The top floor of the central hospital was desolate and silent during the night. Apart from the royal private hospital and the military district medical facilities, this was the primary concentration site for M Star’s top-tier medical equipment. Its pricing was something ordinary citizens could never afford, but ever since reaching an agreement with Helin Zhou’s people, he had immediately transferred his grandmother to this hospital.
Malignant brain tumor cell carcinoma the doctor had given him a definitive reply that Grandma could not live past two years, and perhaps four successful surgeries could extend her lifespan by another two years. The risks of the surgery were fifty-fifty, and he had to find the best doctors, provide Grandma with the best conditions, and let Grandma live.
The price was becoming the mental soothing balm for Helin Zhou’s rut cycle, helping him safely navigate through his rut. He didn’t care about these things; the generous remuneration was sufficient to support him in paying upfront for all of Grandma’s medical expenses, making everything worth it.
Having experienced it last time, he could also sense the abnormal fluctuations in Helin Zhou’s pheromones during his rut. Helin Zhou’s beastly nature would be magnified, his combat power was not to be underestimated, and he was uncontrollable. His intelligence probably hovered around the stage of a seven- or eight-year-old child; he could understand speech, and was easy to coax and trick, except… he couldn’t stop. Fortunately, he harbored no aggressiveness toward him and wouldn’t threaten his life.
He reasonably suspected that the cold-hearted, merciless S-class red fox alpha sitting across from him when they signed the contract had concealed something from him. The running dogs around Helin Zhou simply didn’t have a single good egg among them!
And yet, it was normal that anyone capable of matching with him would have some sort of problem; otherwise, he figured that the moment he released his pheromone, he would have long since swelled with lust and burst to his death from drained vitality.
Now that there was no longer any possibility between him and Xiaze Zetian, the little knot in his heart could be considered untied. The process of shattering and reassembling a heart was cumbersome and cruel, yet also fiercely gratifying. Living was already difficult enough; why bother tasting the bitterness of romance? He was destined to be a wild weed blooming amidst thorns, growing freely without needing an alpha, let alone shelter or protection.
Since fate had granted him a chance to survive, he would fight desperately to climb upward and uproot those rats lurking in the gutters who harmed omegas.
The broken streetlamp on the avenue flickered erratically with light and shadow, while crickets and cicadas in the bushes sang tirelessly and relentlessly in chorus. The neon flashing signal lights grew more and more distant, and the late-night breeze in the early evening felt somewhat chilly.
A black-and-purple electric Leopard Harley roared out into the open, its roaring engine piercing through the dark, lonely night. Atop the fluorescent ink-purple helmet, a string of blurred pattern totems revealed the tips of white-gold hair at the edges, and a pair of dark-red pupils focused on the road ahead. A trail of motorcycle exhaust leaked out several meters long, lingering and refusing to disperse for a long time.
Another two crossroads away, the gates of the military academy would come into view, and Shi Yixing tightened his grip on the handlebars, preparing to accelerate.
“Help, let me go, mhm… save… me, HELP!!”
Shi Yixing’s acute rabbit ears twitched, and his sharp gaze narrowed. Estimating the distance of the cry for help to be around 300 meters, discounting a 50-meter margin of error due to obstacle blockages, the actual distance was between 250 and 350 meters where someone was calling for help.
“Buzz-buzz—!” The motorcycle sharply spun its head around, speeding away like a prowling black leopard lunging through the dark night.
At the dead-end of the southern road, an A-class snow wolf omega was being clawed and torn at by four bulky rat-beast beta thugs. Two of them turned around to pull open the door of a Volkswagen sedan, while the remaining two flanked the omega, dragging and hauling him toward the interior of the car.
“Mhm mhm…” The gagged omega shoved and resisted, struggling against the car door crack.
“Damn you, get in!”
Losing patience, a beta delivered a fierce slap that smashed the omega’s head straight into the safety glass, causing him to momentarily lose consciousness which also provided an opportunity for them.
Ten meters away, the blinding white headlights of the motorcycle flashed violently, dazzling the eyes of the several men. The roaring motorcycle horn sounded right at hand: “Weng-weng bang!”
The leopard-type motorcycle reared straight up into the air as the wind tore through eardrums in a whistling roar. The body of the bike smashed into and sent two of the betas flying away, while the remaining two rushed forward to help upon seeing this.
Shi Yixing, clad in tight black training gear, controlled the direction with one hand while abruptly lifting his body from the seat to sweep out a horizontal kick that knocked over one of the men. With a nimble flip and twist of the handlebars, he crashed right into the final remaining beta dead ahead.
Scooping up the panting omega coughing up his tongue from the ground with one hand, he hauled him onto the back seat, his cold, crisp voice neither hurried nor slow: “Xia Mingluo, hold on tight.”
“Weng——!” The engine exhaust smoke choked the recovering betas into a coughing fit.
