He had absorbed Yin Chen’s life?
Song Zang’s heart jolted. He struggled to speak and refuse, but Yin Chen had already anticipated his objection and promptly overruled it.
A custom-made, ultra-powerful anesthesia mask suddenly covered Song Zang’s face. Large amounts of cold liquid flooded into his veins again, and crushing drowsiness swallowed him like a towering wave.
Song Zang could not resist. Harassed dizzy by a constant stream of system notifications, he eventually gave up and sank completely into a peaceful sleep.
There was no point struggling any further. He was afraid Yin Chen would keep increasing the dosage and poison him straight into stupidity.
If Yin Chen were pushed hard enough, he was absolutely capable of doing something that deranged.
…
When Song Zang woke again, he felt completely refreshed.
He was lying in a mountain of piled-up clothes, the mattress beneath him soft as a cloud and nearly swallowing his whole body.
A metallic heart-rate monitor was attached to the tip of his right index finger. The thin little piece of metal had warmed from his body heat, which meant he had clearly been wearing it for quite a while.
The faint scent of old roses lingered around his nose, and the mild unease Song Zang had felt on opening his eyes quickly faded with it.
Yin Chen’s scent. Yin Chen’s clothes… but apparently not Yin Chen’s bed.
Pushing apart the mountain of clothes, Song Zang braced himself on the mattress and sat up. The ceiling and walls were all the familiar icy silver-gray, and he could faintly hear a barely perceptible vibration from the engines.
Official aircraft had nearly perfect noise insulation, yet at that moment the power room on the lowest deck was producing enough noise for Song Zang to hear.
This had to be a privately modified craft.
That was right. One moment ago, Song Zang had still been struggling against anesthesia during an illegal operation. The next time he opened his eyes, he was already aboard Zhang Tao Xiong’s illegally modified spacecraft, nearly hundreds of millions of kilometers away from the Zone A capital.
Yin Chen sat beside the bed sucking on a mint candy and casually watching a pirated insectoid movie provided by the ship.
Noticing Song Zang stirring, Yin Chen lazily reached into his pocket and tossed him a sweet-orange hard candy.
The wrapper dissolved as soon as it entered his mouth. A crisp, refreshing orange fragrance burst across his tongue, and fresh fruit juice spilled from the candy’s center.
Song Zang smiled in satisfaction and mumbled, “It’s really good. Bring me a few more next time.”
“Sure. Are you hungry?”
Yin Chen picked up Song Zang’s wrist and removed the lightweight monitor, his tone oddly subtle. “There’s food in the next room. Pick whatever you want.”
Song Zang blinked blankly, laced his fingers with Yin Chen’s, used the leverage to rise from the bed, and immediately straddled his lap. “Let’s go together.”
Yin Chen did not refuse. He lifted Song Zang easily with one hand under his butt and discreetly squeezed a few times.
The sensor door slid open automatically, and a dazzling expanse of gold nearly blinded Song Zang.
The dining room was packed with clutter, so full that even Yin Chen could barely walk through it.
There were mountains of colorful gemstones and gold bars, limited-edition coins stamped with rose motifs, two sacks of smuggled black steel and roughly refined radiant iron… The temperature-controlled dining table was covered with fragrant foods Song Zang could barely identify.
A hind leg from some unknown exotic beast patterned with complicated diamond markings. An eerie, delicately made man-eating-flower pudding. Bread roasted with plum-colored sauce. And the baked eyeball of some kind of flying fish.
The eyeball was nearly larger than Song Zang’s fist. Its white sizzled under the heat, releasing a thick, creamy liquid scented with cheese and butter, while the pupil had turned from black to pink as it cooked, looking uncannily like tender pan-seared salmon.
Song Zang stared at the spread until his eyes could barely keep up, and even his growling stomach became hesitant.
He was hungry, yes, but faced with foods this strange, he suddenly did not dare be too hungry.
