No amount of discussion could compare with seeing it for themselves.
They stopped wasting time and followed the navigation coordinates at a faster pace, crossing two low hilltops.
The floating screen displayed exact real-time latitude and longitude. The two of them were now near the central axis of Iceberg.
The closer they drew to the equator, the worse the network connection became. Red warnings repeatedly flashed across the screen, reporting severe magnetic-field disorder, roaming electromagnetic interference, and chaotic signal disruption. Any aircraft attempting to pass through the airspace had as much as a ninety-percent chance of losing contact and crashing. Extremely dangerous.
No wonder Vast Sea AI had stopped the spacecraft ahead of time and insisted they walk more than a kilometer through the mountains.
The instant they crossed the equatorial line, it felt as though they had passed through an invisible membrane and abruptly entered a completely different world.
Before them was no longer an endless range of mountains covered in white snow, but a landscape of pure ice, translucent mountains and valleys built entirely from frozen crystal. Even the high air seemed coated in a thin layer of ice.
There was no snow. Not even a single snowflake existed. The ground beneath their feet was a strange, deep-blue frozen layer of ice, astonishingly clear.
Beyond that stood an obviously artificial complex of buildings.
Square blocks of ice had been stacked into countless transparent buildings, hard and geometric like piles of frozen tofu. The privacy of the outermost rooms was completely exposed. Song Zang knew at a glance that this was not Rose Empire architecture.
The navigation display showed that their target coordinates were not inside the buildings. They had already reached their destination. It lay deep beneath these clear blue layers of ice.
Song Zang wiped away the thin fog on the ice surface and shone a powerful flashlight through it. The moment he saw the person inside, his heart tightened.
It was someone both he and Yin Chen knew very well.
Catherine Percy.
It was difficult to describe her condition in words. Time seemed to have been stretched out, turning her into a slow-motion animation visible to the naked eye.
Over the course of two full minutes, Catherine blinked only once, while the gun in her left hand rose only a few inches. Her thick golden hair had come loose and floated inside the ice, frozen into an upward arc.
Yet her expression was ferocious and alert, as though she were locked in battle with something invisible and could suffer a fatal wound at any moment. The unseen fight looked violent and frantic.
Even the top-grade charged electromagnetic gun in her hand, a top-grade radiant iron weapon issued to legion commanders, had become mottled and ruined. Its supposedly indestructible silver-black casing looked as though some terrifying liquid had been steadily chewing through and corroding it, exposing the thickened charging chamber beneath. It was barely holding together and dangerously unstable.
If the chamber exploded by accident, everything within a one-kilometer radius would be hit by the blast. Catherine would not survive either.
Blood had gradually soaked into her golden hair. The area above her right temple had suffered a severe injury and required immediate treatment.
But all of this was impossibly strange. How had Catherine ended up inside Iceberg, sealed deep in blue ice like an insect trapped in agate?
“Cut it open and see. We need to get down there anyway.”
Yin Chen raised his long blade, drove it into the thick, hard ice, and levered upward with brutal force.
The shriek of breaking ice and grinding friction was unbearable. Fine icy powder exploded into the air as the entire frozen surface split open like an earthquake, forming a crack several kilometers deep and sending the people and structures above into violent tremors.
Song Zang used the silver knife as a cane and drove it lightly into the frozen ground beside him to keep his balance. Once steady, he looked down as the shaking ended and saw Catherine’s figure becoming more transparent little by little. The instant the fracture stabilized, she vanished completely.
Only empty, bottomless layers of ice remained beneath their feet. A pale mist quickly rose along both sides of the fissure, blocking what little greenish daylight had been reaching the depths.
“…Where did she go?” Song Zang wondered. “Was what we saw only an image created by refracted light?”
“She may be somewhere on this planet, but not necessarily anywhere near us. Let’s go down and look.”
Yin Chen opened Song Zang’s small backpack, took out the nail gun and safety line they had prepared in advance, and fired several extremely secure anchors into both sides of the fissure.
The safety rope was fastened around Song Zang’s waist. Yin Chen prepared nothing for himself. Instead, with obvious interest, he took Song Zang’s hand and jumped without hesitation.
“Yin Chen, you fucking lunatic!!”
Song Zang’s shout was instantly swallowed by the wind.
It felt horrifyingly like being forced into a double suicide, and the sheer adrenaline was overwhelming.
