Chapter 36#
The Innocent and Naive Fool#
The system felt that no matter how much it upgraded and iterated, it would probably never understand the complex emotions and thought processes of humans.
“What do you mean?” it asked incredulously, “But Lu Xing clearly agreed—” The words stopped abruptly halfway through. The system was silent for a moment, then asked, “So, he was lying to you before?”
“Yes,” Lin Xiaodong said, “It’s quite obvious.”
The system replayed its screen recording, but couldn’t find anything obvious.
Could it be that all the humans it knew were micro-expression masters?
“Not micro-expressions,” Lin Xiaodong smiled, “Lu Xing’s words were impeccable. I noticed it from the unwilling expression on the researcher’s face when Lu Xing reprimanded him. As he himself said, it was only for one night, there was no need to risk offending his superior to keep me. But that researcher still spoke up, which proves that if I left, it would likely be for more than just one night.”
Also, he thought, when Lu Xing looked at him just now, the young man’s expression wavered.
Though only for a fleeting moment.
At that moment, upon hearing him say “I trust him,” Lu Xing was indeed touched by those words.
System: “Then he’s not just a great actor, he’s also a lying scumbag.”
Anyone with a conscience wouldn’t bear to leave Lin Xiaodong alone in this place surrounded by wolves and tigers, especially since Lu Xing had promised to take him back before coming.
“I just want to know what excuse he’ll use to leave later,” Lin Xiaodong said lazily.
He was also tired of the castle, and Lu Xing helping him open a new map suited him perfectly.
However, in the end, the little merman only received a soft, whispered “I’m sorry.”
After the banquet dispersed, Lu Xing watched the attendants take away the cloud, seeing the little merman’s face filled with panic, disbelief, and heartbreak after being betrayed, and calmly watched them go far away.
He stood there for a long time before silently turning and leaving.
Lin Xiaodong was led into an empty hall.
He looked up and immediately saw a huge decorative wall, nearly ten meters high and thirty meters wide.
The wall was made of white jade, and the decorations on it were hundreds of mermaids with tightly closed eyes and pale, stiff faces. When they were alive, they refused to sing for the nobles, so after death, they were made into specimens, forever frozen here.
It was both an insult and an act of venting.
The little merman stared at them blankly, tears falling from his eyes.
“If you don’t behave, these mermaids will be your future,” the old king’s hoarse voice came from behind him. Supported by an attendant, he walked towards them step by step, leaning on his scepter. “I advise you not to have too many delusions. Lu Xing has already given you to me.”
But the little merman just wiped away his tears, glared at him fiercely, and pursed his lips without saying a word.
“So beautiful.” As expected of father and son, they were both obsessed in the same way. The old king gazed at his young, fair face in a trance, reaching out with a greedy desire to touch Lin Xiaodong, but was once again blocked by the shield.
“Attendant!” he roared, “Why hasn’t this been dealt with yet?”
The attendant said tremblingly, “Sorry, Your Majesty, but, but His Royal Highness insists on not telling us the password, and we can’t do anything about it.”
“Then why can the Earl touch him!?”
“Be-because at that time, to feed the merman, His Highness voluntarily removed the barrier…”
“Useless!” The old king kicked him, and the attendant dared not resist, only gritting his teeth and enduring the kick. Lin Xiaodong watched this scene with cold eyes, once again marveling at the similarity between the father and son.
But the system suddenly spoke up: “You need to be careful. I just detected that he has been parasitized by a brainworm.”
“What?” Lin Xiaodong was stunned, “Who are you talking about?”
“Both of them.”
Lin Xiaodong looked closely, and indeed, the old king’s eyes were already bloodshot with frenzy, and he kept muttering curses, clearly in an abnormal mental state; and the attendant being reprimanded at his feet, though seemingly docile on the surface, was clearly enduring desperately, and would probably develop to the mid-stage soon.
“But when we came in, wasn’t there a big detection gate at the entrance?” he wondered, “These nobles are more afraid of death than anyone, how could they all be parasitized?”
Lin Xiaodong had the system by his side, so he naturally wasn’t afraid of brainworms, and besides, mermaids were the natural enemies of brainworms. But to think that even the monarch of a country was parasitized, what kind of concept was that?
Given the terrifying spread rate of brainworms, basically, everyone at tonight’s banquet would not be able to escape!
“It’s indeed very strange,” the system admitted, “Brainworms can only parasitize living organisms, so everyone must pass through the detection gate before entering the palace, whether they are attendants, nobles, or creatures they brought from other planets, except for—”
“Except for the highest-ranking few,” Lin Xiaodong realized.
The old king and Lu Xing, they naturally didn’t need to be tested.
