Free Web NovelWhen Wen Yuzhi woke up the next day, he discovered he was lying in the bed.
The soft mattress beneath him was far more comfortable than sleeping on that hard floor.
But Wen Yuzhi clearly remembered that last night, he had fallen asleep on the floor...
At that thought, he hurriedly turned to look at the bedding off to the side.
But the blanket on the floor had already been folded up and put away.
The other person had even guessed that the moment Wen Yuzhi woke up, he would look over there first, so a clean set of clothes had been placed by the bed, along with a note.
Wen Yuzhi ignored the clothes for the moment and picked up the note first.
On it was a single line written in Xi Heyan’s own hand:
[I went to find Uncle Chong. Breakfast is on the table.]
His handwriting was strong and forceful, the strokes sharp with a cutting edge.
But what Wen Yuzhi noticed was the word breakfast. He lifted his head, and sure enough, on the desk he saw the same tray as yesterday, with a lid covering it.
Xi Heyan clearly had no way of knowing when Wen Yuzhi would wake up, and yet he had already prepared both the clothes and the breakfast in advance.
Wen Yuzhi had felt this kind of delicate thoughtfulness many times before in his chats with Xi Heyan.
But he had never expected that in real life, that delicacy and care would show up in an even more concrete and thorough way.
Xi Heyan had practically arranged everything for him down to the last detail.
Following the note, Wen Yuzhi changed into the new clothes, washed up in the bathroom, then came over to the desk.
When he lifted the lid, he found a sandwich on the tray, with meat, vegetables, and a fried egg between the slices of bread.
And what surprised Wen Yuzhi most was that Xi Heyan had somehow even found milk. Beside the bread sat a cup of milk, still warm at just the right temperature.
On a place like Blackrock Star, where supplies were scarce, this kind of breakfast was downright extravagant.
Looking at it, a thought rose uncontrollably in Wen Yuzhi’s mind.
Was there anything Xi Heyan didn’t think of?
He had prepared clothes for him, fixed breakfast for him, dried his hair last night, roasted rabbit for him, and so on...
Before Wen Yuzhi had even realized it, Xi Heyan had already arranged everything.
All Wen Yuzhi had to do was wait there like a little prince and let himself be taken care of.
It would be great if there were a housekeeping robot out there that could arrange everything in advance for him the way Xi Heyan did...
That was what Wen Yuzhi was thinking.
If there really were a robot like that, he would absolutely buy one and take it home.
And the very Xi Heyan Wen Yuzhi happened to be thinking about...
suddenly felt, in the depths of his heart, a strange sensation, as if someone were thinking of him.
But before Xi Heyan could react, that inexplicable feeling disappeared again.
In the few seconds he paused, the door in front of him had already opened.
Chong Fengxue nodded at him. “Brother Yan, Uncle Chong is already inside waiting for you.”
Xi Heyan gave a quiet hum and walked straight into the room.
Hearing the footsteps, Uncle Chong slowly rose to his feet. But the instant he saw Xi Heyan’s figure, his expression flickered out of control for a moment.
The black-haired young man walking toward him wore a fitted black combat uniform. He was tall, with clear, bright eyes, deep, striking features, and a cold expression. His entire bearing was as sharp and forbidding as a drawn blade, impossible to look at lightly. freeweɓnovel.cøm
And in that dazed instant, Uncle Chong almost thought Xi Shixiao had returned.
The figure of the black-haired young man before him seemed to overlap with the man in military uniform from his memories.
For a moment, Uncle Chong could not even tell whether he was dreaming or standing in reality.
In terms of appearance, Xi Heyan and Xi Shixiao were not actually that similar. Xi Heyan’s features resembled his mother more, the famous mech master Madam Lena.
Madam Lena and her father August had both inherited the Damian family’s blond hair and blue eyes. It was said that the Damian family had royal blood, which was why, like the Hoffmann royal family, they possessed hair brighter than gold itself.
Their features were also exceptionally deep and sculpted. Every Damian was blessed with outstanding looks.
