"Chop, chop, chop…"
Ye'er swiftly sliced a tomato into thin pieces and gathered them onto a plate. He looked down at 015 floating beside him. "You try."
015 nodded solemnly and took the kitchen knife. But the instant it brought the blade down, a spark flashed from its mechanical arm, throwing off the angle. The tomato went rolling straight into the sink.
"S-sorry."
It stammered, and a crying expression refreshed on its screen.
"The new battery works very well, but the circuitry is still badly aged. It leaks electricity from time to time… I can't perform precise operations."
Ye'er had found 015 outside his door a year ago. The silly little machine had used the last sliver of its battery to help him find his keys, crackling all the while as it wished him a pleasant night, completely unaware that it was on the verge of being scrapped.
Ye'er's heart had softened, so he picked it up and brought it home.
But 015 was a model that had been obsolete for years, and there was nowhere to even begin repairing it. All Ye'er could do was keep it plugged in and see whether it could restart its own program. After charging for an entire month, it had suddenly woken up.
"Forget it."
Ye'er picked up the tomato and rinsed it. His wet fingers tapped 015 on the metal head. "The fact that you can still move at all is already a miracle."
"I'll replace your chip next month. I asked the shop owner to keep an eye out for a new one."
He efficiently finished preparing the ingredients, told 015 to watch the soup, wiped his hands, and left the kitchen.
He had barely sat down on the sofa when the smart-home system gave a soft beep. A huge floating screen projected itself against the wall in front of him.
"Viewing intent detected. Appropriate content has been located for you—"
"Huge sale! Massive markdown! The female-slave exchange will be launching a New Year discount event on the third of this month!"
Ye'er looked confused for an instant, then understood and did not know whether to laugh or cry.
This overly sensitive intelligent system must have picked up the audio from outside his door and decided that it was "content he was interested in."
The projection was still playing. Unlike the advertisement, which had shown only photographs, this was comprehensive footage shot inside the exchange. It displayed the female Zergs about to be auctioned from every angle so buyers could inspect them for fraud, illness, and the like.
There was nothing else he particularly wanted to watch anyway, so Ye'er reluctantly kept looking.
"Everyone, look. This is the largest training room in the exchange. It's equipped with specialized apparatus…"
Ye'er had never imagined it would be this kind of content. For a moment, he froze.
The camera kept moving, taking in the entire chaotic scene. It even repeatedly adjusted the focus to magnify details, showing absolutely no restraint.
His brows knitted tightly at once. Turning his head aside, he spoke in a rare cold tone. "Turn it off. I don't want to watch anymore."
The smart-home system responded to his voice. Yet just before the image vanished, the camera suddenly switched angles, and a familiar flash of gold crossed one corner of the screen.
The image jolted violently, as though something had been kicked hard to the ground and had knocked the camera askew with it. Amid the sound of a body hitting the floor came a hoarse, muffled grunt—
The next second, the projection went dark.
Wait. Just now, was that…?
Ye'er remembered that fleeting glimpse. A strange sense of familiarity rose in his chest, and he could not help frowning. He hesitated, uncertain whether to keep watching.
The red indicator on the smart-home system flashed. With spectacularly poor timing, it beeped again.
"Elevated hormone levels and accelerated heartbeat detected. Determined that viewing intent remains. Reopening livestream for you."
Ye'er: "…" Why did it have to be this smart?
The moment the projection came back on, a sharp whistle of displaced air tore past his ears, followed by the solid crack of a steel rod coming down.
"I told you to dodge! I told you to dodge… A cheap female like you really gets itchy if he goes one day without a beating!"
Ye'er's pupils contracted sharply.
His gaze involuntarily followed the angle of the falling rod downward and met a pair of eyes suppressing intense pain.
Golden, beastlike eyes filmed with involuntary tears from the pain, but holding not the slightest trace of fear or retreat—
It was the female Zerg he had just seen in the advertisement at his door.
Unlike the cropped upper-body photograph, the female Zerg in the footage had been forced into complete exposure, every detail nearly visible under the high-definition camera.
He had soft white hair, though it was now disheveled from rolling across the floor.
The vivid contrast of scarlet, white, and molten gold was beautiful and striking, spread across broad expanses of pale honey-colored skin. The body beneath was full, powerful, and harmoniously built, like a mature snow leopard—agile, fierce, and dangerous.
Ye'er stared fixedly at the scene on screen, his fingertips tightening without his realizing until they left crescent-shaped pink marks in his palms.
"…Oh? You still dare fight back?! Then don't even think about getting food or water for the next month!"
Ye'er's Adam's apple moved. At last, he could not bear it and bent over, retching violently.
"Beep! Obvious distress detected. Mosaic censorship has been enabled for you."
The next second, his vision blurred as the entire projection filled with mosaic blocks. Even the sound was muted, swallowed by the north wind battering the windows.
"Aaaah, what happened? I suddenly heard an alarm!"
015 hurriedly floated out of the kitchen, expressions flickering chaotically across its small screen with anxiety.
Ye'er choked after retching and coughed for quite a while before calming down. In a slightly hoarse voice, he said, "I'm fine."
