Meanwhile, Chi Yan quietly began investigating the sudden epidemic of epileptic seizures Arthur had mentioned.
She pulled up one suppressed old case after another from the database and analyzed them.
Arthur had been persecuted so relentlessly not only because he threatened the Eldest Princess’s position as heir, but also for one much more direct reason.
He had dug too deeply while investigating the epilepsy problem and had nearly traced it back to the Eldest Princess herself.
From the players’ present-day perspective, it was obvious that the Eldest Princess had been involved with some kind of conspiracy. Back then, however, no one could possibly have imagined that patients convulsing in the streets had anything to do with the imperial family.
Even if someone had gone outside with a megaphone and shouted it to the world, people would only have dismissed it as an absurd idiot conspiracy theory.
Chi Yan could not understand it. Had the Eldest Princess already been conducting human experiments several years ago?
Arthur had only been a naive eighteen-year-old boy then. He had never involved himself in politics, content to lose himself in flowers, plants, and biomedical science, while the Eldest Princess was a rising tequila-scented rose of the Empire, bright, unique, and brilliantly colorful, making countless Omegas across StarNet go, “Hnnng.”
She already had the people’s hearts in her hands and victory all but assured. There was absolutely no need for her to win through such sinister and dangerous methods.
Chi Yan therefore made a preliminary judgment that the Eldest Princess had to be suffering serious problems with both cognition and mental state. When a person’s thinking developed obvious flaws, sank into an irrational and distorted loop, and yet they themselves believed it beyond doubt… no one could haul them back out of the abyss.
Xie Chun Ye was still embroiled in household warfare in Zone B, and Chi Yan had no intention of investigating alone. Charging straight through the door single-handedly was never a wise choice.
She planned to use Yin Chen’s connections to contact Captain Percy first and find out whether their armed reserves were sufficient.
But just then, Fiona de Cavendish, the Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Military and practically a living legend of the Empire, contacted her first and brought several pieces of rather unpleasant news.
Captain Percy had vanished under bizarre circumstances. Her chip signal disappeared completely in an instant, and even the military intranet could not locate her. The Commander-in-Chief had tried contacting the Eldest Princess to sound her out and request a meeting, only for the princess’s side to politely refuse under one excuse after another, claiming she was not fit to see anyone. There was no question now: she was missing.
Along the border between Zones A and B, traces of repeated insectoid-warship activity had appeared. Their stealth coating was so perfect that radar picked up only the faintest traces of combat fluctuations.
Yet when the border forces personally went to inspect the sites, they could not find the other faction that had supposedly fought those insectoid warships at all. To make matters worse, several nearby planets then suffered horrific incidents in which Alphas went into mental-power rampages and indiscriminately murdered people, leaving everyone so busy they were practically tripping over themselves.
As these undercurrents churned, the Commander-in-Chief’s suspicions grew stronger and stronger until she finally used her special clearance to forcibly access the Eldest Princess’s personal records, even though the Imperial Security Center would log her visit.
She sent Chi Yan the medical files of Princess Fiona Rose that had never been made public and discussed them with her.
Just as Chi Yan had suspected, there really was something medically wrong with the Eldest Princess.
Metachromatic leukodystrophy, adult form.
Fiona had first been diagnosed at age twenty-two. Before that, she had already suffered several attacks, all forcibly concealed by the Rose imperial family.
It was a recessive hereditary disorder caused by a genetic mutation, one that could produce severe neurodegeneration and metabolic defects. Sulfatides the body could not break down accumulated throughout the brain, causing brain-tissue atrophy and lesions, slowing nerve conduction, and even threatening liver and kidney function… To this day, there was no true cure.
Because early-stage patients could present with clinical symptoms such as schizophrenia and epileptic convulsions, while brain imaging could also resemble conditions such as viral encephalitis, almost no doctor would think of the disease immediately, medical robots included.
In other words, it was a desperately incurable chronic cancer that was extremely easy to misdiagnose.
Gene therapy and bone-marrow transplantation could alleviate the symptoms to some extent, but damage to the cerebral white matter and cerebellum was almost impossible to reverse.
Modern regenerative technology focused on reconstructing severed limbs, but the evolution of the mental sea had made the human brain an even more intricate and delicate structure. Even ordinary craniotomies had become increasingly difficult.
There were occasional cases in which a mental-sea rampage erupted during surgery, killing or severely injuring entire medical teams. The rare tragedy involving the Sapphire Queen was far from the only one.
