At the Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix Conference, the Ugly Waterfowl evolved into three different forms in a single leap.
Among them, the Abyssal Water Phoenix Fledgling and the Mysticfeather Peacock were undoubtedly far more dazzling and eye-catching than the Clouddown Bird.
As a result, after Jiang Xing finished writing the Pet Beast Compendium entry for the Clouddown Bird, he shifted most of his attention toward the Abyssal Water Phoenix Fledgling and the Mysticfeather Peacock.
Only after the second batch of Clouddown Birds was born did he turn his focus back to them and begin conducting more detailed, in-depth research.
That was when he discovered sothing strange—
The power of the Return used by the Clouddown Birds was abnormally high!
It imdiately caught Jiang Xing's attention.
After all, in order to prove Friendship Theory, he had conducted extensive research into the "Training Power" move, later renaming it "Return" and giving it a more reasonable explanation.
Naly: Return was a special move. It did not belong to any attribute, and its power was unrelated to proficiency. Instead, it depended solely on the Pet Beast's Power Level and Friendship value.
Afterward, Jiang Xing obtained the Friendship Detector.
This piece of black-tech equipnt allowed him to skip the usual research process entirely.
By directly observing changes in a Pet Beast's Power Level, Friendship value, and Return's damage output, he managed to calculate the power formula for Return.
Because this achievent involved the nurical classification system of Friendship itself, Jiang Xing had not made it public.
At this point, he could say without exaggeration that no one in the world understood the Return move better than he did!
And yet, right at this mont...
Jiang Xing discovered that the power of Return used by the Clouddown Birds did not match the Return Formula he had calculated!
The margin of error was nearly double!
How could sothing like this happen?
Jiang Xing's first suspicion was that the formula itself might be flawed.
So he sought out Pet Beasts that possessed the Return move, such as the Mysticfeather Peacock, the Abyssal Water Phoenix, and the Undead Guardian Hound. Using instrunts, he asured their Power Levels, Friendship values, and Return damage output...
He even used the system reward — the Technical Machine (Return) — to let the Rainbow Dragon Hatchling, the Golden-Patterned Koi, and other Pet Beasts rapidly learn the Return move through direct skill infusion before testing them as well...
After verifying the formula repeatedly, Jiang Xing reached a conclusion.
The formula was not wrong!
Since the Return Formula worked perfectly on every other Pet Beast, the only possible explanation was that the issue lay with the Clouddown Birds themselves.
They possessed so kind of unknown power — sothing no other Pet Beast had — which caused the Return move to unleash nearly twice its normal power.
Recalling that the Clouddown Bird's other two talents were both related to emotion and emotional energy, Jiang Xing speculated that this might be an entirely new talent connected to Friendship or emotional energy.
After all, the number of racial talents a Pet Beast possessed was not fixed.
So species might have only a single talent.
Others could possess three talents — or even more.
Of course, having more talents did not necessarily make a species stronger. It simply ant there were more possibilities.
Because any individual Pet Beast could possess at most one racial talent.
Following that line of reasoning—
Perhaps the Clouddown Bird also possessed a third talent!
With that thought in mind, Jiang Xing conducted a second round of testing on the Clouddown Birds.
The results were astonishing.
The Clouddown Birds did not possess a third talent.
Their talents were no different from the others of their species, remaining either Perception or Good Mood.
After discovering this, Jiang Xing simply gathered every Clouddown Bird together and tested the power of their Return move one by one.
The result was that every Clouddown Bird's Return dealt exactly twice the theoretical value.
The sheer consistency and regularity of the results only further proved that there was nothing wrong with the Return Formula.
It proved that there truly was an "unknown variable" within the Clouddown Birds themselves.
And it was this variable that was affecting the power of the Return move.
Now that the existence of this variable had been confird, Jiang Xing beca even more puzzled.
'If it isn't a talent, then what could it be?'
Personality?
Leaving aside the fact that the Clouddown Birds did not all share the sa personality, other Pet Beasts had personalities too. So why didn't they display the sa phenonon?
Attribute?
Before writing a Pet Beast Compendium entry, the very first thing Jiang Xing tested was a Pet Beast's attribute.
The principle behind the Attribute Detector was to simulate faint energies of different attributes in order to stimulate a Pet Beast's extraordinary power. By observing the resistances and suppressive reactions displayed by the Pet Beast, researchers could determine its exact attribute.
In the Beast Taming world, this was already an extrely mature technology.
The Clouddown Bird was unquestionably a Water-attribute Pet Beast.
Beyond that... gender? Height? Age?
None of those possessed any true uniqueness.
The Clouddown Bird had them, but so did every other Pet Beast species. They could hardly serve as the "unknown variable" influencing move power.
If he absolutely had to force an explanation, could it really be the species itself?
For example: only the Clouddown Bird species could unleash the full effect of Return, doubling its power...
Setting aside whether that hypothesis sounded ridiculous or not—Jiang Xing was a researcher. What he sought was the cause, not the result.
What he cared about was not: "Is this the result?"
What he cared about was: "Why is this the result?"
He paced around the study again and again.
In the end, his attention still returned to talents.
If he had to assu the existence of "an unknown variable similar to Friendship, related to emotional energy but completely unrelated to any known nurical value"...
Then it would make far more sense to first assu that the Clouddown Bird possessed a hidden talent capable of strengthening emotion-related moves, and that this talent could function simultaneously alongside existing talents.
At the very least, talents were already an established concept among Pet Beasts, and they could be detected rather than guessed out of thin air.
With that thought, Jiang Xing decided to test their talents once more—
Just like the Attribute Detector.
In order to better study Pet Beasts and compile Pet Beast Compendium entries, Pet Beast scholars had invented a machine known as the Talent Detector.
This machine could extract the "talent energy" from a Pet Beast, analyze it, and categorize it into types such as "Attack-Type," "Defense-Type," "Enhancent-Type," "Area-Type," and "Domain-Type."
Afterward, Pet Beast scholars would conduct targeted testing based on those results, gradually identifying the Pet Beast's exact talent.
The talents of Pet Beasts like the Rainbow Dragon Hatchling and the Abyssal Water Phoenix Fledgling had all been personally tested and docunted by Jiang Xing himself.
If there were inaccuracies, it could only an the technology was not advanced enough.
The Clouddown Bird's talents had likewise been identified through Jiang Xing's own testing.
However, sothing like "enhancing move effects" clearly belonged to the Enhancent-Type category.
Yet when Jiang Xing used the instrunt, he had not detected any "Enhancent-Type talent energy" within the Clouddown Birds.
Because of this, Jiang Xing speculated—
Either the instrunt contained so degree of error and was not accurately detecting the Clouddown Bird's talent energy...
Or the Clouddown Bird possessed "hidden talent energy" that ordinary instrunts were incapable of capturing.
Whichever the case, Jiang Xing needed talent-detection equipnt that was even more precise and far more advanced!
Thus...
"Teacher, lend the equipnt for a bit!"
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