When Cyril forcibly picked the lock, thunder rolled outside, lighting up the sky as bright as day. His face, carved from the exact same mold as Lyle’s, was exceedingly somber, resembling a classic scene of catching lovers red handed in bed.
Lyle and Ning Qing were tangled together like conjoined twins.
Needless to say, after these past few days of “training,” Ning Qing had grown accustomed to the touch of warm skin. Lyle was able to easily bury his chin in Ning Qing’s shoulder notch, wrap his arms around his waist, and reach even deeper.
It was an extraordinarily intimate posture.
In this small building that Cyril had ordered the housekeeper to clear out and redecorate, on this fabric sofa that Cyril had personally purchased, and even under the rabbit down throw blanket wrapped around them, which Cyril had selected himself for its softer texture, everything was his.
Cyril had studied the law well, largely thanks to his extraordinary memory. He remembered that just a week ago, Ning Qing, that highly vigilant little animal, was at most willing to hold his hand.
Yet with a different person, one who even shared the exact same face, could do anything he wanted?
Having completely forgotten the kiss Ning Qing had left him, Cyril stepped closer to his younger twin brother, who was immersed in bliss with the corners of his mouth practically curling up to the sky. “Lyle, come out. We need to talk.”
No response.
Cyril lifted the thin blanket and forcibly pried open the tightly locked hands. Just as he was about to scoop the limp Ning Qing out by the waist, he was unexpectedly shoved back.
“You’ve crossed the line, Cyril. Are you trying to steal my person?” Lyle rarely skipped calling him “Brother,” raising his left eyelid to glare at him, a trick he had learned from Ning Qing that proved quite imposing.
“How do I remember you saying you weren’t interested in Ning Qing at all?”
“How did that line go again? ‘An uneducated commoner, a Beta of low bloodline, unfit to become a Lanchester lady.’ So what are you doing now? Let go of him right now!”
Taking advantage of Cyril’s momentary loss of balance, Lyle hugged Ning Qing tightly from behind like an octopus, regaining the upper hand.
He admitted he had indeed been pretending to be asleep just now, but Cyril couldn’t just snatch his wife away right in front of his face (even though they didn’t have an official title yet).
Cyril finally calmed down.
His dissatisfaction was naturally unreasonable, but he found an explanation for his anomaly, as heirs to the Lanchester family, the two brothers possessed countless assets, and there was nothing they couldn’t share.
Ning Qing was merely a pretty vase, a rare experimental subject, and an interesting plaything. He was not so irreplaceable that the brothers needed to turn against each other.
He deliberately ignored his own loss of composure, treating it merely as the disgust of having his private property touched.
However, there was still a problem.
Cyril frowned as he replayed the previous audio recording. “You have no right to reveal Imperial secrets. Frontline conditions are tight right now, and Alpha qualities are declining severely. If the Eve Project is leaked, both you and I will have to be sent back to the furnace to be remade.”
“I heard it, loud and clear with both ears. I know my limits. Remember to close the door when you leave, the rain has splashed all the way into the living room,” Lyle immediately issued a command to leave.
“Still not leaving?”
Perhaps stimulated by the water vapor brought in by the intruder, Ning Qing began to cough.
“Regardless, his body was modified under my direction. I have the right to inspect it.”
Hearing the cough, Cyril changed direction. He knelt halfway on the sofa, resting the rim of a teacup against Ning Qing’s pale lips, slowly feeding him warm water.
Water droplets spilled from the corner of his lips and fell inside his collar, only to be wiped away with a handkerchief.
As he wiped, the hand suddenly took a turn, unbuttoning more buttons through the soft cloth. Thin radiance bloomed from his luminous white skin.
“His chest seems to have become a bit fuller.”
It was as if a newborn dove was resting there.
Ning Qing was awkwardly sandwiched between the two of them, like a slice of cheese in a sandwich being slowly melted, stretching into sticky threads.
Gasp, gasp.
His breathing grew heavier, and he began to kick wildly. To him, these two newly grown organs were not yet that sensitive, but the chest was the vital area where the heart resided. If pierced by an insect’s appendage in the wild forest, or caught by a wild beast resembling a tiger or leopard, there would be almost no chance of survival.
To fight back, he bared his teeth and bit fiercely into the attacker’s shoulder.
Then, carrying a burning, stinging sensation, warm blood rushed into Ning Qing’s throat. Blood should have tasted like rust, but Ning Qing tasted a pungent, suffocating smell of alcohol instead. That scent rushed violently to his crown as if to force him into submission.
He did not know that this was the most violent type of Alpha pheromone, an innate biological weapon of a top-tier Alpha.
Neither Cyril nor Lyle had anticipated that years of rebellious willpower would allow Ning Qing to break through both the drug’s restraint and the pheromone’s suppression, awakening to consciousness.
“…Why can’t I see, nor hear clearly?”
“But I remember your scent.”
The whisper repeated over and over, until Ning Qing truly opened his eyes.
His pupils trembled violently, and purple spots characteristic of dizziness filled his vision. Ning Qing breathed heavily, discovering he was already sitting up on the sofa, his clothes pulled into a messy, wrinkled state like pickled vegetables.
