Chapter 51#

The Innocent and Naive Fool (END)#

On the second day after Gu Xi left, Lin Xiaodong took the initiative to find the military staff.

“I know what he’s doing, and I know you all want him to come back,” he said, “let me go see him.”

The staff was not confused by Lin Xiaodong’s straightforwardness and only reacted after a while: “No, how did you know?”

This was a secret that the Marshal had repeatedly emphasized should not be leaked, especially not to Lin Xiaodong!

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Lin Xiaodong interrupted him, “you just need to tell me where he is and take me to see him.”

The staff looked at him and shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said, “but I made a vow to the Marshal. We are soldiers under him and will always be loyal to his orders.”

“Even if he never wakes up again?”

The staff didn’t speak. After a while, he sighed deeply: “There’s nothing we can do either. The mother bug cannot be completely eliminated. The Marshal has delivered a massive amount of mental power to you. If it’s known to the outside, it counts as treason. As of now, what else can I do?”

“Leave it to me.” Lin Xiaodong insisted.

“Do you have a way? …No, impossible,” the staff muttered, “even if mermaids are the nemesis of brain bugs, you’re only one person. How can you deal with hundreds of millions of brain bugs throughout the galaxy?”

Lin Xiaodong indeed couldn’t deal with them, but he had the system.

Fortunately, the system could contact headquarters now, and various data inquiries were quite convenient. For hosts like them, they would release a large amount of energy when they left this world. The system could use this to convert them into mental power and form a viral destruction program to be implanted into the mother bug’s instructions, ordering all brain bugs in the host’s body to self-destruct, thereby achieving the goal of eliminating all brain bugs once and for all.

But this method had a prerequisite—

He must come into contact with Gu Xi and indirectly control the brain bugs through the mother bug in the man’s body.

Although from the current situation, if he did nothing, the brain bug in that sugar pill would also evolve into a mother bug autonomously because of the large amount of mental power nourishment. But by that time, even if the system helped, it might be too late.

Lin Xiaodong nagged the staff for a whole week, and finally made the other party agree to take him to see Gu Xi once.

“He’s currently lying in a hibernation pod. Don’t touch any devices at will, and don’t stay too long,” the staff warned worriedly. “I can only give you two hours at most, hear me?”

“I know.”

The little mermaid’s expression was very calm.

After hearing about Gu Xi’s current situation, there was neither sadness nor any other emotion on his face.

The staff always felt that something was not quite right, but as Gu Xi’s subordinate, he couldn’t help but carry a glimmer of hope—if, just if, Lin Xiaodong really had a way to cure the Marshal?

On the morning before departure, Lin Xiaodong got up very early.

He quietly went to the kitchen and made several sandwiches for the three of the Xu family for breakfast and put them in the refrigerator.

Because he was afraid they wouldn’t notice, the little mermaid specifically drew a smiley face note and pasted it on the refrigerator door, so Lulu could see it first thing in the morning.

After leaving the door, there were still more than three hours until the appointed time.

Lin Xiaodong sat on the flyer and first went around Central Park. The original mermaid statue had not been well-maintained during this period of time. In addition, people were constantly in a state of anger and extreme emotion, and many cursing words had been sprayed on the base with yellow spray paint.

Although the military would send someone to clean up these spray paints at a fixed point every day, many mottled traces remained.

The little mermaid wore a cloak and looked up at the withered flowers placed at the foot of the statue by people and the glaring curses on the stone surface. His expression was indifferent, and his heart didn’t even ripple.

A gust of autumn wind blew, blowing sky-high petals.

He reached out and pressed down hard on the cloak hood he was wearing on his head.

Although there were very few people in Central Park at this time, there were still a few scattered residents nearby taking a walk. Lin Xiaodong narrowed his eyes, intending to wait for the wind to pass before leaving, but he didn’t expect the flyer to hit something when he turned around—

“Ouch!”

Okay, it wasn’t a thing, it was a person.

Lin Xiaodong bent down and picked up the bunch of lilies that had fallen on the ground.

The pure white petals still had crystal clear dew on them. He sniffed it gently, and the elegant fragrance lingered at the tip of his nose, making his spirits rise.

“Give it back to me.”

The little girl who was knocked down by him patted the dust off her skirt, got up from the ground, and stretched out her hand to him rightfully: “This is for someone!”

