Chapter 378 - 255: Cognitive Camouflage

[Luo Sen]: Let me ask you a question. What do you think "resources" are?

[Su Zhi]: Uh...

[Su Zhi]: I guess they’re probably all the things that help Pet Beasts evolve and grow stronger?

[Luo Sen]: Not bad. You even knew to add "I guess they’re probably" to show your uncertainty. Much better than that stubborn bunch of old geezers from the Boya Alliance.

[Su Zhi]: me_being_well_behaved.jpg

[Luo Sen]: For the longest time, many scholars from the Boya Alliance have generally believed that the essence of resources is the concentration of natural quintessence. They even wrote as much when compiling their textbooks.

[Luo Sen]: However, if we accept that definition, then in theory, mega-scale resources shouldn’t exist. And those old geezers did, in fact, write that very idea into their textbooks.

[Luo Sen]: But the Golden Sand Flower is sitting right here, which is basically a slap in the face to those old geezers. To this day, they still haven’t come up with a convincing explanation.

[Su Zhi]: Mm.

Su Zhi could relate to that.

He remembered a geography question from back in his first year of high school. The source material was about Fuguang Lake. At the time, he had asked his teacher, didn’t the book say mega-scale resources don’t exist?

His teacher had told him it wasn’t his place to question the people who write the textbooks, and that he should just answer the question...

Seeing Luo Sen use the term "old geezers" three times in a row, Su Zhi didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Before the Common Defense Alliance was formed, the Boya Alliance and the Divine Strategy Alliance were actually two opposing schools of thought.

The former saw themselves as the orthodox academic authority and denounced the Divine Strategy Alliance as heretics. The latter believed that pioneering and innovation were more important, dismissing the Boya Alliance as hidebound old fossils clinging to the past.

The two sides often tore into each other over all sorts of trivial matters, both wanting to persuade the other with reason—and sometimes, they even resorted to "persuading" them with physical force.

After the Common Defense Alliance was established, they all became comrades on the same side. On the surface, things became much more amicable, but the under-the-table rivalries never stopped.

Take this definition of resources, for example. He’d heard the Boya Alliance and the Divine Strategy Alliance were currently at odds over it, and the Alliance Headquarters was holding academic conferences every other day.

Plenty of Alliance Members went to watch each time, but few of them genuinely understood the academics. They mostly just wanted to see the big shots trade insults.

[Luo Sen]: So, we believe that resources are not generated naturally.

[Su Zhi]: ...but are subjectively created by certain Pet Beasts?

[Luo Sen]: Yes.

[Su Zhi]: Holy shit.

After hearing Yu Bao’s theory before, Su Zhi had thought it was outrageous. ’What kind of Pet Beast could condense such a massive resource? You probably couldn’t do it even if you squeezed an entire Race dry.’

But now, he recalled Luo Sen’s hypothesis from a long time ago about the Hundred Rivers Earthquake—that the quake originated from the activity of a giant Earth and Gold Element Pet Beast.

Two ideas from completely different fields had now, surprisingly, connected.

’Is this what it means to be a top expert? He can connect anything with just a moment’s thought...’

[Su Zhi]: But that doesn’t add up. The Golden Sand Flower is located right on a weak point in the geological structure. If it was placed there intentionally, then this Pet Beast must have wanted to protect Hundred Rivers from the effects of an earthquake.

[Su Zhi]: If that’s the case, why would it then cause an earthquake? Wouldn’t that contradict its own purpose?

[Luo Sen]: That’s not a real problem. Many hypotheses could explain it.

[Luo Sen]: Perhaps causing the earthquake wasn’t its original intention, but an unintentional or unavoidable action. Or maybe the one that left the Golden Sand Flower and the one that caused the earthquake weren’t the same Pet Beast. It’s also possible the earthquake was just an intermediary factor, and both leaving the Golden Sand Flower and triggering the quake were done to achieve some other goal...

[Luo Sen]: Of course, these are just conjectures with no solid evidence for now. I’m just spitballing with you.

[Luo Sen]: We do have some shame, you know. We won’t parade unproven theories around as truth like those old geezers.

[Su Zhi]: funny_face_crouching_in_corner.jpg

[Luo Sen]: By the way, how’s that classmate of yours who evolved the Wave-Riding Duck? Is he having any trouble with overexposure?

[Su Zhi]: I don’t think so. His daily life seems to be the same as before.

The Holy Order Alliance’s protection and public opinion monitoring were quite thorough. They implemented targeted protective measures the moment Liu Yuhang entered the public eye.

All independent media outlets that published information about the Wave-Riding Duck were put under strict supervision. Videos filmed by audience members were also suppressed, greatly limiting their spread.

Official media videos also adopted a relatively low-key tone when discussing Liu Yuhang, using very restrained wording in their evaluations.

Right now, Liu Yuhang is what you’d call moderately famous in the Beast Tamer circles of Huai City. His peers will praise him with "You’re the man, dude," and the older generation will remark that "the young are to be respected," but that’s about the extent of it.

He doesn’t have much fame outside those circles. It’s not like he’s being followed by paparazzi everywhere he goes, nor are there crazy female fans showing up to his matches in wedding dresses.

In fact, this was the proper way to handle it...

On Blue Star, successfully raising an Evolutionary Type that had been extinct for some time was certainly rare, but it wasn’t anything new. In recent years, others had also managed to bring back other extinct Evolutionary Types, and each had caused a sensation at the time.

However, due to the media’s excessive packaging and hype, most of them were distracted by various commercial activities and could no longer settle down to focus on Beast Taming... Now, they’ve mostly faded into obscurity.

For a high school student whose Beast Taming career had just begun, protection was a more appropriate course of action than praise.

Of course, making empty promises was also out of the question.

The class’s academic representative got every last bit of the resources and prize money he had coming to him, and his application to join the first wave of second-year Alliance Youth Team Members was approved without a hitch. After a long period of laying low, he was finally on the path to taking off.

It reached the point where the others on the team inexplicably felt a sense of relief, like ’their child had finally grown up’.

[Luo Sen]: That’s good. Otherwise, it would have been very troubling for me.