In the three years since arriving here, he had basically learned the Zerg language and all the common knowledge of their society.
But until today, those things had been nothing but dry words to him, with no sense of reality at all.
His psychological resistance to this unfamiliar world had raised a wall around his emotions, automatically filtering out anything too absurd or unacceptable.
The scene just now had been like a needle puncturing a vacuum-sealed balloon—
No matter how similar the surface might look, this was a nonhuman species and a nonhuman society, saturated with an inhuman kind of distortion and cruelty. Fanaticism and coldness stood at two irreconcilable extremes.
Caught between them, he was an outsider through and through.
Ye'er could not name what he felt.
There was anger, there was disgust, but more than anything there was the helplessness of a mayfly drowning beneath a boundless forest canopy.
It was like the first time he had opened his eyes here and seen a military female spread his hideous bone wings across the sky, blotting out the heavens.
In the end, Ye'er could hold on to nothing, and he could change nothing.
"Bubble, bubble—"
The sound of boiling suddenly came from the kitchen. 015 gave a cry and rushed back in, followed by a clatter of frantic activity.
Ye'er sat lost in thought for a moment. After gathering his emotions, he followed to help.
By the time the mess in the kitchen had been dealt with, the livestream projection outside had detected that no one was watching and automatically closed itself.
Night had fallen completely. The living room was silent, like a dim, cold house made of snow.
*
A month passed quickly, and the end of the year drew near.
Heavy snow fell all day.
After dinner, 015, still thinking about its new chip, began dropping not-so-subtle hints to Ye'er. One moment it carried his coat to the sofa and ironed it; the next it rolled his fluffy white scarf into a neat bundle…
Once that was done, it began circling his feet and sweeping the floor with loud clanks, as if terrified Ye'er might fail to notice.
Ye'er, who had wanted to laze around a little longer, sighed and closed the book in his hand. "All right, all right. I'm going now."
He picked up the down jacket beside the sofa, tidied himself up in a few quick motions, and left under 015's intensely hopeful gaze.
The sky was pitch black. The snow outside had lightened slightly, but the temperature was much lower than the day before, and the howling wind kept worming its way inside his scarf.
The shop was fairly far away. Ye'er hesitated, then decided to take a shortcut.
Going straight through the black market in this district would halve the distance. It was his first time crossing it at night, but city patrol machines operated around the clock, and male Zergs were closely monitored. There should not be any trouble.
The black market had already closed. Every storefront along the way was tightly shuttered. Only old streetlamps cast pools of amber light, and Ye'er's boots squeaked against the snow.
Bang—!
The back door of a building not far ahead suddenly flew open. A blurred dark figure was thrown out, followed by several more figures.
"The order from above is to kill him outright, cut him into a few pieces, and dump them in the garbage lot. Finish beating him, then get it done!"
Ye'er's brows drew together slightly. Then he lowered his eyes, buried his face in his scarf, and resolved to carry the role of an accidental passerby through to the end.
But the alley was narrow. If he wanted to pass, he had no choice but to approach the scene of violence. The closer he came, the clearer the figures became, and he could feel several vicious gazes landing on him.
Ye'er quickened his steps. But with one accidental glance from the corner of his eye, he suddenly caught a dull flash of pale gold.
Wait… gold?
As a possibility occurred to him, Ye'er's eyes widened slightly and his heart inexplicably missed a beat.
He looked over. Under the dim light of the streetlamp, he finally found a familiar feature within that bloodied, mangled mass—
It really was that female Zerg.
A month was neither especially long nor especially short, yet the female Zerg looked completely different.
He no longer even resembled a Zerg. His entire body was covered in dried blood and filth, with knife cuts, whip marks, and burns layered over one another. There was scarcely a patch of intact flesh left on him.
"…Why aren't you dodging anymore? Weren't you so capable?"
The hard shell around the female Zerg had been smashed apart completely. He no longer had the strength to resist this one-sided beating.
Beneath his disordered hair, his expression was numb and dazed. His golden eyes were dim and cloudy, like the rancid eyes of a fish long dead.
Never had Ye'er understood more clearly—he was dying.
If Ye'er waited a few minutes—no, perhaps only a few seconds—when the next fist fell, this female Zerg would stop breathing and become a lump of rotten flesh beside the trash bins.
Ye'er slowed his pace, but his gaze never wavered from the curled figure on the ground.
"What are you doing? What are you looking at? Mind your own damn business!"
An angry shout rang out. The female Zerg who had been punching until his eyes were bloodshot straightened and glared viciously at Ye'er.
Forget it.
Don't get involved.
There were so many female Zergs. Saving one would change nothing.
Why make trouble for himself?
Every rational thought in his mind leaned overwhelmingly in one direction, yet Ye'er's breathing grew tight without his noticing.
He walked forward step by step, passing within inches of the female Zerg on the ground—
A faint tug pulled at the hem of his down jacket.
He stopped.
Author's Note:
Yeye is actually a little emo, because he's all alone on an alien planet and very lonely, and he's super softhearted. For some reason it reminds the author of an internet image: poor Yeye picking up junk to support the household.jpg. (Strangely fitting QA—
