The Alpha prince who had died at eighteen was named Arthur.
Without question, there was almost no intact flesh anywhere on his body.
Even the handsome skin of his face had been gnawed full of pits by “stray dogs.” After several years of freezing, what remained of his flesh had long since turned grayish white and blue, hard and stuck together, like some crooked-eyed, twisted-mouthed cannon-fodder zombie from a horror movie.
Song Zang should not have been able to recognize him, nor should he have dared to be certain that this really was Arthur.
But he was wearing an extremely distinctive floral-collared shirt embroidered with roses, made from excellent fabric. The tears, bloodstains, and grime on the shirt matched the photos Chi Yan had sent exactly.
Then there were those unique rose-gold double pupils. Even dulled under a layer of gray inside the freezer, they still displayed the royal family’s atavistic bloodline.
It was precisely because he resembled a legendary emperor from the Empire’s history so strongly that his father had adored him, and precisely why he had suffered such an innocent and tragic disaster.
If he had been allowed to grow smoothly into true maturity, reaching an age mellowed like fine wine… the people of the Empire, who worshiped retro romance, would have projected all their nostalgia for that legendary emperor onto him and loved him madly. Calls to support him as the next emperor would inevitably have grown louder and louder.
Song Zang felt nothing but pure sympathy for this beautiful boy whose life had been both pitiful and short.
But he absolutely did not want to sympathize with a rotting prince who had inexplicably risen from the dead.
“Yin Chen, I’m scared…” He threw himself into Yin Chen’s arms, incredulous. “What is Commander Percy even doing? How could she dare hide a prince’s corpse aboard a military ship?”
Yin Chen tightened his arms and soothingly rubbed Song Zang’s trembling shoulders, completely unruffled.
He leisurely observed the “corpse’s” stiff movements and casually explained, “Because nobody would ever suspect Commander Percy of secretly keeping the prince’s corpse. They’d be even less likely to imagine she hid it among a mess of severed limbs from dead soldiers.
“Even if someone really raised the suspicion, people would probably think they’d lost their mind. Nobody would believe them.”
Song Zang squeezed deeper into his arms, buried his face against Yin Chen’s chest, and said gloomily, “That makes so much sense. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t believe it either. But this is terrifying. I don’t even dare look. Hurry up and check whether he’s human or a ghost.”
Yin Chen raised an eyebrow. “Neither human nor ghost. Wait outside and don’t wander off. I’ll kill it first.”
“Wait, then what exactly is it?”
“…Maybe a mass of proliferating flesh caused by a genetic mutation.”
Yin Chen could not determine that directly either, which was why he intended to inspect it himself. Carrying his blade, he stood before the freezer-room door, entered a string of numbers, and successfully unlocked it with an iris scan.
Because of the mole crisis, the Blazing Sun’s master-control AI had been shut down. Surveillance was still operating normally, but identity verification and scanning were actually less strict than before. Entering restricted military areas had become extremely convenient.
Of course, loosening security was also part of the plan to test the mole. Catherine was handling the details, and Yin Chen did not intend to interfere for now.
If she still failed to identify the culprit by name before they reached Zone A… Yin Chen could simply kill every suspect to vent Song Zang’s anger. There was still enough time.
After being entangled with Song Zang for so long, he seemed to have become much kinder. If this had been the old him, everyone would already have been cut down the instant the examination pod exploded.
Yin Chen shut the freezer-room door behind him and stood outside the cryogenic compartment, staring at the corpse sitting upright inside.
And now, incredibly, he actually found himself wanting to… communicate with this lump of proliferating flesh.
It was all Song Zang’s fault.
The morgue was filled with a strangely familiar smell, like the rush of frozen meat and fresh food that hit you when opening a refrigerator. Prince Arthur’s beautiful double pupils looked especially striking beneath the cold lighting, their romantic rose-gold sheen gradually becoming clearer and more vivid.
But that did not change one indisputable fact: Prince Arthur had been dead for a long time.
Yin Chen’s assessing gaze fell on the man’s uncontrollably twitching lower leg. His trouser leg was torn, revealing mottled, grotesque flesh. The exposed fat layer had frozen hard and pale, covered in dense bite marks from small dogs.
Deeper muscle tissue, however, showed an inappropriately fresh color, almost as though it were actively circulating and breathing. Hemoglobin was squeezed outward by the spasms, becoming startling “bloody water” that slowly slid along the muscle fibers.
Prince Arthur had died in a beautiful sky garden located in a district with excellent public security.
The supposed attack by a pack of “stray dogs” could reasonably be inferred to have involved nothing but royal-exclusive dachshunds.
