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A week passed, and thanks to Mort's eight daily phone calls, Nova's application to enter the Silver Mountain Secret Realm was finally approved. He would be allowed to enter at any time after one month had passed, meaning sometime in October of this year.
The reason Nova was scheduled for October instead of the coming September was simple: the Silver Mountain Secret Realm strictly limited the number of outside visitors, and all the September slots were already taken.
Of course, not everyone who visited the Silver Mountain Secret Realm had the chance to capture a Pokemon there, let alone a Pseudo Legendary. Most visitors were scientific researchers or investigative journalists. Entering the Secret Realm was simply part of their job, and they were not permitted to catch Pseudo Legendary Pokemon on their own.
This was not bad news for Nova. Since his visit was set for October, he was in no hurry at all. He had planned to keep using the excellent training facilities at the Gym and finish his training schedule, but new tasks from Mort and Gilbert forced him to set out once again.
Both old men had lived hard lives when they were young, and that experience shaped how they treated their successor. They had clawed their way up from nothing, so there was no reason to let Nova take it easy now. The wild terrain of the Tamar Desert hadn't been enough to make him feel real danger, and it had even let him earn a small fortune. Gilbert decided it was time to raise the difficulty a little.
For example, Layered Peaks Gym was busy developing the new entrance to the Hisui Secret Realm that Nova himself had discovered. That location badly needed more workers and was running into serious trouble, so sending Nova there solved two problems at once.
First, at his current strength, an average Elite Trainer already had trouble defeating Nova's main Pokemon. As one of Layered Peaks Gym's strongest battlers, having him at the Hisui Secret Realm would give the staff there real protection.
Second, Nova had plenty of wilderness survival experience. Layered Peaks Gym needed skilled explorers to scout the land beyond the entrance to the Hisui Secret Realm, and the two old men trusted him completely with that kind of work.
On top of that, Nova found it almost impossible to turn down the mission. The twelve percent share of the Secret Realm's profits that Mort held actually belonged to Nova.
Working hard without owning any shares is what people call being a wage slave. Slack off for even a few hours and you're only cheating yourself. But once you actually hold shares, working hard suddenly becomes something else: building your own wealth.
If the yearly dividends came out to hundreds of millions, Nova would happily work like a donkey turning a millstone in the Hisui Secret Realm every single day, and do it with a smile.
Still, things weren't as easy as Nova had imagined.
He assumed that as long as the pay was good enough, brave workers would show up under generous rewards. The staff at Little Oasis were all earning triple wages. Even facing hardship, he thought, their spirits should stay decent, even if not sky high.
But when Nova finally arrived, he found that progress inside the Secret Realm was painfully slow, and a heavy sense of defeat hung over the Little Oasis camp just outside the entrance.
In ten full days, the Layered Peaks Gym staff hadn't even managed to build a safe path over the volcano on the far side of the Secret Realm's entrance.
The person sent to brief Nova was an old acquaintance, Superior Trainer Aston, whom Nova had once defeated three to zero in a Gym battle.
Fourteen Superior Trainers were currently stationed at the Little Oasis camp, handling different tasks. That was nearly half of all the Superior level staff Layered Peaks Gym could currently send out. Since Aston was the youngest among them and already knew Nova, his colleagues pushed him forward to be the one to greet him.
Truthfully, the staff of Layered Peaks Gym saw Nova a little differently from how they saw each other. Even though he held the same Superior Trainer title, his close ties to the two top leaders made everyone treat him more like part of the leadership than like an equal coworker.
Because progress at Little Oasis had been so slow, Nova's visit was officially meant to help, but most of the staff quietly saw him as a representative sent by the two bosses to check up on them. Naturally, people tried to keep their distance from him.
So when Nova landed at the camp today aboard the supply airship, this was exactly the mood that greeted him. The other Superior Trainers had all gone into the Secret Realm, eager to prove they were working hard, leaving only Aston behind at the camp to show Nova around.
"To put it simply, there are a lot of problems and not many solutions," Aston said immediately, describing the situation inside the Secret Realm as extremely difficult.
Nova wasn't fond of such vague explanations, so he asked directly, "What's the biggest problem in there?"
Without even pausing to think, Aston answered, "The local Pokemon have absolutely no manners!"
From what Aston explained, Nova got a clearer picture of the trouble facing the Layered Peaks Gym staff inside the Secret Realm.
As a massive and ancient Secret Realm, the Pokemon living within the Hisui Secret Realm carried a certain wild, primal energy. Compared to the wild Pokemon found across the Norlandia Alliance, these Pokemon were far more aggressive and individually much stronger.
Gilbert had already prepared for this possibility when he first made his plans. Knowing how fierce ancient Pokemon could be, he had sent seven Superior Trainers at once to set up the outpost.
However, the Volcanic Island that Nova had discovered, sitting far from the mainland, turned out to hold Pokemon that were even more aggressive than those found at the other known entrances, and their sizes were far larger than ordinary Pokemon.
The humans who had just built a camp on the Volcanic Island were attacked that very first night by several groups of red eyed Pokemon. Thanks to the protection of the seven Superior Trainers, no lives were lost, but the camp's resources were stretched thin just trying to keep everyone safe, let alone getting any real work done.
The next day, they sent a request for reinforcements back to Layered Peaks Gym. Gilbert responded twice, eventually bringing the number of Superior Trainers on site to nearly twenty.
Even so, the situation refused to improve. Trainers exploring beyond the camp kept getting hurt and were forced to abandon their assignments and return to the Gym to recover.
This was exactly why a mood of defeat kept spreading through the Little Oasis camp. Triple wages were tempting, but working under such dangerous conditions slowly built up stress and worry, and that anxiety spread through the group like a sickness.
Eventually, the Little Oasis camp sent a third request for help to Layered Peaks Gym. This time, an exhausted and frustrated Gilbert simply sent Nova to deal with it.
It wasn't hard to guess what would happen if even Nova couldn't fix the problem. One of the two old men would have to drop everything they were doing and come see for themselves exactly what was going wrong in the Secret Realm.