Ultraman Legend of the Light Chaser

Ryo Nakai was not surprised by this: "When the first unknown life form appeared, the higher-ups ordered the geological research team to analyze the cause of the abnormal heat energy, and that's what they did."

"Not because of the lava monster?" Kinoshita Kei asked him.

"It's a magma monster. The key question is, how can a monster grow out of magma? The temperature is so high that any piece of flesh would turn into charcoal, let alone something underground. How did it grow out of the ground? How did it burrow upwards? What is the strength of its body? What is the material of its outer layer? Why can it emit enough heat to trigger an alarm? These questions all need to be analyzed."

Nakai Ryoya lowered his voice: "Last time they also submitted a 'Lava Monster Chronicle'. A group of people were locked up for a meeting all night. When they came out, some were banging their heads against the wall, and others were handing in their resignations. Besides being unable to perform their duties, some of their reasons included wanting to become monks."

Kinoshita Kei drew upon his knowledge base and said mysteriously, "I think I can explain it."

"How to say?"

"Energy," according to the usual formula of tokusatsu dramas, don't ask, it's an aggregation of various energies. So Kinoshita Kei said, "Magma monsters, well, monsters formed from magma energy, eyeballs in the mountains, that's natural energy, or the resentment of people who died lost in the mountains, the consciousness of legendary monsters, and so on."

"Oh ho, you're quite talented." A shadow suddenly loomed between the two.

Kinoshita Kei looked up and saw that the geological research group next door had all gathered around.

“Nakai, you know we’re just a bunch of laborers who only know how to dig rocks,” the man in the lead grinned. “We’re exactly looking for a reporter like this, who can spout nonsense with perfect logic and without breaking a sweat. How about it? You’re not going to fix that telescope, so lend it to me?”

"Get lost! Go find some myths and legends to make up your reports!" Nakai Ryo also laughed and scolded, "You guys better take this seriously, or you'll be fired sooner or later."

The geology research team scoffed and went back to eating: "I don't want to make this up... so why would a living eyeball grow inside a rock?!"

Kinoshita Kei continued guzzling soup down his throat; a bowl of soup before a meal is good for your health.

Nakai Ryo didn't have this habit either. He would start by eating rice mixed with vegetable soup and then dig in. He had a large appetite and ate quickly, just so he could sleep a little longer at noon. Kinoshita Kei had confirmed the second reason for his physique.

“You don’t look too good today. The security guard praised you to me, saying that you were the only one with your light on in the whole building at midnight. He said that young people like to learn,” Nakai Ryoya said, looking at his dark circles. “Have I been putting too much pressure on you?”

“No, no,” Kinoshita Kei put down the bowl, “I was having… a nightmare.”

"Nightmare? Monsters ate the base?"

"No, it was... I dreamt of a very desolate place, and someone on a mountaintop was reading a letter for a very long time. Then there was the sound of someone singing, from a solo to a chorus, and it still makes my head buzz."

Ryoya Nakai picked up a thin slice of fish: "Dreams are a reaction of the subconscious. Someone reading a letter might mean you're thinking about someone. Someone singing... Maybe I was a bit too strict. You want to relax."

Who is he thinking about?

Kinoshita Kei almost instantly thought of Uranus. TV dramas often use this technique: when the protagonist misses someone, they look up at the sky; if there's a moon, they film the moon; if it's daytime, they zoom out to show the lonely figure standing alone in the wind against the distant horizon. Uranus, too, gazed at the sky. Was he thinking of someone?

Who are the "visitor" and the "returning person"? They are not young.

It takes a lot of effort for a person to get to that place. He was also carrying an oxygen tank, and anyone who didn't know better would think he was climbing a snow-capped mountain in full gear. He was huddled inside his thick spacesuit, and it took him a long time to unfold those fragile letters one by one.

“Maybe I’m thinking about giants,” Kinoshita Kei said half-jokingly. “When another robot that tall comes along, I’ll name it GUNDAM.”

……

In the mountains.

Fighter, having failed to defeat Eye Q, retreats to await XIG's analysis of how to counter the monster.

Aiba Yu sat on a tree not far from EyeQ, holding Salty Fish in his arms. He had originally intended to just observe the situation from a distance to make sure EyeQ hadn't rushed into the city, but Salty Fish wriggled in his arms, saying, "It's a guy I've never seen before! How did it grow like that!"

"You don't even know you have something growing on your body?"

"Can you count how many bacteria are crawling on your skin?" Aiba Yu found a tree with a good view and sat down. The salted fish finally stopped protesting. It stared with its dead fish eyes, as if it wanted to compete with EyeQ to see who had bigger eyes: "I smelled the smell from somewhere else... Anyway, it's not on me."

"External forces?"

Salty Fish didn't answer him immediately, as if to confirm, and after a while he said, "When that Gob came, it also brought an external force. It seems to affect my children. Gilu and Bokulagu are probably affected by it. Perhaps the sudden growth of this eye is also because of it."

"Did Gobu awaken them?"

“You could say that,” the salted fish twisted its body, “This eyeball isn’t normal, aren’t you going to fix it?”

