Late Night
Inside the room, Xie Chi’s fresh, sweet-and-sour pheromones spread through the air.
Perhaps because what Xie Chi had said was so absurd, Yan Wanqiu’s expression faltered. Even the pressure of his pheromones seemed to freeze for a moment.
Xie Chi could finally breathe again.
He quickly drew his pheromones back in. His back was already soaked with cold sweat, and he bent over awkwardly, gasping for breath as he stole a glance at Yan Wanqiu, who seemed lost in thought.
Though Xie Chi seemed to be speaking without thinking, his logic was actually seamless.
His hearing was sharp. He had only been distracted for a moment when he thought of his family just now, so Yan Wanqiu could only have arrived then.
That meant he’d only heard the talk of marriage. For now, he had no concrete proof that Xie Chi was a traitor. And according to history, he didn’t yet know that Xie Chi was in frequent contact with Yan Baiyue.
Even the accusation Yan Wanqiu had just made was only that he had “seduced the royal family.”
So no matter what, Xie Chi first needed an excuse to cover up the original owner’s feelings for the Third Prince. As for the suspicion of treachery raised by his closeness to Yan Baiyue, he could worry about clearing his name after he’d made sure to stay alive.
What reason could be more convincing than being a gay alpha who couldn’t possibly fall in love with an omega?
Silence fell over the room.
No one had expected Xie Chi to suddenly say something so shocking. Even Yan Wanqiu, who had been in a fit of rage, froze for several seconds.
That faint, refreshing scent quickly faded from the air.
Yan Wanqiu instinctively sniffed, catching the lingering sweetness in its afterscent.
Then he came back to himself and let out a cold laugh.
Xie Chi hadn’t managed to throw him off track. Whatever his sexual orientation, the fact remained that he’d secretly contacted Yan Baiyue, the ungrateful wretch who’d framed him.
Yan Wanqiu stared at the shadow guard, whose pheromones were as green as they came, and after a long pause, said mockingly, “Since you’re a gay alpha, I’ll send you an alpha tonight and let you have your wish.”
His tone was unhurried, in stark contrast to Xie Chi’s tension.
“If you can’t get it up, I’ll cut it off.”
Xie Chi, a fiercely straight man whose only dream was to take a wife: “…”
Xie Chi braced himself and accepted. “Thank you for indulging me, Your Highness.”
.
“What a mess this is.”
Only after Yan Wanqiu had finally left and he’d ended his video call with Yan Baiyue did Xie Chi sigh and sit back down on the bed.
According to history, the original owner wasn’t exposed until after Yan Baiyue arrived in Blizzard City. Xie Chi had no idea what sort of butterfly effect his transmigration had caused, but the moment of exposure had come so much earlier.
Two faint breaths came from outside the door. There was no need to guess. They were guards Yan Wanqiu had assigned to watch him.
Xie Chi surveyed the bare-bones bedroom, feeling even more troubled.
The Northern Domain star system was poor in resources, and spent ten months of every year in the freeze season. Temperatures fell as low as minus 100 degrees. Roads froze over, ferry ships stopped running, and travel beyond the region became impossible. Countless civilians froze or starved to death every year.
Blizzard City was the most chaotic city in the region, a gathering place for convicts and unregistered residents. As the confidant of an exiled prince, the original owner had been assigned a house considered quite decent by local standards. But to Xie Chi, who had come from 3,000 years in the future, it was still a slum.
The dormitory was one large room, roughly forty square meters. The walls were more than a meter thick to keep out the cold, and the main source of heat was the furnace behind the dining table by the entrance, which burned thermal ore.
It was the most primitive kind of heating stove. You had to feed it thermal ore regularly, just like shoveling coal into a furnace, to keep the room warm.
There was no partition between the living and sleeping areas. A 1.5-meter bed stood to the right of the dining table, and to the right of the bed were two small rooms, one a bathroom and the other a kitchen.
The hot-water pipes in the bathroom often froze over. It was now the brief summer in Blizzard City, with outdoor temperatures hovering around minus 30 degrees, so the pipes were still just barely usable.
