“I really like you. I can’t bear to hurt you.”
Before Song Zang could respond, Yin Chen’s warm lips landed against the vulnerable side of his neck, brushing and kissing softly before abruptly escalating as Yin Chen pressed him back against the sofa.
With just a little strength in his arms, Yin Chen pinned Song Zang together with the soft cloud-white cushion. No matter how Song Zang struggled, he could not move an inch.
Yin Chen smiled gently and bit Song Zang’s burning ear. “If you want to run, stab me once. If you don’t, then cooperate and let me kiss you. It’ll put me in a better mood.”
Song Zang certainly did not want to run. He truly was fragile right now and had no interest in cutting open his lover’s body with a knife.
So he relaxed and let Yin Chen hold him tightly. They kissed for so long it resembled an attempted suffocation murder, and Song Zang remained breathless and dazed for quite some time afterward.
Intricate, bizarre black-and-gold patterns climbed upward from the back of his neck, spreading wantonly across skin as pale as jade, faintly tracing a flushed haze.
Song Zang was finally soothed. Tears still shimmered in his blood-red eyes, but his mood had become utterly peaceful.
Yin Chen’s uncompromising kisses were like a supercharged power bank that worked only on him, allowing Song Zang to stay calm… for at least half an hour.
While he was still sane enough not to start acting crazy again, Song Zang calmly tore open Yin Chen’s shirt, calmly pressed a hand against his firm abdominal muscles, and calmly reopened his implanted terminal with one hand to contact Little Star AI again.
The wireless bugs and hidden cameras spread throughout the villa looked horrifying, but for the Eldest Princess they were also a potential vulnerability.
Song Zang could use them to conduct a reverse-trace investigation, follow the signals all the way back to their origin, locate the receiving devices and databases storing the audio and video, and directly identify the exact coordinates and the registered information of the connected equipment.
He was already good at this, and Little Star AI’s help made it even easier.
Little Star looked furious, even angrier than Song Zang about these devices that “might spy on Song Zang’s naked body.” It silently pushed its computing power to the highest level and within seconds traced the exact receiving equipment and image-storage database.
The monitoring registration information belonged to the Capital University Information Department. There was no individual name attached, so responsibility could not be assigned to any particular person.
But the problem was that none of the equipment was actually located in the capital. It was on a remote planet in Zone A called Iceberg.
The Eldest Princess had purchased eighty percent of the private land on that planet, which effectively meant Iceberg was her territory. She possessed almost complete political jurisdiction there and could also station large amounts of heavy weaponry indefinitely as a form of self-defense.
As long as the weapons never left the satellite range around Iceberg, everything remained perfectly legal.
For a wealthy, powerful Alpha, life could be that comfortable, safe, and completely ordinary.
They now had two choices.
The two of them could go alone. That would make movement extremely convenient, their teamwork was already well-practiced, and they could conceal themselves.
Or they could persuade Catherine Percy to authorize troop deployment and simply bring the First Legion straight to the planet for a top-tier overwhelming assault.
If one ignored Yin Chen’s absurd strength, the latter was obviously the path the players ought to choose, even if it was more troublesome and involved a long chain of political procedures.
It was safer.
With large warships taking the lead, even if Iceberg was riddled with danger and a gigantic boss like the wild rose appeared, they would not accidentally be crushed into paste or swallowed whole.
“Should we bring Sister Chi Yan and the others?”
Song Zang knew he was calm, which was precisely why he did not trust his own judgment and proactively asked Yin Chen for his opinion.
The Empire’s spatial-transfer technology was highly advanced. For only five hundred star coins, a small vessel could be transferred back and forth between the major star systems of Zone A.
“You know I prefer acting alone.”
Yin Chen tugged at his already partly open shirt as he spoke softly, revealing a broad stretch of pale, sharply defined chest and abdominal muscles.
He lounged lazily against the sofa. The beautiful lines of his iliac furrows disappeared little by little beneath his lower abdomen, hidden by tightly fitted military trousers, secretive and deliberately tempting.
Song Zang’s gaze sharpened slightly. The hand resting against Yin Chen’s abdomen could not help sliding around his waist, searching for the shallow dimples hidden at Yin Chen’s lower back that no one else knew existed.