Xi Heyan had clearly inherited those excellent genes from his mother’s side as well.
His eyes had inherited the Damian family’s blue, while his features and brow line shared Madam Lena’s same deep-cut sharpness, carrying an unmistakably handsome, forceful edge.
Xi Shixiao, by contrast, had been the gentler, more refined sort, like a clear breeze and bright moonlight. He also loved to smile, and his temperament had been warm and gracious. Nearly everyone in the army, from top to bottom, had benefited from the leader’s kindness.
In Xi Heyan, Uncle Chong could see shadows of both Xi Shixiao and Lena.
He had grown up. In him lived both the Xi family’s unbending pride and the Damian family’s inborn force and majesty.
With those two temperaments combined, Xi Heyan looked even more exceptional and dazzling than his parents’ generation had.
Time really could transform a child.
Looking at the black-haired young man who now stood even taller than he did, Uncle Chong’s eyes reddened uncontrollably, and that weathered face trembled faintly.
“Y-Young...”
He stood up from his seat and had just begun to bow to Xi Heyan when Xi Heyan stopped him.
“There’s no such thing as a young lord here anymore. You’re my elder. You were the one who helped raise me.”
Blackstone City was long gone. He was just an ordinary person now—less than ordinary, really.
After all, if word ever got out that he was Xi Shixiao’s son, the number of people who wanted him dead would be more than fish crossing a river.
Uncle Chong understood that too, but he still insisted on finishing the bow.
“There is no leader anymore, and Blackrock Star stopped existing long ago. It was the leader who brought us through those impossible years and kept us alive. You are his child. On behalf of all the survivors of Blackrock Star, it’s only right that I thank you.”
Uncle Chong treated the bow as gratitude, which left Xi Heyan with no way to stop him again.
Even so, Xi Heyan turned slightly to the side instead of fully accepting it.
Xi Shixiao had indeed made enormous contributions to Blackrock Star, but that merit did not belong to Xi Heyan. He did not deserve to receive it.
When Uncle Chong saw that, the admiration in his heart for Xi Heyan only deepened.
This child had turned out so well.
If Xi Shixiao had not died, if Blackrock Star had not suffered such utter catastrophe, and if someone like Xi Heyan had inherited everything after him...
then how could Blackrock Star ever have failed to stand shoulder to shoulder with the great planets?
Bernard...
As he chewed over those three words, a trace of coldness flashed through Uncle Chong’s eyes.
But when he looked at Xi Heyan again, the emotion in his gaze had already been replaced by worry.
“Why did you suddenly come back? Did Bernard’s people discover you?”
“Bernard’s mental sea developed problems. For years now, he’s been searching for treatment, but his condition has only gotten worse. He doesn’t have the spare energy to concern himself with other matters anymore,” Xi Heyan said.
To hide the illness, Bernard had appeared in public less and less often, which in turn led him to begin delegating power downward. And that only let the nobles below him gradually develop ambitions of replacing him.
Now Bernard had to find ways to prolong his own life while also keeping the royal family’s grip on power steady. He was stretched too thin. As for the noble houses, the only thing they cared about right now was the throne.
At a moment like this, no one was going to pay attention to a student in a military academy.
And the people in the army now were all later promotions by Bernard and those powerful interests. They were unfamiliar with the Blackstone Legion, and because Bernard had issued orders forbidding anyone from mentioning the Xi family or the Blackstone Legion in order to cover up his crimes—and had even wiped away every trace of them—he had never expected that this very act would instead provide Xi Heyan with the perfect cover.
Right under those people’s noses, Xi Heyan had entered a military academy and, by observing what happened there, slowly come to understand the current state of the army.
And the more he learned, the more Xi Heyan realized that the Empire’s military had become nothing but loose sand.
Every noble family wanted a share of it, and the result was that the army was filled with each noble house’s direct faction.
Those people schemed only to occupy high positions and live in luxury. They had no combat capability at all. That rot had even spread into the academies. The gulf between the children of the powerful and ordinary students was only growing wider.
