[Song Zang: Baby, was that you?]
[Yin Chen: Not me.]
Then who else could it be?
[Xie Chun Ye: Lin Wen Jing is insane. She fed herself to a black hole. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead.]
[Chi Yan: ?? What happened to that girl? Last time she even promised me she’d live properly. You didn’t run your mouth and piss her off, did you?]
[Xie Chun Ye: No. Wife, I’m about to die. Talk later.]
[Xie Chun Ye: Sharing location with you: third floor, Zone B Ancient Fossil Museum.]
Song Zang felt a little worried. Xie Chun Ye’s vague explanation had basically explained nothing at all.
Things clearly looked bad, but he was too far away to do anything.
Song Zang did not even know his own exact location yet, and his StarNet connection still would not work. Even if he wanted to help, he could not exactly fly there.
He could only count on Chi Yan to work a little harder.
The landing gear of the insect-egg-shaped aircraft looked like a pair of little children’s feet, pale and tender with a faint glow, rounded and cute like two thick lotus-root segments. They planted themselves firmly on the ground, the landing so smooth it felt as though the craft had stepped onto cotton.
Rather than an interstellar world, the scene looked more like something from a bizarre cult film.
Once again stunned by the insectoids’ reproductive anxiety, Song Zang looked away because he could not bear to keep watching.
He picked up his half-finished orange soda, threw on the brand-new coat the female insectoids had prepared for him, and calmly pushed open the door.
His eyes were lazy and his lips flattened, as if he had only just woken up and was suffering from a touch of morning temper.
Looking at the two unfamiliar female-insectoid soldiers who approached him, Song Zang pretended he knew nothing about Kyle’s earlier conversation and lifted his chin. “Where’s Louis? I want him protecting me. You two stay away.”
“Of course, sir.”
The female insectoids had excellent attitudes and were long accustomed to male insectoids behaving tyrannically. If anything, Song Zang counted as fairly easy to deal with. As long as his requests were satisfied, he did not keep making trouble.
Louis, summoned by the male insectoid, had his entire mind on his framed female father. Distracted, he hurriedly put on his coat and rushed downstairs, nearly barging Song Zang off the boarding stairs.
Song Zang sidestepped without drawing attention to it and became even more speechless.
Louis deserved to be single.
Song Zang stopped talking, and Louis did not dare speak either. Pale and awkward, he followed behind Song Zang with his gun raised protectively while Major General Kyle practically bored holes through his back with his stare.
Escorted in silence by several female insectoids, Song Zang was the first to step off the aircraft and made an impressive procession toward the H+ pharmaceutical building.
The closer they came, the more the building, formed from several stacked spheres, resembled clumps of sticky insect eggs still joined by strands of mucus. It towered into the clouds without any visible end.
Song Zang stood outside the main entrance and raised his head, apparently giving the place no more than an interested glance.
A faint crimson shadow glimmered inside his jewel-bright ruby irises.
He focused again and tried to use his penetrating vision. His steps paused, and he suddenly felt as though his megalophobia was about to flare up.
The entire building was densely parasitized by some kind of thick, luxuriant thorned vine, wrapped so tightly there was scarcely a gap.
The outermost ventilation shutters were covered in dark-green leaves, along with huge clusters of double-petaled roses and heavy orange-white fruit. Left unpicked for so long that they had almost rotted with ripeness, the fruit fell to the ground and burst, splashing pungent alcoholic fragrance and juice everywhere.
Based on Song Zang’s shallow botanical knowledge, these appeared to be hybrids of egg-fruited rose and tequila rose. Their richly colored petals were slightly less saturated than the tequila rose itself, but remained gorgeous, and the fruit was cute too.
The problem was that each blossom was about the size of a twenty-four-inch computer monitor. The fruit was a little smaller, roughly the size of an irregular football.
Song Zang was not joking. He genuinely feared one of those ripe, heavy fruits might suddenly fall and crush all five of them to death outside the front door.
It seemed the Eldest Princess really had been captured and subjected to many experiments, but the consequences of those experiments had slipped beyond either side’s control.
Worse, the rose was diseased.
Extremely, absurdly diseased with anthracnose.
It was a pathogenic infectious disease that humans, livestock, and plants could all encounter, and the modern world had long possessed methods of prevention and treatment.
The tips of many leaves whose stems were still dark green were covered in grotesque oval black lesions and sunken yellow-brown spots. In severe areas, even more disgusting white fungal filaments had risen from the tissue. Had the disease been treated early, it could never have spread this far.
Focusing more closely, Song Zang could actually see the crescent-shaped fungal spores and acervulus structures with his naked eyes. Even now, they continued multiplying. It had rained in X12 not long ago, and the damp air provided an ideal cultivation environment.
