This somewhat overly intimate form of address made Bai Jinqiu pause for a moment, and he could not help asking:
“How old are you this year?”
“Nineteen years old,” Rong Zhiting answered truthfully.
Bai Jinqiu blinked, thinking to himself that he was so young, seven years younger than him. At this age, ordinary people should still be in school.
Perhaps because Rong Zhiting showed a faint sense of closeness toward him, Bai Jinqiu’s tone softened considerably during the subsequent conversation.
“You are still so young, how did you become a scavenger? And what you mentioned earlier about the battlefield ruins, what is this place?” Bai Jinqiu asked.
“This is EQ952B3. Have you heard of it?”
“A fringe planet?”
“Right. As for why I became a scavenger, it is because I have to support myself. Moreover, I have to participate in the Seventy-Third Military Academy entrance assessment in half a month, so I need to save money. Being a scavenger is the most profitable occupation on the fringe planet.” The most profitable normal profession, that is; things like smuggling or space pirates do not count.
After hearing this, Bai Jinqiu fell into deep thought.
The fringe planet EQ952B3 was not too far from his mission location, but it was still some distance away. How did he get here? Given his current injuries, even walking was a struggle, so it was impossible for him to appear out of thin air in the ruins.
The most likely possibility was Mitian.
Then where was Mitian right now?
“Zhiting, what did the surroundings look like where you found me? Was there anything strange?” Bai Jinqiu asked tentatively.
He did not notice that he was calling him by the overly intimate name of Zhiting with complete naturalness.
“Strange places? Do you mean the impact crater?” Rong Zhiting quickly figured out what he wanted to ask.
“Don’t worry, your mecha is in my spatial button. It is severely damaged, and the materials needed to repair it are hard to get. I have no way to fix it for now, but it will always be repaired eventually.”
Rong Zhiting smiled meaningfully. “Older Brother is no ordinary person, I know. Don’t worry, I will not tell anyone.”
Bai Jinqiu was silent for a moment, then chuckled softly. “You certainly are confident, claiming you can repair my mecha. However, since you found me inside the mecha, aren’t you afraid that I might be some ruthless and dangerous person, and that once my injuries heal, I will return kindness with enmity, kill you, and run away, or that I might have enemies who will implicate you?”
Rong Zhiting raised an eyebrow, thinking to himself, Do I not know what kind of person you are? Aloud, he said, “Is Brother Bai underestimating me too much? In a place like the fringe planet, if I did not even have a bit of discernment for reading people, surviving would not be nearly this easy.”
“Is that so?”
Bai Jinqiu wanted to say something else, but Rong Zhiting suddenly stepped forward, pressed down on his shoulders, and pushed him backward onto the bed.
Looking at Bai Jinqiu’s slightly dazed expression, Rong Zhiting said with a smile, “Brother, it is time for you to change your dressing. I need to check how your wounds are healing.”
With that, he reached out to undo the collar buttons of Bai Jinqiu’s shirt.
Bai Jinqiu reflexively caught his wrist and said, “I can change the dressing myself.”
“You cannot see, so how can you change it yourself? Moreover, some of the wounds on your body are very deep and require debridement. If you touch them with your bare hands, the wounds will easily become infected.”
As he spoke, Rong Zhiting used his other hand to undo his buttons.
With only one hand able to move, Bai Jinqiu had no way to stop him. Thus, he pressed his lips together, turned his head slightly to the side, and resigned himself to his fate.
It would have been one thing if he was unconscious and unaware, but now that he was awake, exposing his body in front of a stranger who was neither a doctor nor a comrade, lying powerlessly on the bed while letting the other person handle his body and tend to his wounds, and with some of the wounds located quite privately, to be honest, he inevitably felt a bit awkward.
Bai Jinqiu’s body was very well-proportioned. Like most Omega soldiers, he was not the overly muscle-bound type, and his skin was very fair, making him look almost gentle and frail while dressed.
However, if you took off his clothes and touched his body, you would find that his muscle density was astonishingly high, with powerful explosive force hidden beneath graceful, fluid muscle lines.
An S-rank Omega’s self-healing ability was extremely strong, and Bai Jinqiu’s self-healing ability was terrifyingly powerful. Otherwise, after suffering such severe injuries in his previous life, he could never have survived without receiving any treatment whatsoever. If anyone else had been in his place, they probably would have died on the spot.
Over the past two days, most of the wounds on his body had scabbed and healed, including the piercing wound on his chest, which had also begun to close under the auxiliary treatment of medicine and a therapeutic device. Only the wound on his abdomen showed no signs of improvement.
The results displayed by the diagnostic instrument indicated that the weapon which inflicted the trauma had been coated with a substance that prevented wound healing, along with a bizarre biological toxin.
Rong Zhiting had injected him with serum and performed debridement on his wounds every few hours over the past two days, until yesterday when the wounds finally stopped oozing black, dirty blood, though they still had not closed up.
Rong Zhiting carefully re-disinfected and applied medicine to his wounds, then took out the portable therapeutic device, letting the healing light wash over the top of the wounds. Throughout the entire process, Bai Jinqiu’s entire body was completely tense.
Once vision was lost, the body’s other senses were magnified exponentially.
The pain of the wounds could be endured, but the feeling of the other person’s calloused fingertips touching his body was very strange, especially when Rong Zhiting touched his lower abdomen, causing him to tremble involuntarily.
The moment Rong Zhiting looked up, he caught sight of his Brother Bai’s completely red ears.
“Brother Bai, are you blushing?” Rong Zhiting asked, holding back a laugh.