As Aiba Yu watched the eyeball slowly close and retract into the soil, he said to the salted fish, "Gaia can handle this."

Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Owner of the Letter

Aiba Yu and Pito sneaked back to the base, only to find Kinoshita Kei's dormitory empty.

"Isn't it rest time now?" The clock on the wall pointed to seven o'clock in the evening. Pito hopped to the window and looked at the pebble path in the ecological park not far away: "Could it be that Xiao Jing has already become a mature human form and knows how to train?"

Aiba Yu's gaze pierced through the concrete wall, reaching the workshop frequently used by the astronomy research group, where he saw a guy squatting to the side, scratching his head and saying, "He's... biting a pen cap."

"Heavy metals! Synthetic compounds! Unhealthy!" Salty Fish suddenly jumped into his arms: "Quick, quick, he must have encountered some problem. Let me, his loving mother who has seen through all his tutoring books, come and give him loving off-site support!"

workshop.

To be precise, it is Workshop No. 3 under the Astronomical Research Group. It mainly focuses on the maintenance and repair of small and medium-sized equipment. It does not have the production pressure or the seriousness of a large equipment maintenance workshop. In Nakai Ryoya's words, it is very suitable for beginners.

“Newbie village, right? Don’t worry,” Kinoshita Kei thumped his chest loudly, “Just wait until I’ve mastered the basics. I’ll be able to tell how many turns a screw should be turned by just one glance, and whether a thing is up to standard by just one look at a weld. Even the Sword God of Shilipo will give me a thumbs up.”

Although he didn't understand half of it, Nakai Ryo understood the newcomer's determination. He patted Kinoshita Kei on the shoulder with relief: "Alright, then the solar blind channel test of the fourth-generation sky survey camera is entrusted to you. First, learn about the internal structure, and keep an eye on the components so you don't break them."

Kinoshita Kei shouted slogans loudly, but when it came to actually doing them, he ran into a lot of trouble. That's the difference between theory and practice.

"So many wires for the solar blind channel, sensors... which one is connected to the solar blind channel?" Kinoshita Kei stared blankly at a bunch of identical wires: "The wide area channel and high resolution channel have been confirmed by Nakai-senpai to be fine, which one is the solar blind channel?"

He shamelessly asked the operator, who told him the arrangement rules for the independent channels. He carefully wrote them down and went back to continue studying them. As a result, he was able to identify the sensor in the sunless channel, but then he ran into trouble in the next step.

“Photocathode, microchannel plate, and anode array…” His eyes glazed over: “I know they’re different in theory, but which of these things is which?!”

Precision components shouldn't be left open for too long. Kinoshita Kei was certain he couldn't see anything, so he closed the casing and squatted down to read the instruction manual over and over again.

There were illustrations above, but the difference between the illustrations and the real thing was no less than the difference between perfect colors and the soul of a stick figure. Kinoshita Kei thought of the boast he had made and just wanted to bang his head on the ground.

"What's so difficult about recognizing a basic structure? I'm a top student under Professor Fukui, and I can learn a structure in an afternoon. It's like a 99-level expert coming to a village and crushing the kids." That's what he thought at first, and he entered the workshop full of confidence. Reality gave him a rude awakening.

Just as I was staring anxiously at the manual, almost cracking the pen cap, my fellow villager's voice suddenly came: "If you bite it six more times with this force, you can taste the blue ink."

"Ink replenishes the brain," Kinoshita Kei said in a low voice without looking up. "You want me to train? I need to figure out its structure before I can move. If I boast to someone and then hand in a blank paper tomorrow, I'm dead. You'll have to go back to the seabed and collect my corpse."

"Structure?" Aiba Yu blinked, and the Sky Survey Camera in front of him transformed into a pile of semi-transparent components: "Which one do you want to ask about?"

Kinoshita Kei was stunned for a moment before he reacted: "Holy crap, my fellow countryman is awesome!"

He shouted so loudly that everyone else in the workshop looked at him curiously.

"My fellow townsman... ah... that Suzhou chef in the cafeteria!" Kinoshita Kei said with a forced smile.

"Making flower cakes is awesome."

After getting the others to listen, Kinoshita Kei asked in a low voice, "Can you help me identify these three things? They look pretty much the same. Which one is which? The innermost part is blocked, so I don't dare to leave the outer shell open for too long, and I don't dare to shine a flashlight directly on it."

Aiba Yu knew nothing about his profession and could only listen to his descriptions repeatedly to confirm. Occasionally, an employee would pass by and listen with a strange expression as Kinoshita Kei "talked to himself" and kept repeating the differences between the various components.

The idea that "this is how geniuses learn" quickly spread.

With Aiba Yu's "fully revealed map," Kinoshita Kei's work went very smoothly, and he was full of confidence in Asahi Nakai Ryoya's test.

When Pito brought up physical training, they thought Kinoshita Kei would try to find an excuse to run away again. Pito was already prepared to become a muscular man and stuff him into the pirated Meta world.

But Kinoshita Kei readily agreed.