He looked back at Yin Chen, who was secretly taking liberties with him, and asked gloomily, “Yin Chen, whose bandit stronghold did you rob?”
“You robbed it.”
“…Huh?”
Yin Chen said expressionlessly, “After you woke from general anesthesia, you turned into a tyrannical bandit chief who bullied men and women alike. I didn’t want to cooperate, so you decided to bully me.”
“How could I possibly bully you? You’re the one who bullies me!” Song Zang stared at him in disbelief.
“The first thing you did after waking was pull down my pants. You insisted on tying my hands with my own belt and playing young master and bookboy with me. Song Zang, you really do love acting.”
Yin Chen remained expressionless as he continued his complaint word for word.
Listening to Yin Chen’s accusation, outwardly calm but faintly on the verge of collapse, Song Zang finally learned what unhinged things he had done after the anesthesia made him abandon all restraint.
Once Song Zang had had enough of the aristocratic-young-master scenario, he had somehow started improvising a whole plot and could no longer stop.
His household was confiscated and he was exiled. He secretly plotted rebellion, recruited troops all along the road with his beautiful bookboy, and eventually became a vicious bandit chief who robbed travelers and raided homes.
By then, the ship had already completed a short-range spatial jump and was positioned near the edge of Zone A, where public security was slightly worse and planetary infrastructure more desolate, rather like neglected suburbs at the edge of a prosperous capital.
So Song Zang decided to immediately put his dream of becoming a robber into practice.
He did not rob ordinary people on poor planets. Instead, he ordered Yin Chen to take a detour and launch surprise attacks, thoroughly looting several passing space pirates.
They really had only been passing by.
The space pirates had merely parked their ships in an uninhabited area and were peacefully minding their own business. They had no intention of causing trouble that day. Yet Song Zang and Yin Chen jointly robbed them of all their savings, dismantled their weapons and ammunition, packed up every flashy modified weapon they owned, and nearly left them without even their underwear.
With his bandit origin story complete, Song Zang happily wrapped himself around Yin Chen and kissed him ferociously until Yin Chen’s lips were chafed raw. Only then did he fall asleep again, utterly content.
Yin Chen casually dumped the stolen junk in the bottom hold of the spacecraft. The remaining jewelry and “wild game” delicacies reserved for space pirates could at least be kept around for entertainment.
“…My god, I’m so evil.” Song Zang’s feelings were complicated, and he was even a little proud.
Yin Chen nodded in agreement and gave a faint, sinister laugh. “I’ve always known you’re a bad person. You keep trying to prove you’re not, but actually you love seeing me get bullied more than anything. Your heart is practically made of snakes and scorpions.”
“I was wrong…” Song Zang squirmed in his arms, apologized softly, then tried to turn the tables. “But you’re not much better. You have pica, you secretly eat my brain, and your motives are sinister too!”
Yin Chen paused. His thin lips moved, but he said nothing and made no attempt to defend himself.
Song Zang was still glad that Yin Chen had his own pride. Even when he wanted to conceal something, he at least disdained fabricating lies.
Seeing Yin Chen’s reaction, Song Zang quickly pressed his advantage and stared directly into his eyes. “I suspect this wasn’t the first time you ate my brain. From Happiness Community until now, how many times have I lost my memory?
“Tell me the truth right now, or I’ll break into your octopus body and hang myself beside your heart.”
What kind of bizarre threat was that…? Yin Chen’s mouth twitched. He answered helplessly, “Including today’s anesthesia blackout, only twice in total.”
“So why do you eat my brain?” Song Zang narrowed his eyes in scrutiny. “Does chewing away my memories benefit you somehow?”
Yin Chen was silent for a moment. “Since you’ve already remembered fragmentary images, that proves your brain function is intact and the memories it recorded are still stored there. Keep remembering them slowly on your own. When I interfere with your brain, I’m helping you too.”
Song Zang fell silent as well. Listening to Yin Chen explain it with complete seriousness, he did not know whether to laugh or cry.
