The next morning I left Utopia together with Horus/Xatu and had him bring me back to the coast of Lilycove City. I thanked him for his help as soon as we stepped onto the beach before I moved him back inside Utopia. Then I told Mothra/Butterfree to switch to her chibi form before bringing her out so that she could accompany me while I made my way through the city towards the western boundary/exit.
The first stop of my journey was going to be Hardfort City. Hardfort City was a Tier 5 City with roughly 480k inhabitants. Due to being a Tier 5 City, Hardfort City was not marked on the standard map of Hoenn, which just like the Kanto map only showed Major Cities of Tier 6 and 7. Nonetheless, that was not a problem since I had bought multiple maps of Hoenn, including one that focused on the more important settlements on the stretch between Lilycove City and Brightwick City, which unlike Hardfort City was a Tier 6 Major City visible on the standard Hoenn map.
Anyway, Hardfort City as the home to a Minor Gym qualified as one of these important settlements, so I would be able to make my way there without any problems by referring to the map I had, and according to said map, the journey from Lilycove City to Hardfort City was about 530 km long, which was neither close nor all that far away. If I wanted, I could easily run 530 km in a few hours. Heck, I could probably cover that distance in minutes if I simply teleported there, or in quite a bit less than an hour if I flew there.
However, that was not what I was going to do. I was planning to walk the 530 km stretch at regular speeds, if not even at what would be considered a bit of a slow speed, while exploring the wild, or rather the trainer route, though I was still going to ignore the other cities, towns, and villages on the way to Hardfort City. This way I would be able to keep an eye out for any Pokemon that caught my interest, such as the Wurmple I still was planning to catch.
If I was lucky enough, I might even stumble upon other interesting items as well as Pokemon, which would not be possible if I rushed the journey. Besides, I could also use the chance to give my Pokemon a workout against some of the wild Pokemon as well as trainers we came upon on the road, and depending on what I stumbled upon as well as how many battles I agreed to while I was on the road, I expected the journey to Hardfort City to take somewhere between 7 to 10 days.
If I had not decided to skip the other settlements on the road, that estimate would have probably been thrice as long. As for the trip itself, I was naturally not going to stay outside Utopia during the evenings unless I for some reason felt like spending the night in the wild, so I was only going to be traveling after our morning training sessions, which would be sometime around 9 a.m., until dinner time, which I was going to push back to 8:30 p.m. That left me with around 11.5 hours per day on average on the road, which I felt was more than enough.
Speaking of time on the road, lunch was going to be the only meal I would have outside, though the majority of my Pokemon would still be having lunch inside Utopia. Who knew? Maybe we'd meet some interesting Pokemon or people that way. Honestly, I was pretty confident that I'd be able to lure/attract some curious Pokemon with my candy, I mean lunch.
I tossed out those thoughts when we passed by a PokeMart and came to a sudden halt. The capture spree I had been on during the last two days had significantly consumed my stash of regular PokeBalls, so I decided it would be better to stock up some more, especially since I was still planning to catch a lot of Pokemon during the next few days/weeks. I mean, I still had a considerable stock of my self-made balls, but I did not plan to use them on some run-of-the-mill Pokemon, so buying more PokeBalls was definitely necessary.
Still, while there was no real limit to the number of PokeBalls one could buy, at least as far as I knew, buying more than 500 of them at once would probably still be seen as suspicious, and I did not want to deal with that, so I first entered the PokeMart in front of me to buy a 150 PokeBalls before leaving again. The cashier was quite surprised when he saw me buying 150 PokeBalls, and "low-key" asked me what I wanted to do with so many PokeBalls.
He "advised" me to not waste my money like this and suggested that 50 PokeBalls were likely more than enough to meet my needs. He added that I could stock up once more once I was close to running out. It was unbelievable that the man was already this nosy with me buying just 150 PokeBall, and I did not want to imagine what he would have done if I had gone for double that amount or more. Regardless, I gave him a simple but logical excuse that alleviated his concerns enough for him to quiet down and leave me alone. I just told the guy that I was going into the wild for a training trip, and that I was not planning to come back for a while.
Honestly, after leaving that PokeMart, all I could think was that I was really hoping that the other markets I was planning to visit would not be a repeat of this one. I knew of two more PokeMarts that were on the way to the western boundary I was heading to and another two that would only require a small detour. I naturally made sure to visit each one. I bought another 150 PokeBalls in the first store, 200 more in the second store, and another 150 in both the third as well as fourth PokeMart.