To prevent the spread of unfamiliar viruses and infectious diseases, the plant-dog Song Zang had insisted on keeping was still quarantined inside the Special Inspection Division. It needed to remain under observation for one full day before being released, and would receive a legal dog license and identity chip at the same time.
But Yin Chen remembered the little monster very clearly. He had long since memorized every detail of how its teeth had mutated.
The bite marks on Prince Arthur’s body were too dramatic to resemble those of an ordinary small dog. They looked more like the work of canine monsters that had mutated to a certain degree… but they definitely did not belong to the one Song Zang had adopted.
Yin Chen lit up his floating screen, displayed his A-9 officer credentials, and asked coldly, “Are you Arthur?”
The corpse froze for a moment, then stiffly shook its head.
Turning its neck was still far too large a movement for flesh that had been frozen for years. Several cracks suddenly tore open along the side of its neck, and its brittle blood vessels snapped with crisp sounds. Several streams of freshly pumped blood sprayed out at once.
It was like a chilling, bizarre little rain of blood inside the cryogenic compartment. The droplets quickly became blooming scarlet frost flowers, freezing one after another onto the double-layer glass, the chaotic severed limbs of soldiers, and Prince Arthur’s bluish-white skin.
“Ah… ah…”
Its stiff vocal cords strained desperately to vibrate, rigid as steel rods knocking dully inside its throat.
Yin Chen frowned tightly and ordered impatiently, “Write it. You can’t speak.”
The corpse obeyed. Dipping one finger in blood flowing down the side of its own neck, it shakily wrote several crooked lines across the glass.
【The prince’s brain】
【Save me】
【I’ll obey】
【Behead】
…See through?
Elio’s Notes: The crooked handwriting says “behead,” which Yin Chen momentarily misreads as the similar-sounding phrase “see through.”
“You want me to cut off your head and save it, while leaving the rest of your body here?” Yin Chen narrowed his phoenix eyes.
【Destroy. Thanks.】
Bang!
Beep, beep… beep-beep…
Before the corpse could finish, the explosive crash of shattering glass mingled with the rapid warning alarms from the damaged refrigeration equipment, reverberating deafeningly through the room.
Yin Chen lost patience. With a casual swing of his blade, he cut through both the cryogenic compartment and Prince Arthur’s body at once. The severed head rolled helplessly several meters across the floor, then wobbled to a stop. Fresh, delicate growths quietly emerged from the cut surface of its neck, resembling the curled first traces of hands and feet forming on a human embryo.
Humans had only four limbs, but this cluster of new growth emerging from the severed flesh consisted of at least hundreds upon hundreds of pink filaments at a glance.
Yin Chen lifted the tip of his blade, dug the strangely beating heart out of the torso, crudely shoved it into his coat pocket, then grabbed a fistful of the prince’s cold, pale blond hair, lifted the still-bleeding living head, and strode toward the exit.
He had suddenly heard Song Zang’s voice. Even through the thick, bulletproof radiant-iron door, it sounded unusually distinct.
But a moment later Yin Chen abruptly stopped. He realized the morgue door had somehow been locked without his noticing.
Manually locked from the outside.
It was a blast-resistant manual radiant-iron lock made from thickened aerospace-grade material. Even an ordinary laser-charged gun firing continuously at full power for three days could never break through it.
At the same time, the temperature inside the freezer room plummeted, dropping rapidly from minus thirty degrees as the air turned bitterly cold and thin.
The moisture in Yin Chen’s breath instantly crystallized into tiny particles visible to the naked eye. In the blink of an eye, this already bone-chilling space became like a frozen hell, completely unsuitable for any organic life to remain in safely.
An ordinary human, even wearing a down jacket, would freeze to death within an hour with almost no hope of survival.
Yin Chen narrowed his eyes, a mocking, icy smile touching his lips. This mole not only wanted to abduct Song Zang while they had the chance, but also wanted to kill him along the way. Unfortunately, they had picked entirely the wrong target.
For the First Legion, however, it was one disaster piled on top of another. The moles planted aboard the ship were not limited to the technical department responsible for artificial intelligence.
The biological laboratory of the Legion’s Special Inspection Division had also been quietly infiltrated by people with ulterior motives.
Song Zang had been abducted by a mole from the Inspection Division, and he had gone willingly.
The stranger’s rough palm ground mercilessly over Song Zang’s mouth and nose, and a highly targeted Alpha contact anesthetic rushed straight into his respiratory tract.
The distinctive smells of disinfectant, rubber, and faint blood immediately narrowed the blindfolded Song Zang’s estimate of the man’s identity to two possibilities.