“For whom?” Lin Xiaodong turned his head and looked behind him. There was only a mermaid statue there. “Is it for him?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you giving him flowers?” Lin Xiaodong was curious.

The little girl pointed to the elderly man in the distance leaning on a crutch: “That’s my grandfather. He asked me to send them.”

Lin Xiaodong looked up and saw a white-haired elderly man standing far away in front of the statue. He couldn’t go down the steps, so he just looked deeply at the mermaid statue singing toward the sky with his eyes. His old face was furrowed with wrinkles, and it was unknown what he was thinking.

“Thank you for the flowers,” he smiled, “tell your grandfather that I received them.”

“What?”

The little girl looked back, but found that the flyer parked in front of her had disappeared. Her mouth suddenly pouted, and she burst into tears:

“Waaaaah—there’s a flower thief!!!”

Lin Xiaodong, who was treated as a thief, took the flowers and detoured to the cemetery on the outskirts of the city, and put the bunch of lilies in front of the Empress’s tombstone.

“I’m not a generous person,” he was silent for a while, stepped back half a step, and bowed slightly, “Sorry, although Lu Xing is your biological son, I won’t forgive him. There’s also Lu Shengzun, and those nobles… the sins they committed will eventually be returned to their own bodies one by one.”

Back in the castle, the blood drawn by Lu Xing’s researchers was not for nothing.

There were also the lives of thousands of mermaids, it was also time for a debt of blood to be paid in blood.

He thought indifferently as he stood before the slowly opening door of the hibernation pod.

The cold white mist filled the room. The little mermaid looked at the man lying silently in the hibernation pod, whose face was almost completely covered by silver-gray hard bone except for his face, and asked softly: “Can you let me stay here alone for a while?”

The staff frowned.

Although he agreed, he still finally warned him worriedly: “Come out early, I’ll be waiting for you outside!”

“Mm.” The little mermaid nodded obediently.

But as soon as the staff walked out the door, he immediately let the system block the monitoring, and then grunting and huffing pulled out all the tubes in the hibernation pod regardless of everything, and dragged Gu Xi out from inside.

“To be honest, his current look is a bit like an armor warrior,” he toyed with the man’s body with some curiosity, analyzing it seriously in an academic research tone, “or Iron Man? But compared to the iron shell, the weight of the mother bug armor seems to be lighter.”

He tapped the hard shell breastplate on the man’s chest and leaned over to listen to his heartbeat.

However, he heard nothing.

“If the mother bug is not responsible for production, how exactly do the brain bugs reproduce?” Lin Xiaodong had been confused by this question for a long time.

System: “Have you seen paramecium splitting?”

“I see.” He suddenly understood. “So the mother bug is just a central brain, and it has no other functions except controlling the brain bugs?”

System: “Well, not exactly…”

Before the voice fell, suddenly, the man who was lying quietly on the floor opened his eyes.

Gu Xi’s eyes had completely turned azure blue, and his gaze was cold and indifferent, with no human emotion.

Lin Xiaodong held his breath and looked at him for a few seconds, carefully stretched out his hand, and waved it in front of him.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

The man pursed his lips and didn’t make any sound.

Just as Lin Xiaodong relaxed his guard slightly, suddenly a slender bone like a spider extended from Gu Xi’s back, the tip was a small sickle-like shape. It swung back and forth in front of Lin Xiaodong’s neck, as if verifying if the little mermaid was threatening to himself. Lin Xiaodong was forced to raise his head high to prevent the tip of the sickle from scratching his skin.

Just a distracted moment, the two people’s attack and defense positions instantly reversed.

He was suddenly pressed against the wall by the man, letting out a cry of pain. But before he could struggle, his two arms were separated by hard insect bones. Cold tentacles slid down from his face, as if perceiving the shape of the prey to facilitate finding the weakest point for a fatal blow; and also as if playing with it with ease, waiting for some more wonderful moment of enjoyment.

The little mermaid couldn’t help but tremble slightly.

But his eyes still stared firmly at Gu Xi’s inorganic blue eyes. Even if he might be gutted by the monster in front of him the next second, there was no fear on his face.

He opened his mouth and hummed softly.

Gu Xi tilted his head, seemingly not understanding why the prey even dared to provoke him.