"Waaaaah, my child has finally come to his senses, Mommy is so happy!" The salted fish shed tears, stretched out its short fins, and splashed onto Kinoshita Kei's face, rubbing it all over him: "When you successfully awaken Uranus, Mommy promises that when you land, the dust will fly higher than anyone else's!"

Aiba Yu used his telekinesis to "catch" the splashes of water from the salted fish as it thrashed about, returning them all to its owner. He then said to Kinoshita Kei, "Don't try to be like Gaia."

Kinoshita Kei chuckled. The footage of the three giants battling the monster that day was stored as important data at the Geo base, and researchers like them could access it. Luckily, his fellow countryman was holed up in the dormitory when they watched the footage; otherwise, if Aiba Yu had seen Kinoshita Kei clapping repeatedly, he might have had to make up for it with extra training.

The wind and snow replaced the dormitory walls, and Kinoshita Kei gradually became serious. He said to the salted fish, "It's not really a matter of 'enlightenment'... it's just that I saw Uranus yesterday."

The salted fish jumped high: "Uranus? Tell me, tell me!"

"It's a very desolate place, probably on a mountain, but it's just rocks and lots of red sand on the ground. To be honest, it looks a bit like Mars... Could he really go and stay on Mars?"

Kinoshita Kei recalled what he saw: "Then a spaceship landed, and a person wearing a spacesuit came out. He had been there for a long time, so he was carrying an oxygen tank."

"That outfit wasn't suitable for walking, much less for turning the pages of a paper. He was reading some letters, probably written by a child, all addressed to Uranus. I couldn't hear him clearly at first, but I gradually got the hang of it."

"Then someone started singing. I couldn't tell if someone was really singing or if Uranus was hallucinating. I suspect it was a dream Uranus had. I could only see the mountain and a small area around it. Anything further away was covered in sand, like a sandstorm. Pito, do you know where that was?"

"You said it was a dream, how would I know?" Dead fish eyes showed no expression, only the ice water around the salted fish was getting higher and higher.

“And another thing…” Kinoshita Kei hesitated for a moment, then said to Aiba Yu, “I think it might just be a coincidence, there’s a letter signed…”

"It's Hitomi Onodera."

Chapter 40: My Favorite Fish King

"What did you say?! I'm a geologist who's been researching from the Cambrian, Ordovician, and Silurian all the way back to the Neogene, and I even consulted with friends who specialize in paleontology to discuss its evolutionary possibilities, all to find the origin of that eyeball, and you're telling me it's a 'ghost'?!"

The head of the geological research group stared at the young man on the screen: "I dream, you are from XIG and the Alchemy Star, a PhD in quantum physics. You're talking to me about 'ghosts' instead of explaining their existence to me from a physics perspective?"

“There’s no other explanation. The most important thing right now is to confirm its movements,” Takayama Gamu said. “Please keep an eye on any unusual activity near the Yato Mountains. You should have already obtained the data on that monster. It swallowed all the missiles that it lured Fighter to launch. You can find it by using electromagnetic waves.”

The geological research team members welcomed the emergency situation, and they were nowhere to be seen in the lunch canteen at noon.

Kinoshita Kei was praised by Nakai Ryoya and ate half a bowl more at noon. Nakai Ryoya thought he could inherit his mantle, worthy of being a member of the astronomy research group, with a heart for the universe and a generous heart.

After observing the astronomy research group's ancestral appetite and abs for a while, Aiba Yu revised Kinoshita Kei's training plan.

Pito has prepared his next combat training opponent after basic physical training: the female protagonist of "The Swordsman". She is out of place in the world of swords and uses her fists. She is very cool in the early stages, but is responsible for being captured and forcibly sent away by the plot in the later stages. However, Kinoshita Kei keeps calling her his wife and even bought her a figure. She is a long-legged mature woman.

Who knows how she fought while wearing wooden clogs the whole time? Maybe the wooden soles gave her a critical hit.

Pito confirmed her characteristics by referring to the comic, and then carefully transformed her into a new form based on the figurine that Kinoshita Kei had brought to the base like a precious treasure. The transformation was flawless and perfectly graceful. Aiba Yu earnestly asked if they wanted to change it, and Pito confidently replied, "Kei will definitely like it!"

Kinoshita Keisho was unaware of the "surprise" Father Earth had prepared for him. He only thought his fellow countrymen had incredibly sharp eyes, like human X-rays and high-end microscopes. While his employees were still confused about why the data was unstable, he quietly asked Aiba Yu. Aiba Yu, with his bright, shining eyes, glanced at the chip and told him that a pin on the chip was broken.

Kinoshita Kei tentatively asked the repairman, "Should we check the pins?"

The latter checked and indeed found the problem. He mentally added a "lucky" label to the new researcher, thinking that he could use him to try his luck when investigating difficult cases in the future, without having to worship the ancestral master.

"Why did you come here?" Kinoshita Kei knew that Aiba Yu rarely came to see him during work hours. He was either out there trying to reform a monster that had been cursed, or he was holed up in his dorm room slowly figuring out how to increase his psychic power.