Either he worked in the medical department or the Inspection Division. Even without releasing pheromones, their bodies, especially the joints of their fingers, had long been soaked in the smells of disposable gloves and various chemical agents.
Song Zang had not seen the little dog for an entire day anyway, and nobody was allowed inside while it remained quarantined in the Inspection Division. He simply went along with things, let out a startled cry, tilted his head weakly and helplessly, and “fainted,” allowing the unfamiliar soldier to drag him away.
The smell of blood rapidly intensified as the soldier moved forward. The strange wet odor clung to the air and entered Song Zang’s nose through the ventilation system. With his eyes closed, he listened in every direction and realized that all five of his senses were becoming stronger and sharper.
As the soldier carrying him ran, his nose produced harsh wheezing sounds. His lungs and bronchi seemed to contain some strange inflammation, like suppurating fluid or tiny foreign objects causing blockages, making his stamina drop rapidly.
But the soldier himself seemed completely unaware. Even as breathing became more difficult, he simply assumed he was too nervous.
The abnormality was not limited to the soldier’s condition. There were also strange details aboard the spacecraft itself.
Song Zang could hear unfamiliar wet living things crawling and swimming along the inner panels of the exhaust and oxygen-supply ducts.
About ten meters away, there were weak sounds of humans struggling and crying, along with the fine, dense chewing noises of some animal. Through the sealed metal door, he still could not hear them clearly.
For some reason, however, the soldier’s footsteps suddenly became frantic. He activated voice communication. “John… John? Open the door!”
“Woof, woof!” No one answered, but a familiar voice immediately came through the speaker instead.
“Hot Dog!”
Song Zang shouted in delight, slapped the soldier to the floor, then stood in front of the sealed quarantine door and narrowed his eyes to look inside. He did not even need to break the door open by force. His penetrating vision could assess the danger in advance.
There was nobody alive inside.
Every soldier in the quarantine room had died beneath Hot Dog’s teeth.
Their necks were broken, their skin blue-white from rapid blood loss, and the signs of struggle were brief. At least they had died quickly.
Hot Dog, meanwhile, was very much alive, its mouth covered in blood. The instant it realized Song Zang was calling for it, its round, watery eyes suddenly lit up red.
It wagged its tail with all its might, two gunshot wounds visible on its backside, and excitedly rose onto its little body. Scrabbling wildly at the metal door with its paws, it barked loudly, “Woof woof woof!”
The soldier Song Zang had knocked down sat stunned against the wall for half a second before flying into a rage. “Fuck your O, you were faking it?!”
Song Zang was no longer in any particular hurry. He turned, smiling sweetly at the soldier. “Why are you bullying me? If you don’t explain yourself, I’ll stink you unconscious.”
The instant the words left his mouth, he released the pheromones he had kept sealed away for so long without hesitation.
Never in his wildest expectations had he imagined that his pheromones would now be several times more overwhelming than at the beginning of the instance. An extremely dense wave of decay exploded outward, carrying the bizarre, distinctive stench of rotting vegetation as it swept across the spacious Inspection Division cabin.
The soldier’s eyes flew wide. He wheezed twice, “Hhk, hhk,” and then instantly passed out from the smell, eyes rolling back as he lost consciousness.
Song Zang strode over and slapped him again without hesitation.
The soldier was violently slapped awake and blinked dazedly. He had barely opened his mouth to speak when, two seconds later, his head tilted and he passed out again. The smell had actually knocked him unconscious a second time.
Song Zang wanted to laugh. He pressed his lips together and held his breath to suppress it, then raised his hand and slapped the man again.
The cycle repeated several times. The soldier still could not remain conscious. Instead, the smell made him cry while fainting, until at last he tilted his head, let out a miserable “Blargh!” and began vomiting uncontrollably.
What came out of him was horrifying.
Large numbers of living, writhing, indescribable “worms” poured like a flood from his mouth, ears, and the edges of his bloodshot eyeballs.
They were roughly the size of an adult woman’s little finger, and there seemed to be several hundred of them. These revolting things had been secretly living inside the soldier’s lungs and trachea.
Song Zang could not even describe what kind of worms they were. No creature like them existed within his understanding of the world.
It was almost as though a human had transformed into a slimy worm. Its legs had atrophied into two tiny fan-shaped lumps of flesh, and faint facial features could be made out, yet at the same time it possessed all kinds of redundant, twisted organs from marine life, like the unrestrained deformities of a deep-sea fish.
Yet around the “gills” on top of the worm’s head, there were also two bizarre little hands resembling the paw pads of a feline.