No normal person would ever dare imagine that eating a small amount of someone else’s brain tissue could somehow be described as a form of 【help】.
Of course, Yin Chen had already eaten it. There was no point in Song Zang clinging to the issue and continuing to argue.
They still had plenty of serious matters to handle.
For example, the original purpose of the craniotomy: dealing with Little Star AI.
The excessively lifelike artificial intelligence had been stripped out together with a piece of Song Zang’s brain tissue and sent for analysis.
Yin Chen’s hypothesis had been correct. It really was insectoid biological brain-computer technology.
Compared with the Rose Empire’s subcutaneous implant chips and chaotic birth-registration system, insectoid society possessed more advanced technology, and its procedures were clearly stricter and far more orderly.
While humans were still exploring the fragile, sensitive mental sea and cautiously using peripheral nerves as bridges to virtual networks, the insectoids had already put natural brain-computer interfaces into formal use.
Before insectoid larvae even hatched from their eggs, they were sent to factory hospitals in batches to undergo brain-computer implantation and cultivation. Rare male-insectoid eggs born with insectoid markings received much gentler treatment.
By the time the hatchlings broke free successfully, their brains had already developed to an initial stage. All data from the growth of their neural networks was fed into a companion AI so the artificial intelligence could form a corresponding mimetic logic network.
That meant they could access the network for free and communicate through thought at any time within signal range. Their brain tissue was almost naturally matched to the insectoids’ mimetic network.
The personal artificial intelligence built into their brain-computer system from birth also used a very unusual predesigned algorithm.
Beyond the data fed to it in advance by the mimetic network, the AI would live alongside the owner of the brain and grow with them. It could begin learning from an ignorant newborn state, constantly improve and refine itself, develop its own way of thinking, and perfectly meet the service needs of different individuals.
Female insectoids in particular were physically strong and full of vitality, so they did not require constant hands-on parenting. The mimetic network was extremely powerful and delivered age-appropriate content to young insectoids, covering a complete insectoid education.
Through this strange but convenient technology, every insectoid could be guaranteed to complete its “genetic inheritance.”
Even if they were abandoned at birth and left drifting across deserted planets, they could still grow into a useful member of insectoid society.
Clearly, Little Star AI was Song Zang’s companion tool as a human-insectoid hybrid.
But there was a problem. The Rose Empire’s interstellar network was the only officially recognized legal platform and had long since completely blocked signals from the mimetic network.
Unless someone possessed special methods of accessing the network or knew information ordinary people did not, even insectoid natives raised inside the Empire, much less players, could not easily discover that their brains contained an entirely separate online system.
That was why Song Zang and the others had never seriously considered the possibility at first.
The clues had linked together one after another. Back at the little mining-planet military camp, Song Zang had packed the corpse of the female insectoid disguised as a Beta nurse into his system inventory and thrown it to Yin Chen to deal with.
After casually dissecting the insectoid’s brain, Yin Chen discovered that the mimetic neural-network structure was unusual: an unprecedented double-entwined form. Entire sets of neurons had been duplicated inside the brain and stuck tightly together, so closely that even scanners failed to notice anything unusual.
Neurotransmitters could carry information back and forth between the two identical neural networks. In theory, communication and transmission between them would be completely unobstructed.
Unfortunately, what Song Zang had brought back at the time was only a corpse. The brain tissue had already lost all activity, so Yin Chen could not directly observe or test the special function of the doubled neurons. Before now, he had only suspected the truth.
Only after arriving in Zone A, meeting Chi Yan, borrowing the princess’s browsing privileges to look up information about the mimetic network, and learning Song Zang’s background through the tragedy of the Sapphire Rose Empress… had everything become much clearer.
As a hybrid of human and insectoid, regardless of whether Song Zang had been born from a womb or hatched from an egg, the fact that he had been violently taken away in such a bloody manner meant he had been considered worth cultivating. The probability that a brain-computer system had been implanted in him was extremely high.