Hearing the familiar voice, Xiaze Mingluo wrapped his arms tightly around Shi Yixing’s waist and wailed with tear-filled eyes: “I caoh!! My Xingxing darling!! Cough-cough” The fierce wind made it impossible for him to open his eyes, and his pair of white furry wolf ears were plastered flat against his scalp as he clung to Shi Yixing to continue pouring out his grievances.
He shrieked at the top of his lungs: “Damn it, you have no idea, I almost got kidnapped! I was just craving a midnight snack outside the school gates… Those few weasels used some kind of drug on me, leaving me completely drained of strength all over. When we get back, I’m going to have my brother properly investigate and make them pay through the nose!”
“Did you go to see Grandma? Why are you so late today?! Didn’t my brother go pick you up? Holy shit, my snacks—damn those stinking, cheap weasels to hell. All my snacks are gone!!”
Shi Yixing steadily parked the motorcycle beneath the A-building omega dormitory of the military academy, yet the omega clinging to his back showed no intention of letting go.
Xiaze Mingluo tightened his grip around Shi Yixing’s slender waist, reluctant to let go, and spoke in a soft, coaxing tone: “I’m hungry… my snacks are gone.”
“Go on up first, I’ll buy some and send them to you. Send whatever you want to my phone. Go back inside and report what just happened to Brother Tian first.”
Xiaze Mingluo unwillingly released his hold, propping his long legs over to dismount from the bike. One side of his tender, delicate face was swollen high, marked by five gruesome and terrifying bloody claw-marks. Yet the young master, mindful of his pride, hadn’t uttered a single word of pain.
His white windbreaker was zipped all the way to the top, shielding more than half of his face as the chatterbox young master muttered and grumbled: “If I tell my brother, I’m going to get yelled at again.”
Xiaze Mingluo had been pampered and doted on by the Xia family since childhood, and after differentiating into an omega upon reaching adulthood, his family members became even more accommodating and lenient toward him. His absent-minded, chatterbox personality was simple and carefree, and he loved to eat, could eat, and was gluttonous. His crowning achievement alone was being able to single-handedly consume 8 catties of crayfish, 5 catties of boiled fish, and an additional three 6-inch chocolate blueberry cakes.
Yet he was also ambitious and capable, possessing a heaven-sent talent in medical pharmacology. Ranking first in both written examinations and practical operations, he was also the omega among the new batch of recruits who secured a spot in the reserve medical forces the earliest. He stood out as a rising newcomer breaking out of the fiercely competitive medical corps.
With an older brother who was a high-ranking military commander, Xiaze Mingluo as a younger brother was destined to be a high-profile existence from the very moment he enrolled. There were no shortage of alphas around him who wanted to use this connection to cozy up to the Xia family, suck up to him, or court him. Yet for some reason, Xiaze Mingluo simply loved hanging around with Shi Yixing regardless of the occasion.
This also resulted in those high-tier alphas who already looked down on Shi Yixing finding yet another layer of reasons to hate him, adding a fair share of trouble to his plate…
The evening breeze was light, the crescent moon cast a weak, angled ray of light, and the warm street lamps beneath the dormitory building elongated two figures one tall, one short.
Standing on the steps, Xiaze Mingluo reined in his playful, mischievous antics. His gaze drifted off into scattered memories as his tone grew solemn:
“The drug those people used was very familiar 15% Cukexin hallucinogenic agent, 30% Suli麻 paralytic toxin. Those were fine, but the most important thing was that their vehicle carried the scent of the latest purified Nor-milin bacterial strain extracted in the laboratory. There’s no mistake about it; the bacterial strain samples had just passed through my hands for review two days ago. I suspect…”
Through his goggles, Shi Yixing met Xiaze Mingluo’s gaze and took over his words: “You suspect there is a mole at the top of the military.”
“That’s right, and that gang has already taken a step ahead to use it for clinical trials, using it to harm people. The high-tier omegas who have been frequently disappearing lately might be related to this matter.”
Xiaze Mingluo’s voice drifted lowly into the deep curtain of night: “That’s a cancerous tumor that accelerates secondary differentiation. Success lets one break through to the high tier, while failure causes gland mutation, reducing one to nothing more than livestock, or even death.”
The madmen in the interstellar society who pursued high-tier glands were utterly devoid of human conscience. If they truly found a mature and proficient method to break through the limits of their glands, they would once again rake in astronomical fortunes.
Omegas, who were already relatively vulnerable, would inevitably become their targets. Once a B-class omega broke through to become an S-class, their gland could be sold for a sky-high price. An S-class producing another S-class meant rolling interest upon interest—the astronomical profits of low-cost, high-return ventures were built entirely upon a terrifying profit chain piled over the corpses of ordinary people.
The desolate night breeze blew cold enough to chill the spine, and Shi Yixing’s gaze swept blandly across Xiaze Mingluo’s slightly swollen, red cheek. Gripping the motorcycle handlebars tightly, the engine hummed to life: “Go back to your dorm first, remember to tell Brother Tian, I’ll be right back.”
“Weng, weng!”
“So noisy, who the hell is it in the middle of the night?! Can’t people sleep?!”