The smooth, tight warmth beneath his palm trembled quietly.
Other than Song Zang, no one in the world had ever touched the dimples at Yin Chen’s waist.
No one else would ever know that Yin Chen was a little sensitive there.
A dark glimmer moved through Yin Chen’s narrow phoenix eyes. A rose-colored flush spread across the pale skin of his neck as he curled his lips and asked, “Did the □□ work?”
Elio’s Notes: The source itself contains □□ here. I’m preserving the missing characters exactly rather than guessing what was censored or lost.
“Very successfully. I’ll listen to you. Whatever you want to do is fine.”
Song Zang breathed in the increasingly rich rose fragrance in the air, his pupils scarlet as he answered calmly.
That settled it. Yin Chen wanted the two of them to act alone, so the next operation absolutely had to be a two-person mission.
Zhang Tao Xiong’s illegally modified spacecraft had arrived at exactly the right time to be useful.
It had top-grade stealth coating that could evade deep radar scans entirely. All they needed to do was pay the five-hundred-star-coin transfer fee and they could jump directly into the Mingling star system where Iceberg was located.
The modified ship also carried an extremely powerful weapons reserve. At full output, it could overpower military warships several times its size.
If Song Zang had to fight it alone, concentrated fire might actually knock him unconscious.
In the end, Zhang Tao Xiong had died so quickly and miserably because he had underestimated his opponent too much and never treated Song Zang as a real threat from the start.
If Zhang Tao Xiong had truly descended on the garbage planet in that ship and fired without restraint, Song Zang would have had no choice but to retreat temporarily. But now the ship belonged to Song Zang, a perfect means of transportation.
The broad plan had been settled. They could depart at any time.
But before that, they first had to deal with… the increasingly severe problem of Song Zang’s susceptible period.
Successfully tempted, Song Zang calmly enjoyed himself with Yin Chen on the sofa.
Like a starving little wolf cub, he clamped his teeth onto Yin Chen’s battered neck and refused to let go, pouring his strange, bizarre pheromones into him in an attempt to leave a permanent mark.
But Alphas were restricted by biology and could not mark each other at all.
So when the pleasure finally ended, the aftereffects came rushing in even more violently.
Song Zang became even more fragile.
In the bathtub, he clung to Yin Chen and cried while helping him make bubbles.
Once they changed into pajamas and lay down, if Yin Chen failed to immediately lie beside him, Song Zang hugged Yin Chen’s pillow and kept crying.
Yin Chen no longer dared to speak.
Because every time he made a sound, Song Zang cried even harder. He even tried to help Yin Chen apply medicine through his tears, wanting to cover the mottled bite marks on the back of his neck.
So Yin Chen silently opened the medical kit and applied two suppressant patches to himself.
Supposedly, when two Alphas spent enough time together, the timing of their susceptible periods would gradually synchronize.
If the two of them entered a fragile, emotional state at the same time…
They would really be finished.
Yin Chen reopened the physiology textbook, copied out the susceptible-period information, and stuck it to the bedside table so that if he himself also went crazy, Song Zang would know how to deal with him.
【Your Alpha is very fragile right now and prone to overthinking. He needs large amounts of comfort and affection, gentle and sincere reassurance. Treat him like a child who has not grown up yet. Maintain close physical contact and satisfy his childish possessiveness.】
【As a reliable Omega partner, you should also prepare several pieces of clothing that carry your scent and leave them somewhere your Alpha can find them. That way, even if you and your Alpha are temporarily separated, you can still provide enough pheromonal comfort.】
【Let your Alpha come into contact with your gland frequently. If the bites become too severe, stop him gently and apply a small amount of Galaxy Growth Factor to the wound to ease the pain. Endure a little during the susceptible period. He will become even more dependent on you and feel guilty, then repay the gentleness you gave him many times over.】
Raising a child really wasn’t easy.
Yin Chen’s head hurt from reading it, and irritation rose in him, but he also could not help feeling relieved.
Fortunately, the version of Song Zang he had met first was already an adult.