Why Song Zang had then been abandoned on a garbage planet to grow up as an orphan remained an unsolved mystery.
By the time Yin Chen finished explaining the insectoids’ network system, Song Zang had already eaten three huge pieces of the pudding they had stolen.
The soft, springy pudding wobbled as he dug into its tender body, spilling a flood of plum-colored sauce.
The filling was a sweet-and-sour fruit liquor with an extremely high alcohol content, a special version made for space pirates. Supposedly, its design had been inspired by an Omega’s soft gland. The concept was a little vulgar, but the taste was excellent.
Song Zang scooped up a large bite and fed it to Yin Chen, then tilted his head. “So where is Little Star AI? Is it still alive?”
Yin Chen stole Song Zang’s spoon, rubbed his head, and answered casually, “I cut off a piece of brain tissue you didn’t need and left it in a warm, humid, sealed environment to keep cultivating it.
“If the brain tissue grows successfully, the mimetic network can connect automatically. You can treat the AI like an external Bluetooth device. Safe and reliable.”
“That’s amazing… a brain in a vat? Yin Chen, you’re incredible. You’re looking more and more like a mad scientist.”
Still shaken, Song Zang raised a hand and touched the back of his head.
After waking aboard the space pirate ship, Song Zang discovered that the hair Yin Chen had shaved off was back, only… the method of restoration was rather special.
Yin Chen had been excessively thorough. He had ordered the finest invisible medical sutures in advance, collected Song Zang’s hair, and sewn every strand back into the skin over the cut section of skull.
Then he disinfected the bone again, fitted it perfectly back into the rear of Song Zang’s skull, and used a nail gun to secure the edges firmly in place.
Song Zang’s head could now practically qualify as a weapon. It was packed with radiant iron nails. If someone threw it hard like a basketball, it could probably cause penetrating injuries to more than ten people.
“Think of it as a miniature brain in a vat. It’s still being cultivated in isolation. Once it succeeds, I’ll let you try it.
“Also, you can’t use charged electromagnetic guns for a while. They’ll interfere with the healing speed of the wound.”
As he spoke, Yin Chen summoned the silver knife labeled 【Hard】 from his system inventory and tossed it backward into Song Zang’s arms.
The sharp silver knife’s handle had been wrapped in soft insulating material and coated in advance by Yin Chen with an electrical-blocking layer. Safe and dependable.
Song Zang bit his lip, deeply moved. “Husband…”
“…Don’t call me that randomly.” Yin Chen paused, took a deep breath, and continued, “Use this knife for now. Come on. We’re here.”
“We’re here?”
Song Zang turned toward the glass window.
The modified spacecraft, whose furtive cruise path avoided every radar scan it could, had finally reached Zone A’s Mingling star system.
Mingling was a very strange name for a star system.
The term mingling first appeared in the Book of Songs. It was also used for the double-striped night moth, a nocturnal agricultural pest. Its larvae were tender green and blended into fresh leaves, while the adult moths had wings that concealed their bodies, colored like waves of golden wheat.
Pests always troubled farmers, but the highly camouflaged mingling had a natural enemy too.
A certain kind of wasp loved hunting mingling larvae. It quietly pierced their soft green bodies and laid strings of wasp eggs inside them.
When the eggs hatched, the mingling larvae were torn apart and killed by the newborn wasps, their flesh becoming food and nourishment for the young.
When you thought about it, the story was horrifying enough to be a ghost tale.
Standing on the enclosed deck of the modified ship, Song Zang looked into the distance and saw a beautiful pale-green star positioned along the system’s central axis, radiating an intense blue-green glare that was almost impossible to look at directly.
This was the star at the center of the Mingling system. Its temperature was too low, leaving several surrounding planets poorly suited to human habitation.
With enough money poured into large-scale terraforming, artificial ozone layers, climate-controlled zones, and other advanced technologies, it was still possible to force out a small habitable settlement.