“Zhiting, do you know that I am an Omega?” Bai Jinqiu countered. His warm, gentle voice carried a trace of oddness, as if he were restraining something.
“I know.”
Bai Jinqiu sighed softly, “Although I am very grateful that you saved me and helped me apply medicine to treat my injuries, do you know that your actions right now would be considered harassment outside?”
The chest and lower abdomen were both private areas for an Omega.
Although Bai Jinqiu could not see right now, he could deduce that Rong Zhiting was a Beta.
A Beta making such a move was not as bad in nature as an Alpha, but it was still somewhat presumptuous. Bai Jinqiu simply assumed he was young and might not have been taught these things on the fringe planet, so he offered a reminder.
“Unless necessary, it is best not to casually touch these body parts of other Omegas in the future.” Doing that was a quick way to get beaten up.
Upon hearing this, Rong Zhiting almost fell flat on his face right there on the spot, remaining speechless for a moment. If only you knew, he thought, the harassment you subjected me to in our past life was far more excessive than this.
After changing the dressing, the sky had grown completely dark.
There was no nightlife on the fringe planet, and Rong Zhiting generally went to sleep early and woke up early. However, worried about Bai Jinqiu’s injuries over the past few days, he had not slept a single full night, waking up every few hours to check on him out of fear that the wounds would worsen. Now that the man was awake, he felt much more at ease.
With the continuous rain over the past few days, the water storage tank had collected plenty of water. After filtration and purification, although this water was still not drinkable, it could be used for household purposes.
After testing the water quality, Rong Zhiting boiled some hot water, cleaned up briefly with Bai Jinqiu, and prepared to rest.
For the night, Rong Zhiting set up a newly acquired folding bed against the wall, choosing not to crowd into the same bed with Bai Jinqiu.
Although he desperately wanted to sleep with Brother Bai, he was afraid that tossing and turning in his sleep might press against the man’s injuries.
In truth, Rong Zhiting used to sleep very still, hardly moving at all throughout the entire night.
That was a habit formed during his time at the orphanage.
The environment at the fringe planet orphanage was hardly good, and the children all slept on large, shared platform beds with double-tiered iron frames. Those beds had been in use for quite a few years, and even the slightest movement on them would produce a loud noise that woke the other children.
Back then, their stern old director was still around, and any child who kept tossing and turning and disturbing the sleep of others would be driven to the utility room or reading room to sleep on a makeshift bed on the floor. Filled with all sorts of clutter, tables, and chairs, the room would pitch black at night, and children’s vivid imaginations made the bizarre shadows of various objects terrifyingly spooky, while the thin floor bedding was both cold and hard, leaving their entire bodies aching after a single night. No child was willing to go there.
Therefore, most of these children slept very quietly at night, and Rong Zhiting was no exception, carrying this habit over when he later went to the military academy and entered the Second Legion.
However, ever since his rebirth, he had been unable to sleep peacefully at night, frequently waking up from various nightmares, then tossing and turning unable to fall back asleep. On the rare nights he did not wake up, he would often find his quilt on the floor the next morning, making it obvious how many times he had tossed and turned during the night.
Consequently, until Brother Bai’s injuries fully healed, he dared not contend for the privilege of sharing a bed.
Perhaps due to the extraordinary exhaustion of the day, or perhaps because the person who brought him peace of mind was by his side, Rong Zhiting fell asleep very quickly that night, his breathing stabilizing within minutes of lying down.
On the bed across the room, Bai Jinqiu did not fall asleep immediately.
Having been in a coma for several days, his mental state was not great right now, but his mind was still quite clear. Taking advantage of this time, he closed his eyes and silently sorted through his memories.
His head had been injured, and the loss of memory was likely due to the impact received by his brain. This kind of memory loss would not be permanent, but with the mission situation unclear, the sooner he remembered, the better.
Moreover, he faintly felt that the memories he had lost might not be limited just to the period before and around the mission. But aside from that portion, the memories in his head were otherwise complete, which gave him a strange feeling.
In the first half of the night, the rain outside stopped for a while, only to start up again in the second half.
The pattering sound of rain served as the best white noise for falling asleep in the dark.
Wearied by his injuries, Bai Jinqiu ultimately lacked stamina and drifted into a light sleep shortly after the sound of the rain resumed.
He had no idea how long he had slept when a flash of lightning crossed the horizon, followed closely by a muffled clap of thunder that grew nearer and nearer, finally exploding right beside his ears and startling him awake from his slumber.
He rubbed his temples with a headache, feeling the dizziness in his brain, and silently let out a breath.
With an outsider present, under normal circumstances he would find it hard to lower his guard and fall asleep, even though he believed Rong Zhiting had no reason to harm him, but this kind of instinctive conditioning was difficult to change easily.
Unexpectedly this time, likely due to his injuries, he had actually fallen soundly asleep without realizing it.
At that moment, he heard a faint movement coming from Rong Zhiting’s bed across the way.
Had he been woken up too?
Unable to see with his eyes, Bai Jinqiu listened closely and discovered that it did not sound like the noise of someone tossing and turning.
It was the rustling sound of friction from fabric, accompanied by short, rapid breathing. The person on the bed seemed to be shivering, and furthermore, he heard faint sobbing.
“Zhiting?” Bai Jinqiu frowned and called out softly.
The person across from him gave no reply, instead emitting a whimper laden with a crying tone:
“No, do not do that, Brother Bai.”
Brother Bai?
Bai Jinqiu sat up, looking toward the person across the room with a trace of surprise, even though his unfocused eyes could see nothing at all.
Was this calling out to him?