Chapter 7: Average IQ, Decent EQ

However, Dr. Aurin’s words put Luo Mu at ease.

Since the Paldia Trench-related project is still in the restart phase, that means the time machine hasn’t been built by the couple yet—meaning everything might still be changed.

The entire Pokémon Scarlet and Violet storyline is largely free of deep grudges, filled with a sense of “utopia.”

The only major regret is Dr. Aurin and Dr. Futu, who will fade into the past, and Senior Pape, who lost his parents.

He might yet change some things in the future...

Dr. Aurin displayed a loquacious talent on par with Pape’s, even surpassing him by a notch whenever she spoke of Zone Zero.

Perhaps she also wanted to spark Luo Mu’s interest in Zone Zero.

Dr. Aurin’s torrent of words flowed like beads on a string, technical terms emerging one after another, seamlessly linked.

After listening until his head spun, Luo Mu finally grasped only one truth.

Pape’s incessant talking was likely inherited from his mother.

What silenced Dr. Aurin’s monologue was neither disaster nor calamity, but a sharp alarm suddenly blaring from the high-precision research equipment behind her.

“Looks like another failure,” Dr. Aurin sighed, stopping her flow of words, slipping on gloves with practiced ease, and using tweezers to pick up a clearly ruined special core, her expression grim.

The experiment on spatial transmission tolerance had failed again.

The wild Pokémon in the Paldia Trench are extremely powerful; to enter its depths, establish a stable research lab and observation station, and move freely between them, they must build a transmission device based on Poké Ball teleportation technology.

With the transmission device, they wouldn’t need to retrace the treacherous path of the Paldia Trench every time they transported supplies.

The technical calculations were complete; the only problem was the repeated failures of the core experiments, with no cause found.

If this continued, the restart of the Taile Research project would have to be delayed—and that was something Dr. Aurin and Dr. Futu, who longed for past and future Pokémon, could not bear to see.

Watching the core Dr. Aurin held, Luo Mu suddenly wondered if the hint system could help—he asked silently in his mind: “System, can you give me a hint on this?”

【The blue solution on the doctor’s left, second bottle, and the pink solution in the fourth bottle can be mixed together.】

Luo Mu followed the system’s hint and saw the two solutions clearly present; he suddenly said: “Dr. Aurin, could you tell me what those two solutions on your left are?”

“Of course.” Though puzzled, Dr. Aurin picked up the two bottles Luo Mu mentioned, gently shaking them as she said slowly: “They are space solidifier and the extracted psychic energy from Kecleon’s saliva...”

“Space solidifier?”

“Simply put, it shrinks and stabilizes the spatial range...”

Luo Mu didn’t understand Dr. Aurin’s advanced scientific knowledge, but as she spoke, she seemed to have a sudden insight, called out to him, and immediately buried herself in research.

Perhaps because she had failed countless times before, her movements were extremely skilled; she took out several clearly empty core shells and began testing her sudden inspiration.

The number of failures need not be detailed; after another hour and a half, during which Luo Mu heard Dr. Aurin muttering formulas nonstop, she finally produced two cores emitting a soft green glow.

She installed the cores into the device on the ground; as the ring of light on the device ignited, her expression instantly brightened with excitement.

“It worked!”

Luo Mu, who had come from the modern world, never tried to understand any of Pokémon World’s black tech—it was just a pointless drain on his brain cells.

But the moment Dr. Aurin activated the device, he recognized exactly what it was.

“Hss...”

Isn’t this the black tech from the game that lets you teleport between observation stations?

Dr. Aurin cautiously placed an empty beaker on the transmission device and, her right hand trembling slightly, pressed the retro red button that looked like it could launch a nuclear bomb.

After a faint hum, a blinding green glow flared and vanished—and the beaker appeared on another transmission device five meters away.

Luo Mu was stunned. Is invention and research really this easy?

This was absurd—both the system’s seemingly prophetic hints and Dr. Aurin’s sudden epiphany.

It left Luo Mu with a crushing sense of intellectual inferiority.

Luo Mu exclaimed silently in his mind: “Are you really this good?”

【Hehe!】

Even those two simple characters, just by their bouncing motion, made Luo Mu know the system was smug.

Let it be smug—it could still contribute significantly to the future development of his farm with this incredible, controllable hint function.

Luo Mu had enough foresight to see that.

After entrusting the raw Terastal Crystals to Dr. Aurin, she seemed to believe she had succeeded in building the transmission device only because of Luo Mu’s reminder.

In expressing her gratitude, Dr. Aurin enthusiastically invited Luo Mu to switch careers and become a researcher, offering him better pay than the Orange Academy, with only one condition: occasional overtime.

That “occasional” and “maybe” were suspiciously vague—Luo Mu vaguely remembered that after the couple devoted themselves to Zone Zero research, Pape truly became a literal latchkey child.

He saw his parents only a handful of times over several years.

If the employer was like this, how hard must her subordinates be working?

Goodbye!

Seeing Luo Mu refuse her invitation with an inexplicably resolute expression, Dr. Aurin sighed in disappointment and handed him several bags of seeds with no labels, taken from a nearby Baoxian fridge.

Dr. Aurin said: “These are a few bags of seeds I happened to acquire while researching the past. I don’t know their species, but the energy inside is extremely active—they’re definitely not ordinary plants.”

Luo Mu picked up one bag and examined it closely, but with his meager knowledge, he couldn’t identify the species at all.

He planned to grow crops on his farm to make money; unknown seeds, with no known species, might not even be sellable if they grew.

Luo Mu wasn’t particularly smart, but his emotional intelligence wasn’t low.

Even if he wondered what these seeds could do, they were still Dr. Aurin’s thoughtful gift—he’d take them, store them away for now, and plant them later in spare areas once the farm was running smoothly.

After all, someone once said: make as many friends as possible.

As Luo Mu was leaving, Dr. Aurin suddenly remembered and called out to his back: “Teacher Luo, please look after Pape at the Orange Academy!”

Luo Mu’s steps halted; his expression twisted into something strange, and he suddenly felt his stomach ache.

If Pape is going to be my student...

Then doesn’t that mean I’ll run into all the other main characters and troublemakers too!?

Gulp... I don’t want that!

Before even starting work, Luo Mu already wanted to quit.