Second Galaxy, Memphis Starport.
Not long after Eros departed, a massive vessel sailed into the port. Its pitch-black hull was embossed with the name of the craft: Lutes. Lu Rong quietly watched as his personal flagship docked smoothly at the berth.
The Lutes was a mother-ship-class interstellar carrier with a main starship carrying capacity in the tens of thousands. Combined with countless auxiliary escort vessels, patrol ships, living quarters, and more, it was roughly the size of a large city-state when fully loaded.
Therefore, people often joked that the Lutes was a mobile city of shattered stars. Wherever Lu Rong went, he always carried his shattered star in the palm of his hand.
The Lutes had been hovering in the endless starry sky for a week, constantly waiting for its master to return. Upon receiving the rendezvous order, it had proceeded at full speed, heading straight for Lu Rong.
Lu Rong operated his flyer to dock with the Lutes’s hull and successfully landed. Stepping out of the flyer, he was immediately met by a wave of people. Everyone looked at him anxiously. With a quick glance, Lu Rong saw that not only had the medical department arrived, but the starship guard unit was here as well. Anyone who knew the situation would say he was just coming back; anyone who didn’t would have thought he was leading a fleet off to war.
He froze for a second. “I don’t recall notifying this many people to come.”
The leading woman wore a light blue signal uniform, and the nameplate on her chest displayed her name and position—“Medical Director Shen Danshi.” Her dark green hair was tightly bound behind her head, projecting sharp efficiency. Her gaze swept over Lu Rong like a medical scanner, precisely pinpointing the core issue: “Wasn’t it you who got hurt?”
“Even if it were me, it wouldn’t require this many people,” Lu Rong laughed. “Though I do indeed need some manpower.”
He swept his gaze across the crowd, his eyes landing on a young man at the very back wearing a gray signal uniform. “Niyin, I’ve brought back the Pantheon Astrolabe for you; have someone send it to the lab later. For now, help me activate the medical room in the L5-C3 sector flyer, and prepare a large-scale teleportation device for me.”
Niyin was leaning against the wall. Upon receiving the command, he waved at Lu Rong. “No problem.” A faint light flashed across his grayish-green right eye, transmitting the order instantly.
Afterward, Lu Rong told the rest of the crowd, “Everyone can leave now. I’m fine, don’t worry. Only the medical department needs to stay.”
The crowd greeted Lu Rong one after another before dispersing. After returning their greetings individually, Lu Rong looked at Shen Danshi in front of him. “The patient’s condition might not be very good.”
Shen Danshi nodded slightly, entirely unruffled. “What’s the situation?”
“Have you ever heard of ‘Immortal Flower’?” Lu Rong said as he led Shen Danshi and her most trusted assistant into the flyer. When they saw the scene inside the rear cabin, an absolute silence fell over the interior.
“If I’m not mistaken, is this a Naga?” Shen Danshi even suspected for a moment that she was hallucinating.
“Yes.” Lu Rong confirmed her “hallucination.”
“I had no idea you had such a hobby,” Shen Danshi said with a puzzled tone.
Lu Rong tilted his head slightly. “This clearly isn’t my hobby. We need to get him down first.”
“Of course.” Shen Danshi nodded. She and her assistant, Yu Xiaozhi, had already put on their gloves. During the gap where Lu Rong used a key to unlock the metal cage, the two of them simultaneously deployed medical eyes. The medical eyes flew up steadily, entered the cage, and began an initial examination of Fenie.
“Patient is male, Omega.”
“Species: Naga. Tail length over 8 meters, wingspan 3 meters.”
“Vital signs… hmm…” Yu Xiaozhi calibrated the data while reporting. Then, looking at the vital signs displayed on the terminal, he fell silent. These were clearly not the vital signs a living person should have, and he looked over at Shen Danshi.
Shen Danshi was studying the structure of the chains piercing through the collarbones, frowning. “Clearly, this is a very retro sadist. The mechanism lock is jammed right into the collarbone.”
Lu Rong was carefully observing Fenie. He noticed that Shen Danshi had walked quite close, yet Fenie showed no reaction at all, looking just like a corpse.
Lu Rong couldn’t help asking, “How is he?”
Shen Danshi glanced at the data transmitted by the medical eyes and looked at Lu Rong. “The good news is that his body seems to have fallen into some kind of unexplained hibernation state. The bad news is that he isn’t truly a snake; an Orc’s hibernation represents a state close to death, and it is very likely he will never wake up again. It is similar to being in a persistent vegetative state.”