The spores were so dense as they drifted on the wind that Song Zang instinctively held his breath, keeping his dry eyes open.
He remembered the so-called “hazy shadow” he had seen from the aircraft at a distance…
That had not been a shadow or mist at all. It was the wildly proliferating anthracnose growth, so concentrated that it had completely blocked the refraction of light around the building.
“Don’t you think this building looks strange? It’s ugly as hell.”
Song Zang exhaled and turned toward Major General Kyle. His attractive brows knit together as he asked with open disgust, testing him.
Kyle’s reaction was flat. Before answering, he even took an unhurried step forward, activated the identity verifier, and completed an iris scan.
With a click, the locked doors slowly opened.
Only then did Kyle look back at him. He sounded like someone soothing a spoiled, ignorant child and had already done it so many times he was numb. “I apologize for causing you discomfort. The pharmaceutical building’s design symbolizes endless regeneration and reproduction. It is also the founding philosophy of H+ Biotechnology.
“If you have a different opinion, the External Publicity Department welcomes your valuable suggestions at any time, honored male-insectoid sir.”
Throughout the explanation, his gaze remained gently fixed on Song Zang’s face. He had no awareness whatsoever of the spores drifting through the air, and his breathing did not change in the slightest.
But fungal spores had never been something harmless.
Whether they entered the bloodstream through damaged skin, were inhaled into the lungs, or were accidentally swallowed with food and entered the digestive tract, there was always a chance of infection and of the lesions spreading further.
Necrosis of flesh and intestines, lymphatic and alveolar edema, hemorrhagic meningitis, sepsis… countless unimaginable consequences were probably already lying dormant inside every H+ employee and female-insectoid soldier here, waiting to erupt.
Elio’s Notes: The source uses 炭疽病 here in a mixed way. The plant lesions, fungal spores, and acervulus structures correspond to anthracnose, while the human and animal exposure routes and severe systemic complications described here resemble anthrax. We have preserved the chapter’s presentation rather than silently rewriting the source.
Female insectoids had strong immune systems, but not so strong that they could live inside a pathogen nest and walk away completely unscathed.
“You are all in serious trouble.”
Song Zang curved his lips into a faintly mocking smile, carrying a trace of inscrutable arrogance and deliberately cultivated mystery.
Louis froze, apparently inserting himself into some tragic melodrama in his head. He lowered his head in shame and pressed his lips together. “Honored male… this is all my fault…”
“You’re fine.”
Song Zang pulled his coat closed where the breeze had blown it apart, then turned and walked into the H+ pharmaceutical building.
An entire row of supervisors and researchers stood in the center of the lobby, craning their necks in anticipation of his arrival.
They all looked like formidable figures. Even with their heads lowered and apologetic expressions on their faces, the faint sharp pressure surrounding them could not be completely restrained.
Song Zang, meanwhile, had a questionable identity, unclear information, and a suspicious method of appearing inside the experimental restricted zone. These insectoids had to be suspicious of him, but that was fine. He could seize the initiative and point out H+’s problems first.
“You still haven’t come up with a solution for the special experimental subject’s severe loss of control? The irregular transfer failures of the large-scale brain-computer system, the illegal StarNet signal station that can’t be dismantled, biological deformation and mutated-beast disasters, one problem after another. If the rebels get word of this, will Federation citizens still live to see tomorrow’s sunrise?
“The President doesn’t know yet, does he? How long have you hidden this? How much longer do you intend to hide it? If mass casualties erupt in the capital, not one of you will get to die quickly or comfortably.
“Take me to the biological laboratory right now. I can deal with that disgusting brain.”
Song Zang said it all in one breath. The silent insectoids stared at him in shock, and even Major General Kyle narrowed his gray eyes.
Song Zang paused, then curved his lips in a contemptuous little laugh. “So annoying. A bunch of useless idiots who can’t even speak properly.”
＊
Hundreds of millions of kilometers away, in the peaceful, cozy Cat’s Eye star system of Zone B.
Half of Xie Chun Ye’s body was trapped inside a black hole. After the agony of his legs being torn and dragged reached its peak, it abruptly dissolved into a calm numbness.
His upper body hung upside down in empty space with nothing to brace against, loose hair drifting. His elbows and long-barreled laser cannon together supported a swaying radiant-iron wall panel. Xie Chun Ye sighed.
For the first time in many years, he lit a cigarette again, bit down on it, and took several hard drags, only to cough repeatedly from the smoke.
Bad luck.
He found it difficult to describe the complexity of his feelings.
