Qi Shaozhou did not actually believe there was any possibility that their emperor had fallen in love with Gu Yuanze at first sight or had secretly harbored feelings for him for years.
He was quite certain that, throughout all those years, His Majesty’s feelings toward his nemesis, the Federation Fleet Commander, had been nothing more than the ordinary curiosity, interest, unwillingness to concede defeat, and resentment one might expect between two longstanding enemies.
As for how those relatively normal feelings had somehow transformed into such distorted desires…
Although Qi Shaozhou held dual doctorates in medicine and psychology, the abnormal psychology of the Yu Imperial Family was evidently still somewhat beyond the scope of his conventional research.
Could it really be as the saying went? That love and hatred were separated by only the thinnest of lines?
Regardless, Qi Shaozhou knew that this was not something he could interfere with.
He understood all too well the tremendous psychological pressure Yu Weiming endured on a daily basis. To a certain extent, perhaps this abnormal obsession was actually a rare outlet for him amid the crushing burden of state affairs and the endless scheming and deception that surrounded him.
Sometimes, Qi Shaozhou also wondered whether Yu Weiming’s extraordinary fixation on Gu Yuanze stemmed from the fact that he saw a reflection of himself in his nemesis.
At first glance, after all, there seemed to be absolutely nothing comparable between the life of the Federation Fleet Commander and that of an Imperial prince.
For one thing, Gu Yuanze had been nothing more than a commoner.
In the Federation, where the class hierarchy had long since become just as rigid and entrenched, people born at the bottom of society should have had virtually no chance of rising above their circumstances. Gu Yuanze’s rise to the position of Commander of the Cloudship Fleet had been entirely the result of a series of fortuitous coincidences.
Gu Yuanze had grown up in an orphanage, but he was exceptionally intelligent and excelled at his studies.
With financial support from the Federation’s orphan assistance foundation, he had successfully completed high school. After reaching adulthood, however, he had needed to find a way to continue his education and had no choice but to enroll in a military academy that offered full scholarships.
Yet Gu Yuanze’s major at the military academy had actually been in the logistics preparatory department, where students studied how to grow wheat on agricultural satellites.
Even the numerous investigative reports the Empire had compiled about him later stated that, during his student years, he had shown absolutely no interest in either warfare or politics.
He regularly skipped classes to sleep in his dormitory, avoided the military academy’s physical training whenever possible, and had even made such lazy remarks as, “The logistics department doesn’t have to go to the front lines anyway, so there’s no need to exercise,” and, “I’m just a lazy person who wants to live a peaceful, uneventful life.”
Gu Yuanze was particularly fond of flour based foods.
During his university years, he had devoted practically all his attention to figuring out how to use the wheat he cultivated to bake better bread and make softer, fluffier steamed buns.
As a result, his academic performance in his chosen field had been outstanding. For four consecutive years, he had been the military academy’s most prolific student in terms of published research papers on wheat cultivation within the logistics department, ultimately graduating with an excellent academic record.
As for his talent in strategy and tactics, Gu Yuanze had displayed almost none whatsoever.
He had barely scraped through the examination for Basic Tactics with a passing grade.
However, in his spare time, Gu Yuanze seemed to have a particular fondness for playing military strategy board games on sand tables.
He claimed that he was merely playing for fun, yet when he entered a university level competition for the first time, he effortlessly defeated the top student from the strategy and tactics department and won the championship.
Of course, according to Gu Yuanze himself, it had been nothing more than a stroke of luck. He had only entered the competition because he had been desperately short of money at the time and wanted to win the five thousand lira prize.
The following year, when the competition prize money was discontinued, he never participated again.
…..
During the final two years of his university education, Gu Yuanze entered the period of compulsory military service and became an ordinary lieutenant aboard a Federation logistics and supply ship.
Putting his natural talents to use, he joined the vessel’s catering and logistics department.
Every day, he continued happily baking bread, steaming buns, and roasting flower rolls. Time passed quickly, and before long, he was only two months away from completing his military service. He had already received an assignment to work on an agricultural satellite, where he would be able to continue doing what he loved most: growing wheat to his heart’s content.
However, just as he was about to leave the ship, he was once again forcibly conscripted and temporarily reassigned to a frontline warship because of a shortage of personnel.
And so, a military academy student specializing in logistics was abruptly swept into the most famous First Defense Battle of the Celestial Fortress.
There were no endless green wheat fields in the vast expanse of the universe. There was only a brutal, blood soaked battlefield, surrounded by countless wrecked vessels, corpses, and shattered debris floating through space.
The fleet repeatedly fell into enemy ambushes, and fellow officers continued to die one after another. Meanwhile, Gu Yuanze’s military rank kept rising.
Eventually, every officer aboard his ship who outranked him had been killed.
Still not even a graduate of the military academy, he was left with no choice but to take command of the warship. Relying on his still immature strategic instincts, he led several battered vessels cautiously through a minefield, only to suffer the misfortune of encountering the Imperial Crown Prince’s flagship, the Akhenaten, head on.