Perhaps perceiving the brain bug about to evolve in the little mermaid’s body, his expression was somewhat restless, and a trace of killing intent gradually rose in his eyes. He began to make a low hiss from his throat, lowered his head, and bit Lin Xiaodong’s throat.

“Mm…”

A stinging pain came from his neck, and the song stopped abruptly.

Lin Xiaodong’s body suddenly tightened for a moment, but he soon forced himself to relax.

“Not here,” he panted and took the opportunity to break free a hand to slowly stroke the back of the man’s head, “you can bite the arms and legs as you please, but if you bite through my throat, I won’t be able to sing.”

Under the little mermaid’s comfort, Gu Xi’s wary eyes gradually receded and turned back into a blank state.

He stepped back half a step, letting the little mermaid fall to the floor from mid-air, turned around, and stabbed the hibernation pod with a sickle.

The sound of buzzing current accompanied the sound of broken parts. The staff outside the door immediately asked loudly: “Is everything okay?”

“…Fine!”

Lin Xiaodong covered his throat and tried to answer in a normal voice.

Ignoring his hands full of blood, he rushed over and hugged the man who was going crazy everywhere in the room around the waist. Feeling the weight on his waist, Gu Xi’s movements paused, and he subconsciously picked up the little mermaid in front of his eyes, swinging him like a rabbit.

Lin Xiaodong: No, what exactly is wrong with this person!?

But soon, the little mermaid’s open mouth attracted all his attention. Gu Xi stretched out a tentacle, tentatively touched those two soft wet lips, and as if fascinated, he also put the tip of the hard bone inside to stir it.

Lin Xiaodong, who felt like he was doing a nucleic acid test: …vomit.

He couldn’t take it anymore: “System, leave, leave, quickly leave!”

System: “Wait a moment, about ten more minutes, bear with it.”

Lin Xiaodong rolled a big big big white eye. He couldn’t bear it!

Fortunately, probably stimulated by the bloody scent on the little mermaid, Gu Xi’s originally blank eyes flashed slightly, struggling for a moment of sobriety: “Xia…dong?”

“It’s me.”

Lin Xiaodong sighed in relief, otherwise these last ten minutes would really be hard to endure.

Gu Xi looked at him fixedly for a few seconds, suddenly covered his head, and knelt on the ground gasping for breath, with a painful and distorted expression.

“Go… no…”

The system explained: “This is a normal phenomenon after the mother bug is hit by energy. Try to divert his attention, maybe it can alleviate some pain.”

“But,” Lin Xiaodong coughed twice, and a fishy sweetness rose in his throat because of the squeeze just now, “my voice is hoarse, I can’t sing.”

He sat in the messy room, looked around, and suddenly found a book in the damaged hibernation pod.

—It was the book “The Little Prince” that he couldn’t find no matter how he looked for it.

“This guy,” a helpless smile appeared in the depths of his eyes, “so tsundere.”

The little mermaid sat in place for about half a minute, slowly crawled over, and picked up the book.

Because of the posture of covering his throat just now, the pages of the book inevitably got stained with blood when flipping through the book, but Lin Xiaodong couldn’t care about that now. He helped Gu Xi up, let the man pillow on his tail, sighed deeply, and leaned against the wall with sweat all over his head.

This armor is really heavy.

“Click click click…”

The friction between the bug armor made a harsh and raucous sound, proving that Gu Xi’s current state was very bad.

Lin Xiaodong looked down at him and said in a hoarse voice: “Bear with it, it’s only ten minutes. Want to hear a story?”

Gu Xi opened his eyes and looked blankly at the little mermaid above his head: “Click?”

Lin Xiaodong smiled tiredly. The massive amount of mental power drawn away in a short period of time made him feel very exhausted. But he still braced himself, opened a page at random, and read it slowly:

“I should have guessed that behind her not-so-clever tricks lay the deepest tenderness. The thoughts of flowers are always hard to see through. I was too young and didn’t know how to love her…”

Time passed minute by minute.

The little mermaid’s eyelids gradually drooped, his voice became lighter and lighter, and the pages of the book in his hand reached the end.

“I’m going home today too… the road is long and very difficult…”

He yawned, finally couldn’t hold on any longer, put down the book, and fell into a deep sleep against the corner.

Four hours later, the staff waiting outside finally led people to pry open the vault door that was locked by the system.

At the moment he broke into the room, he saw Gu Xi in the corner holding the little mermaid with his head down and half of his chest stained with blood.