At the beginning of the instance, not being assigned to the same location as Chi Yan had been annoying enough. Worse, he had been locked into the role of a gentle, graceful Omega and unable to break character for a long time if he wanted to complete his mission.
And Xie Chun Ye could not sweet-talk people to save his life. He was simply bad with words, afraid of being around too many people, and absolutely terrible at household scheming.
The role itself was heavily constrained too: ambition higher than the sky, life cheaper than grass, money but no power. He was an exquisitely packaged gift, a glamorous tool meant to please other people.
His Alpha father at home bore the hollow title of Viscount Frello-Rose. He had long since been driven out of the center of power, and after his own father died, he had once fallen into such poverty that he nearly could not afford food.
His starting capital came from his wife’s financial support and the advantage of his viscount title. For years, he had accumulated wealth like a madman in hopes of returning to Zone A.
That profit-crazed pervert had a head full of unrealistic fantasies. Whenever he had free time to rest at home, he would clutch a paper genealogy in his hands and drag all the children over to trace their blood relationship to the Rose imperial family.
He believed he too was qualified to inherit imperial power. Xie Chun Ye could not understand who had given him that kind of confidence.
As for his Omega father, he was an already-disfavored madman whose family estate had long since been swallowed by his spouse’s side.
No one remembered his name. They simply called him Madman. Adopted children, illegitimate children, and biological children all called him Madman too.
Madman spent every day shut inside the attic. The household robot delivered his meals, and from time to time at night, eerie laughter drifted out.
His mature, full, syrupy pheromones were like rock sugar scorched and melted by flame, sticky enough to draw threads, escaping strand by strand and clinging like spiderwebs throughout the house.
Alpha relatives who came to visit, or subordinates of Viscount Frello, had all been seduced into distraction by Madman’s scent, breathing unsteadily with flushed faces, unable to stop their ambiguous, curious gazes from drifting toward the dim upper-floor attic.
But whenever Frello smelled his wife’s scent, he seemed to feel nothing but disgust. Gradually, he simply stopped coming home.
The head of the household rarely returned, leaving behind a large crowd of young descendants with tangled bloodlines and one mentally unstable madman.
The kind of chaos that occurred every day inside this vast, castle-like mansion was easy to imagine.
During the few days Xie Chun Ye had lived there, he had beaten many people and killed many people.
He broke the wrist of a younger brother who poisoned the family pet. An antisocial younger sister conducted experiments in her bedroom, illegally raising a whole pack of man-eating mutated beasts that had already devoured three infants.
Xie Chun Ye broke in at midnight and slaughtered every beast. He held himself back, failed to keep holding himself back, and killed that sister too while he was at it.
The Alpha male model his older sister brought home was a ruthless social climber who likewise wanted to seize the family fortune and had her completely under his thumb.
The frail young Omega his older brother brought back was a monster bought for a high price on the black market and forcibly modified from a Beta.
Not a single one of them was good. They were all lunatics. His madman father was somehow the most quiet and law-abiding “normal person” in the household.
When they learned Xie Chun Ye would be sent to Zone A as the viscount’s “biological son” to attend an aristocratic marriage banquet, the already dangerous castle erupted into chaos.
He could not even sleep peacefully at night. He beat to death quite a few disgusting Alphas who sneaked into his bedroom and tried to assault him.
He was genuinely exhausted.
While trying to stay alive, Xie Chun Ye still had to force himself to go out and investigate Zone B.
Its economic and industrial development lagged far behind Zone A, but the people standing at the top of the pyramid lived just as comfortably as emperors who could do whatever they pleased.
Zone B’s industrial parks and emerging technology companies were actually fairly mediocre. It had no exclusive mineral resources and instead leaned heavily on pride in its cultural heritage.
Officials proclaimed it to be humanity’s oldest genetic place of origin and worked tirelessly to keep living off archaeology’s past glory, century after century.
In reality, though, the place was basically one enormous luxury retirement home. Many high officials and nobles who had lost political struggles or family power struggles were exiled to Zone B to recuperate. There were plenty of calculating old foxes, and countless failed schemers like Viscount Frello who still refused to give up.
The Cat’s Eye star system was not large, but countless dangerous undercurrents hid within it. Lunatics were everywhere, psychiatric hospitals were perpetually full, and small families treated one another as though divided by generations of blood feuds, trying to kill each other at every opportunity.
To stop Omegas from other families from marrying upward, they used every disgusting method imaginable. Pheromone poisons were abused constantly.
Xie Chun Ye really was exhausted. He suddenly understood Yin Chen’s habit of cutting people down the moment they disagreed with him.
Yin Chen was killing far fewer people these days, while Xie Chun Ye had started killing people morning, noon, and night.