To survive, Gu Yuanze had no choice but to stake everything on a desperate gamble. Taking advantage of a brief electromagnetic interference that disrupted navigation systems, he risked everything to lure the Imperial flagship into a nearby gravitational end current.
Exploiting the disadvantage of the massive flagship, whose enormous mass made it difficult to maneuver once caught in the current, he managed to trap several Imperial warships within the gravitational flow while allowing his own small, battered vessels to escape intact.
The Federation subsequently portrayed his return as a Miraculous Retreat.
People showered him with flowers, and high ranking officials personally presented him with military decorations. For a time, his name appeared everywhere in the news.
His assignment to an agricultural satellite was revoked, and almost overnight, he became the youngest captain on the frontline.
After that came the Second Battle of the Celestial Fortress, the Battle of the Mars Base, the Z3 Satellite Battle, the Asteroid Belt Defense Battle…
The number of stars on Gu Yuanze’s shoulder insignia continued to increase, and his military achievements grew ever more distinguished.
During the Third Battle of the Celestial Fortress, his fleet even inflicted a crushing defeat on Yu Weiming, the Empire’s legendary god of war, shooting down one of the Empire’s principal flagships and firmly establishing the reputation of the supposedly unbeatable Imperial commander as anything but invincible.
Gu Yuanze thus became the most legendary hero in the history of the Federation.
After the captured Imperial flagship was repaired, it was also handed over to him, eventually becoming the renowned Cloudship.
Throughout this entire process, no one paid any attention to the humble wish of the commoner Gu Yuanze, who had wanted nothing more than to grow wheat.
Captain Gu Yuanze’s applications for retirement, submitted after every battle, had been rejected without exception.
At the time, the Federation’s political system was rotten to the core, its military technology lagged far behind that of the Empire, and its front lines had been steadily retreating. Amid the resulting turmoil and growing public anxiety, the Federation’s leadership desperately needed to promote a hero of the Federation who could inspire the people and restore their confidence.
When they set about creating a legend around Gu Yuanze, they had never imagined that he would genuinely become an undefeated champion.
He was a young man with no formal military background who had not even finished reading the books on military tactics. Yet, despite facing an enemy with ten times his firepower, he had managed to hold the Celestial Fortress, an essential stronghold that stood directly in the path of the Empire’s invasion of the Federation. He had even managed to suppress Yu Weiming, the crown prince hailed as the God of War of the Empire, through sheer tactical brilliance.
Step by step, year after year, Gu Yuanze had become the Federation’s sharpest blade and its spiritual leader.
From afar, he stood in opposition to his nemesis, Yu Weiming, the rising sun of the Empire.
At that time, both men possessed extraordinary individual abilities, and both stood only one step away from the pinnacle of power. They were showered with countless flowers and endless praise, yet they were also trapped within layer upon layer of invisible cages.
Obedience was a soldier’s foremost duty.
As the commander of the fleet, Gu Yuanze was therefore often powerless to resist the foolish orders repeatedly issued by his superiors. He could only watch helplessly as defensive positions fell and his comrades sacrificed their lives.
At the same time, he had grown thoroughly sick of the Federation’s decaying and corrupt political landscape, the relentless power struggles among its high ranking officials who continued fighting for their own interests without caring whether the people lived or died, and the endless schemes, manipulations, and calculations through which they sought to win one another over.
On the other side, Yu Weiming was likewise struggling in vain to pull the Empire out of the mire of decay and prevent it from marching toward its inevitable destruction.
The two men, struggling within mirrored Klein bottles, had caught sight of one another.
They continued encountering each other on the battlefield, again and again, until they became sworn enemies locked in a conflict that could end only when one of them was defeated.
Qi Shaozhou thought that this was probably one of the reasons Yu Weiming had always felt such a profound kinship with his nemesis, Gu Yuanze, and had never been able to forget him.
……
Relatively speaking, however, Gu Yuanze had undoubtedly suffered more.
After all, Yu Weiming was already the exalted sun of the Empire. The worst possible outcome of his life was that he might end up like the previous emperor, hiding away in his bedchamber for the rest of his days and refusing to concern himself with state affairs.
As long as the Empire did not meet its end during his reign, even if Yu Weiming’s mind descended into the abyss, he could still spend his days surrounded by luxurious clothes, exquisite food, and endless indulgence, drinking himself into oblivion and losing himself in a life of decadent pleasure.
He could even continue receiving the gifts he liked so much, using them as diversions to relieve the boredom of his long, interminable life.
But the commoner who had risen to become the Federation’s commander had no way out.
Gu Yuanze’s reputation was simply too great. He was young, upright, and had no powerful backers to protect him. He had become far too threatening to those in power, making him a natural target for their resentment and suspicion. His fate had practically been sealed from the moment his fame began to overshadow theirs: sooner or later, the powerful would drag him down from the pedestal on which they had once placed him.
Yet everyone had still underestimated the sheer horror of human nature.
Many people believed that the commander had been secretly murdered in prison. Very few had imagined that he would instead be subjected to such inhuman and wanton cruelty, ultimately reduced to something neither fully human nor truly dead, a gift locked inside a box.