Two tufts of gray fuzz grew around what appeared to be the mouthparts at its front end, stained with pink bloody foam and saliva from the soldier.
Weird. Very weird. Extremely weird.
The more Song Zang narrowed his eyes and focused on examining them, the less he understood their true structure. Instead, he kept unexpectedly discovering organs that should not have existed.
Inside its internal “reproductive” system was a mouth shaped like a long, narrow bird’s beak, opening and closing for some unknowable purpose.
Song Zang stared with his penetrating vision for a very long time, but still could not understand the logic of either its internal or external anatomy.
These things were also extremely fast. To prevent them from hiding in sealed parts of the spacecraft and reproducing wildly, Song Zang hurried after them, trying to crush every last one into pulp, only to discover…
Physical attacks were extremely inefficient, nearly useless. Even after Song Zang crushed them with all his strength, wet mucus would pull the mangled chunks of flesh back together and rapidly reconstruct them. Their regenerative ability was absurdly powerful.
But Song Zang soon made another discovery.
His own rotten, bizarre pheromones, which even he did not dare smell for too long, were extraordinarily effective against them in a completely different sense.
The worms scattered through the air, repeatedly dying and reviving. After moving around freely for a while, they gradually stopped fleeing. Instead, they actively surrounded Song Zang, curling tails covered in black scales and lighting up several… inexplicable dim-yellow lamps.
Yes, they could actually glow. The tips of their rear ends lit up like little lamps.
Song Zang’s lips twitched. More than frightened, he was speechless.
He could vaguely sense friendly “thoughts” pouring toward him from every direction. The alien worms were trying to show goodwill.
They loved his pheromones. They trembled and rolled around in delight, doing everything possible to imitate human culture. They wriggled the soft “cat paws” on top of their heads, pressed them together, and bowed to Song Zang in greeting.
Song Zang felt slightly dizzy. He could not tell whether his own pheromones were knocking him senseless or whether the very existence of these bizarre creatures was influencing his mind.
He certainly did not dare trust an alien’s show of goodwill.
Before long, the unfortunate soldier slowly woke again and proved that Song Zang’s suspicion and caution were justified.
After seeing the contents of his own vomit with his own eyes, the soldier simply died on the spot, suddenly and horribly.
With a sharp pop, his head exploded like a freshly ripened watermelon, spraying blood and brain matter everywhere.
Wet human brain matter nearly splashed onto Song Zang, but several hundred worms sprang into the air and formed a slick wall of flesh to shield him from the filth. Then they quickly scattered in orderly fashion, surrounding Song Zang and trying to act cute again.
Maybe this was another way the worms showed goodwill, but Song Zang was genuinely stunned.
Before long, the soldier’s eyeballs abruptly fell out, rolled several times with wet little sounds, and were swarmed and devoured by the worms.
The gland at the back of his neck fell out too. For no apparent reason, it forcibly detached from the back of his neck, while the flesh wrapped around it gave off a faint rotten stench and visibly began decaying at high speed.
That small gland, creamy white and with a texture like soft cartilage, was not eaten by the worms… even though they obviously wanted it badly.
They lifted the wet, bloody gland together and “presented” it to Song Zang’s mouth, apparently hoping he would eat it.
Song Zang thought about it, then opened his mouth and swallowed without hesitation.
Two new notifications lit up on the screen at the same time.
【You consumed Flower Seed: Hall Crabapple. Attack +10】
【You consumed Insect: Regenerative Mucus. Life +2.5】
Regenerative mucus from the worms!
Whatever kind of worms these were, they were good worms!
Song Zang’s eyes immediately lit up green. He grabbed a huge handful and stuffed them into his stomach.
He knew he was being impulsive. He knew he was being influenced.
But that did not matter. Life was extremely important. Even if he was going to die, he had to increase his Life first and die afterward.
The worms Song Zang swallowed alive did not resist. On the contrary, they seemed delighted.
It was a bizarre sensation. Song Zang rubbed his stomach and discovered that his powerful digestive system was battling the living parasites inside him, repeatedly attempting to corrode and digest them, repeatedly failing, and helplessly watching their flesh reconstruct itself.
Song Zang stared blankly for a moment and seriously considered what to do. Then a flash of inspiration suddenly crossed his mind.
He knew what to do. He hurriedly shouted at his own stomach, “Stop trying to defeat them. Digest that sticky □□ on their bodies first!”
His stomach was very smart. It reacted immediately and changed its battle plan.
Sure enough, before long the game system notified him again that Song Zang had consumed a large quantity of the worms’ mucus. His Life shot upward by roughly fifty points.
