It was not especially late yet, and the hospital was brightly lit.
The female Zerg had already been taken inside for surgery. Ye'er, who followed after getting out of the vehicle, was led by a sub-female nurse to pay the fees. All sorts of miscellaneous bills and forms were stuffed into his pocket.
Ye'er looked at the papers, then at his account balance, and sighed.
Picking up one female Zerg was expensive. If this kept up, the balance on his optical terminal really would hit bottom.
"If you thought it was too expensive, you shouldn't have beaten him that badly in the first place… He's already in the operating room. We don't even know whether he'll survive…"
The female Zerg printing his forms at the window suddenly spoke under his breath. Light from the floating optical display reflected in his eyes, and his rims were actually faintly red.
The sub-female beside him nudged him under the desk, hinting that he should stop talking nonsense. If a male Zerg took offense, nothing good would come of it. The female Zerg bit his lower lip and fell silent.
Ye'er looked up at him, then casually stuffed the paperwork into his pocket.
"I picked him up on the road. I don't even know his name."
After saying that, he followed the nurse away without looking back at the female Zerg's expression.
*
The female Zerg had already been pushed into the operating room. The red light above the door came on. Ye'er pinched the bridge of his nose and sat in a chair nearby.
Before long, a medical worker hurried over and whispered nervously, "Your Excellency, you may wait in the private reception room. We've already prepared—"
"Thank you, but there's no need."
Ye'er turned his head and stared at the tightly closed door. His voice was very soft. "Let me sit by myself for a while."
From passing through the black market, to finding the female Zerg, to arriving here, only a few dozen minutes had passed. Now the rush of blood in his veins was receding, and with it the inexplicable impulse that had seized him. Reason gradually took control again.
A momentary impulse did not seem enough to explain what he had just done, yet he could not find any deeper motive or purpose either.
Neither when he saw the advertisement nor when the livestream disgusted him had he ever thought of buying the female Zerg.
Part of that was psychological resistance. He could not accept the buying and selling of living beings.
The other part was that he had transmigrated here. He did not understand the mechanism behind it. If he could suddenly arrive in this world, perhaps one day he might suddenly return. He was not suited to forming an intimate bond with anyone.
…Forget it.
Ye'er interlaced his fingers and pressed them to his brow, breathing in deeply.
Let the female Zerg recover in the hospital, then tell him to find work and support himself.
There was no need to take him home or create any unnecessary relationship. Ye'er could simply treat it as one act of courage in helping a stranger.
…
Five hours later, the female Zerg was transferred to a regular ward.
Ye'er followed and immediately saw him lying naked on the hospital bed.
The full, resilient lines of the female Zerg's body rose and fell like mountain ridges, carrying a gentle softness even in stillness. The crisscrossing wounds had stopped bleeding, but exposed bright red flesh and white bone beneath, looking horrifyingly savage.
"Why isn't he covered with a blanket?"
Ye'er frowned. Remembering the humiliated shame on the female Zerg's face during the livestream, he drew the curtain around the bed, blocking any possible view from outside.
A female Zerg doctor stood inside the ward. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and rimless glasses, and was checking data on the instruments. Hearing Ye'er, he looked over apologetically.
"It was only for ease of observation… I'm sorry, Your Excellency. I failed to consider that you might already be tired of seeing this female slave's body."
Ye'er's movements paused. He found the comment inexplicable. "Don't make unnecessary assumptions. He isn't my female slave."
"He isn't?"
The doctor asked in confusion. "But your information has already been entered into his collar. He is indeed your female slave."
Ye'er looked even more baffled. "I picked him up on the road. I never entered any…" information.
Wait. The collar?!
A bad feeling struck him, and Ye'er nearly sucked in a sharp breath.
He had indeed touched the collar around the female Zerg's neck, but he had given up after failing to find an opening. Could it automatically identify and record information?!
He woke his optical terminal and began searching entries about slave collars and female slaves.
"If a male Zerg strokes once around the collar, it is regarded as confirmation of registration. A female slave whose collar has recorded a male Zerg's information belongs to and owes loyalty to that Male Lord for life… The male Zerg is responsible for providing basic conditions for survival and must neither abandon nor abuse the slave…"
Ye'er skimmed it quickly and finally understood one thing—
The female Zerg he had rescued had, through an absurd chain of accidents, already become bound to him. And the term of that bond was the ridiculously casual phrase "for life."
It was like some sort of agreement one had to sign when adopting a stray cat or dog.
Ye'er had complicated feelings.
This was completely opposite to his plan to let the female Zerg leave.
The doctor standing nearby looked up at him. "If Your Excellency doesn't want to spend too much effort on him, that's fine too. You've already done everything anyone could reasonably expect by bringing him to the hospital. You can leave the rest to us."
"Leave it to you?" Ye'er caught a strange implication and frowned. "What does that mean?"