Lu Rong nodded. “Treatment plan?”
Shen Danshi hesitated, stopping mid-sentence. She thought her phrasing of “vegetative state” was already blunt enough; at this stage, even treatment had lost its inherent meaning. But since Lu Rong asked, her gaze swept across the Naga’s entire shell, and she sighed, “If you are determined to treat him, you will probably need to find a sufficiently large treatment pod first, and we can make decisions on the remaining details after a thorough examination. But it seems we don’t have a treatment pod that large; we might need to stop by a nearby planet to resupply.”
“No need,” Lu Rong slowly walked over to Fenie, looking up at the suspended Naga. “He has already prepared it in advance.”
Shen Danshi: “?”
Getting Fenie down from the golden cage took quite a bit of effort.
Because Fenie’s physique was far too massive, an ordinary person couldn’t lift him, and Lu Rong didn’t want too many people to know about this matter. Therefore, the three of them had to collaborate.
The elevator lifted Lu Rong up behind Fenie. He half-embraced Fenie in his arms to prevent him from falling, while Shen Danshi and Yu Xiaozhi first established a sterile zone centered around Fenie, then used a cutting tool, tweezers, and a scalpel to slowly separate and remove the chains from the flesh bit by bit.
Perhaps because he had stayed at the top of the tower for too long, Lu Rong smelled the scent of ice and snow on Fenie—a very pure, cold aura, the chill of a natural climate, unlike the coolness brought by mint, and carrying no other scent whatsoever. His scent was as clean as a Beta’s. Lu Rong looked at the back of Fenie’s neck, which was obscured by a cascade of snow-white long hair.
Lu Rong guessed that Fenie had already washed away the complete mark he had given him—that inexplicable mark. After all, he was going to enter a political marriage with Gormo. Although it ultimately failed and the consequences were disastrous, at the very beginning, it was unlikely he would go into a political marriage carrying someone else’s mark.
The surgery to untangle the chains lasted for 8 standard cosmic hours. The wings and collarbones, stripped of their chains, were a bloody mess, but Fenie showed no reaction whatsoever; he seemed unable to even feel pain.
Lu Rong held the heavy Fenie, feeling as though a massive boulder had been dropped into his arms. Fenie’s face was pale, his features emaciated, his lips purplish, and his body ice-cold, devoid of a shred of vitality, resembling a sculpture made of plaster.
Shen Danshi and Yu Xiaozhi exchanged glances. Neither of them spoke, but the data in their hands indicated that this was practically the shell of a deceased person.
Lu Rong seemed completely unaware of this. He wrapped the snake tail around his forearm multiple times, adjusted his posture, and stepped off the elevator. Weighing it in his hands and comparing it in his mind, Fenie seemed much lighter than the last time he had carried him.
Niyin had already prepared the teleportation channel, linking it directly into the flyer. Lu Rong carried Fenie directly into the flyer in the L5-C3 sector.
If Fenie were still awake, if he could open his eyes and take a look at this flyer in the L5-C3 sector, he would discover that this flyer actually belonged to him—it was the very one he had left for Lu Rong when the two of them first met.
At this moment, the treatment pod hidden within the medical room was filled with treatment fluid, completely accommodating the dormant Naga.
Lu Rong looked around a place he hadn’t visited in a long time.
It felt both familiar and unfamiliar.
Back then, after Fenie rescued him, when he woke up again, he had also been lying inside a treatment pod just like this one, though that treatment pod was slightly smaller, located at the other end of this flyer. At the time, he hadn’t known it was a treatment pod; he only knew he was completely naked, lying inside a transparent container surrounded by dense liquid, and his open wounds on his abdomen and lower limbs had completely vanished as if they had never existed, fully restored to health.
When he sat up, the transparent cover automatically sensed him and opened the exit. Not far away, a rack happened to hold a set of clean clothes, which looked as though they had been prepared for him in advance.
Lu Rong tried to summon his spiritual beast, but after several attempts, it failed, so he gave up and got up to put on the clothes.
While dressing, Lu Rong noticed that the material of the clothes was quite different from what he usually encountered—thin and soft, yet wearing them didn’t feel cold at all. The style was simple, but also rather uncommon.
