🎆 Happy New Year! 🎆
Thank you all for the amazing support throughout this year. 💙To celebrate the arrival of the new year, here is a special New Year code:
🎁 Code:NewYear: F3B16
📅 Code validity:
Start: December 30, 2025 at 11:55 p.m.
End: January 2, 2026 at 11:00 p.m.
Enjoy it and let's start this new year strong. 🚀✨Here's to an amazing 2026! 🎉
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Cain's brow remained furrowed, not relaxing.
Could someone really be so brazen?
Inside the League's territory?
The malice of that individual wasn't only directed at him, but also at everyone around him.
Under normal circumstances, this wasn't something Cain should handle. After all, he was in Mt. Silver: it was enough to report to the League what he had sensed.
But, since it was merely an intangible gaze, even if he explained the other's intentions, the League wouldn't be able to do anything without proof.
When Cain lowered his head to reflect and then raised it again, he discovered that the seat in front of him was already empty.
"I'll step out for a moment."
He murmured to Steven and the others before heading straight for the stadium exit.
They didn't question him too much, since at that moment Lance and Lorelei were locked in a heated duel.
It was worth watching: they could better gauge the distance that still separated them from the Elite Four level.
After leaving his seat, Cain moved without delay to the outside.
The stranger had left behind a trail of psychic waves in the air, very obvious to a psychic.
Clearly, he had done it on purpose, as if to say: "I went this way, come if you dare."
Cain hesitated for only a moment before following.
The one who masters an art may allow himself boldness; he didn't believe anyone could cause much trouble right there in Mt. Silver, the League's headquarters.
Following the psychic waves, he soon arrived at the mountain's commercial area.
The pursuit led him to a café at the edge of the main avenue.
There, right at the shop's entrance, the waves disappeared.
Standing before the door, Cain looked through the window.
No one was inside.
The decoration was that of an ordinary café, nothing strange.
Narrowing his eyes, he turned his palm, took a Pokéball, and hooked it to his belt.
With firm steps, he approached the door and pushed it open.
At the very instant he did, he noticed something abnormal.
But it was already too late to step back.
Fortunately, there was no real danger. Someone had manipulated the entrance so that, upon opening it, one immediately passed through a dimensional barrier.
The Unown on his wrist transmitted to him that he wasn't at risk.
He had merely been transported to an alternate space.
After Cain crossed the threshold, the café and the street once again appeared normal, as if nothing had happened.
He observed his surroundings and noticed how the space around him fluctuated, clear and uncertain.
With his experience, it wasn't strange to him: this wasn't the first time he had created or traversed an alternate space with the help of the Unown.
It was an ordinary secondary space.
There, in the middle of that place, awaited a middle-aged man dressed in black, with a wide smile, as if he had been expecting him.
"You're Cain, right?" asked the man.
Cain's brow furrowed deeper, not answering immediately.
That he could call him by name meant he had come prepared.
He was the target.
"Who are you?" Cain retorted.
"Heh, don't try to buy time. As a psychic, perhaps you don't even understand where you are. A lost psychic... how pitiful." The man's voice dripped with mockery.
On his face was evident scorn toward Cain's condition as a psychic.
A lost psychic?
"You're a psychic too! What's your purpose?" demanded Cain.
An alternate space?
Inwardly, he found it laughable.
Pure showing off.
If not because he wanted to obtain information, breaking that space would be child's play for him.
"Now I speak in the name of our organization to offer you an opportunity: abandon that farce of pretending to be a so-called advanced psychic, leave behind your pathetic bond with the League, and return to us, the primordial psychics. Then you'll know what true mental power means!"
"You're not like the others. You have the conditions for us to accept you. Otherwise, you would have died the very instant you stepped into this alternate space."
At the mention of "primordial psychics," a glint of madness and fanaticism shone in the man's eyes.
Primordial psychics?
Cain paused, feigning a trace of anxiety.
"What are the primordial psychics? If you want me to join, you should at least explain what kind of organization you are."
The man fell silent for a moment.
He recalled the mission entrusted to him by that lady in white: attempt to recruit Cain into their group, and then eliminate Steven, Cynthia, and the others before they reached their full potential.
He was the group's first emissary, a symbol that they would soon emerge into the light.
He reflected: what Cain said made sense. Why would anyone join an organization they knew nothing about?
Besides, this was his alternate space. There was no way Cain could escape.
Even if he tried to draw out information, he would remain trapped.
"As a psychic, you should know something of our history," the man in black finally said.
Cain nodded.
"What you know must be the common version: that in ancient times psychics were arrogant, they wanted to enslave ordinary humans, and in the end they were overthrown. That the survivors allied with common humans, and thus the current relationship was born."
Cain nodded again.
That was what he had learned: both in the League's records and Team Rocket's, that was the official history.
"Nonsense!"
The man in black exploded in a shout, as if he had been deeply insulted.
"That's nothing but history twisted by the victors to make themselves look righteous!"
"The truth is that ordinary humans voluntarily offered themselves as vassals to the psychics. But at a moment they themselves plotted, they betrayed and rebelled."
"Some cowardly psychics allied with them, and thus the entire psychic kingdom fell into ruin!"
"Those were the lapdogs of ordinary humans!"
In the man's gaze burned an ever-intensifying fury, as if he had lived that era.
"Look at this alternate space! Has any psychic nowadays taught you to create something like this? In ancient times, anyone who reached the intermediate level learned this technique. And now?"
"Ninety percent of psychic arts have been lost. And you think a little telepathy is enough to call yourself a psychic?"
"In those times, that was like a child's babble, a basic skill. Now you call it the hallmark of a psychic. You, a so-called advanced psychic, are nothing but a joke. You barely brush the intermediate level, and even then with no real mastery."
"Your control over your own psychic energy is pathetic."
Looking at him, the man in black exuded disdain.
In his eyes, Cain's abilities were worth absolutely nothing.
His control and his methods of use were, to him, trash.
(End of chapter)