"Once daylight comes, or once this female Zerg wakes up, just drive him out and let him fend for himself. If you don't want him, a hospital isn't a charity. Naturally we can't keep a severely wounded female slave here."
The doctor smiled indifferently and tucked his pen into the pocket of his white coat. "That's how it's always handled."
"Besides—whether I'm speaking from the hospital's standpoint or my own, I don't recommend that Your Excellency take him home."
The doctor's smile faded slightly. Looking at the unconscious female Zerg on the bed, he said in a low voice, "Because he's already ruined."
"This female Zerg has severe inflammation and infection in both eyes. His right eye is nearly blind. The bone wings on his back were torn out by the roots; the bases are completely necrotic, and the area of trauma is enormous. Both legs were shot through by bullets containing stellar dark matter, and afterward they were completely broken. The left leg is a little less severely injured than the right, but it will still be very difficult for him to stand again. Those are the major injuries. There are many other wounds, large and small…"
The horror and suffering in those words seemed to acquire weight, pressing heavily on the listener's heart. Ye'er tightened his lips and stared at the female Zerg's brows, still furrowed with endured pain.
By the end, even the doctor, who was accustomed to seeing all manner of injuries, showed pity and sighed.
"The most dangerous thing is that during surgery I noticed signs that he may have been subjected to illegal biological experiments… He has already lost most of his self-healing ability."
A female Zerg's natural physical advantage was his terrifying regenerative capacity. It allowed them to survive for long periods on the battlefield, and also made it easier for them to endure all kinds of torment from male Zergs.
"He should have died back there. It was only because Your Excellency picked him up that he managed to cling to life for this little while longer. Beyond that… there is nothing more the hospital can do."
It was effectively a death sentence.
The ward fell utterly silent. Outside, the wind and snow grew fiercer, pounding against the glass as cold seeped in through every crack.
A sharp crack came from Ye'er's knuckles as he clenched them, jolting him back to himself. "There's really nothing that can be done?"
He had not intended to involve himself this deeply at first, but after going to such effort to save him, anyone would be unwilling to simply watch him die now.
Besides, through sheer accident, the female Zerg had been marked with Ye'er's information and become his "property"—and therefore his responsibility.
The doctor considered for a moment. His gaze swept over Ye'er, and he suddenly said, "There is one method. I can't promise a cure, but it might at least let him live longer… though it requires Your Excellency's cooperation."
*
Aside from the enormous sex-based differences in Zerg society, two other important reasons had shaped its social structure.
First, female Zergs entered estrus at regular intervals every year. Without the soothing effect of male Zerg pheromones, their bodies would gradually deteriorate. The process was irreversible; simply enduring it was useless.
Second, a female Zerg's mental power began to destabilize not long after adulthood. The older he became, the worse the disorder grew. Without a male Zerg's mental guidance, it could develop into a full riot, ending in death amid extreme agony.
Synthetic pheromones and substitutes for mental power existed, but the soothing effect of a male Zerg remained the strongest and purest. It was irreplaceable.
"Our tests just showed that this female Zerg is already in the late stage of a mental-power riot."
The doctor's suggestion was, "You can give him one session of mental guidance to delay the collapse of his mental landscape."
"You're a little unfamiliar with it? That's fine. Mental guidance is an innate ability of every male Zerg. You don't need to worry. I doubt this female slave's condition can get much worse anyway."
"All right…" Ye'er looked at the female Zerg on the bed, his expression becoming serious. "I'll do my best."
He sat sideways on the bed, closed his eyes, and reviewed everything he knew about mental power.
…
[Your rank is D, and your mental-power activity is not ideal.]
The worker responsible for the test had looked disappointed and shaken his head at the various Zerg waiting outside.
Male Zergs were indeed precious, but the upper classes had no shortage of one mediocre D-rank male.
After that, more than half the Zergs who had hovered around his hospital bed disappeared. Not a single aristocratic family showed further interest in recruiting him.
…
[When mental power is relatively scarce, guidance should avoid spreading over too wide an area. Learn to feel with your heart and search for the "eye" of the mental landscape.]
A D-rank male Zerg did not have enough mental power to sustain complicated guidance. The instructor who had taught Ye'er how to use his mental power had only explained the general method and had never allowed him to practice it.
[It's very simple. It's like brushing dust from the edge of a blade and revealing a beautiful flash of light… In that instant, you'll understand.]
…
What Ye'er had never told any Zerg was this—there was no mental landscape inside his mind at all, meaning there was nowhere for his mental power to be stored.
But when he calmed himself and tried to gather mental power, it would appear from nowhere as though answering a summons, docile and eager to be used by him.
Invisible fluctuations spread outward like ripples from a stone dropped into water. Tens of thousands of threads of mental power wound around his fingertips.
Ye'er closed his eyes and touched a finger to the female Zerg's brow, attempting to enter his mental landscape—
He opened his eyes amid the howl of wind.