This was absolutely not a field that could be mastered easily.
Chi Yan rubbed her throbbing temples and sighed, beginning to understand the Eldest Princess’s basic line of thinking.
Schizophrenia itself was not a major problem. No matter how severe the symptoms became, hospital treatment could bring them under control.
But when a schizophrenic patient held enormous power, wanted to conceal her condition, insisted on choosing only the treatment she personally liked, or even refused to admit she was ill… frankly, no one could stop her.
When her cognitive impairment and disordered thoughts gained the upper hand, when hallucinations generated by her own brain were mistaken for reality, there was little anyone could do to stop the Eldest Princess from committing even the most unimaginable acts.
Add Emperor Rhinegold’s own intermittent “mental problems,” which left him unable to pay much attention to his children… and a mad Eldest Princess wielding great power could bring about an unimaginable catastrophe.
The Federal President did not have much of a public presence, but like the Commander-in-Chief, he was one of the final restraints capable of limiting the Eldest Princess.
Chi Yan quickly sent everything she had uncovered to Yin Chen, then invited the president to an online meeting in the name of the Second Princess.
The Federal President, Julian Cooper, was a common-born A-rank Alpha whose pheromones smelled of clean, delicate Snow Mountain roses.
He was exceptionally handsome, with silver-white hair flowing like an icy lake and mixed-race features that were deep-set yet still soft. When he curved his lips into a faint smile, he looked especially gentle and refined, with tremendous natural approachability.
In the election held once every five years, he had crushed every opponent by an overwhelming margin, and that handsome face had certainly done its share of the work.
The instant the video conference connected, Julian spoke in a gentle voice. “Your Highness, I understand why you’ve come. Regrettably, I must refuse any public cooperation with you. The Federation has strict procedural rules. Without His Majesty’s approval, I cannot bypass him and disclose any secrets to you.”
The refusal sounded airtight, but anyone listening could tell there was room to maneuver. They could cooperate in secret, just not openly.
Chi Yan gave him an interested look and said lazily, “I don’t need you to disclose any secrets. I only want to ask you one thing. When the Eldest Princess loses her mind, will you mobilize the fleet to stop her?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t stop her.”
Julian sighed softly, the smile in his eyes dimming.
He was implying that the Eldest Princess’s combat power had already exceeded the Federation Guard’s maximum firepower.
It sounded unbelievable, but once Chi Yan remembered the bizarre accident that had ended Prince Arthur’s life so horrifically, everything suddenly made sense.
Chi Yan negotiated with this gentle man for the entire morning and could more or less confirm one thing: the bastard knew everything, but did nothing.
He calmly kept the Federation running in peace, possessed an extraordinarily powerful intelligence service, and had informants planted throughout the Imperial military who could help him avoid in advance every risk that might destroy the Federation… yet he absolutely refused to interfere with the imperial family’s secrets.
Even Philip, the military doctor on the mining planet, was one of Julian’s informants, or perhaps more accurately, a collaborator.
Only then did Chi Yan realize that Julian had been willing to share information with her precisely because of yesterday’s elegant afternoon tea.
Yin Chen’s deliberate appearance at the Second Princess’s private residence had amounted to a brazen, public declaration of allegiance.
And Yin Chen was powerful, powerful enough to make Julian consider him worth approaching.
Philip had truthfully reported Yin Chen’s unscathed nighttime exploration of the mine to the Federal President.
Buried in corners of the daily news that no one paid attention to, the ecological conditions of the Zone C planets had improved dramatically overnight. The air quality on multiple garbage planets had risen from “extremely poor” to “moderate”; torrential rain fell across drought-stricken regions; and areas suffering catastrophic blizzards suddenly saw the clouds part and the weather turn calm and clear.
More importantly, huge numbers of green plants that had never been able to grow in those hostile environments put out shoots and sprouted overnight after a warm rain, spreading into vast, thriving stretches of greenery.
Philip had witnessed every one of these changes with his own eyes, so his attitude toward Yin Chen had naturally become much friendlier.
No one dared mention that enormous, bizarre, single-petaled wild rose, but the people in high positions were inevitably insiders who knew and were powerless to act, too afraid to involve themselves. No one wanted to be brutally killed by the moonlight and reduced to a grotesque puddle of rotting flesh.
Of course, so long as his own safety could be guaranteed, Julian was also willing to help secure the Empire’s future.
“That commander and his legal spouse may be the only people in the entire Empire capable of opposing the Eldest Princess. The commander carries a blessing from [Mother].”