Otherwise, he really might have been unable to stop himself from choking that brat unconscious.
While Yin Chen was busy studying, Song Zang’s chaos had not stopped.
Song Zang dismantled every cabinet door in the two-hundred-square-meter walk-in closet, pulled out all of Yin Chen’s personal clothing, and built an extraordinarily balanced, perfectly circular nest on top of the bed.
It was so perfect that Yin Chen could not even get onto the bed. He could not step inside the nest at all and could only stand silently outside the circle, exchanging a long, eerie stare with Song Zang hidden in the middle.
“I am physically standing right here. Why are you tormenting my clothes?” Yin Chen finally demanded.
Song Zang looked wronged. “I don’t feel safe. You wouldn’t understand.”
Yin Chen rubbed his brow. “Then what exactly do you want?”
“I want to give you the purest version of me.” Tears slid down Song Zang’s face. “The me right now is dirty.”
“…What does that mean?” Honestly, Yin Chen did not understand him at all.
“There’s an AI living in my head. It’s terrifying. It feels awful.” Song Zang’s eyes were red. “When can we do the craniotomy?”
So that was what he had been obsessing over. Fine.
Through layer after layer of clothing, Yin Chen stretched out his arm, caught Song Zang by the head, rubbed it, and explained gently, “I ordered some specialized medical equipment. It should be airlifted here soon. I promise Little Star AI’s problem will be solved today.”
After exchanging information with Chi Yan, Yin Chen was very confident and had a clear plan for the surgery ahead.
“Am I going to have an ugly head?” Song Zang was still uneasy. “You have to shave hair for a craniotomy. What if you cut my head open and make it ugly?”
“Then cut mine too.” Yin Chen tipped his chin up and gave it a squeeze. “Use my knife. It’s very convenient for cutting through a skull. Make it as ugly as you want. I won’t be angry.”
Yin Chen was not joking. This was genuinely how he imagined it, and to him the logic was perfectly sound.
Song Zang’s heart pounded. The idea excited him in a subtle way. He practically loved Yin Chen like this.
With an offhand attitude, Yin Chen could calmly say one twisted, horrifying thing after another without believing there was anything wrong with it.
Because Yin Chen could actually do every single thing he said he would do.
The sense of security was so full it was practically overflowing.
Song Zang stopped panicking. He dug a little tunnel into the side of the fortress he had built and invited Yin Chen inside to sleep.
＊
The surgical equipment Yin Chen had ordered in advance finally arrived at the villa before dinner.
During the livestream of their marriage registration earlier that day, someone anonymous had leaked Yin Chen’s private information onto the dark web.
Little Star AI had detected the leak but had not bothered to warn Song Zang, while Yin Chen did not care at all. Once the information was out, there was no point trying to hide it.
When someone reposted the information onto the legal interstellar network, the intelligent detection system automatically deleted it within seconds, but that did nothing to stop anyone determined enough to investigate further.
The autonomous delivery drone was delayed by several hours because of it. The package itself was intact and had not been opened, but four or five tiny trigger-activated electromagnetic cannons had been tied to the drone’s engine and propellers, all primed to fire.
Judging from the operating principle of the electromagnetic cannons, the moment Yin Chen made physical contact with the delivery package and caused even the slightest vibration, there was a one-hundred-percent chance he would be blown more than a hundred meters into the air, crippled if not killed.
If this had been another player, escaping the trap would probably have required some serious thought.
Yin Chen simply removed the devices with his bare hands, confirmed receipt, took a photo, and tucked each little mechanism into his pocket without suffering a scratch.
Many thanks to the enemy for the free, high-powered ammunition with no tracking serial numbers. It sold for an excellent price on the illegal market, and he happened to need some.
In a good mood, Yin Chen unpacked the custom surgical tools, scanner, and sterile operating table, then arranged them neatly inside a newly cleared surgery room.
He changed into a surgical gown, washed his hands three times, and disinfected them thoroughly.
Before performing Song Zang’s craniotomy, Yin Chen intended to operate on himself first as practice.
He had disliked the remaining half of his gland for a long time. It was about time he removed it completely.
