For Bea’s evolution, he had exchanged for the Mindleech Vine and Subliminal Orb as the Evolutionary Base Materials, and the Cerebral Core to stabilize his usage of multiple materials. He already had several yellow-grade Spiritual Orbs, and he had obtained a catalyst elixir already for free after speaking with one of his professors in the Evolutionary Planner major.
The only thing holding him back is that he’d impulsively also purchased the source of the Green-grade spider’s mental threads—the Mindweaver Crystal.
Kain was quite satisfied with Bea’s current planned evolution…but what if there was an even better option?
Therefore, Kain did one last simulation for Bea, this time using all 3 evolutionary base materials.
However, after the Simulation flashed with light, Kain was notified that the evolution was considered a failure.
He turned angrily to his new assistant, “aren’t you supposed to prevent me from making more failed evolutions?!”
The robot faced the irritated Kain calmly, “I need a large amount of data in order to make accurate predictions. Considering that this was the first evolution I had personally witnessed, my predictions were off. However, I can help you to deduce the cause of the failure.
According to my calculations, due to you suddenly increasing the number of spiritual materials, and one being of Green-grade, the spiritual power contained in the yellow-grade spiritual orb you supplied is insufficient to support the evolution.”
Kain’s irritation calmed down at his assistant’s answer. If he sat down to think about the source of his failure, he likely would have been able to reach that conclusion for himself, but it was nice to have it confirmed by his assistant within seconds.
“Ahem! Good work! I think you’ve finally earned yourself a name. Hmm… let’s see… how about VERA because you’re a Versatile Experimental Research Assistant!” Kain settled on the name quickly while patting himself on the back for his cleverness. Unfortunately, Vera didn’t seem to appreciate the effort he’d put into choosing a name and just continued staring at him blankly.
“So…let’s try this again with a Green-grade spiritual orb.” Unfortunately, using multiple spiritual orbs of yellow-grade was not possible due to the subtle differences in spiritual power between the original owners of the orbs.
Absorbing one source of spiritual power during the delicate process of evolution is stable, but from multiple sources, it would greatly increase the likelihood of failure due to so many types of energies, some of which may be conflicting.
Therefore, for the sake of a stable evolution with a lower risk of failure, it was customary to just use one spiritual orb.
Unfortunately, while Kain had many yellow-grade spiritual orbs from his kills, he didn’t have a single green-grade one, but he had seen one previously and was able to use it in the simulation.
Therefore, after making the same selections but changing the power source, Kain started the simulation.
The glass chamber containing the simulation began to be filled with an extremely bright white light. Once the light faded Kain looked at the creature description that appeared on the screen.
“Huh?! There’s more than one!” Kain thought while buzzing in anticipation while looking at one of Bea’s potential future forms.
——————————
Kain had to sell the majority of the materials and spiritual orbs that remained in his space ring in order to exchange for a single green-grade spiritual orb.
However, the green-grade orb also happened to be from the defeated mental-attribute spider, meaning that it should be even easier for Bea to absorb during evolution.
Usually, matching attributes aren’t so important for spiritual orbs since they mostly contain pure spiritual power and have very little amounts of remnant attribute energy, however during high-risk evolutions it may have a slightly beneficial effect of increasing the chances of success. After all, a 31% chance of a successful evolution is still better than a 30% chance of evolution.
And unfortunately, Kain’s System as well as his assistant had concluded that the evolutionary form he was now planning for Bea would have two possibilities when supplied with the same materials. Both were excellent forms, but one was definitely better than the other. Unfortunately, Bea successfully undergoing the higher-quality evolution was around 20%.
With a spiritual orb of the same attribute, that percentage may increase slightly.
Additionally, Kain was planning to use credits to rent one of the college’s attribute rooms. Attribute rooms are filled with a high concentration of a specific element and are usually used by students as a site of evolution, or to practice certain elemental skills.
The room Kain wanted to rent would naturally be of the mental-attribute.
However, all attribute rooms provided by the college were extremely expensive. Kain had to sell practically everything on his body, aside from his weapons in order to buy the green-grade orb. He absolutely did not have enough credits left to rent out a room.
Therefore, Kain either had to grovel to borrow credits from a classmate or obtain a large amount of credits for himself. Since the attribute room is charged at 10 credits each minute, and Kain wanted to rent it out for one hour just to be safe, that would require at least 600 credits.
Although he knew that if Bridge had it he’d give, not loan, that amount to him in a heartbeat. He didn’t have the heart to take that much from his brother, especially since the re-ranking was coming up soon and every moment taken to improve his strength was needed.
Kain also knew that he was preparing for Lady’s evolution as well, and he didn’t want Bridge to have to put that off for his sake.
Therefore, Kain decided to raise the amount of credits he needed for himself.
With his strength, he could defeat orange-grade spiritual creatures on his own. And the whole body of each orange-grade spiritual creature would usually be worth about 50 to 100 credits, so he could raise the needed amount after hunting only around 10 orange-grade spiritual creatures.
However, even without going into the wilderness, Kain had already heard about how difficult it was to find any spiritual creatures below yellow-grade due to most of them being killed during the beast-tide.
Therefore, Kain headed to the Mission Hall and went to one of the compartments to select his mission in privacy.
Considering that most Bronze, Silver and even Gold missions were completely insufficient to meet his needs, and that the Gold missions that did reward over 600 credits required hunting down more powerful than average green-grade spiritual creatures and blue-grade spiritual creatures, Kain knew he’d have no shot at completing them.
Kain then put all of his hopes onto qualifying to receive another Black Mission.
After completing another questionnaire similar to the previous time, Kain was notified that there were no suitable missions available for him at this time.
‘Figures… Black Missions suitable for a 2-star beast tamer probably only occur once every 10 years. I was lucky to even receive the previous Black Mission.’
With a heavy heart, Kain returned back to the main mission selection screen.