"An Emanator-tier template!"
Julian couldn't help but straighten his posture.
Authentic Emanators were mythical figures whose total number across the entire known universe could be counted on a single person's fingers. While Julian himself had never been particularly obsessed with hoarding raw military might—believing that preserving a safe margin for personal self-defense was more than enough—the classic logic still held true. Carrying a heavy blade and choosing not to draw it was a completely different scenario from having no blade to draw at all. He was naturally thrilled to discover his reservoir now preserved such top-tier authority.
With an anchor of this magnitude attached to his profile, outside of the direct intervention of the Aeons themselves or their designated legendary enforcers like Polka Kakamu, he would basically never face a mortal threat. At the very least, his baseline safety concerns were completely cleared from the ledger.
He didn't let the news turn his head completely, however. Even without the unexpected inheritance of the Destruction energy, he knew his studio's booming trade would have eventually pushed his Pathstrider current past the Emanator threshold down the line just through global game sales. The current crisis had simply forced the graduation metrics to compile much faster than his original roadmap intended.
Madame Herta seemed to read Julian's smug internal calculations with a single glance of her porcelain eyes, pouting slightly as she smoothed her cuffs.
"Do not mistake the title of an Emanator for a cheap commodity, developer—especially for someone like you who dreams of clearing that boundary purely through personal development loops."
She leaned against the console, her voice dropping into a cool, sharp lecture. "The sole reason your active summons managed to force a stalemate against that rogue general on the docks was because she had deployed a mere clone to the sector. Had the authentic Lord Ravager stepped onto the platform in her true form, your defenses wouldn't have survived the opening turn."
"Look at Ruan Mei or Screwllum. Neither of them carries the official title of an Emanator, nor do they possess raw Emanator-tier energy metrics on our instruments. But would you dare stand there and claim that your understanding of your own Path has walked further down the cosmic river than their life's work?"
Herta's sharp words struck Julian like a physical impact, instantly freezing his thoughts and thoroughly shattering his proud little theories.
Originally, he had assumed the structural gap separating his current baseline from a true cosmic heavyweight was nothing more than a fine line. But with the master genius breaking down the mathematics so clearly, he realized that the 'fine line' he perceived was an incredibly deceptive optical illusion.
What kind of titans were Ruan Mei and Screwllum? Even if they didn't hold the official title of an Emanator, one of them could manually build an artificial replica of an Emanator from scratch in her laboratory, while the other casually operated an entire planet-sized mechanical fortress as his personal collection room.
One only had to recall the retired military starskiff, the Cloud-Jumper, which the Xianzhou Alliance currently utilized as a mere floating platform for the Star-Faring Martial Arts Ceremony—that legacy vessel preserved enough raw firepower to cleanly crack a planet with a single orbital shot. If a basic military relic held that tier of destructive capability, how terrifying must a custom-built planetary fortress belonging to Screwllum be? Furthermore, that was merely the technology he displayed to the public; what kind of ultimate insurance policies he kept hidden beneath his servers remained a complete mystery.
Their profound scientific achievements didn't match the rigid parameters of Nous's calculation engine, meaning they were never formally granted the title of Emanator. But Julian would never be foolish enough to believe that the absolute distance they had advanced down the Path of Erudition was inferior to his own studio's metrics.
"Thank you for the reality check, Madame Herta," Julian said respectfully, bowing his head slightly. "Could your office break down the mechanics of this phenomenon in greater detail?"
Herta offered a slight nod, her expression softening into the look of a mentor dealing with a teachable child.
"The entity you named Yveltal was manifested by blending your core Elation energy with a raw injection of Destruction," Herta explained, pointing to the scrolling graphs on the wall. "While the resulting template possesses a baseline strength that completely dwarfs your standard summons, that mixing process alone isn't enough to force a leap into the Emanator tier."
"My current working theory suggests that the creature's biological design happens to share a flawless, absolute harmony with the foundational concept of the Path of Destruction itself."
"Consequently, the exact moment you projected the template and allowed it to anchor itself into the current of ruin through Phantylia's tracking energy, the creature inherently skipped the entire river of progression. On that specific Path, it didn't bother navigating the centuries of accumulation or the long journey; it simply materialized directly at the absolute end of the line."
She turned her sharp gaze back to Julian. "That is why the metrics display such an unprecedented leap. You designed the original blueprint for this beast, so you should understand what your mind was visualizing when you drew its parameters better than anyone else."
Julian felt a wave of internal awkwardness wash over him. What was I visualizing? He had simply copied the exact art assets and lore sheets from the handheld games of his previous life, spending his development hours focusing on how to make the type matches and catching mechanics feel engaging for his players.
Back in his school days, watching the anime adaptations and running through the game regions was done purely for entertainment; he had never spent a single second analyzing the deep philosophical underpinnings of Yveltal's design doc.
But now that Herta had manually raised the question, Julian dug through the ghostly, fading memories of his past life, carefully parsing the meta-lore until a clean conclusion crystallized in his thoughts.
Xerneas was engineered to represent the grand blossoming and eternal rebirth of life.
Yveltal was built to represent the definitive end and absolute destruction of life.
The cosmic Path of Destruction was anchored to the absolute philosophical truth that the universe would eventually move toward an inevitable end and complete annihilation. When mapped against those exact parameters, it would be an absolute anomaly if Yveltal's blueprint didn't clear a perfect compatibility check with Nanook's current.
