SGT CH219

Such formidable mental power: across the entire Zerg race, there was only one bug.

Mental power originating from His Majesty the Zerg Emperor forcefully hauled him back from the sea of death.

Mental threads wove through the void, linking together his shattered psychic fragments, forcibly propping up his collapsed mental realm once more.

…

He was detained in the most heavily fortified detention center on the Capital Star.

Awaiting him was the verdict of the Capital Star’s Supreme Court.

X harbored zero anticipation toward the trial’s outcome.

If it were in the past, he might have hoped the court would uncover everything, exposing the Prince’s atrocities.

Yet now… his cub was dead, the Prince was dead, and nothing mattered anymore.

He only awaited the arrival of death.

Awaiting an opportunity to end his own life.

The Prince’s death was an established fact; even with the Zerg Emperor’s arrival, it could not be altered.

He had already suffered a critical injury once before, his body severely damaged.

If carefully nursed, breaking through again in the future might have compensated for the deficit.

Yet there was no longer any chance…

Even with the Zerg Empire possessing the apex of medical technology, they could not pull a frail male back from the brink of death twice.

Meanwhile, inside the detention facility, X remained submerged in nightmares day and night.

The Prince’s voice and smile surfaced before his eyes again and again, at times overlapping with the face of the little male in his memories, leaving him all the more disoriented and in excruciating torment.

“X-gege…”

The Prince called to him, coughing bloody froth, eyes brimmed with tears.

“X-gege~”

The little male sprinted toward him with open arms, his smile sweet.

Yet in the blink of an eye, it shifted back into the Prince’s resolute, blood-stained face.

The Prince lifted his arms to loop around his neck, whispering in a feeble dying breath beside his ear:

“You come… to die with me.”

Time and again, X jolted awake from nightmares, only to plunge into even deeper horrors, trapped in an inescapable recursive loop.

During his detention, the Marshal visited once.

X did not know how to face the Marshal.

Marshal Shi’an was the superior who had personally nurtured and promoted him, and also the Prince’s cifu…

He had murdered a cifu‘s cub.

He should have been prepared to be executed by that cifu.

X lowered his head, waiting.

Without the slightest thought of resistance.

Marshal Shi’an’s fury and anguish were starkly visible.

His fingers dug into his palms almost to the point of drawing blood, yet he forcefully restrained himself from striking.

The only thing capable of making a cifu endure beneath the agonizing loss of his child was something equally vital.

The truth.

The Zerg Emperor had propped up X’s shattered mental realm with psychic power, which alone hung onto his life, keeping him alive to this day.

Even so, his mental state was in catastrophic ruin.

If Shi’an struck, he wouldn’t survive a single blow.

Shi’an had read his medical examination report.

Before a suspect was locked in the detention center, they had to undergo a comprehensive physical examination and basic medical treatment.

The physicians had discovered a deceased insect egg inside X’s body.

It was the Prince’s bloodline…

X adamantly refused to let anyone remove the egg.

Even if it was a dead egg stripped of all vital signs.

He seemed to believe that as long as the insect egg remained within his flesh, he could stay with his cub forever.

If an afterlife or another world existed, his child could be reincarnated into his womb once more.

This was a female who had already gone mad.

Under the prerequisite of losing a cub, nothing a female did could be considered surprising.

Shi’an wanted to ask him “why.”

Yet seeing X’s posture of refusing all communication and merely seeking a swift death, he understood that words were futile.

In the end, he merely left behind a dossier for him to read himself.

X originally had no desire to look.

The agony in his brain made reading a grueling chore.

Yet, as if driven by an unseen hand, he picked up the dossier after the Marshal departed.

He had assumed it documented the investigation into his assassination of the Prince.

Yet when he opened it, what first met his eyes was an entirely different incident.

A male from the Russell family drugging someone at the Second Prince’s banquet.

It clearly recorded how the male obtained the narcotic, how it was slipped into the wine bottle, and how Major General X was made to drink it.

And following that, the male stalking Major General X, only to be driven away by the Prince’s psychic power.

And X boarding the Prince’s shuttle…

Included within was even surveillance footage.

Not only from the banquet.

But also inside the shuttle.

X’s face had paled upon reading the beginning; the further he read, the more bloodless his visage became, hands and feet turning ice-cold.

He dared not even play the video.

Yet spurred by an overwhelming compulsion, he tapped it open anyway.

It was footage from inside the shuttle.

The Prince, who had not yet undergone his physiological awakening, sat upon the sofa.

Looking more youthful than the version he knew.

His features were tenderer, softer, and bore an even closer… resemblance to that other male buried deep in his memory.

“Si… Si…”

Darkness swept across X’s vision, the world spinning out of control.

How could this be?

How could they look so identical?

An entirely different temperament and expression, yet brimming with a visceral, suffocating familiarity.