Julian carefully weighed his words before smiling and sighing. “Philip is an exceptionally talented soldier. He should have distinguished himself on the battlefield and accumulated a mountain of honors, but he has certain psychological obstacles that are difficult to resolve, so unfortunately he ended up as an obscure little military doctor.
“Of course, there is no question of his loyalty to the Empire. To overcome those psychological obstacles, Philip spent a very long time struggling away on the mining planet and risking his life year after year. Yet the precious blessing he longed for was handed to that commander by [Mother] with ridiculous ease… He was furious. It’s a good thing I stopped him.”
Chi Yan narrowed her eyes. She had absolutely no idea what Julian was talking about.
But she could relay every word exactly.
For safety’s sake, Song Zang had not told anyone the details of what happened inside the mine, players included, lest they suffer an inexplicable mental attack. Even with Chi Yan, he had only mentioned it in the vaguest terms: inside the mine, he had successfully raised a flower.
After the wild rose sent the two of them out of the mine, it had showered them with a dreamy rain of pollen. From then on, the moonlight had never tried to kill Yin Chen again.
The pollen had disappeared the instant it touched their skin and had shown no real presence since… but if it truly was a blessing, then it had to mean something.
＊
Song Zang removed his oxygen mask, set up the iron pot, and lured the flesh worms into swarming wildly inside, where they became all manner of delicious dishes.
He overate again and sat “weakly” in Yin Chen’s arms drinking water while leisurely browsing the mountain of information Chi Yan had sent.
After the Eldest Princess was diagnosed with metachromatic leukodystrophy, she underwent the most advanced gene therapy available. Using genetic-engineering techniques, healthy exogenous genes were cultured, loaded onto viral vectors, then delivered through recombinant viruses to rapidly infect target cells and correct the princess’s chromosomal defect.
For reasons no one understood, however, something went wrong during the treatment.
A viral vector that supposedly carried no carcinogenic risk somehow gave the princess cancer. A malignant tumor rapidly expanded inside her cerebral ventricle, compressing her optic nerves and mental sea, leaving her mental power in a long-term state of disorder and even forcing doctors to remove half of one kidney.
That was when the Eldest Princess began to feel completely cornered. She came to believe the whole world was persecuting her, that everyone wanted her dead, that danger was everywhere.
She brutally murdered the most elite medical team, then forcibly reorganized and purged the Imperial Central Hospital until it became her personal domain.
She pulled the medical records of every patient, screened out suitable experimental subjects, and secretly began human experimentation under her own direction. Those sudden outbreaks of epilepsy years ago had been the products of her earliest illegal drug trials.
Under extreme stress, the Eldest Princess naturally concluded that Prince Arthur wanted to harm her too and treated her younger brother as an opponent who had to be crushed as quickly as possible.
Step by step, she escalated further and further until she finally reached an irreversible extreme.
By now, everyone in the know understood just how vicious and ruthless her methods were. Even after the Eldest Princess disappeared under bizarre circumstances, no one dared investigate too deeply and risk offending her.
Song Zang bit into a freshly cooked mint-fried worm cake and mumbled to Yin Chen, “I think someone really was hurting her behind the scenes, just like what happened with the Sapphire Queen’s difficult labor. The medical team was too complacent. There was no way they could defend against a spy’s methods.”
“The insectoids?”
“Yeah.”
After all, this was an insectoid teleportation-testing zone, and that enormous brain had been placed in the canyon below the cliff. There was no possible way the insectoids knew nothing about it.
Song Zang glanced at the brain, which was still slowly growing larger. Instead of risking a direct probe below, he turned and went to find the artificial intelligence inside the teleportation-reassembly pod.
He cleared his throat and deliberately adopted the imperious, spoiled tone of an entitled young master. “Hey, ball. What’s that ugly thing under the cliff?”
“It is a delicacy currently being prepared, as well as H+’s five-year secret project. Honored male-insectoid sir, please leave your contact information so H+ service personnel may reach you at a later date.”
“Why should I give you my contact information? Are you even worthy of it?” Song Zang shot it a glance and deliberately sneered.
“Please forgive H+ AI for the offense. Our company holds you in the highest and most sincere esteem. Once this delicacy has finished preparation, H+ will cooperate with the Federation Male Insectoid Association to host a seven-day grand banquet and invite male insectoids to sample it free of charge.
“Premium human brain, tender and bursting with juice. An endlessly regenerating feast. A dreamlike, creamy texture you will never forget for the rest of your life…”
Song Zang cut it off expressionlessly. “You’re insane.”
