At the end of their conversation, Madame Herta had raised that third option as a bit of a joke, but Julian knew very well that if Aha ever caught wind of the opportunity, the masked god wouldn't hesitate for a single second to throw a wrench into the system. However, considering the Elation's track record of failing to completely fool Nous's calculating engine, relying on a chaotic deity to trick the cosmic firewalls was far too much of a gamble. Unless his studio was pushed into an absolute corner, Julian had no intention of rolling those dice.
"As for managing the independent consciousness loop during the summon, your high-tier Psychic-type companions should easily be able to handle that partition, right?" Herta asked, checking a data screen. "If their telepathic capacity falls short, my workshop can easily manufacture a custom dampener to assist you."
"That won't be necessary," Julian replied smoothly. "I can manage the psychic parameters on my own."
He adjusted his coat, offering a polite nod. "I have fully digested the mechanics. Please excuse my boldness, but I would like to borrow a specific item from your collection to run my first controlled trial."
"Are you hunting for a fragment of the Amber Lord's physical essence?" Herta asked without even looking up from her screen. "I'll instruct Asta to retrieve a sample of Divine Amber from the high-security vault and deliver it to your terminal shortly."
Julian hadn't even named the relic, yet the master genius had already mapped his thoughts and granted authorization without a single drop of hesitation. The Interstellar Peace Corporation regularly filled her inventory with these geological samples; she had long since extracted all the useful scientific data they possessed. While the amber preserved a few fading, structural traces of Preservation energy, it was essentially inert, left to gather dust in the dark corners of her collection rooms.
"Keep in mind," Herta added, her voice dropping into a cool warning, "if your studio intends to initialize a summon using that relic, you will need to manually locate a source of pure Preservation current to activate the stone. The residual divine spark inside that specific fragment has long since dissipated into the background environment."
With the theoretical breakdown complete, Herta went right back to her deep analysis of Yveltal's energy grid, completely leaving Julian to his own devices.
Recognizing that his presence was no longer required, Julian sensibly exited the research wing to check in on the progress of the Astral Express crew. Setting his personal combat growth aside, the Stellaron currently nesting on the frozen surface of Jarilo-VI was one of his primary business targets for the upcoming quarter, meaning he maintained a highly focused watch on their itinerary. To keep a reliable line of sight on the team, he had quietly instructed his Marshadow to slip into Dan Heng's shadow before the train cleared the sector.
Monitoring the two female trailblazers would be an absolute breach of social etiquette, and Julian refused to stoop to such tasteless methods. Keeping tabs on the quiet archivist was the cleanest approach.
Wait... their boots are already touching the snow fields?
Shifting his focus to the mental link shared with his shadow companion, Julian's vision was instantly filled with a vast, blinding expanse of white ice. The Astral Express had clearly unhitched from the space station's docking rings and crossed the star-lanes while he was stuck in the diagnostic pods, likely clearing the sector yesterday evening or early this morning.
Sharp Senses in the Snow
Down on the frozen plains of Jarilo-VI, the wind howled fiercely, kicking up thick flurries of frost across the ridge. Dan Heng suddenly came to a rigid halt, his head pivoting sharply as his eyes scanned the empty, white ridgeline behind them.
"Is there an anomaly on the radar, Dan Heng?" March 7th asked, pulling her thick scarf tighter around her neck as she noticed his sudden change in posture.
Dan Heng adjusted his grip on his spear, his brow furrowing slightly. "I feel as though a foreign presence is actively tracking our coordinates... though it might simply be an illusion born of the local ambient temperature."
The young man's survival instincts are remarkably sharp, Julian thought, breaking the mental link with a faint smile. I need to accelerate my own timeline here before they clear the main story chapters.
He had originally planned to head back to his quarters to clear his physical fatigue, as taming the turbulent current of Destruction over the last few days had taken a massive toll on his stamina. But seeing that the pioneers had already advanced onto the frozen continent, he changed his direction, pathing his boots straight toward the station's Supply Zone to locate Stephen.
Now that Madame Herta had logged back into the central servers, the young prodigy could no longer use her private bridge as his personal workshop. Fortunately, the massive infrastructure of the Supply Zone maintained dozens of high-spec testing cells, ensuring he didn't have to worry about running out of laboratory space.
Stephen was currently dedicating his hours to analyzing and modifying the massive war engine known as the Emperor's Scepter. It was a monumental engineering puzzle; without the collective minds of Herta and Screwllum at his back, the short boy had to spend a significant amount of time breaking down the machine's base architecture from scratch.
Julian had completely forgotten about the scepter when his starskiff first docked at the facility. The physical dimensions of the ancient weapon were large enough to rival the neighboring Azure Star floating outside the station's windows; since the massive hull wasn't visible from the passenger lounges upon his arrival, the data had simply slipped his mind. It was only during a casual dinner thread later that he had inquired about the asset, learning that Stephen had used advanced spatial compression tools to fold the massive metallic weapon into a compact structure, safely storing it inside an isolated loading bay.
For inanimate metallic alloy structures, spatial compression was the absolute simplest approach to logistics. But for living biological entities like Yveltal, a technician could only utilize spatial expansion technology—similar to the architectural layout of the Xianzhou starskiffs—to widen the internal rooms; manually compressing the physical dimensions of a breathing animal would cause its biological systems to instantly collapse. This was the precise reason Herta had forced Julian to master his internal energy control instead of simply using a machine to shrink the dark dragon down to size.
"How are the structural calculations progressing?" Julian asked, stepping through the automated glass doors of the testing wing.