The Prince called him “X-gege.”

The safehouse razed to the ground, the little male vanishing beneath the artillery fire…

The one commanding the Zerg army into the Dark Star Region had been Marshal Shi’an, the Prince’s cifu.

The Dark Star Region was incorporated into the Zerg Empire, rechristened White Night Star.

The Prince was the feudal lord of White Night Star.

A territory newly annexed, steeped in chaos, lawlessness, and violence, should never have been handed to the Empire’s most exalted heir.

It was the Prince who had proactively chosen the Dark Star Region as his fief…

Him being drugged was fundamentally none of the Prince’s concern.

Yet the Prince had intervened to save him…

The video continued to play.

In the footage, he proactively drew close to the Prince, resting his head against the Prince’s boot.

Under the scorching fever of estrus, he tugged open his collar, releasing pheromones ceaselessly.

The overwhelming density of an S-grade female’s pheromones triggered the Prince’s physiological awakening.

Drawn in turn by the pheromones of the male’s awakening, he trailed upward along the boots, climbing over the male’s neck amidst the male’s desperate struggles.

“X! What are you doing? Do you know who I am?!”

In the recording, the Prince’s furious shout caused the female’s dazed, unfocused gaze to coalesce for a fleeting instant.

And jolted the X watching outside into sudden, horrifying realization.

“Si Si! Si Si!”

The deduction in his mind grew ever sharper, sharp enough to tear his sanity apart.

The moment he kissed the Prince’s lips in the recording… X’s mental realm collapsed entirely.

Suspects in the detention facility were placed under strict, round-the-clock surveillance.

As the murderer of the imperial heir and an SS-grade, X was subjected to comprehensive room monitoring.

Countless guards scrutinized his every movement without a second of laxity.

Even military battalions were deployed on standby.

The second signs of a mental rampage surfaced, reports were escalated through the chain of command immediately.

The Zerg Emperor was alarmed late in the night.

The Zerg Emperor arrived, his psychic power descending like a firmament.

Psychic fragments shattered nearly into ash were forcibly bound back together by ultra-precise mental threads.

“Please let me die…”

X pleaded.

The Zerg Emperor let out a cold snort, forcefully hauling him back from the sea of death a second time.

Without a shred of mercy.

As though even death had become an unattainable luxury.

Inside the quieted cell, only the female’s breath—wheezing like a broken bellows, reeking of blood—could be heard.

Looking down at the female on the floor who had lost every vestige of a will to live, the Zerg Emperor’s expression was complicated.

“I saw certain memories within your mental realm regarding my cub… I am grateful that you saved him in the Dark Star Region back then, granting him shelter and care amidst such lawless chaos.”

“No, no…”

Clutching his head, X dared listen to nothing, agonizingly tortured by the pain.

The Zerg Emperor paused in silence for a moment before pressing on.

“A few days ago, I likewise retrieved a memory from the mind of my late eldest son…”

X choked into silence in an instant, his frame freezing rigid, eyes wide and unblinking.

Only the Zerg Emperor’s voice resonated through the quiet dungeon.

“Those were memories he had treasured for so long, etched so deeply into his marrow that even after consciousness dispersed, they remained preserved within his vessel.”

“Out of the selfish protective instincts of a xiongfu, I held zero desire to share these memories with any bug.”

The Zerg Emperor lowered his eyes, his gaze settling upon him.

“Yet I believe you must know his past, everything he did for you, and… his love for you.”

The Zerg Emperor left that memory behind.

Countless images surfaced within X’s mind.

The young Prince under assassination attack, opening a spatial wormhole with psychic power at the critical juncture; upon waking again, he was inside his underground safehouse.

A strange female’s opening line demanding to be called “cifu“; naturally unwilling, he puffed up his cheeks in temper.

Yet through subsequent days together, he grew more familiar, trusting him, calling out in a sweet, tender voice again and again:

“X-gege~”

“X-gege.”

“X-gege!”

…

“X-gege…”

The little male opened wide, blank, vacant eyes, staring at the empty, abandoned underground safehouse.

“Do you not want Si Si anymore?”

Under the terror and despair of abandonment, his secondary awakening failed.

The searching Zerg military recovered him, returning him to the embrace of his biological cifu.

From within the Marshal’s mecha, the little male looked back at the forest below and the safehouse hidden beneath the earth.

Slowly saying: “Bomb this place… to dust.”

The Marshal, who had miraculously recovered his cub, naturally could never refuse any request of his.

No matter how outrageous the demand.

As long as the Prince wished, he could use star-destroying dreadnoughts to bombard the entire Dark Star Region into cosmic dust.

The artillery fire leveled the entire forest, leaving only a colossal crater.

Everything dissolved in the bombardment, turning to ash.

Failing his secondary awakening, the little male was exceedingly weak, his mental state in utter shambles.