But ordinary Zone A residents were accustomed to comfortable lives. They were not interested in going to such trouble or traveling all this way to reclaim barren land.
That was why property rights over the marginal outer planets were mostly concentrated in the hands of people at the very top who had more money than they knew what to do with.
Only they could easily purchase enormous tracts of “cheap” land and build unmanned automated industrial parks centered on robots and artificial intelligence. The lower-class workers who once labored on assembly lines and performed hard physical work were no longer needed at all. They had been completely discarded and left to fend for themselves in Zone C’s mines.
The Eldest Princess had openly participated in these land-purchase projects as well, and no one in the Empire had thought anything strange about it.
The ship curved around the pale-green stellar light and headed directly toward the coordinates they had set in advance.
Two misshapen natural satellites circled the cold-colored planet Iceberg in silence.
From ten thousand meters above, endless winding mountain ranges lay buried beneath frost and snow, resembling one tangled white dragon after another, crushing and swallowing every possible trace of life across the land.
The autopilot issued two gentle landing alerts and, after completing its safety calculations, selected a higher mountaintop and landed steadily.
【Attention: The spacecraft is approximately 1,300 meters from the preset coordinates. Large-diameter transportation cannot proceed. Would you like to activate pedestrian navigation?】
Yin Chen raised a brow. “Activate it.”
【Navigation activated. The hatch will open in thirty seconds. According to data supplied by Rose Meteorological Island, today’s outdoor temperature on Iceberg is: -66°C. Atmospheric oxygen concentration: 18%-13%.】
【Vast Sea AI reminds you to prepare sufficient oxygen support, keep warm, and avoid accidents. If emergency evacuation is required, please have the captain complete iris verification and summon Vast Sea promptly so we may escort you to safety.】
【Your journey lies among the distant stars and seas!】
As the announcement ended, the spacecraft hatch slowly opened and a bone-piercing gust of cold air swept inside.
“This AI is actually pretty useful.”
Song Zang shivered and immediately wrapped both hands around Yin Chen’s arm.
He wore a lightweight protective suit with a soft, thick scarf tucked inside its windproof layer. His backpack contained a compact oxygen mask and two cylinders of oxygen ready for immediate use. He was thoroughly equipped.
Yin Chen, meanwhile, was absurd. He needed no protection from the cold at all and had almost walked outside wearing nothing but a short-sleeved shirt, his pale skin faintly luminous against the nearly blinding snow.
Song Zang could not stand looking at him and had forcibly dragged him back to put on a thick coat, which at least made him resemble a living human being.
The temperature was so low that the deep snow had frozen hard, producing a gritty rasp like sand and stone beneath their boots.
Following the navigation route, they walked forward. Strangely, the rock-hard snow gradually became loose and comfortable beneath their feet, as though they were stepping on cotton and walking across floating clouds.
Something was wrong.
There were traces of recent movement. The snow within a radius of fifty meters looked far too fresh, as though it had been cleared not long ago and then covered again by loose new snowfall.
Both of them immediately became alert, and sure enough, they soon found something unexpected.
Song Zang stepped on an insectoid. He used a hair dryer to blow away the snow and discovered more than a dozen of them, shallowly buried beneath the soft layer with no signs of life.
These were not ordinary insects. They were enormous hard-shelled creatures roughly one and a half times a human’s height, limbs curled inward. Dried wounds had congealed beneath their damaged shells, where vaguely humanlike flesh and layers of fat could be seen.
They were insectoid corpses that had dropped out of mimicry mode!
Song Zang approached carefully and used the silver knife to slice open a broken shell, exposing flesh clinging to the inside like tender white shrimp meat.
The bodies had been buried in the frozen layer, making the time of death extremely difficult to determine. They still looked almost freshly dead.
Huge, vicious white bone wings were folded tightly against the bodies without the slightest trace of life, nearly blending into the frost and snow.
Song Zang’s throat tightened as a sudden wave of hunger surged through him.
