their own breeding farms. Once that happened, I would lose my monopoly, but there was nothing I could do against that, short of sterilizing any Pokemon I handed out, which I would never do since that was simply inhuman.

Actually, I had no idea if that was allowed in the first place, but I could see the alliance releasing laws against it. Besides, there were probably laws in place that would let me earn a cut from any new breeding farms that could prop up, as long as I was registered as the original source/breeding farm.

Maybe they even had laws ensuring no breeding farms could officially open without my permission, but those were things future Mikail had to think of, so I would leave that to him.

Anyway, after that small history lesson, James left us alone, and I proposed to my two fellow group members that we could try to center our experiments around the material Mystic Water. We would obviously have to freeze it to turn it into an ice-type item, but I felt as if Mystic Water had the greatest potential use for our goal among all the water materials on our resource list.

The various ways we went about freezing the Mystic Water would be what we had to consider, and my two fellows agreed with my suggestion, so we began discussing how we should turn the Mystic Water into Mystic Ice during our first experiment.

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