The Saint Clan’s last invasion had merely torn away those people’s fig leaf. Even without the Saint Clan, the Empire would sooner or later have decayed in their hands anyway.
“That’s the retribution they deserve.”
Uncle Chong spoke coldly, fingers brushing the scar across his neck.
The wound had been deep. With the level of technology in the interstellar age, repairing a scar like that would not have been difficult.
But Uncle Chong had chosen to keep it.
He wanted to remind himself at all times how the tens of thousands of soldiers of the Blackstone Legion had died back then.
Xi Heyan saw the scar too.
He knew Uncle Chong had received that wound twenty years ago.
Twenty years ago, Bernard had framed Xi Shixiao with a charge of colluding with the enemy and treason, then lured the Blackstone Legion to a dead planet where an ambush had already been set.
Everyone died. Uncle Chong’s neck had nearly been severed, yet he had clawed his way back from that hell alive and become the Blackstone Legion’s sole survivor.
But by the time he finally returned, what awaited him was an even deeper despair.
Even after destroying the Blackstone Legion, Bernard had still been unable to rest easy. He was too afraid—afraid that another Xi Shixiao would appear on Blackrock Star, afraid that another force of soldiers as powerful as the Blackstone Legion would gather there again.
So Bernard simply went all the way. He secretly sent private troops to Blackrock Star, concealing it from the Empire’s citizens, and carried out a bloody purge.
Most of Blackrock Star’s strength had already gone into the Blackstone Legion. The ones left behind were mostly the old, the weak, women, and children. They still had no idea anything had happened to Xi Shixiao or the Legion. Faced with a sudden strike from elite forces, Blackrock Star was caught completely off guard.
And even so, after retreating into Blackstone City, they still managed to hold out under the army’s bombardment for half a month.
In that half-month, Blackrock Star suffered devastating casualties. But Bernard’s elites also lost nearly half their number in that battle. And once he had lost that portion of his personal guard, Bernard later had no choice but to submit to the control of those powerful interests.
But for the people of Blackrock Star, the comrades who had died would never return.
Blackstone City had been destroyed, and they could only begin a life of forced wandering.
And even so, Bernard’s targeting of Blackrock Star never stopped.
He forbade merchant caravans from entering Blackrock Star. He spent enormous sums establishing interference fields to sever Blackrock Star’s connection to the outside world. Food, medicine, and other supplies were placed under strict control as well.
Under that long series of attacks, Blackrock Star, once a prosperous jewel of the frontier, quickly slid into decline.
And Bernard still could not stop.
After already pushing Blackrock Star to the brink, he began releasing large numbers of stray beasts onto the planet.
That’s right. The reason Blackrock Star was now overrun with stray beasts was entirely Bernard’s doing.
At regular intervals, the Empire would send starships to release more of them there.
Because of public sentiment, Bernard had no way to wipe Blackrock Star out all at once. So he used this roundabout method instead, hoping to kill off the survivors still left on the planet.
“The reason I came back this time is because I found out Bernard once worked with Kegso. It seems they reached some kind of private agreement, and Bernard provided Blackrock Star to Kegso as an experimental site for research.”
Xi Heyan’s voice was ice-cold. Anyone who learned that the homeland they depended on for survival had been turned into an experimental site by people with ulterior motives—and that they themselves had been treated like lab rats—would probably be unable to suppress the anger rising inside them.
Uncle Chong also brought over the pile of bones he had kept in the room.
“When I was killing those stray beasts, I noticed something strange. To verify my suspicion, I collected these bones.”
As he spoke, Uncle Chong spread the beast bones out on the table in a certain order.
The first bone was so brittle Uncle Chong could crush it with one squeeze.
The ones after that grew harder and harder. He had to use his heavy sword on them. And by the time he got to the last bone, even the heavy sword could no longer shatter it.
“They’re getting stronger. Or rather... evolving.”