Because the palace was their home, even though Lu Xing had moved out of the palace now, the superficial ceremonies for the Crown Prince still had to be performed properly. For the highest-ranking individuals in the entire empire, being tested in public was itself a very disrespectful act.
“The old king is definitely out of the question, so,” Lin Xiaodong muttered to himself, “the zero-patient is actually Lu Xing?”
Did he know he was parasitized?
No, he must have known for a long time. Lin Xiaodong recalled the young man’s increasingly thin body and his occasional absentmindedness recently, and the more he thought about it, the more he felt a chill—could it be that Lu Xing insisted on bringing him to this banquet precisely to allow the brainworms to spread widely among the upper class, creating a “gu-raising” effect?
Just as Lin Xiaodong was pondering what Lu Xing intended to do, the old king stopped his scolding. After all, he was old and out of breath, glaring at the attendant prostrate on the ground. Although he still wanted to vent, he was willing but unable, and could only spit angrily, “Get lost!”
He paced back and forth agitatedly a couple of times, then suddenly shouted loudly to the outside, “Someone! Call the Queen over!”
The Queen?
Lin Xiaodong blinked. To be honest, if the old king hadn’t mentioned it today, he would have almost forgotten that there was a Queen in the Empire.
Her presence on the star network was pitifully small, and Lu Xing had never mentioned a single word about his mother before. She hadn’t even attended tonight’s banquet… as if this person didn’t exist at all.
A few minutes later, a woman in a plain long dress walked in from outside the hall.
She was tall and thin, especially her neck, which was almost twice as long as the old king’s. One could see the woman’s beauty in her youth from the contours of her eyebrows and eyes, but now she only gave off a feeling of exhaustion and haggardness. Her half-closed eyes seemed uninterested in anything happening in this world, and even her bow to the old king was indifferent: “Your Majesty.”
The old king pointed at her and reprimanded, “Look at the good son you raised! Now that he’s grown wings, all he knows is to go against me. I am the master of the Empire, it’s not his turn yet!”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the Queen lowered her eyes, “You are our King.”
The old king grumbled a few more words, but the Queen remained indifferent. He probably found it boring and waved his hand in disgust, “Forget it, take this merman away. Within three days, if I don’t hear the merman’s song, then I will depose Lu Xing as Crown Prince, and you two can go to the barbaric planet!”
“As you command.”
The Queen straightened up, reached out and took the cloud. She glanced indifferently at the little merman sitting on it, her gaze showing neither the astonishment of seeing a merman nor the greed of other nobles, as if she had just seen a transparent air.
But Lin Xiaodong inexplicably felt that this Queen might become an important breakthrough point for his next mission.
On the way back to the Queen’s bedchamber, for some reason, he always felt like he was being secretly watched.
But when he looked back, the corridor was empty.
The entire palace covered an area of a million square meters, with a quarter of it being buildings. If it weren’t for the advanced technology of the interstellar era, it would take half a day just to walk from the main hall to the bedchamber.
The Queen returned to her bedchamber, dismissed the attendants, and pulled out a small bottle of medicine from under her pillow. She poured out two pills, swallowed one herself, and handed the other to the little merman who was nervously huddled on the cloud, asking very seriously, “Do you want it?”
Lin Xiaodong: “System, what is this?”
System: “Poison.”
Lin Xiaodong: ???
He looked up at the woman in front of him in disbelief, thinking, what’s wrong with this family?
The old king is crazy, his son is even crazier, and there’s a queen in the harem who is slowly committing suicide… No wonder the military wants to rebel. What would happen if such a group of people led the country?
The little merman nervously shook his head, hugging his big tail and retreating. Seeing this, the Queen didn’t force him, but simply put the medicine back, screwed the cap on tightly, and tucked it under the bed.
“Little one,” she said, “it’s late, get some rest.”
The bedchamber was pitch black after the lights were out. In the darkness, the little merman’s voice, tinged with a slight tremor, came: “Are you Lu Xing’s mother?”
Hearing her son’s name, the Queen was silent for a moment, then softly “hmm”-ed.
“But I wish I never had this son,” she said.
“…Why?”
“Because he’s just like his father,” the Queen’s voice carried a hint of difficulty, “both are out-and-out devils.”
After speaking, as if unable to bear it, she took a deep breath, forcibly calmed her emotions, and then said coldly, “Alright, no matter what you want to know, I have nothing to say.”
The woman turned over, lying on the bed with her back to him, and didn’t speak again all night.
The desolate moonlight filtered through the window, reflecting in the empty bedchamber. Lin Xiaodong silently watched the Queen’s thin back, and after a long while, closed his eyes.
Centaurus, on a barren, uninhabited planet.