Ning Qing’s first reaction was to look around for suspicious targets. After all, a lingering strange taste was still stuck deep in his throat, making it feel unlike a simple dream.
There was nothing.
There was only Cyril holding the back of his head, without accepting any arguments squeezing a teacup to pour water into his mouth while blocking his field of vision. “Senior, why did you wake up so suddenly? You kept coughing. Don’t rush to speak, drink some water first.”
Ning Qing: “…Just now, did any person or animal break in?”
Cyril: “Ah, haha, how could that be? The security here is so tight that even the Expeditionary Force couldn’t break through. Maybe it was some bold, perverted lone ghost.”
The emphasis of the entire sentence was placed heavily on the words bold and perverted.
Ning Qing didn’t pay too much attention to this detail. He noticed that Cyril’s clothes were neat and he had no wounds on his body.
Another strange detail was that the door was locked, while the window was wide open, beating against the wall in the wind from time to time. Fine threads of rain drifted in from outside, dripping onto the carpet along the windowsill.
He turned to ask Cyril, who was sitting overly upright. “Did someone just leave through the window?”
“Look at what you’re saying, what kind of person could leave our house like that? I opened the window to let in some fresh air.”
Oh, opening the window for ventilation on a stormy night.
How interesting.
However, no matter how good Ning Qing was at making associations, he could never guess the bizarre truth that Cyril was actually played interchangeably by twin brothers.
He only saw that Cyril was hiding something from him, though he couldn’t guess the specifics.
Ning Qing smiled, patted Cyril’s shoulder twice, and said softly. “Thanks for your hard work. I’ll take care of my own body, so you don’t need to worry about me. Go back to sleep.”
Then, Cyril’s tightly braced shoulders slowly sank down.
Perhaps out of pity, or perhaps out of guilt, early the next morning, Ning Qing retrieved that forged test report from the living room table, earlier than the agreed time.
After arriving at school, Department Head Darren respectfully pulled open the door to lead the way for him, making no mention of dropping out of school and not sparing a single glance at that report.
Ah, yes. This was the privilege of the nobility.
Darren must have known he had connected with the big tree that was the Lanchester family, so he didn’t even need to look at it anymore. Ning Qing only felt weary.
“Please pull up my file. I want to watch you enter the data,” Ning Qing tapped the desktop twice, startling Darren out of his daydream.
“According to my current authority, I should be able to do this, right, Department Head Darren?”
The other party servilely agreed with a quick ah.
A page popped up on the optical computer, recording Ning Qing’s life honors and that youthful ID photo from when he first enrolled. However, when entering the physical examination data, a red warning window suddenly popped up.
[We are sorry, your authority level is insufficient.]
Who transferred it away?
In fact, he knew in his heart who it was. Ning Qing couldn’t help but recall Morley’s head and tail less words. However, he was still unwilling to imagine Cyril as a thoroughly heinous person.
In this school, if even the only person who had helped him wanted to harm him…
Wouldn’t that be too laughable?
Next, to combat the overwhelming sense of emptiness that threatened to swallow him, Ning Qing could only fill himself with knowledge and training. Unlike the small squabbles of the previous two matches, the upcoming match was the official interstellar league contest. They would be sent to a real desolate planet to perform missions like real soldiers.
After stepping out of the tiny solar system, the Galactic Empire had experienced a phase of rapid expansion known as the Great Interstellar Navigation Era. Back then, space fleets carrying mechas sailed into deep space, truly invincible.
That was the last glorious age of humanity before encountering the Zerg, as well as the glorious era missed by countless people. Today, however, the space fleet had shrunk to one percent of its original size, with only the Expeditionary Corps still maintaining organized mecha formations.
Ning Qing wanted to avenge his relatives and also wished to become a hero who revived that glory.
This had been his long-held desire, and now he was only one step away from achieving his dream.
He had to eliminate all obstacles, including his own bodily factors and absolutely could not enter estrus during the match.
Sunlight rose and moonbeams fell. Ning Qing returned to the small base where he and Cyril were stationed after working through day and night, yet he didn’t often see Cyril’s figure. Aside from the agreed upon paired training sessions, that guy was always out early and back late, busy with who knows what.
On this day, while he was reviewing the book Complete Collection of Battles in the Glorious Era in the study with an inhibitor gummy newly developed by the black market research institute still stuffed in his cheek, he was suddenly hugged from behind and lifted onto the tabletop, about fifty centimeters off his chair.
Ning Qing was stunned, and the orange flavored synthetic gummy he was halfway through chewing rolled out and fell to the floor.
Next, Cyril stuffed a large bouquet of green roses dripping with dew into his arms and snapped a photo with a click.
Simultaneously ringing out was his cheerful laughter. “Senior, smile a bit! Though you look quite good even without smiling, green roses really complement your eyes.”
Ning Qing: ?
Huge confusion filled his wide, emerald green eyes.
Cyril announced grandly. “Today, tonight, at exactly five o’clock this afternoon, I am taking you home.”
“Senior thinks I’ve been very strange these past few days, right?”
Ning Qing nodded, then felt his hand being pulled up and pressed against the other’s chest.
A strong, powerful heart beat beneath his palm.
“Because…”
“I’m about to take you to meet my mother. Get used to your new role, boyfriend.”