Stephen was surrounded by a dozen floating holographic displays, his tiny hands flying across the inputs as he tracked the scrolling data rows. The Emperor's Scepter itself was currently floating inside a pristine, transparent containment bubble, suspended in the center of an advanced observation grid.
"Is that the actual scepter?" Julian murmured, leaning closer to inspect the small, irregularly shaped metallic block resting inside the energy bubble.
"The analysis loops are rendering smoothly," Stephen answered without breaking his focus from the monitors. "It will probably take my office another month to fully map out the underlying circuit lines. However, translating the engine's purpose to match our entertainment franchise is going to require a massive amount of physical customization and serious capital."
"At its core, this scepter was forged strictly to handle total war and systematic devastation. Based on the structural models I've extracted so far, our workshop will need to dismantle and replace over eighty percent of its internal components to achieve the clean, safe power distribution we need for the studio's projects."
"As for the exact budget requirement... it's a bit early to lock in the final ledger, but you should brace your studio to authorize at least one quintillion credits. Though, given the velocity of Pokémon's current global sales metrics, that sum shouldn't cause your accounting department much stress."
Julian nodded slowly, his mind running the numbers. A single quintillion credits was a perfectly acceptable baseline. With the studio's current planetary sales velocity, their accounts would harvest that exact amount within a few months—half a year at the absolute slowest. And that calculation didn't even account for the massive merchandise and toy factories they were currently expanding across three separate star-systems. Once those industrial lines went live, the studio would clear that entire expense within a month or two of operation.
"What additional favor does your office require from me today?" Stephen asked, turning away from his console to face the developer. He knew Julian never wandered down to the research cells just to exchange pleasantries; if he showed up in person, he was hunting for a solution to a problem.
Julian didn't bother with polite evasions. There were certain specialized technical questions that felt awkward to drop onto Madame Herta's terminal, making Stephen the perfect partner to consult.
"I mentioned during our initial planning phase that I wanted to secure a stable Stellaron to serve as the permanent power core for our expanded media scepter," Julian explained, leaning against the counter. "I wanted to ask if my companions' unique abilities possess the necessary structural traits to seal a Stellaron on their own. If the Pokédex templates fall short, I'll need to trouble your workshop to manufacture a temporary containment unit for the journey."
Securing a Stellaron was an incredibly dangerous transaction. The containment device had to keep the object completely stable, preventing even a single micro-drop of its corruptive energy from leaking into the surrounding hull. Madame Herta had manually built this entire multi-billion-credit space station just to achieve that exact result under laboratory conditions.
If his legendary Pokémon could act as a natural barrier, the logistics would be simple. If the metrics were unstable, Julian would have to secure the asset in the field, bring it back to the station, and hand the material over to Stephen's team to lock it away down in the vaults.
While Julian wasn't familiar with Herta's personal research history, Stephen had spent months working alongside her. The master genius might have required a massive space station to suppress a Stellaron for long-term evaluation, but after dissecting its physical composition, she had definitely logged a few shortcuts in her private logs.
"My office cannot run a simulation on your companions' biological attributes without a live sample," Stephen replied, tapping a secondary console to initialize a new manufacturing queue. "But turning out a temporary containment box to handle the transport logistics is a simple task."
A Stellaron was a highly irregular cosmic anomaly. Even a scholar of Herta's caliber could only observe and analyze its properties, lacking the technical framework to replicate its structure from scratch. Stephen, despite his immense natural talent, faced the same boundaries. While his raw, intuitive genius might eventually outscale Herta's analytical mind down the line, his current lack of accumulated academic data meant he was still remarkably green compared to the three senior members of the Genius Society.
"That works perfectly for my timeline," Julian said.
Stephen gestured toward the automated assembly line behind him. A set of sleek mechanical arms instantly whirled to life, selecting high-grade alloys from the bin. Within less than ten minutes, the machines turned out a compact, box-sized metallic cube. The exterior surfaces looked remarkably clean and simple, save for a series of incredibly dense, geometric patterns engraved across the metal faces.
Though its physical shape was completely minimalist, the addition of those shimmering circuit lines immediately gave the container an advanced appearance.
"You simply need to drop the core straight into the center chamber," Stephen explained, lifting the cube and handing it over. "My office guarantees absolute energy suppression for a clean thirty-day window. Not a single drop of radiation will clear the shell."
Julian accepted the heavy cube, inspecting the metallic seals with a slight frown. "Are you certain a small box like this can hold the weight? Didn't Madame Herta have to construct an entire orbital facility just to keep her Stellaron stable? How is your workshop turning out a solution so easily?"
Stephen shot him an exasperated look, shaking his head. "Madame Herta constructed this facility to run live, high-intensity research diagnostics on the core. Many of her experimental programs actively poke at the object's power grid, which can trigger sudden spikes in its output—meaning she required the structural mass of the entire space station to absorb the tremors and maintain stability."
"If your objective is simply to lock the core in a room and do absolutely nothing else to its structure, bypassing the active radiation is incredibly easy."
Understanding finally settled into Julian's thoughts. He had spent his previous life wondering why the Express crew could casually seal a Stellaron inside a simple container after every planet arc, while Herta's laboratory setup required a massive orbital complex just to keep one locked in a cage. He had assumed the game writers were simply retconning their own rules to save time. He never could have guessed that the difference lay entirely in the distinction between research and storage.
Tucking the containment cube safely into his pack alongside the two pristine shards of Divine Amber that Asta's couriers had just delivered, Julian finalized his travel logs, preparing his starskiff to descend onto the frozen surface of Jarilo-VI.
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