Even forcing himself to be cheerful and comply with treatment so as not to worry his parents, he woke in terror from nightmares night after night.

If the moon shone that night, he would step outside into the moonlight, falling asleep in the garden bathed in lunar glow.

If there was no moon, he stayed awake until dawn.

He took three full years to gradually step out from the shadows of the past, undergoing his secondary awakening once more.

He appeared to have returned to normal.

Yet it was merely “appearing” so.

He buried his heart even deeper, locking his inner world away.

The Dark Star Region was incorporated under Zerg rule, but its long history of occupation by star pirates and outlaws left it despised and unfavored by all.

The Prince proactively requested of the Zerg Emperor that the Dark Star Region become his feudal territory.

The Marshal fiercely opposed, unwilling to let his suffering cub return to that hellish place.

Yet a cifu could never win against his cub.

Under the Prince’s insistence, the Dark Star Region was renamed White Night Star, becoming his fief.

Escorted personally by the Marshal, the Prince arrived at White Night Star.

While studying, the young Prince diligently developed White Night Star, striving to make it a better place.

Certain native residents of the Dark Star Region who had been imprisoned were reinvestigated and retried.

The innocent were released immediately; others, so long as they were not guilty of heinous atrocities, received a chance at redemption.

Males were scarce in the Dark Star Region, and high-ranking males nonexistent.

The Prince personally administered mental soothing for females tortured by mental rampages, as well as select female Tianjia who had joined White Night Star.

Separated by a wall, thick draperies, and layers of sentries, they crossed paths once more.

X sat alone inside the mental soothing chamber.

The Prince in the adjoining room had recognized him the second his psychic senses reached out.

After a protracted pause, he administered mental soothing for him.

…

So long ago, they had already met again.

Divided by merely a single wall, a straight-line distance of less than ten meters.

The little male he longed for day and night had been right next door, conducting mental soothing for him.

Yet he had remained utterly oblivious.

And long after that, at the imperial gala.

X had stood amidst the ranks of mid-tier officers, while the Prince followed behind the Zerg Emperor.

Under the very same sky, separated by merely a few hundred meters.

The Prince had looked toward him.

While he… had eyes for nothing.

The Prince’s memories contained so very many glimpses of him.

Him enlisting in the Zerg military, him heading to the frontlines, his battlefield dispatches, his combat merits, his medals of honor, his mecha, his injuries, his promotions… him donning the epaulets of a Major General.

Him returning to the Capital Star to report for duty.

Him turning down blind dates with noble males.

Him attending the Second Prince’s banquet.

Him getting drugged…

Inside that shuttle, the Prince had been driven into restless panic by his pheromones, triggering his physiological awakening.

He interrogated him, reprimanded him, yet ultimately, tangled in his embrace, plummeted into the sea of desire alongside him.

After the first surging tide of physiological awakening passed, the exhausted Prince buried himself in his arms, falling into deep slumber.

The excruciating agony of a tearing chest woke him; opening his eyes once more, he faced the cruel female piercing clean through his chest.

The Prince’s heart filled with sheer disbelief.

The agony and sorrow of being betrayed once again pooled tears in his eyes.

Right as the heavily armed personal guards outside were on the verge of breaking in.

Summoning his remaining strength, the Prince severed his wings, subduing him before they entered.

…

The X of back then hadn’t understood.

Seeing it from this vantage point now, everything was glaringly clear.

The Prince was saving his life.

The Prince matched him as his cijun and locked him in the underground room.

Even an imperial heir could not enforce genetic matching without a female’s consent under normal law.

Yet their compatibility was staggering.

100% compatibility, virtually unheard of in the cosmos.

This permitted the male to bypass the female’s authorization and complete the matching directly.

He was locked inside a makeshift disciplinary chamber.

While the Prince injected himself with several vitality-depleting emergency stimulants to cling to life, forced himself to settle all subsequent affairs, and finally collapsed into the medical pod for emergency resuscitation.

The Prince fell into a prolonged coma in the ICU, yet forcefully roused himself when the Zerg Emperor and the Marshal arrived, transferred to a standard ward, and spoke with them feigning minor injuries, concealing everything.

Even when the Zerg Emperor was uncharacteristically enraged and the Marshal visibly doubted his words, under his stubborn insistence, they could only drop the matter.

No matter how the Prince feigned minor wounds, his core vitality had been severed; he lay inside a recuperation pod for three whole months before being able to step out.

He compiled every piece of criminal evidence against that drugging male, stacking into a thick dossier.

That evidence was submitted anonymously to the court.

Yet before proceedings could begin, the Russell family suppressed it completely.

Smooth waters, unbroken calm.

Instead, the Russell family launched an investigation behind the scenes to uncover the source of the anonymous tip.

There were far too many ways for high-ranking males to evade culpability.