The violent sensation of weightlessness and his instinctive desire to survive made Song Zang react instantly. He wrapped both arms around Yin Chen’s neck and locked his legs tightly around Yin Chen’s waist, clinging to the reckless bastard who had jumped without any protection.
In his panic, Song Zang used too much strength and heard Yin Chen let out the faintest grunt. Warm, slightly hurried breath brushed across Song Zang’s neck.
“My waist is about to snap. It hurts.” Yin Chen sounded half amused. “Are you trying to strangle me to death?”
“I’m afraid you’ll fall to your death.” Song Zang tightened his arms until the words came through gritted teeth.
“I won’t die.”
“I know you won’t, but I’m still scared!”
Yin Chen had calculated the distance with absurd precision. When the two finally reached the bottom, the lengthened safety line left Song Zang hanging only about twenty centimeters above the ground. Cutting the rope and dropping from there would have been perfectly safe.
Before that, the two of them had spent several minutes bouncing in midair like they were at a nightclub, rising and falling on the rope’s momentum.
Song Zang finally loosened his hold on Yin Chen. He rubbed his lower back through the protective suit and complained, “My waist is almost broken too. This rope really digs in.”
Yin Chen glanced at him and, without warning, said, “Your waist absolutely cannot break. I need it too much.”
“…Baby, no dirty jokes.” Song Zang’s face reddened.
“It’s a normal physiological need.”
Yin Chen untied the rope from him, squeezed Song Zang’s waist, and spoke with complete justification.
Unfortunately, the flirtatious topic never had a chance to go anywhere. Both of them were drawn to what stood in front of them.
The surveillance database was right there, sitting alone deep inside Iceberg with no corridor or passage that a human being could have used to reach it.
A perfectly ordinary classic spherical computer, fitted with black-steel chips and several large external storage units.
Song Zang inspected it several times before finally confirming that the computer’s outer casing had been manufactured in the Rose Empire, while its internal graphics-card cores were all built from black steel.
Everyone knew radiant iron was the Rose Empire’s most reliable aerospace material, while black steel was a treasure produced exclusively by the insectoids.
Calling it a treasure was no exaggeration. Under ordinary conditions, black steel could serve as a foundational material for mechas and space warships. It was also the most powerful low-temperature superconductor in the world.
Black steel had an extraordinarily wide range of applications. It was suitable for any strong-magnetic-field environment, from high-energy particle accelerators down to basic medical scanners. Even the chips and core components of high-speed computers performed best when built from it.
When it came to information technology, humanity’s luck was indeed slightly worse. Even their core materials lost to their natural enemy. Although there was currently no open war along the border, humans still had to fight public-opinion battles on StarNet with constant caution, plugging every possible gap for fear of silent enemy infiltration.
Human technological development was always half a step slower than the insectoids’, but the gap was not fatal. Instead, it allowed people to glimpse hope and become more determined with every setback. At least according to Rose Empire propaganda, their defensive work remained excellent.
And yet the transmission equipment connected to the hundreds of surveillance devices inside the luxury villa gifted by the Eldest Princess was built from black-steel superconductors restricted to insectoid use…
That cast serious doubt on how effective their defenses against espionage infiltration actually were.
Song Zang rummaged through his little backpack, took several breaths of oxygen to replenish himself, ate a strip of beef jerky, then turned back to trying to crack the computer.
He failed. Completely. He had no idea where to begin!
The encryption logic made no sense to Song Zang at all. It did not resemble human thought.
“Baby, come help.”
Yin Chen did help, but not in the way Song Zang expected.
From his system inventory, he took out a crystal-clear glass sphere.
The sphere was tiny. Song Zang had to lean in close before he could make out a thin layer of white brain tissue inside.
With no blood circulating through its vessels, the tissue had been left suspended in transparent culture fluid. The once pink, attractive brain matter had gradually turned cold and pale.
That did not affect Little Star AI’s survival. It had rapidly rooted itself throughout the tissue, extracting familiar genetic and structural information and constructing a complete neural network.
Song Zang narrowed his eyes and could faintly see strange lights flickering through the newly formed network.
“It grew successfully? Can I talk to it?”
“Try. It refuses to communicate with me.”
Yin Chen placed the glass sphere in Song Zang’s palm and stood beside him with an expectant expression, clearly waiting to watch the show.
Song Zang closed his fingers around the sphere, wrapping it tightly in his hand. He could feel a barely perceptible pulse and warmth from the tiny “cerebral artery,” followed by a faint electric prickling sensation.
