August 20th, Sand River City, Layered Peaks Gym, Gym Leader's office.
Gilbert looked at Nova's confident face and felt a wave of doubt rise inside him.
"So you're telling me that in the two days since we split up, you found the nest of an Elite Four level Flygon?"
Nova nodded, sounding obedient. "Yes!"
Mort could hardly believe it either. "And then you chased off two Flygon?"
Nova nodded again. "That's right!"
Gilbert asked, "And after that, you raided their nest?"
"Correct!"
Mort pressed further. "And you're saying there were more than sixty Pokémon eggs in that nest, and you took every one of them?"
"That's exactly how it happened!"
Gilbert turned to Mort with a pained expression. "This disciple of yours isn't just imagining things anymore. He needs a good scolding."
Mort sighed. "Just tell us the truth about what you did these past two days. Even if you bought these eggs from some poaching ring, we won't be angry, as long as you're honest with us."
Nova's obedient act dropped instantly. What did these two old men take him for?
"Am I really that untrustworthy? I'm telling the truth. I raided the nest of an Elite Four level Flygon, plain and simple!"
Gilbert let out a short laugh. "With your current strength, your Nidoking and Meowscarada working together, along with support from your other Pokémon, you could probably beat two strong Flygon. That part I believe."
"But can't you at least lie a little better, kid? What kind of Flygon lays more than sixty eggs in one nest and doesn't hatch a single one, just so you can scoop them all up at once?"
Nova felt like sighing himself. That was simply how Taylor had set things up, and there was nothing Nova could do about it now. The man was dead anyway, and the Flygon Queen and her mate had already gone back into the depths of the Black Rock Desert. There was no one left to prove otherwise.
Finding more than sixty eggs in a single nest did sound like something out of a tall tale, but the eggs were right there, and facts spoke for themselves. Since Nova had brought them back, Gilbert couldn't simply wave the claim away.
So Nova gave up arguing with the two old men and opened his bag instead.
He pulled out an egg and set it down on Gilbert's desk.
As an Elite Four level Trainer, Gilbert certainly knew how to raise Pokémon well. But knowing how to raise them wasn't the same as being able to judge an egg's potential the way a trained Breeder could. Still, the fact that Nova had a real Trapinch egg in hand meant at least part of his story checked out.
He really had raided a Flygon's nest. Whether the Flygon truly had Elite Four level strength, and whether the nest truly held more than sixty eggs, still needed to be confirmed.
Nova was about to confirm it himself, pulling out a second egg from his bag. Then a third. Then a fourth. By the time he reached the ninth egg, Gilbert finally understood that something big was going on. He picked up the phone and called the Gym, telling the Breeders on staff to get ready for an appraisal.
While Gilbert made the call, Nova kept unloading eggs.
Mort ran out of patience. Instead of watching Nova pull them out one at a time, he stuck his own head into the storage bag to see for himself. When he pulled his head back out, Gilbert asked at once, "Well?"
"The kid's telling the truth," Mort said. "There really are more than sixty eggs in here!"
Gilbert had no choice but to believe him now. Nova had close to a million yuan in savings at the moment, but even that wouldn't be enough to buy Pokémon eggs smuggled out by a poaching ring. A single Trapinch egg usually sold for somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand yuan on the open market. Even on the black market, the price rarely dropped below fifty thousand.
Buying more than sixty Trapinch eggs at once would have cleaned Nova out completely, and then some. Knowing Nova's personality, he might well try something reckless just to pocket the triple price bonus Gilbert had promised him. But gathering that many eggs of a single species in such a short time, even through the Pokémon black market, simply wasn't realistic.
Of course, Nova couldn't tell them the truth, that these eggs were what a dead terrorist had left behind. This particular batch had been altered using dangerous compounds, and once hatched, the Pokémon inside would turn out slightly different from normal, with unusually strong potential. If Nova admitted this now, and people later noticed how talented Taylor's eggs turned out to be, they would want to look into his breeding methods. That was exactly what Nova wanted to avoid, since he needed to keep the method of breeding Pokémon with dangerous compounds buried for good.
He trusted Gilbert and Mort completely. But these sixty seven eggs would eventually belong to sixty seven different Trainers. Could he really trust every one of them the same way?
It was better to cut off that path from the very start. As long as he kept insisting the eggs came from an unusually powerful Flygon, any Trainer who later noticed something unusual about their Pokémon would simply assume the parents were exceptional, rather than suspect anything sinister.
Gilbert called over several Gym staff members to move the eggs Nova had unloaded to the Gym's cultivation room, where the in house Breeders would appraise each egg's potential.
Nova found the whole process fascinating, since this was really his first time seeing a Breeder's work up close. To everyone else, his current skills already matched those of a top senior Breeder. But in truth, Nova relied almost entirely, about ninety nine percent, on his breeding system's scanning ability. He himself knew next to nothing about how real Breeders judged the potential of Pokémon and their eggs.
The group boarded a shuttle within the Gym grounds and arrived at the Cultivation Research Lab that Layered Peaks Gym had spent a fortune to build.
Howard, the head of the research lab, was already waiting by the main entrance with several Breeders at his side. He looked to be around forty, with a boyish face and black rimmed glasses. If not for the gray hair at his temples, someone might have mistaken him for a fresh university graduate on an internship.
Compared to the relaxed, individual style Trainers usually dressed in, Breeders tended to dress more uniformly, especially while on duty. Much like programmers in Nova's past life who all seemed to wear plaid shirts and jeans, Breeders favored white lab coats at work, a small badge that marked them as people engaged in serious scientific research.