The starship had been stationed here for nearly a week. The adjutant stood in front of the tightly closed interrogation room door, his eyes dark with exhaustion.
Since Gu Xi went in, he hadn’t closed his eyes for three days and three nights, guarding outside the door.
Some of the troops outside were already restless. The commanders of various regiments had come to him, asking the adjutant for a definite answer—whether they should abandon Lieutenant General Gu.
It all started with the battle ten days ago.
Facing a devastating blow, the mother worm, at a critical moment of life and death, created an unprecedented mental vortex, targeting naturally Gu Xi’s leading squad.
When the adjutant and his men completed their sector’s annihilation mission and rushed to that star system, they found that the entire squad had been wiped out, and the only survivor, Gu Xi, had faint abnormal life activity detected in his brain—
That’s right, the man was parasitized by a brainworm.
A few days later, Gu Xi woke up, showing no abnormalities. His mind was clear, and his thoughts were normal.
But the instruments wouldn’t lie; the brainworm was indeed still active in his brain.
It even began to gradually evolve, devouring his mental power day by day, until one day it would fully revive and become a new mother worm.
Only then did the adjutant and his men realize that the mother worm could never be truly eliminated.
Because all brainworms had the potential to evolve into a mother worm.
So, to control the activity of the new mother worm, they did not kill Gu Xi immediately.
But if it truly revived completely, then all the sacrifices they made in this battle would be in vain.
“I’m a good sample,” Gu Xi himself said calmly after hearing the news. “Lock me in the interrogation room for observation. If anything goes wrong, don’t hesitate, release the poison gas immediately.”
And the last thing the man said to the adjutant was, “Take good care of him.”
Both of them knew who “him” was.
For the past three days, the helpless adjutant could only turn on the interrogation room’s broadcast, playing the little merman’s pre-recorded songs over and over again.
He had never been so sincerely grateful for Lin Xiaodong’s foresight. The merman’s singing suppressed the mother worm’s revival to the greatest extent, and also bought Gu Xi precious time to remain conscious.
During this period, the mother worm would accumulate energy and stop its activity; but at the same time, losing contact with the mother worm, the brainworms scattered on various planets in the universe would become abnormally violent, accelerating the absorption of the host’s mental power, and the parasitized host would also be affected.
The adjutant worriedly thought that the worst part was that this effect was currently unknown.
Their communication with the central star had been forcibly cut off half a month ago, and no messages could be sent back. The adjutant now had no idea what the situation was like on the central star. The matter of the mother worm alone was enough to make him frantic.
He leaned against the door of the interrogation room, sighing wearily.
And in the sealed room behind him, the man lying in the corner silently opened his eyes.
Next to his pillow was a photo of the little merman foolishly holding a dried fish and looking at the camera.
Gu Xi’s originally dark eyes had turned a translucent azure. Although there was only a solid iron wall in front of him, he seemed to have countless eyes, able to see what was happening in every corner of the universe.
He knew this was the mother worm’s control over the brainworms.
The process of parasitism was a struggle for dominance. The mother worm wanted to revive using his body, but Gu Xi could also take this opportunity to claim its abilities for himself.
He endured the excruciating pain in his brain, wanting to gain the upper hand in this life-and-death struggle. But amidst the dazzling array of images, Gu Xi’s attention suddenly focused on one of the parasitized individuals.
Judging from the environment this parasitized person was in, he should be in the palace, probably an attendant of the old king or another noble. Through his perspective, Gu Xi passed through the quiet corridors and arrived at the periphery of a desolate palace.
It seemed that no one had cleaned this place for a long time. The steps were covered with withered branches and fallen leaves, and there were no guards around.
It wasn’t a cold palace, but it was worse than one.
The person looked around, then quickly walked up the steps, tiptoeing to the window—
Seeing the little merman curled up uncomfortably on the cloud inside, Gu Xi’s pupils instantly constricted.
Why was Lin Xiaodong here!?
The attendant stared at the sleeping little merman for a long time, then suddenly pulled out a bottle of volatile gas poison from his怀里, gritting his teeth and muttering, “Damn that old lunatic, I can’t deal with you, but I’ll silence this merman!”
The flying device’s shield couldn’t block gas. He held his breath, walked step by step to the little merman, and was about to open the bottle to let the poison slowly evaporate into the air, when suddenly his temples throbbed twice, and an unbearable sharp pain came from deep within his brain.
The next second, a bloodcurdling scream pierced the night sky.
Lin Xiaodong, startled awake from his sleep, opened his eyes to see a person with wide eyes falling “thud” in front of him, still tightly clutching an unopened glass bottle.
He stared blankly at the back of the person’s head for a long time, unable to react.
What the hell, what’s going on?