“Mr. Song, are you going to abandon me?”
The soft voice of a young man trembled with tears and flowed into Song Zang’s ears through bone conduction.
“I’m not. You’re still alive.”
“But you don’t want me to stay inside your brain. I’m so sad…”
“Stop talking nonsense.” Song Zang kept his face taut and spoke coldly under Yin Chen’s stare. “Analyze and crack this computer for me. I want its owner, its users, and all stored data.”
“Of course, Mr. Song. As long as Little Star remains even the tiniest bit useful to you, Little Star will work hard to stay alive for your sake, imprisoned in this lonely and terrifying frozen cage, waiting for your gaze to descend upon me once more.”
Song Zang: …
What on earth had happened to this role for him to train an AI this bizarre?
After a full five minutes of waiting, Little Star AI’s cracking results appeared on the floating screen.
According to Little Star, this was an insectoid computer that had been forcibly installed inside a human-built machine. The mimetic-network signal was poor, but StarNet could connect wirelessly at high speed. The chip manufacturer was Ayr Technology of the Insectoid Federation, and the purchaser had been an anonymous female insectoid.
Because Song Zang counted as “half a male insectoid” and had an exceptionally high bloodline rank, he had the authority to ignore the insectoids’ privacy rules and directly inspect the female insectoid’s personal information.
X, an entirely ordinary female-insectoid soldier who was already dead.
Apparently, someone had ordered the computer under her name to avoid detection.
The registered StarNet user, meanwhile, was… Yin Chen. Equally perfect for concealing the true owner.
Yin Chen’s mouth twitched. He had Little Star dig into the initial registration date, and sure enough, more irregularities surfaced. At the time, Yin Chen had only just been admitted to Imperial University and was receiving elite small-class instruction, including professional courses in information technology.
Back then, ignorant and inexperienced, there was no telling how many network endpoints he had been tricked into registering under his own identity.
Things became even stranger afterward. Computers in the current era had enormous storage capacity, so in theory there should have been no need for so many large external storage units. Little Star AI’s investigation revealed that the main computer itself was almost completely full and had no room left for more video files.
What filled the main computer was a spatial-transfer drive.
Once activated, it could use an 【unknown】 method of 【unknown】 transfer to move people and objects in batches to some distant place on the other side of the world.
Even Little Star AI lacked permission to access the information hidden behind those two 【unknown】 fields. According to its search, however, this new computer-based transfer technology was the Insectoid Federation’s latest secret research project. Its ultimate goal was to use brain-computer systems to collect complete bodily data and perfectly reproduce it, allowing instantaneous transport of living bodies through particle reconstruction.
If it succeeded, soldiers could reach a known battlefield in a single second, or escape mortal danger just as quickly.
The product was still in the testing stage. If the research truly succeeded, future wars would become brutally difficult for the Rose Empire.
Yet here, in an unknown corner deep beneath the frozen layers of Iceberg, territory belonging to the Eldest Princess, sat a prototype transfer-drive unit still officially under testing.
Song Zang was increasingly tempted. After copying everything from the external storage units, he simply asked Little Star AI to perform a life-form scan.
The scan confirmed that Iceberg currently held no other organic intelligent life and no lethal threats. The only danger came from the computer’s own signal-interference field. Any spacecraft flying over it still risked crashing instantly.
The extraordinarily powerful Alpha who had killed the insectoids and left behind a faint floral fragrance had clearly already departed Iceberg for somewhere else.
“Why don’t we try the transfer?” Song Zang looked at Yin Chen, increasingly eager. “If something happens to me midway, you should be able to collect my body’s particles, right?”
After all, this was a game dungeon. If there was a transfer button, it was obviously there for players to use.
Little Star AI’s calculations showed that development of the computer’s transfer drive had already been completed. Although it remained in an ongoing testing phase with continuous adjustments, there were already plenty of cases where test subjects had survived successfully.
The mortality rate was around forty percent. Most deaths resulted from failed bodily decomposition or reconstruction, chronic illness or cardiovascular and cerebrovascular conditions that left the test subject unable to withstand the shock of being broken apart and rebuilt, or serious bugs and prolonged delays in the safety-reception equipment at the destination.
It sounded dangerous, but at least the success rate was still sixty percent.
“Don’t worry. You won’t die.”
