Chapter 150: Ancient Jigglypuff, Alakazam, Gengar

The inscriptions on the golden spoon were tiny and dense.

To the naked eye, they almost looked like some carved fish-scale pattern.

Under White’s expectant gaze, Natsume copied the characters one by one.

Even with a magnifying glass, the shapes were barely discernible, but under Natsume’s psychic influence, the characters appeared as clear as normal-sized text.

The more he copied, the more amazed he became. On such a small spoon, there were thousands of characters engraved, each one distinct, with no clumping.

How could something like this be achieved with ancient, primitive techniques? Even a psychic like Natsume would struggle to replicate it without modern tools.

After transcribing nearly three thousand characters, Natsume rubbed his sore wrist.

White’s gaze, however, grew even more expectant.

“Mr. Natsume, I have two more items!”

She brought over two more glass cases, containing a black sphere and a bronze bell. Both were covered in dense inscriptions.

Giant Gengar… and giant Jigglypuff?

Natsume froze for a moment, realizing the system hadn’t issued a mission.

Why? At a time like this, the system should have started alerting him frantically.

“Uh, Mr. Natsume, is this too much trouble?” White asked shyly, noticing the workload. Just the golden spoon had taken Natsume nearly five hours to copy. The sky was already dark.

“No problem. You can compensate me,” he said. Before he could haggle, a card appeared in his hand.

“Mr. Natsume, this is all I have! Please help me!” White clasped her hands, looking at him with hope.

Natsume didn’t check the card’s contents, only staring at White in surprise. No wonder she had chosen this notoriously difficult specialty—it was clear she genuinely loved it.

Glancing at the moon outside, he returned his attention to the three artifacts.

Without a research task, it was possible he had already encountered something similar before—like the Giant Tentacruel, which operates on the same principle as the Giant Dragonite—so the system didn’t trigger a task.

Perhaps the second Unown had fallen in the Kanto region long ago, dating back to the ancient era. Natsume speculated that its arrival might have caused a batch of Pokémon to grow huge, later sealed by ancient wisdom.

Although he wasn’t interested in studying the inscriptions themselves, Natsume was fascinated by the “wisdom of the ancients.” How did these Pokéball-like devices function? And how were the inscriptions engraved so precisely?

Quietly, he continued tracing the ancient text, while Giselle chatted with White.

“Miss White, does an ancient civilization really exist?” Giselle asked, holding a book filled with theories about ancient times.

“Oh, this is my teacher’s book,” White said, taking it from her.

Flipping through a few pages, she frowned. “Well… how to put it…”

“It’s just a reasonable theory. No one knows for sure if an ancient civilization truly existed, but—”

Her tone shifted. “Ancient Pokémon definitely existed.”

White spoke with absolute certainty.

“One of my teachers saw one with his own eyes. He had released an ancient Pokémon at a ruin he was studying.”

“That was a Golett, but it was even larger than a Golurk!”

“And, it’s said that the appearance of ancient Pokémon brings disaster, but a giant glowing figure carries them away,” White said mysteriously.

“A giant of light?” Natsume asked, tilting his head curiously.

“Not light—golden electricity, like arcs jumping inside a bulb. That’s how my teacher described it,” White corrected.

“Oh, let me guess… was it quadrupedal?” Natsume said casually.

“No,” White shook her head seriously.

“It was a humanoid Pokémon, but with only one leg, very large—enormous. A huge hand protruded from its chest and took the giant Golett away,” she explained carefully.

“Which teacher are you talking about?” Natsume asked suddenly.

“He passed away two years ago,” White’s voice lowered.

“Where is your teacher’s grave?” Natsume pressed.

“Why do you want to know?” White asked, puzzled.

“To dig him up, put him in the Pokémon Tower… maybe he’ll—uh!”

Before he could finish, Giselle smiled and covered his mouth.

“Ha, Mr. Natsume means the Pokémon Tower has good Feng shui for the deceased to rest,” she said apologetically, then lifted Natsume’s head to rest firmly against her chest.

“All right, all right. Let me massage your shoulders, just focus on copying,” she said, preventing a diplomatic disaster.

Hours passed as Natsume carefully enlarged the inscriptions from the black sphere and bronze bell onto paper. To save time, he used his psychic powers to control two pens simultaneously, tracing both artifacts at once. If the characters weren’t so intricate, he could have finished much faster.

Outside, faint cries of Surskit occasionally punctuated the night.

White had fallen asleep on a nearby table.

“All done,” Natsume said, and Giselle, face flushed, came back to herself.

“Mr. Natsume, are you finished copying?”

“Not yet. The bronze bell has more inscriptions,” he replied, pausing as a twinge of pain struck the back of his head.

Strangely, it felt like he had been sleeping on a rock. Giselle pouted, slightly annoyed.

White was asleep, so Natsume quietly moved the glass case containing the sealed ancient Gengar and the golden spoon to another table and returned to continue tracing the bronze bell.

Natsume didn’t know the conditions to release an ancient Pokémon, but once White decoded the inscriptions, they might gain some clues.

The next day, in the tent, in front of the computer

“So, have you found a way to release the ancient Pokémon?” Natsume’s voice called from behind White.

White turned, surprised. She wondered how he already knew that the three artifacts contained ancient Pokémon. She had only just finished deciphering the inscriptions to learn that three ancient Pokémon were sealed inside.

“Yes, there are three ancient Pokémon, but—” White hesitated, then stood and showed her computer screen to Natsume and Giselle.

The screen was split: one side displayed Natsume’s traced enlargements of the bronze bell inscriptions, the other showed White’s translation.

Curious, Natsume looked on. In a sense, these were messages left by the ancestors for future generations.

The first line read:

We went to great lengths to seal these terrifying Pokémon. You wouldn’t want to release them, would you?

“Hm,” Natsume said silently.

He felt a certain resemblance between this ancestral messenger and himself.

“Are there any clues about how to release the ancient Pokémon?” he asked, unwilling to give up.

White didn’t respond, only picked up the mouse and scrolled.

The 148th line read:

You haven’t read it all, have you? If we recorded how to release these terrifying Pokémon here, why would we have sealed them?

Natsume: “...”

“Uh, the only useful information I know so far is that the three artifacts seal ancient Jigglypuff, Gengar, and Alakazam,” White said, waving her hand.

She continued, “In any case, the inscriptions on the bronze bell are like this. Perhaps the other two artifacts contain different information.

“Give me half a day; by tonight, we should know.”