The sky hanging overhead held neither stars nor moon, only a darkness too dense to dissolve.
He stood in a vast, desolate snowfield. Everywhere he looked, there was nothing but raging wind and blizzard, panicked and bleak.
A mental landscape reflected the strength of its owner's mental power. The broader the landscape, the stronger the mental power.
This place was empty, but its sheer scale was enough to show how terrifyingly powerful the female Zerg's mental power had once been.
"But… why snow?"
Ye'er struggled through snow up to his knees, like a tiny fish swimming upstream against a river rushing backward, nearly swallowed by the storm.
"Because he almost died in the snow? Did fear get projected into his mental landscape and create this blizzard-covered wasteland?"
He drew in a breath of icy air, his thoughts suddenly clear.
No. That was not it.
At the instant their mental powers blended, he had indeed felt fear, but it made up only a small part. There was firelike anger, a faint and pervasive sorrow, silent and restrained hatred… all kinds of emotions painted in heavy strokes, surging over him like waves.
A female Zerg with such an immense mental landscape could not possibly be weak. At the very least, fear alone would not drive him toward self-destruction. There seemed to be some other reason for the riot.
That also meant finding the landscape's "eye" would be extraordinarily difficult.
Clang!
A piece of metal flew away under his foot.
Ye'er realized he had walked into a field of ruins.
Steel bars, boards, glass… all jutted at crooked angles from the snow. Buildings seemed to have once stood here.
He walked and stopped, searching for a long time. Then, the instant he raised his head, an unusual color caught his eye.
A faded strip of red cloth hung from a length of exposed rebar. A round piece of metal was tied to its end and swayed in the wind.
By the weak light from the sky, Ye'er barely made out an ear of wheat and a pair of wings engraved upon it—
It was actually a rusted medal.
Ye'er stared at that medal for a long time. Suddenly he understood that the bloodied, humiliated pride he had sensed belonged to a warrior who had once fought desperately on battlefields, only to fall miserably to this state afterward.
He could feel that the "eye" of the mental landscape was inside this medal.
But like its owner, the "eye" had already gone blind. It represented past glory and memories. It represented everything that had now been utterly destroyed.
It would be buried in these ruins together with the past.
Whether he removed it, repaired it, or destroyed it, none of those actions would affect the owner anymore. The collapse and destruction were irreversible. The female Zerg would undoubtedly die.
No. Maybe there was another way…
[Finding the landscape's "eye" is one method of awakening the owner from outside. There is another method: make the lost owner develop self-awareness and a desire to survive, so that he struggles to wake himself.]
The cold words from the textbook seemed to acquire a voice and sound in his ears.
Ye'er looked across the distant wasteland. At the far edge of sight, he could vaguely make out the rise and fall of mountains, merging gently into the heavy black night.
It took him a long time to climb that mountain.
The summit was ravaged by wind and snow, but the view was broader. From there he could easily take in the entire plain, including the ruins and the fluttering red ribbon above them.
With a thought, Ye'er transformed and condensed his mental power into the shapes he wanted. Soon several thick wooden planks and a few simple tools appeared on the snow.
He picked up a long plank and planted it into the snow, then fitted the pieces together like building blocks. After a stretch of hammering and knocking, a small wooden cabin took shape beneath his hands.
The cabin was only slightly taller than he was. With limited materials, it was crude, but it stood firmly on the ground, unafraid of the violent wind and snow.
The core of mental power forming his body had already begun to throb faintly. The longer one remained inside another's mental landscape, the greater the discomfort and even injury.
Ye'er acted as though he did not notice. His long fingers never stopped moving as he quickly carved and joined something. Only after quite a while did he finally finish. Then he bent down—
And hung a lamp in the little cabin's window.
The mental power flowing through his body condensed into a sphere of light, which he pressed into the lamp's round belly.
A thin warmth melted the snowstorm's chill. The small, round halo of pale yellow light looked like a newborn hedgehog curled into itself.
Earlier, Ye'er had made a decision on the female Zerg's behalf. But whether he could ultimately wake up still depended on the female Zerg himself.
"Try hard to find your way. Wake up…"
Ye'er squeezed out the last of his mental power and poured it into the lamp, ensuring that it would remain bright for a long time. Only then did he finally relax and stop resisting the mental landscape's powerful rejection.
The body formed from mental power gradually dissolved. He closed his eyes and sank completely into darkness.
…
No one knew how long passed.
At last, the raging storm across the snowfield began to ease. The lamp that had been rattling against the window frame stopped swaying.
Through the glass, a finger cautiously touched the warm ball of light.
The black night sky began to crack apart inch by inch.
Daylight burst into being.
Author's Note:
Yeye: Big light bulb installed. Check mark.
P.S. The doctor is actually pretty decent. He just comes across as a little cold and ruthless, w—