He wanted pan-seared lamb chops, sprinkled with finely ground bone-wing powder and roasted in sizzling oil. The flavor would be unbelievably fresh.
Of course, that was not where his attention should be.
Iceberg was dangerous.
At minimum, something dangerous had appeared here, something powerful enough to force insectoids who normally remained in mimicry to abandon their human forms, retreat into their hard shells, and fight for their lives, only to have their chests pierced through and die horribly anyway.
Judging by the sparse traces of battle, the dozen insectoids’ desperate resistance had extended their lives by only about five minutes.
In a heavy mood, Song Zang continued turning over the other bodies with his knife, repeatedly slicing through hard shells, stabbing into the frozen flesh beneath, and studying the bloody tissue leaking from their abdominal cavities as he tried again to estimate the time of death.
The hard shells provided some insulation and oxygen retention. Several corpses still had damp intestinal organs holding a faint warmth above freezing, which meant they had died only recently.
The massacre had happened within half a day. While Song Zang was going mad and robbing space pirates, the female insectoids who had secretly entered Imperial territory had been brutally erased on Iceberg by some strange and terrifying force.
Yin Chen stood beside him staring without moving, rather like a bodyguard standing watch.
Song Zang immersed himself in the grisly work for a while before finally noticing Yin Chen’s increasingly impossible-to-ignore gaze, which had been resting openly on him the entire time.
“What are you looking at?” Song Zang glared back.
“I’m observing whether, within twenty-four hours after brain surgery, you retain good cognitive ability and motor coordination,” Yin Chen answered calmly.
“Oh. And what’s your conclusion?”
Yin Chen curled his lips. “I’m a miracle doctor.”
He treated the dead insectoids as though they did not matter at all, completely at ease.
“…Did you cure my susceptible period too?”
Song Zang was shocked to realize that aside from his steadily worsening hunger, he no longer felt any of the emotional fragility from before. Without waiting for Yin Chen to answer, he pressed again, “So why exactly do you eat my brain? And what’s with that adorable pink-and-white jelly form of yours?”
Yin Chen’s expression stiffened slightly. He stayed silent for a long while before saying darkly, “You’re the only person in the entire world who would call my true form an adorable pink-and-white jelly.”
Once again, he avoided directly answering the question about eating Song Zang’s brain.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Song Zang was not angry. He smiled sweetly. “As long as you don’t cheat on me, you’ll always be the most perfect monster baby in my heart.”
Yin Chen fell silent yet again and even began to doubt whether Song Zang’s cognitive function had actually returned to normal.
He picked up his long blade and silently joined the dissection work. After checking the wound details, he removed the insectoids’ brains and wings and stored them in the system inventory. The remaining body parts were not especially valuable and could be left behind for now.
The surroundings remained nothing but white in every direction. After a brief discussion, the two decided to continue exploring ahead.
“I looked up some information,” Yin Chen added as they walked. “The Mingling star system once belonged to the insectoids. But when the insectoids fractured into internal conflict, they were too busy fighting among themselves, and the Rose Empire took Mingling during the height of its power.”
The emperor had even deliberately consulted historians before giving the system a new name soaked in malice and curses.
From then on, the Mingling star system belonged entirely to the human Empire. Low-temperature planets were not suitable for male insectoids anyway, and there were no mineral resources nearby, so the insectoids chose not to seize it back. Losing face was not enough reason to care.
Of course, that did not mean they abandoned it completely. As today’s scene showed, traces of insectoids lingering and testing the borders were obvious. Unfortunately for them, they had died unexpectedly.
This kind of covert border friction had long since become routine.
The only truly unusual thing was the penetrating wounds in the corpses, which carried a faint floral fragrance. Both men recognized it immediately as the residue of an Alpha’s abnormally violent pheromones.
Even on Iceberg, where savage winds tore endlessly across the mountains, the lingering scent remained obvious.
And there was the problem. The Rose Empire did not have an Alpha this powerful.