Yin Chen fastened the oxygen mask over Song Zang’s face and continued, “Replenish your energy and make sure your body is in peak condition. We can leave whenever you’re ready.”
Song Zang had been fairly confident, but the moment Yin Chen said that, his confidence evaporated. Through the mask, he complained aggrievedly, “Don’t forget, I’m a patient who just had brain surgery. You even ate several pieces of my brain…”
“Eating them was good for you, because you ate part of me too. Your brain is healthy, and it’s perfect.”
Yin Chen suddenly curled his lips, a thread of strange amusement spilling into his eyes.
Song Zang felt uneasy beneath that stare. “Wait. Explain clearly. What happened to my brain?”
“Your brain and my body combined to form entirely new brain tissue.” Yin Chen rubbed Song Zang’s head, his fingers moving through the soft hair in gentle strokes. “I didn’t expect the human body to hold this many possibilities either. It can contain me, possess me, and use my severed limb to generate new life…
“Maybe only you can do it. If it were anyone else, they would have died immediately. Died in a truly disgusting way.”
Song Zang was silent for a moment, taking a deep breath to suppress the emotions churning inside him. “I understand. Because I absorbed your severed limb, my brain happened to grow back complete, with nothing missing. But what if you’d put two tentacles inside back then and I’d eaten more?”
“You don’t want twisted, deformed organs proliferating inside you, do you? Too much nourishment and growth would happen too fast. Your skull would get punched through.” Yin Chen pinched Song Zang’s reddened ear. “Right now it’s exactly enough. You can’t eat any more.”
“Oh. Fine. Let’s go.”
Song Zang was still taking deep breaths as he turned and pressed the drive’s activation control. He pulled down Yin Chen’s wandering hand and clasped their fingers tightly together.
Honestly, having brain tissue made from a lover’s severed limb was far too erotic a concept.
If Yin Chen kept touching him like that, Song Zang was afraid he would get too excited and tackle him into a ten-minute kissing session on the spot.
The transfer activated. A subtle instability rose from the soles of their feet as though the ground itself had shifted. Song Zang quickly shoved the glass sphere into Yin Chen’s hand for safekeeping and closed his eyes.
Leaving Iceberg was fast, but brutally rough. Song Zang felt as though he had abruptly become rootless duckweed with no ground beneath him, swept along by violent currents and hurled through space.
As expected of insectoid engineering. It offered absolutely no consideration for user experience.
When Song Zang opened his eyes again, he was standing intact on solid ground, still holding Yin Chen’s hand with their fingers interlaced.
Damp heat rushed over him. He was wearing far too many layers, and the cashmere scarf inside his protective suit suddenly felt stifling.
A spherical receiving device hovered in front of them, flashing crimson light on and off.
Several lines of unfamiliar blue text appeared across its screen and were translated in real time into language humans could understand.
【Third-generation experimental transfer successful. Test Subject One: one SS-rank Alpha human male, gland absent. Rare data collected. Test Subject Two: SSS-rank Alpha ma… Error. Error!】
【Esteemed Male, greetings. Welcome to the H+ Combat Readiness Mainframe-Driven Transfer Device. Your participation is the greatest honor of our company. Would you be willing to provide your identity information so that your female spouse or guardian may escort you safely away?】
Song Zang was reading seriously when he suddenly froze. This thing could communicate with people in real time too? He tried asking, “Why does a guardian need to take me away?”
【Your transfer destination presents significant safety hazards. If you do not wish to disclose your personal insectoid privacy, our company will provide complimentary escort services. Your guardian’s abandonment of you in an illegal and dangerous area constitutes severe dereliction of duty and a major violation of your right to personal safety! Esteemed Male, with your authorization, our company will make every effort to initiate legal proceedings on your behalf!】
“…All right, all right. Your job is done. Baby, let’s go.”
Song Zang’s head spun from reading it. He pulled up the oxygen mask over his face and ignored the enormous blocks of blue text that kept loading across the display.
“This is the transfer system’s particle-reconstruction chamber. The equipment for decomposition and transmission can be simplified almost without limit, but rebuilding a physical body still requires large machinery for support.” Yin Chen held Song Zang around the waist as they walked toward the exit, his gaze sweeping thoughtfully over the cold metallic chamber. “Looks like insectoid technology isn’t quite as impossibly advanced as we imagined.”
If war truly broke out, humanity might still be able to force a brutally costly draw.