His hands were drenched in blood, yet in front of outsiders he still had to act sweet and agreeable. He was practically developing schizophrenia.
And right then, Viscount Frello suddenly brought Lin Wen Jing back to the castle.
A wildly popular Omega superstar abruptly became everyone’s powerful competitor, throwing the already chaotic household into an uproar. Members of other families also came to probe for information openly and secretly, on high alert.
Their deranged adoptive father smoked cigars nearby and watched the show. He was forever making suggestive, ambiguous remarks to deliberately provoke fights among his children, especially trying to push Xie Chun Ye and Lin Wen Jing into a vicious “female rivalry,” as though raising venomous creatures in a jar and waiting for the survivor.
Xie Chun Ye swallowed his disgust, acted and bickered with Lin Wen Jing, and worked with her from inside and outside to investigate in secret. They uncovered quite a few hidden truths.
Prince Arthur was actually the biological son of Viscount Frello and his first spouse.
Perfect blond hair and blue eyes, a baby-swapping scheme carried out in cooperation with the insectoids, a potential heir favored by both the Emperor and the public… No wonder Frello had been so confident in his plan to return the family to its former peak.
The problem was that Arthur was already dead. The sheer horror of his death had shaken the entire Empire.
From that day onward, Frello’s methods became even more deranged. He drove every child in the household into madness, while he himself became a volatile lunatic who fed on other people’s suffering.
After dealing with the family for several days, Xie Chun Ye’s investigative direction became clearer and clearer.
No matter how much misfortune someone suffered, a normal person would not fall into madness this easily. Even if they did go insane, they should not become this distorted and unscrupulous, as though trapped for years inside a whirlpool of collective hysteria with no hope of escape.
There were too many lunatics in Zone B. That meant the problem was not the people. The problem was Zone B itself.
The Zone B Ancient Fossil Museum, the largest ancient-fossil museum in the entire Empire, stood on Elizeen, the central star of the Cat’s Eye system.
Its name was a transliteration associated with paradise and heaven. The planet possessed deep cultural heritage and a romantic artistic atmosphere. Countless outstanding artists had been born there, and enormous entertainment galas were held every year, drawing even nobles from Zone A in droves.
Xie Chun Ye knocked out everyone in the house, arranged for large amounts of sleeping medication to be administered, hacked the household robot, and rewrote the access-control program, turning the castle into a quiet, silent prison.
Once he confirmed no one could wake midway and come interfere, he bought ample weapons and equipment on the black market. Only then did he propose traveling with Lin Wen Jing to Elizeen to investigate the museum.
Lin Wen Jing’s investigation had produced even more than Xie Chun Ye’s.
Noah, the handsome dark-skinned man filming a skincare advertisement with her, turned out to be a hybrid between a male insectoid and an Omega.
But his bloodline awakening had failed. His human genes dominated so strongly that he displayed none of the traits of a male insectoid. The insectoids therefore gave him to Frello to use as he pleased. Noah was an early experimental product discarded long ago.
Noah truly could not become a male insectoid, but a genetic mutation during cultivation had turned him into a genius with perfect memory.
He remembered every detail, from developing and being born from his mother’s womb to later being raised and observed in a laboratory. He told no one. Instead, he relied on his perfect memory and went straight into acting.
As long as he remained visible to the entire world, Frello would not dare torment him to death. As long as he did not reveal his perfect-memory talent, he had a chance of being allowed to keep living. His life was exhausting, desperately exhausting, every day spent walking on thin ice.
So when Lin Wen Jing personally castrated Viscount Frello, dug out his gland, stuffed it into her mouth, and ate it expressionlessly like fresh raw food… Noah was completely stunned by this insane woman.
He told Lin Wen Jing every terrifying childhood memory carved deep into his bones.
The split within the Insectoid Federation, deliberately engineered human-insectoid hybrids, and the series of human experiments carried out after abducting people… in the end, every cause led back to one thing.
They could not produce children.
Yes. The insectoids genuinely could not reproduce anymore. Their birth rate had plummeted starting several decades ago, and no one knew why.
Female-insectoid eggs and male-insectoid eggs alike were extraordinarily prone to dying before hatching. Even when a female insectoid risked death to lay an egg, bizarre rot and spoilage frequently appeared during incubation, along with organ deformities, mutations, toxic shells, softened shells…
The number of newborn hatchlings each year had crashed from ten million eggs to one thousand. It was as though a terrifying apocalypse had suddenly descended and heaven itself wanted the insectoids extinct.
The insectoids had kept this secret sealed as tightly as possible and still did not dare let humanity learn of it.