Next to that stack of clothes lay a bracelet. Lu Rong couldn’t tell what kind of bracelet it was, but when he picked it up to examine it, the object seemed to automatically recognize something. Before Lu Rong could fully react, it shifted its shape, snapped backward around his wrist, and transformed into a thin, snug layer.
Lu Rong studied it for a few minutes. He couldn’t understand the text displayed on the bracelet, but after his vision flickered several times inexplicably, he gradually began to comprehend those words. For a moment, he couldn’t grasp how he had managed to understand them, but from the information he gathered, he realized that this was a pheromone-suppressing bracelet in front of him.
This bracelet could flexibly control the degree of pheromone release and even had an option for whether or not to receive Omega pheromones. It was much more convenient and intelligent than any bracelet he had encountered before, and it looked as though it would never fall off or experience any accidental malfunctions.
He felt a sense of quiet astonishment inside, wondering where on earth he had fallen and who had rescued him. With his doubts, he looked around and promptly discovered that he was on a peculiar craft that appeared to be a flyer.
Just like the suppressor from a moment ago, the technological level of this thing seemed to exceed that of Asta Star.
Moreover, although Lu Rong didn’t know how long he had been unconscious, his previous gut-wrenching wounds clearly couldn’t have healed from just a nap—the medical level here was also astonishing.
He had numerous guesses in his heart, yet no idea how to verify them. He walked a short distance down the corridor after exiting; the wind and snow outside the flyer’s window had stopped, and the snowy hue made the world desolate and unfamiliar. It was nighttime, and the starry sky was brilliant.
When suppressing the civil unrest on Asta Star, Lu Rong had been to many places on the planet and remembered the star chart of Asta’s night sky. Staring for a moment at the tranquil starry sky before him, he gradually realized that this was not the sky belonging to Asta Star.
The inside of the flyer was as warm as spring, yet a chill crept into Lu Rong’s heart. He told himself that everything before him was a dream, trying hard to wake himself up from it. Whenever he did this in the past, he could quickly snap out of all sorts of bizarre dreams.
But this time, Lu Rong failed. He understood that this was by no means a dream.
He had also seen those third-rate novels on Asta Star where someone traveled to another world after an accident, but he had never imagined such an absurd thing would happen to himself.
He did not want to linger in an unfamiliar place; he wanted to return to Asta to check on the condition of his adoptive parents. He had left far too hastily, and that wedding had been far too chaotic.
Asta Star had not yet researched the technology for free space exploration, and Lu Rong guessed this might be another planet with life in the universe. His immediate priority was to find a way back to Asta.
He hoped the technology of this place was advanced enough.
Yet…
“Mr. Lu Rong, his tail looks a bit unusual,” X01 suddenly spoke up, pulling Lu Rong back to reality.
Shen Danshi was squatting by the edge of the treatment pod. The medical eyes had scanned layer by layer down to the middle and lower sections of Fenie’s tail. The results showed that while the interior of that section of Fenie’s tail was his original spine, the exterior was actually a prosthetic limb made of high-adaptability bionic material.
Lu Rong’s gaze swept over it, staring fixedly for a moment. He bent down, scooped the scanned portion of the snake tail out of the treatment fluid, and looked closely. One could clearly see a very distinct incision mark at that location. The bionic craftsmanship of the prosthesis was so lifelike that Lu Rong hadn’t noticed it when he carried Fenie earlier. Only after careful groping and inspection could one tell the subtle difference: although the bionic snake tail could also bend as it swayed, it was slightly stiffer, and the luster of the scales was quite dim.
Scanning information compiled in front of Shen Danshi’s goggles. After reviewing it, she summarized, “He has been modified. It’s deduced that the original flesh and scales were scraped away, leaving only the nerves and bone. This snake tail was rebuilt on that foundation of nerves and bone, and then the scales were pasted back on.”
Lu Rong remained silent, once more scrutinizing Fenie. This time, he was meticulous, following from the glistening long hair down the pale skin, pausing all the way at the chest—as if he himself were beginning to doubt, forced to confront certain problems he was rather reluctant to face. He hesitated and asked, “Can you monitor his heartbeat?”
“Very slow, 5 beats per minute,” Shen Danshi replied. She raised her head, her gaze calm and restrained, but her tone as gentle as possible. “What are you planning to do? Among existing cases of this ‘Immortal Flower,’ I’ve never heard of anyone recovering. His condition… perhaps, if you don’t mind, you could consider euthanasia.”