That day, Qi Shaozhou had gone to perform his routine physical examination of His Majesty’s beloved gift.
The moment he entered the bedchamber, he saw the handsome, silver haired emperor gently combing the hair of that expressionless body, which could neither cry nor smile.
Qi Shaozhou: “…”
The scene was indescribably bizarre. Throughout the entire process, Gu Yuanze looked like a lifeless doll entirely at someone else’s mercy. His half open eyes were utterly vacant, his expression numb and despairing to the extreme. To Qi Shaozhou, he even seemed to trigger the uncanny valley effect, making him feel an instinctive sense of unease.
Yet Yu Weiming could still gaze at him with tenderness and boundless adoration shining in his eyes.
After finishing his hair, the emperor did not forget to kiss him. And once he began kissing him, he grew so emotionally absorbed that he could hardly stop himself. Truly, he was a worthy inheritor of the Imperial Family’s most powerful lineage of madness.
Qi Shaozhou could only console himself with the thought that, at the very least, Yu Weiming still knew enough to put some clothes on his doll…
Moreover, over the past several days, he had spared no expense in administering countless precious medications and nutritional injections to Gu Yuanze.
Yu Weiming probably had no conscious intention of tormenting Gu Yuanze to death.
Besides, he did not spend every single day endlessly holding his doll and kissing him, either. For most of the time, Gu Yuanze was actually lying properly on a ventilator, with various tubes attached to his body to keep him alive.
Only during the brief periods when his dressings needed to be changed would Yu Weiming have him disconnected from the medical equipment, greedily gather him into his arms, and do whatever he pleased with him.
Qi Shaozhou even seriously considered the possibility that Yu Weiming might not actually possess some particularly unusual fetish after all…
For example, a necrophilic obsession.
He probably did not.
In any case, the results of that day’s routine examination were, as always, far from encouraging.
In truth, both Gu Yuanze’s blindness and his deafness could potentially be treated through subsequent surgeries. Even the hand and leg he had lost could, with the Empire’s current level of bionic prosthetic technology, eventually be replaced with advanced artificial limbs that would allow him to walk and grasp objects just like an ordinary person.
The greatest problem now, however, was his psychological trauma.
Only one of Gu Yuanze’s hands and one of his legs had been lost during the war. The remaining limbs, it seemed, had been taken from him… while he was imprisoned.
Although Qi Shaozhou had yet to obtain written evidence, rumors had already begun circulating that those within the Federation who resented Gu Yuanze had gradually cut away his remaining limbs while he was in prison.
That kind of torture was no less horrific than lingchi, the ancient punishment of slow slicing.
The inhuman torment had caused Gu Yuanze to suffer a complete mental collapse in a short period of time. His heart had even stopped beating on several occasions.
He probably would never recover for the rest of his life…
How could anyone possibly recover after being treated like that?
According to Qi Shaozhou’s straightforward understanding of human suffering, if he himself had been subjected to the same treatment, he would never have recovered, either.
A complete mental collapse was entirely understandable. Rather than remain trapped in a lightless cage, suffering in despair as he watched his own body slowly rot away, perhaps becoming an unresponsive doll like this was preferable.
After changing the patient’s dressings, Qi Shaozhou wisely took his leave.
This left Yu Weiming to bend down once more, holding the honey colored waist of the man connected to the ventilator as he tenderly kissed his severed limbs.
“Commander, I should have found you sooner.”
In fact, as early as when Gu Yuanze had first stood trial, the new emperor of the Empire had dispatched the intelligence department to negotiate behind the scenes and seek a way to intervene. After the Imperial Army captured the Federation’s capital, the secret search for Gu Yuanze’s whereabouts became the military’s foremost priority, and they spared no effort in trying to locate him.
Unfortunately, they had failed to find him.
The person in his arms remained unresponsive.
Yu Weiming thought this was only natural. The commander had endured despair for far too long and had been exhausted for far too long. He had also suffered such severe injuries that he must desperately need an extended period of rest.
Once again, he bent down and kissed the numerous scars covering Gu Yuanze’s body.
“It must have hurt terribly back then, Gu Yuanze.”
“It’s all right. Everything is over now. Sleep well.”
“If it’s too painful, why don’t you spend the rest of your life as my doll? Would that be all right?”
“Gu Yuanze.”
Yu Weiming’s breathing grew rapid once again.
His profile remained flawless, and he was still the silver haired, saintlike, handsome new emperor. Even as he knelt beside the bed, his posture resembled that of a devout believer offering a prayer.
“Once you’ve recovered from your injuries, we’ll do it every day. Day and night, without end. I can give you endless pleasure.”
“Just leave everything to me. You won’t have to think about anything at all.”
“I’ll take good care of you and serve you well. I’ll make sure you feel comfortable every single day, so comfortable that you’ll never want for anything.”
“No one will ever dare bully you again.”
“From now on, your world will contain nothing but an endless succession of indulgent pleasures.”