Gland-removal surgery was classified as extremely high-risk in the Rose Empire, with countless possible complications and lasting side effects. Patients had to undergo strict physical evaluations, asset checks, and personality testing. Only if they perfectly met the required scales were doctors legally permitted to operate.
If anything went wrong before or after the procedure and the Empire lost an excellent Alpha or Omega as a result, the entire hospital could face enormous fines and legal liability.
It was all so troublesome that cutting it out at home himself was much easier.
Song Zang knew the circumstances. He only pressed his lips together and sat nearby wearing a mask, making no attempt to stop Yin Chen’s madness. He liked the rich, velvety, old-fashioned rose fragrance, but he liked Yin Chen’s natural mint scent too. It was familiar and reassuring.
Although that scent actually came from… Yin Chen’s secret addiction to mint candy. He always kept several pieces hidden in his pockets.
Of course, Song Zang was still deeply displeased with Yin Chen right now. this infuriatingly casual man did not even bother wearing gloves. He simply picked up an extremely sharp silver-white blade and drove it hard into the back of his own neck with a reverse grip.
Seeing Song Zang’s tense expression, almost as though he had forgotten how to breathe, Yin Chen curled his lips and reassured him casually, “Don’t worry. Even without a gland, you can still inject pheromones into my body. Just cut an opening anywhere you like.”
That was not the point! Song Zang drew a deep breath and refused to engage with such a perverted topic in case Yin Chen genuinely became excited.
Hot blood wound down Yin Chen’s pale fingers, dripping one drop at a time into a sterile glass bottle.
Yin Chen collected a small amount of blood with a cotton swab, mixed it with several special color-development reagents, and sealed it inside a thin glass slide. These were all samples that needed to be cultured and observed. Yin Chen was having far too much fun.
The bloody gland itself was immediately sealed and placed into the scanning equipment for an automated deep analysis.
It was an extraordinarily simple minor operation, and Yin Chen barely felt any abnormality or discomfort. He washed his hands, took out a large sterile cotton ball, saturated it with alcohol until it swelled, and shoved it directly deep into the wound at the back of his neck to stop the bleeding and disinfect it.
The crude simplicity of the motion made Song Zang’s heart jump.
The scan results arrived quickly. No pathological tissue, high-risk bacteria, or viruses were detected, and the intelligent doctor classified the gland tissue as 【No Risk】.
Yin Chen disagreed. He stared at the high-definition scan on the floating screen, magnified it bit by bit, and narrowed his phoenix eyes thoughtfully.
“Upper-left C-2 grid. There’s a tiny white dot there, Yin Chen.”
Song Zang was even more focused than he was and spotted the abnormal detail at a glance.
The tiny white speck looked almost like a dropped frame in the scan and was smaller than an ant. Yin Chen confirmed its exact location on the image, finally put on gloves, and took out the bloody half of his gland.
He sliced the soft cartilage evenly, layer by layer, flattened it beneath his fingertip, and searched carefully… Sure enough, he found the unusual white dot buried inside the gland.
“It looks like a plant seed.” Yin Chen carefully picked it out and ran a second analysis.
According to the AI scan, it was an original seed from the ancient rose cultivar Crimson Glory. The seed had already begun producing fine threads and sprouting. The young shoot curled inward in a malformed way, with only its tip connected to the surrounding flesh.
The seed had been growing for more than fifty years, older than Yin Chen’s role itself.
The two of them stared at each other in stunned silence.
Neither of them had expected the answer to be so simple. There was actually a rose seed growing inside Yin Chen’s gland.
Nothing remotely like this impossible anatomical case had ever appeared in the history of Imperial medicine. If they told anyone, they would probably be treated as lunatics.
The textbooks were perfectly clear. The Alpha and Omega glands possessed by humans were the result of ecological changes during humanity’s long interstellar expansion and bodily evolution over tens of millions of years of survival, developed to preserve the human species.
How could such a perfect, almost heroic product of evolution possibly have been grown from a plant?
Yin Chen looked toward the surgery room door, where a certain little dachshund was pacing anxiously, and could not help curling his lips. “Looks like it and I are the same species. This little thing is pretty cute too.”