Without exaggeration, the staff’s heart skipped a beat at that time.

He raised his hand to block the soldiers behind him, walked carefully to Gu Xi’s side, and whispered:

“Marshal, you…?”

“Don’t speak,” Gu Xi didn’t look up, but said in a low voice, “get out, you’re noisy to him.”

The staff took a quick look at the deep tooth mark on Lin Xiaodong’s neck and the pale face with eyes tightly closed. He opened his mouth and finally plucked up the courage to say: “Marshal, this is not your fault. The information department just reported that all brain bugs in the galaxy have died within an hour. To be able to do this, it can only be done by impacting the mother bug with mental power hundreds of times more than a normal human in a short time…”

After saying this in one breath, he closed his mouth and silently saluted the little mermaid lying in Gu Xi’s arms.

Although there was no order, the soldiers behind the staff also raised their hands in tacit understanding.

Although they were not parasitized by brain bugs, they also had families, friends, and people they cared about and loved. They had all witnessed how much the Marshal had endured in secret these days and how much Lin Xiaodong had sacrificed for humanity.

Unfortunately, things cannot always be perfect.

Gu Xi stayed in the room alone for a long time.

the man was silent, and slowly picked up the book “The Little Prince” that fell on the ground with his human hands that had returned to normal.

On the pages of the book, the red that was not yet completely dry seemed to sting his eyes.

But he still forced himself, like self-torture, to stare fixedly at the illustration of the little prince returning to his planet, until his fingers trembled slightly because he couldn’t hold on.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have taken Lin Xiaodong away from the Mermaid Star in the first place.

No, if only they had never met.

Gu Xi thought of the desperate tears on the little mermaid’s face after hearing that the Mermaid Star was destroyed. He suddenly gave a low laugh, hugged the cold body in his arms tightly, and asked in a hoarse voice: “You’re just home, aren’t you?”

The little prince returned to the star that belonged to him.

That star is in the distant universe, with flowers and grass on it, green water and blue sky, and many many beautiful mermaids.

At that time, will he still think of me?

Gu Xi asked himself.

He didn’t know the answer.

Because from today, the one and only rose belonging to him has withered in his arms forever.

“Host 68711 task completed, exited the world, requesting to connect to headquarters.”

“Connection progress 10%, 20%, 30%… connection successful.”

“Detecting the physical and mental state of the host…”

“Detection progress 10%, 20%, 30%… detection completed. Host physical and mental state meets the standards, approved to enter the next world.”

…

…………

“Eh,” Lin Xiaodong was a bit strange, “why is there no broadcast to clear memory this time?”

System: “This is an optional item in the first place. It’s mainly because those hosts would have some psychological problems more or less after the previous tasks were over, so the headquarters set the default to clear memory in our program.”

Lin Xiaodong understood and was a bit proud: “That means my psychological quality is strong and I don’t need this function, right?”

“No,” the system said slowly, “it’s because your skin is thick enough.”

Lin Xiaodong: “……”

Just as he was about to roll up his sleeves and have a war of words with the system for three hundred rounds, he suddenly heard someone say to him: “Miss, let me light your cigarette.”

“Oh.” Lin Xiaodong instinctively replied.

He sat in the seat and leaned over according to the other party’s hand-raising action.

A match lit up with a “swish,” and the somewhat pungent smell of tobacco spread between his lips and teeth, making him instinctively cough a few times.

“Take it easy.”

The man hurriedly nodded and bowed to apologize to him, and his gaze swept across Lin Xiaodong’s bulging chest when he lowered his head, and then quickly pulled down the rickshaw’s canopy before being noticed by other people on the street, and turned around to pull the rickshaw.

“Miss, sit tight, we’ll be home soon!”

Lin Xiaodong leaned on the soft seat, thinking for a moment with a cigarette in his mouth.

…Always feel like something is wrong.

After a while, he finally reacted, slapped his thigh, and said in horror: “Damn, what did this guy call me just now? Miss!?”

The system gave a heavy cough, seemingly reminding him, but the flat voice sounded a bit gloating no matter how it sounded: “Don’t spread your legs, remember to be a bit lady-like, you’re wearing a cheongsam now.”

Lin Xiaodong’s unbridled actions instantly stiffened.

With a wooden face, he looked down at his body and was numb.