"But why would the Path system allow such a massive leap to compile?" Julian pressed, his brow furrowing.
The baseline rules governing the universe weren't a set of poorly written video game scripts; a Pathstrider couldn't simply exploit a bug or download a cheat code to bypass the gods. The long walk down an Aeon's Path had to be trodden step by step, with the only variation being the velocity of the traveler. Unless an Aeon consciously reached down to hand-select a follower as their chosen enforcer, a sudden, instantaneous leap like Yveltal's should have been mathematically impossible.
"I spent my morning analyzing that exact problem," Herta noted, tapping the console to update the models. "Without formal verification experiments, the scenario remains highly irregular. However, I can offer a highly viable hypothesis."
"Under standard conditions, the Pokémon you manifest utilizing the current of Elation remain tightly bound to your personal soul registry, meaning they are completely invisible to the observation arrays of the other Aeons and Paths. But the sudden intervention of the proxy general introduced a massive anomaly. She manually injected the concentrated energy of Ruin straight into the template, and because Yveltal was temporarily severed from your direct control during the struggle, it briefly registered as an independent, living biological entity out in the open void."
"That brief separation allowed the Path's automated arrays to detect its presence. Furthermore, you cannot discount the sudden impact of Nanook's gaze. You explicitly stated that your consciousness was pulled straight into the interstice of the Paths due to the density of the proxy's energy, didn't you? That divine flash likely acted as the ultimate catalyst."
"Finally, because the creature's internal design was already in perfect, natural alignment with Ruin, the Path's automated logic mistakenly calculated that this new entity had already walked to the absolute frontier of the Path. Under the weight of all these perfect, chaotic coincidences, the system directly pushed the summon into an vacant Emanator slot."
Julian rubbed his temples, feeling a minor headache coming on. The entire structural explanation was dizzyingly convoluted. Even with a scholar of Herta's tier breaking down the variables, it took his mind a few quiet moments to fully digest the logic.
But the exact frame the concept clicked, a brilliant, high-stakes idea flashed through his thoughts.
"According to your thesis, Madame Herta... if my studio manually replicates these exact ambient conditions, does that mean I can systematically guide my other legendary companions to inherit Emanator-tier power from the other Paths?"
While Yveltal now preserved an immense reservoir of strength, its fundamental nature was completely tied to cataclysm and decay. In day-to-day scenarios where Julian wasn't actively looking to flatten a planetary system, the dark dragon was far too volatile to be practically useful.
But if he could leverage this exact sequence to let his other legendary sovereigns inherit Emanator-tier authority from different Paths? That would rewrite his entire strategy. He could simply summon the exact specialized companion required to handle whatever political or physical crisis blocked his starskiff.
"How could a sequence like that possibly be common currency?" Herta rolled her eyes at him, letting out a sharp scoff. "I have already stated that securing a direct gaze from an Aeon is the absolute core link in the chain. Even if you are simply looking to hitch a ride on someone else's divine focus, where on earth do you expect to find the statistical luck to stumble into a god's line of sight every single week? An Aeon's gaze isn't a head of common cabbage you can buy at a market stall."
Julian's eyes lit up like twin stars. Hitching a ride on a gaze? Isn't that the simplest part of the equation?
"I preserve my own secret methods for managing the divine tracking array," Julian smiled confidently, his mind already drifting toward his upcoming multiplayer expansion. "Why don't you break down the remaining parameters, Madame Herta? Running these details out loud will only help your office verify your data models, won't it?"
Herta paused, considering the proposal. Explaining the theoretical framework required zero real effort on her part, and if this bizarre developer actually managed to successfully duplicate the anomaly under controlled conditions, the resulting data would provide her with an entirely new, profound understanding of how the Paths operate.
Satisfied with the bargain, she began walking him through the precise mechanical steps, detailing how to align the internal energy currents and highlighting the micro-details that required absolute focus.
Most of the physical variables were straightforward enough to manage; he could simply reconstruct the atmospheric density and energy containment grids from their previous battle. But one critical structural hurdle remained—
"How do I guarantee my character gets noticed by an Aeon a second time?" Julian asked, tapping his fingers against his belt. "The next time I cross paths with a divine gaze, I won't have a hostile Lord Ravager anchoring a tracking curse onto my soul to drag me into the interstice."
"Furthermore, I must ensure there is a foreign, independent consciousness actively interfering with the summon's energy loop during the manifestation. That is the only way to trick the system into thinking the Pokémon has separated from my profile to become an independent life-form."
Herta smiled, a sharp, prepared glint illuminating her eyes as she pulled up a fresh schematic file.
"My office has already mapped out two viable paths to bypass that restriction. The first method is straightforward: we simply borrow a controlled sample of energy directly from a cooperative Emanator to mimic the tracking script. The second method involves locating and physically integrating an authentic relic or a genuine body fragment belonging to the corresponding Aeon straight into the Pokémon's core matrix before you initialize the summon."
She leaned in closer, a playful, dry smirk touching her lips. "Of course, if your studio is feeling adventurous, there is always a third, highly entertaining alternative. You could simply open a direct line to the Aeon of Elation himself. If you ask him nicely, I am entirely certain Aha would be absolutely thrilled to manually forge a simulated replica of another Path's tracking code just to see if he can trick the other gods' firewalls. In fact, knowing his personality, he would probably clear his schedule just to watch the show."
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