“Well, well, well. Who was it that said he hated dogs before?” Song Zang crossed his arms and spoke in a deliberately mocking tone.
“I never hated them.” Yin Chen gave Song Zang a meaningful look and pushed the sterile medical kit toward him. “Sew me up. I know you like it.”
“…Okay, baby.”
Song Zang had been thoroughly handled. He really did like it.
Using forceps, he slowly removed the cotton ball. Through the rubber glove, he touched the deep wound at the back of Yin Chen’s neck, where bone was plainly visible. He inhaled slowly to calm his excitement.
Suturing a body with such perfect flesh and muscular structure was the ultimate pleasure for both sight and touch. Song Zang was so happy he nearly floated away.
He had not always been this perverted. Really.
It was all Yin Chen’s fault for being a pervert, which had turned Song Zang into one too. Marry a chicken, follow the chicken; marry a dog, follow the dog.
…
The two of them discussed serious matters while “flirting sweetly.”
The unexpected discovery of the rose seed made the suspicions hidden beneath the world’s setting increasingly clear.
Their thoughts naturally shifted toward the name of the dungeon.
Project: Raising Roses. What kind of roses was it actually raising?
For that matter, who had proposed the project in the first place?
If Yin Chen’s gland had been secretly altered and implanted with a flower seed, then every subordinate of the Eldest Princess became suspicious. Perhaps they had also been modified in secret, forcibly increasing their mental-power ranks and even making their fragrant pheromones more attractive to the opposite sex.
More frightening still, some person or organization might be using their authority to harvest other people’s glands and experiment with growing flowers in innocent flesh.
There were many suspicious points worth recording. The two of them had no time to investigate each one now, so they might as well send everything to Chi Yan and have her look into it.
The Second Princess did not enjoy overwhelming popular support, but she was still a princess. As long as neither the emperor nor the president intervened, she could do almost anything she wanted right under Fiona’s nose.
For now, Song Zang obediently closed his eyes and lay down on Yin Chen’s custom operating table.
The practice run was over. The craniotomy officially began. Three round medical robots patrolled back and forth around Song Zang, assisting Yin Chen.
The glaring surgical light switched on above him. The cold sensation of anesthetic flowing slowly into his vein was particularly obvious. Song Zang could not help turning his head to speak to Yin Chen. “Do you think I’ll suddenly run into terrible luck during surgery and have the same thing happen to me as the Sapphire Rose Empress?”
“…I’m letting that go because you’re in your susceptible period,” Yin Chen said coldly.
Song Zang quietly raised a brow and suddenly noticed something strange about Yin Chen’s attitude.
He knew Yin Chen had been more tolerant of his mood swings, but he also knew perfectly well that Yin Chen was not the kind of person who simply “let things go.”
So what if Song Zang was in his susceptible period? He understood Yin Chen’s personality. Yin Chen especially hated hearing him make unlucky predictions about himself, and it always made him furious.
A susceptible period that existed only inside the dungeon’s setting was not some golden immunity token that could erase every conflict.
Even if Song Zang were a cancer patient and said something Yin Chen hated hearing, Yin Chen would stop whatever important thing he was doing, pinch his neck with a sinister expression, and insist on settling the matter with him.
Yet right now, Yin Chen had not started an argument at all. He had brushed the topic aside as though it meant nothing.
That could only mean… Yin Chen had something more urgent he wanted to do and did not want to waste even a little more time.
The powerful anesthetic was already circulating through Song Zang’s body. He quieted himself and began thinking about what this craniotomy was really supposed to accomplish, and what exactly Yin Chen intended to do to him.
Dismember him? Plant a parasitic curse inside him to control him?
Deliberately damage his brain tissue and turn him into a pretty, obedient idiot like a doll?
All of those sounded oddly erotic… enough to make Song Zang feel a strange anticipation.
Drowsy and hazy, he imagined one inappropriate scenario after another and wanted to simply fall asleep and have a pleasant dream, but unfortunately that did not happen.
Song Zang’s resistance was simply too strong. Ordinary general anesthesia was nowhere near enough to put him fully unconscious.