But once the freeze season came and temperatures dropped to minus 100 degrees, the only way to take a hot shower would probably be the locals’ most primitive method: melting ice and heating the water.
Between the harsh living conditions, a job with no prospect of getting him a wife, and the threat of death hanging over him from Yan Wanqiu, Xie Chi could see nothing but darkness ahead.
What was he supposed to do now?
The future was an age of total integration between races. Men and women, sentinels and guides, ABO, even half-alphas and half-guides, Walmart shopping bags and armed helicopters… Any gender was possible.
But Xie Chi was a standard straight man. Back in this country 3,000 years ago, where everyone was male and gender was distinguished by ABO, he had never even considered an omega, let alone an alpha.
Yan Wanqiu clearly hadn’t believed his flimsy explanation. That promise to “let him have his wish” had sounded more like a cat toying with a mouse. If Xie Chi showed even the slightest sign of anything being wrong tonight, Yan Wanqiu would definitely kill him.
Although he’d transmigrated in person, he had nothing but his fighting skills and no weapons. Even if he faced an entire camp of guards head-on, he’d be hard-pressed to fight them all off.
Just as Xie Chi was despairing over how he could bend his own sexual orientation, he caught sight of the plain platinum band on his ring finger.
He froze, then his eyes lit up.
It was his spatial ring.
His storage space had come with him, too.
Xie Chi immediately opened the spatial ring and checked his equipment.
Since he was often out on missions, Xie Chi’s spatial ring was stocked with just about everything.
He took a quick inventory. Inside were three unusable bank cards, twenty-seven fake IDs, three terminals, more than a hundred quantum guns, sniper rifles, machine guns, portable quantum cannons, time bombs, and drones, plus crates of nutrient solution, repair fluid, and all sorts of everyday supplies.
“That’s great.”
Seeing all the supplies that could save his life, Xie Chi let out a long breath of relief.
This equipment, utterly ordinary in the Star Calendar’s third millennium, was a technological sledgehammer in the first year of the Star Calendar, when even starnet coverage was far from complete. Even if Yan Wanqiu insisted on executing him, Xie Chi might still be able to fight back.
Getting away from Yan Wanqiu, the villain doomed to die, and finding another star system where he could earn money and find himself a wife would be a piece of cake.
Feeling a little more at ease, Xie Chi took his most frequently used terminal from the spatial ring. The terminal could change shape easily, and once removed, it automatically shifted into its default form: a pair of black-framed glasses.
Xie Chi put on the terminal glasses.
【Welcome back, user [AAA Private Chat Hit Quotes]】 【Disconnected from starnet. Please check your network connection.】
Although Northern Domain Star wasn’t covered by starnet, Yan Wanqiu had set up a temporary signal tower in Blizzard City. That was how the original owner had been able to contact Yan Baiyue.
Xie Chi went straight to the signal source named “Blizzard City,” cracked its flimsy password with ease, and connected to starnet. Then he used the AI to search the terminal’s database for every historical record related to Blizzard City and Yan Wanqiu.
But the connection was so slow that even the AI built into the terminal could barely sort through the results. Xie Chi watched as a loading icon appeared on his top-of-the-line terminal, which had shown full signal even in outer space.
Xie Chi fell silent.
Since it was going to take a while for the terminal to load, he took a quantum gun out of the spatial ring first.
The cold weapon spun once around his long fingers. He sensed something was wrong, narrowed his eyes slightly, and looked down at it.
Then he raised the quantum gun and casually pulled the trigger, aiming at the wall.
The gun didn’t make a sound.
Xie Chi’s heart sank. He immediately tried another one, but it didn’t work either.
Unwilling to give up, Xie Chi took out a quantum machine gun, a portable quantum cannon, a drone…
Five minutes later.
Xie Chi sat on the bed, utterly despondent, staring at the explanation finally displayed by the terminal’s smart assistant.
