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Her long, glossy ice-blue hair drifted in the wind like the finest silk, shimmering with a dreamlike glow beneath the crimson light of the erupting lava.
Her deep blue eyes were bright and clear, calm and composed, yet still carrying the lively spark unique to a young woman, as if countless morning stars were flickering within them.
Her delicate features came together in perfect harmony. The soft curve of her crescent-like brows added another touch of gentleness to her already graceful beauty.
Her figure looked slender at first glance, but was beautifully proportioned beneath a flowing outfit rich with classical elegance.
A pale white dress fell in long, smooth lines, covered by a layer of fine, delicate gauze. Simple floral patterns traced in silver thread decorated the cuffs, understated yet undeniably refined.
Along the hem ran soft, rippling lines like flowing water, giving the pure white garment a light and graceful quality.
Beneath a sky filled with ash and smoke, thick with the scent of disaster.
The young woman in elegant traditional dress sat quietly atop the snowy white swan Pokémon.
Completely still.
As though she were immersed in a world of her own.
Serene.
Graceful.
Possessing a strange beauty that stood in sharp contrast to the devastation around her.
At that moment, Lanlian was feeling rather troubled.
As the newly appointed Water-type Elite Four member of the League, she had only just managed to squeeze out a little free time after the annual Elite Four challenge, a grueling and exhausting affair, and had planned to bring all of her Pokémon out for a group training session.
Instead, she had run straight into a volcanic eruption, the kind of natural disaster that might not happen once in a hundred years.
"What awful luck."
Lanlian let out a quiet sigh in her heart as her training plans went up in smoke.
Faced with a catastrophe powerful enough to destroy almost anything in its path, even an Elite Four Trainer with immensely powerful Pokémon partners had no choice but to avoid it.
By most people's logic, a place like the core of Molten Season Forest, saturated with Fire-type energy and practically a holy land for Fire-type Pokémon, had nothing at all to do with a Water-type Elite Four member.
If anyone should be here, it ought to be a Fire specialist.
But Lanlian saw it differently.
Though she was still young, her experience as the League's Water-type Elite Four member far surpassed that of almost anyone her age.
There was naturally a reason she had chosen a place so hostile to ordinary Water-type Pokémon as a training ground.
Lanlian came from an exceptional background. She had been born into a prestigious family of breeders and had received the most systematic and complete Pokémon education from early childhood.
She could effortlessly list detailed information on nearly every species recorded in the Pokédex. As for the Water-type Pokémon her family specialized in, she knew them even better.
That privileged upbringing had given her more than an education far beyond ninety percent of her peers. It had also given her access to extraordinary resources.
Once her remarkable talent as a Trainer was discovered, her family used its influence in the League to pour unimaginable resources into her growth.
Rare and powerful Pokémon.
Ancient manuals and precious texts.
Personal guidance from elite Trainers.
All of it, combined with her own outstanding talent and, most importantly, relentless hard work, had allowed Lanlian, a young woman barely in her early twenties, to become one of the youngest Elite Four Trainers in League history.
And during all that time, to train her Pokémon as well as possible, she had visited nearly every Water-type sanctuary known to the human world. If not every single one, then certainly most of them.
So she had almost no need left for places like that.
The real problem she faced now was that several of her ace Pokémon had reached a bottleneck. A true wall.
Simple training no longer produced any meaningful progress.
Her family did possess methods for breaking through limits like that, but every one of them had the same flaw.
They took far too long.
For Lanlian, who had become an Elite Four Trainer barely past twenty and still carried enormous ambitions, spending years, maybe even more than a decade, repeating the same rigid, dull training every day was absolutely intolerable.
She had to find another way.
A shortcut, perhaps.
Something that could accelerate her Pokémon's breakthrough.
And Molten Season Forest, where she now found herself, was one of the solutions she had come up with.
If environments rich in Water-type energy no longer did anything for her Pokémon, then what about other kinds of environments?
Or even more extreme ones.
Places that stood in direct opposition to them, like a Fire-type training ground.
To others, Lanlian's method might have seemed foolish.
After all, even first-year Trainer students knew that raising Pokémon in an environment misaligned with their elemental nature usually led to half the results for twice the effort.
But she did not care.
Lanlian understood that only the most extreme methods could produce results beyond what ordinary people could ever reach.
Besides, she was not stupid, and she was certainly not the sort to stubbornly force a bad plan forever. It was only an experiment. If it failed to help her Pokémon break through their bottlenecks, then she could always leave.
And even in the worst case, a shared training trip like this could still deepen the bonds between her Pokémon, which was valuable in its own right.
So, bringing more than a dozen Pokémon with her, Lanlian had come to Molten Season Forest.
Unfortunately, luck had not been on her side.
Before the young Water-type Elite Four member had even found a suitable place in the forest to begin training, the volcano, dormant for centuries, erupted.
"Sigh."
Lanlian reached down and rubbed her lower leg, sore from sitting too long.
"Good thing I brought Swanna with me. Otherwise, this would have been a real problem."
That was what she was thinking when it happened.
"Chwee!"
The clear cry from the Swanna beneath her caught her attention.
"What is it?"
"Did you find something?"
Proud by nature, Swanna was not especially affectionate even toward the Trainer it spent every day with.
It only nodded, stopped its forward flight, veered slightly in the sky, and began circling above a patch of forest below.
As a powerful Water-type Pokémon itself, Swanna could still detect Kael's presence even though his aura had grown incredibly faint, as though it might disappear at any moment.
In a place so saturated with Fire-type energy, that moist, gentle presence, the complete opposite of violent fire, stood out like candlelight in the dead of night.
Even from several hundred meters away, Swanna could smell it with ease.
The discovery made it feel that its Trainer should be informed, and that the decision should be left to her.
"Oh?"
Curious, Lanlian leaned forward over Swanna's broad back and looked down.
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
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For early access to advanced chapters on P-atreon:
P-atreon/iamxeno
(Just remove the - hyphen to access normally)
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