The anesthesia could erase pain, but it could not block his perception.
Everything Yin Chen did to his head remained painfully clear to him.
A small patch of his hair was shaved away. Damp, slippery ointment and disinfectant moved across the skin at the back of his head beneath warm fingertips, creating an oddly subtle sensation.
The cold radiant iron scalpel was far too sharp. Song Zang heard Yin Chen turn his wrist lightly, and the skull bone was cut open with the motion.
The sudden threat of death wrapped itself completely around Song Zang.
His eyelids grew heavier and heavier. He could not lift them. He could not raise his hands either. Only his hearing remained exceptionally sharp.
A wet, slick, muddy sound reached him, the collision of a blade tip and brain membrane.
His base Resistance value began flashing rhythmically across the system interface, making Song Zang even sleepier, yet he still could not fall fully unconscious.
He had no idea how much time passed. The surgical knife, wet with blood and cerebral fluid, was casually set back onto the operating table with a metallic clink.
Then another unfamiliar object, strangely moist and springy, quietly spread over Song Zang’s brain. It pressed itself inch by inch against the cerebral cortex, expanding freely and gently wrapping around half of his brain.
Countless tiny wriggling suckers opened and closed, bringing a strange ticklish sensation of suction and the terrifying illusion of being torn apart and eaten.
Something was eating his brain.
No, no…
Yin Chen was eating his brain.
The half-conscious Song Zang was frightened fully awake. He had never been more alert, but his body had already gone limp and rigid under the anesthesia, completely beyond the command of his brain.
Since when did Yin Chen have tentacles?
That had to be a tentacle, right?
Song Zang could not see it or touch it. He could only hear bizarre sounds of licking, rubbing, and sucking spreading from the back of his skull, vibrating in fine resonance through the bone.
His wildly fluctuating emotions dragged Song Zang deep into a whirlpool, and strange images flashed through his pitch-black vision.
Brilliant light inside limitless darkness. A translucent, bizarre jelly-like creature whose size and shape human language could not describe because it was constantly changing, regenerating, and dissolving, its inner cavity filled with shifting multicolored fluid and light.
Hundreds of beautiful translucent eyes were embedded in the springy jelly. Fine hairs lined one side of its tentacles, allowing them to reach directly into the deepest folds of a brain.
Song Zang did not know where this place was, but he recognized Yin Chen instantly.
So Yin Chen could also be a strange, many-eyed jelly octopus, pink and white and… way too cute…
Pale blue-white fire roasted his brain tissue, producing the sizzling fragrance of hot oil. Song Zang struggled to breathe and even became somewhat overexcited.
He watched his mental sea get brutally pierced as a beautiful tentacle pushed inside.
Song Zang’s first reaction was just as brutal. Break it off. Keep it. A souvenir.
The colorless mental power moving through his brain endured the monster’s wanton disturbance and secretly condensed into an almost invisible arrow.
He aimed at the slick inner wall of the tentacle, drew it taut, and fired, setting off a suicidal burst of terrifying force inside his mental sea.
The unstoppable power of the arrow exploded outward, whipping even the air around Song Zang’s body into a violent surge.
The tentacle barely resisted. Curled along the vaguely defined wall of his mental sea, it was pierced once, twice… then forcibly torn in half, trembling as it collapsed. Fine hairs scattered away, leaving the broken flesh riddled with pitiful, wet holes.
Pink blood like liquid pearls, glowing with a hazy scarlet light, welled from the torn flesh deep inside the tentacle and dripped into Song Zang’s brain.
【You absorbed the blood of ???. Resistance -10】
【Resistance -20】
【Resistance -30】
Song Zang: …
What did that mean? He had only wanted to steal a piece of tentacle, and now it was taking huge chunks out of his base stats. How could Yin Chen be this awful?!
Song Zang refused to accept it. He wanted to rebel.
The moment his furious, aggrieved mood appeared, the blue system screen surfaced again.
【Warning: Display error!】
【Error Code 029 reproduction failed. System data recalibrating. Recalibration successful!】
【You absorbed the blood of ???. Resistance +10】
【You absorbed the life of ???. Life +10】