Thankfully none of the workers in those stores were as nosy as the first one, so the purchases went quickly and quietly. Thanks to my little shopping trip, I ended up adding 800 PokeBall to my stock, which raised it back to four digits, which should be enough for now. Regardless, I eventually made it to the start of the route which had Mothra excitedly patting my head. She had been pretty quiet so far, simply keeping an eye on things, only reacting when someone commented how cute she was, but now that she saw the surroundings give way to greenery, her excitement rose quite a bit.
Still, before we really stepped onto the road/route, I decided to call out a few more of our companions to accompany us. First off was Thor/Raichu, who was more than happy to come along. I also brought out Hades/Gengar as an additional safety measure and the guy gave us a happy greeting before diving headfirst into my shadow. His head peeked back out moments later, which was joined by his arm as he gave me a thumbs-up before saying that he was ready to go.
I briefly considered if I should call out someone else as well, but ultimately decided that these three were more than enough to ensure that no mishaps happened, so after telling both Mothra and Thor to not wander too far off from me if they felt like looking/scouting around, I set off. Interestingly enough less than a minute in, I stumbled upon my first wild Pokemon, which happened to be a Wurmple. Not that surprising since they along with Zigzagoon and Magikarp were the most common Pokemon in Hoenn.
Anyway, I naturally decided to capture the Wurmple, and when it noticed us and looked up, it came face-to-face with a PokeBall since I did not bother fighting it before I threw out the PokeBall. I felt its surprise at the sudden appearance of the PokeBall, and after a brief clash between the two, more precisely between the ball and its face, Wurmple got drawn into the PokeBall. I heard Mothra, Thor, as well as Hades snicker/laugh at the capture process, and I could not help but smile as well.
Wurmple seemed to struggle for a bit since the PokeBall did wiggle a bit, but it didn't take long for it to calm down and let out that click/sound that let me know that the capture was successful. I levitated the PokeBall over to my side and put it inside Utopia with a smile before we resumed our walk toward Hardfort City. Throughout the next 9 hours, we kept walking while occasionally coming across wild Pokemon and other people, mostly trainers.
We ignored most of the wild Pokemon unless they were Wurmple, in which case I swiftly captured them before moving on. Well, I also decided to challenge the occasional wild Pokemon if I felt like it and I deemed them strong enough to pose a good challenge for one of my Pokemon. Due to the lack of strength of the wild Pokemon we met so far, these wild Pokemon battles pretty much only involved members of our family that were at the iron or bronze stage, with Hestia/Eevee being the only silver stage Pokemon that got to fight.
Unlike the wild Pokemon, the trainer battles I agreed to mostly involved my silver-stage Pokemon, which they definitely appreciated. There was the occasional chance for my bronze and iron Pokemon to fight, but due to their low number, I generally declined the challenges of weaker/newer trainers. Interestingly enough, so far only two of the trainers that challenged me had gold-stage Pokemon, so Thor also got to flex his muscles a bit, which he was very happy about. I was hoping that I would come across stronger wild Pokemon and trainers once I was a bit farther away from Lilycove City.
Either way, as I had planned, I entered Utopia around 8:30 p.m., and after a satisfying dinner, I spent the rest of the evening relaxing with my Pokemon. The next morning, after a nice breakfast, I told everyone to start their training while I went to the area that I prepared for the Pinkan project and released all 42 Wurmple I caught yesterday. Funnily enough, one of them actually ended up unlocking the Shiny gene during Utopia's optimization process, so I moved him to Mothra's area since he would affect the Pinkan projects's data.
I had to say that Wurmple had quite some luck since none of the much more numerous water types I brought in for the Pinkan project managed to unlock a modifier, much less the Shiny one. In fact, Shiny Wurmple's case made me check out the status sheet of all Wurmple, which I had not bothered with until now, and I had to say that my luck had to have been quite high yesterday.
First off, Shiny Wurmple had blue potential with less than 15% missing for deep blue. Other than that one, there was actually a Wurmple that had her potential raised to light purple and another 6 Wurmple with potential ranging from light blue to deep blue. Frankly, the fact alone that the Wurmple with the worst potential among the 42 I captured now had orange potential was unbelievable, especially since species such as Wurmle, Caterpie, and Weedle generally had a rather high proportion of Pokemon with red and orange potential.
I just stared at the Wurmple in a daze for a short while before snapping out of it. I decided to simply accept the situation and move on, though I definitely hoped that I would be as lucky today as I had been yesterday. Still, I had things to do, so after giving the Wurmple a rundown of what happened and telling them they could eat as much as they wanted while pointing at the various berry trees I moved to this area, I made my way back to my place to supervise everyone's morning training.
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