“But it recognized at a glance that I’m a hybrid. We haven’t been transferred into the Insectoid Federation, have we?”
Song Zang was uneasy. Neither of them knew where they were. The live navigation display showed a weak signal and kept spinning without producing any actual coordinates, while the air here was humid and hot enough to make him irritable.
The oxygen concentration in the reconstruction chamber was even lower than on Iceberg, and the transfer had consumed a large amount of physical energy. Song Zang’s heart was still pounding hard. If he ran even a few steps, he might collapse from oxygen deprivation.
Perhaps that was connected to the tentacle-derived brain tissue inside his skull as well. When a person’s brain underwent an upgrade and became more powerful, its energy consumption naturally increased severalfold.
Fortunately, Yin Chen had prepared in advance and bought an enormous amount of oxygen-support equipment.
“Beep. Error! Identity information cannot be recognized. Please face the camera and scan again!”
While Song Zang was distracted, Yin Chen tried to open the chamber door, but the iris verification failed.
A chamber used for reconstructing human bodies obviously needed to remain locked. If someone maliciously attacked during reconstruction, the occupants would have no chance to fight back.
Song Zang leaned over curiously to look, and the prompt sounded again.
“Chamber unlocked. We respectfully welcome the Esteemed Male to visit again.”
A moment later, pleasant, soothing instrumental music began playing inside the reconstruction chamber, clearly intended to calm the fragile psychological state of male insectoids.
Song Zang shook his head in speechless disbelief and dragged Yin Chen outside.
They had barely taken two steps when an overwhelmingly rich rose fragrance surged toward them, almost sharp enough to sting.
“Slow down. There’s a cliff ahead.” Yin Chen suddenly caught him and pulled him back.
No wonder the H+ company’s artificial intelligence had been so desperate to send 【send the Esteemed Male away】.
There was a monster beneath the sheer cliff.
Song Zang did not know how to describe it in human language.
It was not a tentacle and not a branch, but an enormous human brain. Countless parasitic things churned and writhed through cortical grooves hundreds of meters across.
Even as Song Zang looked at it, the brain continued swelling slowly larger, inch by inch squeezing the space inside the ravine. Disproportionately small human arms and legs were embedded on both sides of the brain, pale delicate fingers waving helplessly in the air.
A woman’s hands.
Several absurd possibilities suddenly flashed through Song Zang’s mind. He had a feeling the owner of this brain was probably no stranger to them.
He adjusted his wrist display into telescope mode and focused. The tiny writhing creatures were familiar too.
Indescribable grotesque flesh-worms, more than ten thousand times as numerous as those aboard the Blazing Sun, formed a sticky, humid sea of moving flesh, living with astonishing comfort inside this bizarre brain-nest.
Song Zang made the decision instantly and released his foul-smelling pheromones without holding back in the slightest.
Honestly, if he had not been wearing an oxygen mask, Song Zang might have knocked himself unconscious with the stench. Yin Chen did not even twitch an eyebrow. Expressionless, he wrapped an arm around Song Zang’s waist and pulled him backward against his body, faint displeasure moving through his narrow phoenix eyes.
He hated seeing anything covet Song Zang, even if what coveted him was a mass of… ugly flesh-worms.
As the rancid scent of rotting roses rapidly flooded the cliff walls, it forcefully suppressed the faint floral fragrance that had previously lingered in the humid air.
The writhing waves beneath the cliff abruptly froze, then surged madly toward Song Zang.
With the creatures pulling away, the enormous mass of brain tissue they had occupied was finally revealed in full under the telescope.
A piece of skull the size of a normal human head clung alone to the top of the brain, still carrying wet golden hair matted with mucus. The strands remained bright, shining like streams of liquid gold as they drifted up and down across the trembling brain tissue. It was beautiful.
Thanks to the regenerative mucus, the natural golden hair growing from the scalp was also lengthening wildly at a rate of five millimeters per second, tearing the woman’s pale scalp until it bruised and bled, only for the damage to heal again almost immediately.
…Whose hair was that?
Song Zang thought for a moment and suddenly felt a chill race over his skin.
Watching the struggling, flailing “tiny” limbs, he abruptly noticed the crucial detail.
The thing in the ravine was not a monster. It was a person. A living person.
But her brain had grown too large, gradually bursting through the skull meant to contain it and crushing the torso that had supported her head, leaving only her limbs barely exposed.
In a sense, she had been killed by her own brain.