Especially backed by the formidable Russell family.

Staring at that report, the Prince pondered for an entire night, deciding to act with his own hands.

Pressuring them with his status as imperial heir could have secured a conviction against that male.

Yet having plunged into an extreme psychological state, the Prince had no desire for that.

That night, fireworks bloomed with peerless brilliance.

Detonating across the skies.

Sitting upon the garden swing chair, the Prince watched the breathtaking fireworks across the heavens in utter silence.

A high-ranking male perishing in a shuttle accident triggered massive shockwaves.

Even when investigation findings proved the other had personally brought volatile energy crystals onto the craft, the Russell family remained relentlessly litigious, demanding the Male Protection Association assist in the inquiry.

Serving as the honorary president of the Male Protection Association, the Prince had to personally step up to handle the fallout.

By the time everything thoroughly settled, a month had already slipped away.

The Zerg Emperor was to host an adulthood banquet in the imperial palace in celebration.

The ball at the gala would see an adult male bombarded with dance invitations from countless females.

Having come of age and standing as the guest of honor, the Prince could not gloss it over merely by dancing with his cifu or younger brother.

Wrestling with his thoughts for a long time, he remembered his nominal cijun.

With a tangled heart, he walked down the underground corridor, stepping into that chamber that would ultimately devour his life.

…

Ever since the Prince had been injured, most of his duties—particularly foreign diplomatic affairs—had been transferred to the Second Prince.

The Second Prince sprinted across the universe daily, spinning like a top, while forcing down the urge to flip the table on the Tianjia in choked fury.

Then, he learned of his elder brother’s death.

The Second Prince’s mind went blank for an instant; by the time he reacted, he was already piloting his mecha back alone at top speed.

How could his xiongzhang have died?

Hadn’t he merely sustained “minor injuries”?

Wasn’t it said that he only needed peaceful recuperation to recover?

The Prince fell to an attack; the assailant, X, was held in the detention center awaiting trial, with the Zerg Emperor strictly forbidding any bug from visiting.

It was actually X.

The Second Prince could never have imagined the culprit would be the restrained, reserved Major General X of his memory.

They had served alongside each other, and had even sparred in the combat chambers.

His brother matching Major General X as cijun on the heels of his injury had already puzzled him.

Now, it was completely incomprehensible.

He could not accept this outcome, wanting to confront X personally, demanding reasons and clear answers.

The Second Prince, who had always abided by protocol and listened to the Emperor and Marshal, defied the Emperor’s imperial decree for the very first time, slipping covertly into the detention cells.

He was an S-grade military female and an imperial prince; if he insisted on entering, the guards could hardly stop him.

Yet when the Second Prince reached the cell housing X.

What met him was news of X’s death.

His mental realm had already mostly collapsed back in the Dark Star Region.

After the Prince became the lord of White Night Star, he had soothed his mental realm once.

A single, brief mental grooming session could not mend it completely.

He was a military female, desperate to accumulate merit, throwing himself constantly onto the most hazardous battlefields; his mental realm had long hovered on the brink of disaster.

Across those ten-plus years, he had held on purely through sheer obsession.

Then, struck by the death of the insect egg in his womb, having personally slain the “culprit,” he harbored zero lingering attachments, bent solely on seeking death.

The Zerg Emperor linked his scattered psychic fragments together, forcibly shoring up his collapsed mental realm, compelling him to survive.

Twice.

Yet stitching and piecing together did not equal healing.

The cracks were already carved; each mental breakdown only multiplied their fractures.

At this point, even with mental power as formidable as the Zerg Emperor’s, he was powerless, unable to pull him back again.

Perhaps this was the conclusion he desired.

X committed suicide.

Dying of self-destruction.

…

The case files concerning the Prince and X were sealed by order of the Zerg Emperor.

Yet news of the Prince’s passing sent colossal shockwaves throughout the Empire.

The Prince was the imperial heir, an S-grade male who broke through following physiological awakening; his demise was a catastrophic loss for the entire Zerg civilization.

The populace’s fury could not be quenched; they urgently demanded the truth and severe punishment for the culprit.

Yet the Empire’s unusually discreet handling of the matter fueled public outrage instead.

They could not help suspecting hidden conspiracies.

Conspiracy theories ran rampant.

The spearhead pointed straight at the greatest “beneficiary” of the Prince’s death: the Second Prince.

This severely threatened imperial stability, damaging the Second Prince’s prestige among the citizenry and military ranks.

Foreign powers fanned the flames in the shadows, threatening to escalate matters uncontrollably.

The Empire had already lost one heir; it could not afford to lose a second.

Ultimately, bowing to pressure from all sides, the sealed dossier was declassified and made public.

…

Yet none of that concerned X any longer.

His consciousness had thoroughly sunk into eternal darkness.

Beyond all redemption.