“Yes. H+ AI is insane. Please forgive us.”
The sheer humility of its attitude and tone was hard to get used to. Rather than being swept away by the flattery, Song Zang became even more wary.
Remaining deeply skeptical, he continued provoking it sharply. “You idiot, haven’t you noticed that this Alpha’s brain has already killed several female-insectoid soldiers? One strike and they’re dead.
“You can’t beat it at all. Are you seriously planning to cultivate a terrifying monster and keep every citizen of the Federation in constant danger?”
“Yes. H+ AI has already reported this issue. Thank you, honored male-insectoid sir, for your assistance and for providing this lead. It is of great significance to our company’s future plans. Please leave your contact information, and we will present you with an exquisite gift valued at up to one hundred thousand Federation credits, including roasted human brain…”
“Shut up!”
“Yes, honored sir.”
Song Zang locked the pod door behind him and said to Yin Chen, “Case solved. It really was the bugs.”
Of course, the insectoids probably had not expected Fiona’s mental power to remain so formidable even while she suffered from white-matter lesions and cancer.
If you exploited a terrifying existence you could not control, then you had to accept the equally terrifying consequences when both sides ended up damaged.
Song Zang looked at the reassembly pod, now in sleep mode, but remained on guard. Something was wrong with that spherical AI. It had been obsessively asking for his identity information, and even with its humble, pleading tone, there was a crazed persistence to it, as though it would never give up until it got what it wanted.
Song Zang was even a little grateful that he and Yin Chen had extracted Little Star AI from his brain early and left it in Yin Chen’s keeping. Otherwise, H+ AI would almost certainly have cracked Song Zang’s hybrid identity by now.
No one could predict how the insectoids would react then.
“Deal with it sooner. You’ve interacted with that intelligence too many times. Someone will come investigate before long.” Yin Chen was getting impatient. He picked up the long blade. “I’ll cut the brain open first. Sit there and don’t move.”
“Okay, baby~”
Song Zang kissed him, obediently sat beside the iron pot, picked up the last few worms struggling toward him, tossed them in, and cooked a light, cooling wolfberry meatball soup.
The steady stream of increasing HP put him in an excellent mood, but he still had to slow down his eating to avoid taking too much mental impact all at once… and slipping into another temporary bout of madness.
Still, the craniotomy had been just as important.
The brain fused with the severed tentacle had significantly increased Song Zang’s resistance.
If his mental state reverted to what it had been aboard the Blazing Sun, then suddenly seeing this many indescribable, slimy monsters… Song Zang would probably become giddily excited again, grab Yin Chen, and charge straight into the Insectoid Federation to become a tyrannical interstellar robber.
Things were much better now. Song Zang was only secretly excited and could control himself perfectly.
Yin Chen, meanwhile, had already jumped off the cliff without a second thought, stepping onto the smooth, springy grooves of the brain and landing steadily.
He made no attempt to communicate with the Eldest Princess. One slash cut open the sticky brain flesh with a wet squelch, and pink-white brain matter wrapped in salty, fishy, grotesque regenerative mucus erupted like a fountain.
Yin Chen silently took out a disinfecting wipe and cleaned the mucus from the side of his face, his cold gaze settling on the bottom of the brain.
The cut had gone extremely deep, completely severing the fibers of the corpus callosum connecting the left and right hemispheres and allowing him to see clearly into every part of the enormous brain’s interior.
The white matter was no longer atrophied. Instead, it had become abnormally massive, compressing and devouring the living space of the gray matter and brain cells. What lay below was even more ghastly.
The mental sea evolved by ABO humans was housed inside the brain’s amygdala, perched directly above the hippocampus and inseparably connected to the entire limbic system.
Princess Fiona’s limbic system, however… was monstrous. It was covered in endlessly proliferating cancer cells, wildly overgrown balls of tissue, dense insect eggs, and thick, bulging, disordered blood vessels.
Not only that, the liver, gallbladder, and kidneys that belonged in the abdominal cavity had been forcibly squeezed into the brainstem region, piled together inside the brain tissue with a twisted, fractured spine like several lumps of useless biological trash.
Without blood circulation, they had turned deathly pale, yet the regenerative mucus forcibly maintained their slick, plump, fleshy fullness.
The next heir to the mighty Rose Empire had actually been reduced to such a wretched state. Even if she had once been a kind person with perfectly normal reasoning, it would hardly have been strange for this to drive her insane.