Once the mucus was gone, Song Zang had his stomach continue digesting them piece by piece, category by category, absorbing one absurd organ after another.
His head grew even dizzier, his mind even more excited, and the gland at the back of his neck burned fiercely hot. His pheromones spread farther and farther until he could even hear people whispering three decks above.
“Old Gil, do you smell something rotten? Like last night’s stir-fried bean sprouts went bad. Did you forget to put them in the fridge?”
“Fuck your O, I think your shit just stinks! Without AI to flush the toilet for you, you can’t even take care of yourself!”
Song Zang listened for a while, then rubbed his brow, caught between laughter and tears.
He did not dare withdraw his scent yet. At the very least, he needed to wait until he finished eating all these worms.
The giant iron pot became the perfect tool.
Song Zang rubbed his gland, coating his fingertips with the smell of rotting roses, then pressed his hand against the bottom of the pot and lured the little worms toward the center.
The opening and closing gills beside their mouthparts pressed wetly and softly against Song Zang’s fingers. They had no tongues, yet somehow made motions like licking him.
Once he confirmed that every worm had crawled into the pot on its own, Song Zang immediately slammed on the lid.
Half a minute later, the twisting, struggling worms had all been cooked through, turning a tender, raw-meat pink as they came fresh out of the pot.
Song Zang sat cross-legged beside the soldier’s gruesome corpse, hurriedly stopped releasing so much pheromone, then cradled the scalding iron pot and ate with gusto, quickly finishing this strange meal of… 《Tianshan Snow Lotus Worm Soup》.
At least, that was what the game system called it.
Song Zang still did not understand the exact principles behind this species, but he ate happily and ended up completely stuffed.
Only after he was full did he seem to wake from a dream and look across the iron door at Hot Dog.
The desperately worried little dachshund had already scratched two enormous craters into the metal door. If Song Zang had eaten any slower, Hot Dog could probably have broken out of quarantine by itself.
Rubbing his stomach, Song Zang stood up, glanced at his pants covered in blood and brain matter, sniffed the thick rotten smell lingering on his hands, and wiped the pale pink soup residue from the corner of his mouth. Then, as if venting his frustration, he raised one fist and smashed the radiant-iron iris lock on the quarantine door to pieces, allowing Hot Dog to leap excitedly into his arms.
Holding the heavy, solid little dog, Song Zang sighed and did not chatter warmly with it as he usually would.
Because he had suddenly realized that his Resistance was nowhere near high enough for him to behave recklessly without fear.
He had absolutely been a little mentally scrambled just now, trapped in a bizarre state that was rational yet wildly excited, perhaps even slightly neurotic, like during last night’s late-night meal, only much worse…
Reflection. He absolutely needed to reflect. Without Yin Chen beside him keeping watch, he had actually dared let himself fall into a mentally unstable state like that. Did he want to die?!
While sternly condemning himself, Song Zang stepped into the quarantine room to inspect the situation.
The Inspection Division researchers killed by Hot Dog had all been carrying lethal weapons. Judging from the footprints and traces at the scene, every one of them had attacked Hot Dog first.
The two scorched bullet holes on the little dog’s backside came from the two researchers who had died the most gruesome deaths.
“You didn’t hurt anyone first. They tried to hurt you, right?”
“Woof woof!”
Hot Dog nodded, bared its increasingly terrifying and deformed teeth, gently bit Song Zang’s collar, and led him toward the office area deeper inside the quarantine room.
Two projection computers were still running. Song Zang tentatively lit up their floating screens with gestures, dug out two researchers’ eyeballs, held them near the cameras, and successfully unlocked the computers with iris recognition.
The computers stored all kinds of testing data and lists, accessible only to Inspection Division personnel and the Imperial Inspection Center. Even Commander Percy was not allowed to inspect them without authorization.
There were plenty of interesting files: lists of lethal infectious diseases currently spreading through Zones B and C, newly discovered top-secret contamination-related microbial colonies, bloodborne carcinogens rapidly transmitted by enormous flying mosquitoes, and… various Zone A-exclusive forbidden-disease lists marked 【Do Not Distribute】.
Song Zang pressed his wrist against the transfer port and copied every bit of computer data without hesitation. He was even forced to spend one thousand star coins upgrading his storage capacity.
Then, following Hot Dog’s frantic gesturing, he opened 【Surveillance Playback】.
The reason the little dachshund had gone on a killing spree was answered with perfect clarity in the footage.
Every military researcher in the First Legion’s Inspection Division was a mole.
They knew better than anyone that this dachshund could not be allowed to live.
Hot Dog had only fought back in self-defense. Hot Dog was a good dog!