【Hello. Since all your equipment consists of the latest terminal-linked devices, which include AI analysis and system-wide energy-saving functions, the terminal’s slow connection could cause dangerous delays if the equipment is used. For your safety, all equipment has been automatically locked. To unlock manually, please visit the official website: [Click here to go]】
Xie Chi: “…”
He’d let himself relax too soon. He’d gotten burned by the pitfalls of high technology.
The concept of a “slow connection” didn’t exist 3,000 years in the future. No matter how they designed it, the engineers couldn’t have imagined someone taking a terminal and weapons back to the first year of the Star Calendar. The manual unlock option was already an extra safeguard.
But now that Xie Chi was 3,000 years in the past, there was no way he could visit a website 3,000 years in the future to unlock them manually.
“Oh, well. At least the terminal still works. I’ll see if I can find a mechanic to modify the weapons later.”
Xie Chi knew how to adapt. Giving up on escaping or fighting his way out, he muttered to himself as he turned to the other light screen, where the information about Blizzard City had finally loaded.
First came a map of the entire city. Since it was so ancient, the map wasn’t very clear. He could only make out that the city was in a basin, with Yan Wanqiu’s encampment at the center and the surrounding districts spreading outward in a circle.
But as an important strategic resource that would drive the ABO race’s technology forward by leaps and bounds, every thermal ore deposit was clearly marked on the map.
A thoughtful look crossed Xie Chi’s eyes.
It was now just before Year One of the Star Calendar, an era of explosive technological growth for the Alberis United Kingdom. AI technology was in its infancy, and new weapons and spaceships had only just appeared. Every one of those developments depended on energy.
The Alberis United Kingdom had once suffered an energy crisis. That was why the thermal ore in Blizzard City, which released astonishing amounts of energy just by burning, was so coveted.
The thermal ore had only just been discovered. With technology still limited, mining and utilization were extremely inefficient, and the ore could only supply Yan Wanqiu’s camp and the surrounding towns.
Things didn’t improve until Yan Wanqiu recruited a mechanic during Blizzard City’s first freeze season. Development of the thermal ore continued for more than a century and directly sparked an industrial revolution.
Later, the First Prince, Yan Huishi, was able to persuade the mechanical civilization, whose technology surpassed that of the ABO race, to send troops because he promised them vast quantities of thermal ore.
As silicon-based life forms, the mechanical race faced an even worse energy crisis than the ABO race. Their reproduction was heavily dependent on energy, too. Before they colluded with Yan Huishi, the mechanical civilization had nearly ground to a halt. Thermal ore breathed new life into the entire civilization, making it an immensely powerful force in the Interstellar Federation even 3,000 years later. It controlled the entirety of starnet, keeping all the people of the interstellar realm under the constant surveillance of its AI.
Most of Blizzard City’s energy still came from outside aid, and the freeze season was coming soon. Yan Wanqiu was eager for revenge and wanted to rapidly expand his power during the freeze season, so building up energy reserves was essential.
The map of the deposits was important, but how to produce it was even more important.
Yan Wanqiu was known for being suspicious and brutal. If a suspected traitor like Xie Chi suddenly produced this map, he wouldn’t even get a suspended death sentence. Yan Wanqiu would kill him on the spot.
Still, it was better to have leverage than none at all. Without a word, Xie Chi downloaded the map of the deposits.
After that came various scattered historical records. Most described how Yan Wanqiu recruited talented people, used thermal ore to improve weapons, subdued local strongmen trying to seize the deposits and expanded outward, and fought the mechanical aliens. But because the history was so old, the terminal’s database only contained a few key figures and events.
Xie Chi downloaded everything he found for offline use, so he could look it up quickly later.
He also downloaded some technical books about thermal ore utilization. Even if Yan Wanqiu didn’t live long enough to see that level of technology, the books would be useless for now but could fetch a good price when energy development took off.
Wait. Energy.
Xie Chi jerked his gaze to his terminal. The remaining battery read 54%.
Three thousand years in the future, they’d long since abandoned inefficient, wasteful methods like burning energy stones directly or using them as fuel. Factories extracted every last bit of energy from each stone and fed it into the energy grid. Once a smart brain connected to starnet, it could recharge automatically.