Chapter Eighty-Eight: On Evolution

"Little beast, you want to grow stronger too, don’t you?"

"Huh?" Feng Xue did not react at first, and then Liu Ji said again, "Then get stronger. Become stronger! Stronger than anyone!"

For an instant, Feng Xue seemed to glimpse the weakness wrapped beneath Liu Ji’s resolute exterior. His attitude, which had originally treated it as nothing more than a young girl’s complaint, became a little more serious.

"I will get stronger," Feng Xue said.

"Then why don’t you evolve?" Liu Ji suddenly turned her head. Her fingers clenched so tightly that even Feng Xue could not quite understand why this少女 was so obsessed with strength.

Seeing that Feng Xue had no intention of answering, Liu Ji did not stop. "You’ve already defeated a lot of enemies, haven’t you? You’ve absorbed quite a bit of data too. So why don’t you evolve? A digital monster that doesn’t evolve..."

As she said this, she seemed to realize something and, in the end, did not continue.

Still, Feng Xue more or less understood what she meant. A digital monster that does not evolve has no value at all, was that what she wanted to say?

Yet instead of hurrying to explain himself like an ordinary, sulking partner, he murmured almost to himself, "The amount of data isn’t enough."

"What?" With her sharp ears, Liu Ji immediately caught his voice.

"I said the data isn’t enough." Feng Xue simply walked on in silence along the road back to Liu Ji’s home. Liu Ji walked beside him in silence as well; the two of them seemed like strangers who happened to be going the same way, walking on wordlessly until they returned to the Makino residence. Only then was that enigmatic stillness broken.

"Liu Ji-chan! You came back late today, and Mr. Fox didn’t show up either! So tonight’s dinner will still be made by Grandma!" Liu Ji’s grandmother greeted her with an unmistakably meaningful tone.

"I understand."

At the moment, Liu Ji’s mind was entirely occupied by Feng Xue’s words, "the data isn’t enough." She did not notice the implication in her grandmother’s tone at all. After hastily finishing dinner, she returned to her room.

"What do you mean, the data isn’t enough? You’ve defeated quite a few Champion levels already, haven’t you? How could it possibly not be enough?" Sitting at the low table, Liu Ji spoke in the tone of someone entering negotiations.

"In the literal sense," Feng Xue said, sitting cross-legged before her, sounding somewhat helpless. "The amount of data I have now is indeed enough for me to evolve once, but soon after evolving I’d revert to Rookie again. I don’t want that kind of false strength."

"You only said..."

"Yes, I need more data so that after evolving I can keep my form at the Champion level." That was what Feng Xue said. Generally, once a digital monster’s data had just reached the necessary threshold, it would begin to evolve, and only after a long period of stabilization could it remain at Champion level. If it fought before that data had stabilized, it would very easily regress to Rookie again because of insufficient data.

And in the first two parts, digital monsters with human partners were different. Their evolution was almost unrelated to data shortages, relying entirely on data transmission from the Digivice, which instantaneously expanded their own data to the limit and thus enabled evolution. After battle, because that data never truly belonged to them in the first place, they could only revert to Rookie.

However, it seemed that Guilmon had no part in this at all, so Feng Xue could not even be certain what exactly Guilmon’s light of evolution was. Was it like the Digivices in the first and second parts, simply enlarging the amount of data? Or was it the key that opened an "evolution lock," something akin to a genetic lock?

But whichever it was, it had nothing to do with Feng Xue now, because he could clearly feel the existence of the so-called "gate of evolution." He only needed to give it a push, and he could evolve into the Champion stage.

"You want to stay at Champion level? Do digital monsters even degenerate?" Although Liu Ji bore the title of the "Queen of Digital Monsters," her understanding of them existed only within the card game. As a strategy card tabletop game with a single match lasting less than an hour, she had never even considered what happened after evolution. Once a creature evolved to the top and won, the game was over. As for what happened after that, to those evolved digital monsters, she had never thought about it at all.

"What do you think digital monsters are?" Feng Xue asked seriously in return. Unfortunately, beneath that comical head that looked like a stuffed toy, he could never seem serious no matter how he tried.

"Digital monsters... are data?" Liu Ji vaguely remembered Feng Xue having discussed this before, and answered somewhat hesitantly.

"Exactly. They are data, and evolution is the process by which data changes from quantitative accumulation to qualitative transformation." Feng Xue nodded and explained. "But a digital monster’s attacks are also data. That creates a contradiction..."

Feng Xue’s words paused there, but Liu Ji naturally understood what he was trying to say. "You mean that when a digital monster uses skills, it consumes its own data?"

"That’s right." Feng Xue nodded in confirmation. "For a digital monster that has already stabilized at its current stage, the data consumed by skills can be recovered simply by eating food that is also data. But for a digital monster that has just evolved up from a lower stage, its data amount is almost at a critical threshold. If it uses even a couple of skills, it will undoubtedly fall back down a rank."

"So that’s why you only use the move called Holy Destruction Arrow when I use cards?" In that instant, Liu Ji understood many of the doubts she had had before, and more questions arose in their place.

"Then does that mean if I keep swapping cards, you can accumulate enough data to evolve?"

"Of course not!" Feng Xue reflexively wanted to tap Liu Ji on the head, but after considering the girl’s personality, he sheepishly drew his hand back. "A digital monster’s capacity to absorb outside data has a limit. On top of that, the type of data also affects the form it takes after evolution. If I were a Data type, that would be one thing. But I’m a Virus type. That means if you keep spamming cards and I don’t expend that data somehow, then I may very well..."

Feng Xue stopped at the crucial point, which only stirred Liu Ji’s curiosity. She widened her eyes and stared without blinking, waiting for his next words with the posture of a kindergartener waiting for a teacher to continue a story. But Feng Xue, as if deliberately keeping it mysterious, said nothing at all.

"Hurry up and say it! What will happen?" Liu Ji grew impatient in the end and, revealing her tomboyish side, slammed the table and ordered him.

"I’ll turn into a Numemon!" Feng Xue wickedly used an illusion, and then a whole swarm of wriggling Numemon appeared before Liu Ji.

"Aah!"