Human-insectoid hybrids did have a chance of producing top-tier insectoid bloodlines, but the greater probability was deformity, or AO humans who would never awaken for their entire lives.
For the Federation’s future, insectoid genetic-reproduction research had already descended into madness and abandoned every restraint.
Their initial plan was to conduct experiments in secret, steal the Empire’s precious mineral resources, and slow humanity’s technological development.
The middle-stage plan was to plant infiltrators inside the military and medical institutions, corrupt the bloodlines of human nobles and elites, drive the entire Rose Empire leadership into madness or disability, and throw lower-level imperial administration into disorder until ordinary people could no longer live in peace.
Their final plan was to use new teleportation mechanisms and death-ray weapons to launch an overwhelmingly one-sided frontal war and permanently swallow the Rose Empire.
More than twenty years had passed, and the middle-stage plan was already advancing at full speed. The Rheingold Emperor’s entire family had been dragged deep into the vortex and met miserable fates. Small figures like Viscount Frello had not escaped unscathed either.
From that, it was reasonable to infer that full-scale war with the insectoids was not far away.
After all, time waited for no bug.
If they waited any longer, the insectoids really would go extinct.
Xie Chun Ye was constrained by his role and could not solve the insectoids’ crisis, but he could investigate what was driving the humans of Zone B insane.
On the third floor of the Zone B Ancient Fossil Museum stood an enormous marine-shell fossil, so huge and oppressive it looked almost dinosaur-like. Archaeologists identified it as a devil giant clam that had undergone a genetic mutation on the prehistoric seafloor and slowly grown to this terrifying size over its extraordinarily long life.
It weighed one hundred tons. When its shell stood upright, it reached fifteen meters high, vast enough to blot out the view. Its dark shell was deeply unsettling, while a thick, vivid scarlet band ran along the curved “lip” at the edge. Even after hundreds of millions of years, it remained bright as new.
Urban legends offered every imaginable fantasy and theory about the devil giant clam. Some said it was a black hole, some a gateway to another world, and others a magical teleportation array.
According to information Captain Percy had gathered, however, a black hole was the most likely possibility.
Xie Chun Ye did not dare lower his guard. He secured safety ropes around his waist and legs, then climbed in over the edge of the shell.
Lin Wen Jing knocked out every staff member and temporarily sealed the third floor, but instead of staying outside as he had ordered, she crawled in after him. Xie Chun Ye could not stop her.
The giant clam was half closed. The two of them could barely stand upright inside it, stepping slowly across the fossilized surface until they reached the center.
To their astonishment, the devil giant clam was not dead at all. It was in a state of suspended animation, and the black hole forming inside it had already grown to roughly the size of an adult’s fist.
The black hole silently and slowly consumed the shell’s remaining skeletal structure, the newly forming pearlescent enamel, and the tender clam flesh, continuously expanding.
The giant clam had instinctively chosen to feign death precisely to resist the black hole’s erosion and preserve its remaining life energy.
Xie Chun Ye wanted to retreat temporarily, but Lin Wen Jing abruptly shoved her hand into the black hole and pulled out a flower petal, along with a hand covered in fresh, mottled, gruesome wounds.
Hot blood rolled across the shell and was silently absorbed and devoured.
The tiny embryonic black hole expanded by several inches. Under Xie Chun Ye’s stunned gaze, Lin Wen Jing shoved her entire arm into it again.
She was perfectly calm. Her tone was no different from usual, steady and unhurried. “Brother Xie, I gained a special ability in the game called Sacrifice. I can sacrifice myself, become one of the system’s reserve NPCs, and exchange that for a stage-based game reward my companions need.
“Unfortunately, it still can’t bring back the person I loved. She never loved me either, actually. But I was her best friend.”
“You don’t have to…”
“I stopped wanting to live a long time ago. When I see someone like you with a happy relationship, all I want to do is kill people indiscriminately. So don’t worry about me.”
Lin Wen Jing smiled. Her voice was soft and numb as she mechanically pushed her head deep into the black hole.
Wet rustling sounds of sucking and gnawing came from the black hole as it abruptly expanded.
Xie Chun Ye’s scalp crawled.
Song Zang’s scalp crawled too.
He was inside the biological laboratory of the pharmaceutical building.
Square transparent embryo-incubation chambers covered an entire wall in dense rows, cultivating enormous numbers of parasitic insectoid eggs.
Flower buds, cow uteruses, avian cloacas…
Song Zang tried to move closer for a look, but Louis yanked him back hard.
The laboratory exploded. The entire wall shattered in an instant.
A woman’s white skeleton suddenly dropped through the firelight.
Inside the skull bloomed a Carola red rose, lush and vivid.