Yin Chen jumped into the damp, sweltering brain cavity, raised the tip of his blade, and crushed every insect egg before examining the still-trembling brain tissue from close range.
A faint rose fragrance lingered through the canyon, blending with the other strange odors into a peculiar fermented scent. There were pheromones, which meant Fiona was still alive and retained the basic functions of an Alpha.
The brain showed no strong aggression toward Yin Chen’s uninvited arrival. It silently accepted his brutal movements and even shivered comfortably when the insect eggs were crushed, opening a path into the darkness on its own.
The wet, writhing squelch sounds were deeply unpleasant, but Yin Chen became interested. He reversed his grip on the knife handle and walked step by step toward the hotter depths.
The structures at the base of the brain had already deformed beyond recognition. The cerebellum had become an irregular, flattened lump of flesh, crushed firmly against the very bottom and unable to perform any function.
Of course, for the Eldest Princess in her current state, an organ responsible for maintaining bodily balance… was not exactly useful anymore.
Yin Chen followed the passage forward. Occasionally, light flashed through the enormous wet bundles of nerve fibers around him, neurotransmitters carrying information swiftly through the tissue.
But logically, there was no way he should have been able to see brain signals being transmitted with his naked eyes. That could only mean this nervous system was not Fiona’s original neural network. Human and insectoid brains were structured completely differently. Had the mimetic-network brain-computer technology already matured to the point where it could even be used on a pure-blooded human?
Deep in thought, Yin Chen kept walking. He rolled the glass sphere between his fingers and threatened Little Star AI into checking the situation for him.
That damned cutesy-voice brat initially resisted in a soft, roundabout way, but after Yin Chen deliberately used Song Zang’s safety to frighten it a few times, it immediately behaved and strained its tiny brain to collect the surrounding signals.
Glass was not a particularly good transmission medium, so Little Star AI struggled for quite a while before finally retrieving the key information.
Princess Fiona’s brain was itself a teleportation device currently undergoing modification.
H+ Biotechnology was a long-established company in the Insectoid Federation. It had signed long-term cooperation agreements with the federal government, had considerable achievements in fields such as brain-computer research and development, and participated in military reserve-engineering projects.
Before working on Princess Fiona, they had victimized other powerful Alphas too, forcibly abducting them back to the Federation and subjecting them to various experiments.
The bizarre disappearance cases on the grasslands of Zone A had been caused by concealed teleportation devices buried underground. Using mental-power detection and pheromone-identification systems, they directly abducted any humans who met the required criteria.
Princess Fiona, of course, had volunteered. As her thinking grew increasingly extreme, she ultimately chose to defect of her own accord… and became one of the controlled experimental subjects.
Someone who had altered human bodies would, in the end, be altered by others.
H+ researchers had long since extracted vast amounts of classified information from her brain. At the same time, they discovered that her brain was extraordinarily unusual: it possessed tremendous vitality, kept expanding, could withstand extreme modification experiments, and had flesh and texture of such exceptional quality that it was unbelievably delicious.
A brain like this was exactly what brain-computer research projects loved most, and it was equally prized by picky male insectoids.
Several benefits at once. Why not?
At the beginning, as many as ten humans had been imprisoned in this canyon laboratory zone, sealed and submerged inside special nutrient solution.
Then one night, Fiona’s brain suddenly began to swell. It crushed her own torso to pieces, devoured every experimental subject around her, and even swallowed several female-insectoid guards.
For some reason, the enormous brain became a nest for the flesh worms. Only then did the researchers discover that Fiona had still been secretly using StarNet, using the mimetic network’s signal source as a bridge to communicate with her subordinates back in the Rose Empire, maintain a facade of normality, and conceal the miserable fact that she herself was trapped.
She was simply too proud to let anyone know how humiliated and helpless she had become. H+ had not used any extreme destructive method against her either. Instead, the company became even more fascinated by Fiona, watching and monitoring her from a distance, driven by overwhelming appetite to forcibly prolong this mad experiment that no one knew how to end.
“So that’s what happened.”
The Eldest Princess was not the only one who had gone mad. Every H+ researcher who had seen the twisted worms had as well.
Yin Chen stood behind the cerebellum, staring at a mass of glandular cartilage nearly half a person’s height and falling into thought.
Captain Percy was actually trapped inside it.
Yes. She was right there in the center of the semitransparent cartilage.
Her limbs were curled inward, and no one could tell whether she was alive or dead.