Uncle Chong had killed too many stray beasts. He knew better than anyone how the beasts on Blackrock Star had changed.
At first, they had not been hard to deal with. There were many of them, but a pack of wolves alone had been enough to kill them.
But slowly, those stray beasts seemed to become smarter. They also became harder and harder to fight, and even learned to gather into organized beast tides to attack the base.
Every time, the base had to pay a terrible price just to drive them back.
And when the hunting team returned yesterday, Chong Fengxue and Chong Fengshuang had brought back an even worse piece of news.
These stray beasts now seemed to be able to spit fire and spray venom as well.
All of those signs showed the same thing.
These stray beasts were growing stronger. They were evolving.
Evolving...
Xi Heyan thought of the people in protective suits from the video, injecting some kind of serum into a stray beast, and how that beast’s body had instantly become larger and more powerful.
If that was what evolution meant...
then it was too absurd.
And worse still, the “evolution” of those stray beasts had been built on the lives of countless people on Blackrock Star.
“What are you planning to do?”
Uncle Chong had already roughly guessed why Xi Heyan had returned.
And Xi Heyan did not hide it.
“If they made Blackrock Star into an experimental site, then to observe it at close range, they must have built a laboratory here.”
At ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) that point, Xi Heyan paused, and his eyes darkened.
“I want to go take a look at that laboratory.”
He needed to gather enough evidence.
Killing Bernard would be easy.
But why should Bernard get off that lightly?
Why should that man be allowed to die so easily...
and die under the name of a great ruler who opened an era of imperial glory?
Even a few hundred years from now, when people spoke of Bernard, all they would remember was that under his reign, the Empire had once entered a prosperous age.
While the Xi family and Blackrock Star would be left to bear an eternal stain.
What Xi Heyan wanted was to drag all of Bernard’s crimes completely into the light, and make him suffer through the kind of pain they had once endured, under a storm of curses and condemnation.
And Bernard alone was not enough.
Back then, for an accomplished legion to vanish completely, and for Blackrock Star to be trapped so tightly, Bernard’s strength alone would not have been enough.
There had also been those powerful families on the capital star, and the people hidden behind them.
Only with the combined force of those three sides could the bloodshed of that year have been brought about so quickly. freeωebnovēl.c૦m
Xi Heyan had not forgotten that Xi Yuelin’s death was connected to the people of Polaris, and that behind Polaris lay an even more tangled web.
If he wanted revenge, then he needed to understand his enemies better and get hold of more evidence.
In a low voice, Uncle Chong said, “Whatever you want to do, go do it. There are still plenty of people alive on Blackrock Star. Blood debts must be repaid in blood. When the time comes, all of us will be blades in your hand.”
Then Uncle Chong looked into Xi Heyan’s eyes and said, “I believe the Damian family feels the same way.”
...........
After finishing his conversation with Uncle Chong, Xi Heyan came out of the room.
There still seemed to be a knot of dark emotion sitting in his chest.
But the moment he saw Wen Yuzhi, that heaviness quietly dispersed without him realizing it.
Wen Yuzhi was holding a rabbit in his arms.
He had just taken the white wolf around the area near the stronghold for a walk, only to unexpectedly discover that the white wolf had dug up another rabbit nest.
Just like before, they split them the same way: Wen Yuzhi took two rabbits, and the rest all went to the white wolf as an extra meal.
The sand rabbits here were especially large, and their hind legs were incredibly strong. Wen Yuzhi had no way of carrying two at once. The white wolf, however, was already full and not hungry for the time being, so it simply held one rabbit in its mouth, almost like it was playing with it.
It didn’t bite down. Instead, it trotted alongside Wen Yuzhi with the rabbit in its mouth, looking eager to please.
When Xi Heyan arrived, he happened to see that exact scene of the white wolf openly trying to curry favor.
“You spoil it too much.”
After glancing at the white wolf, which looked ready to stick itself to Wen Yuzhi at any second, Xi Heyan said in an even voice.
Wen Yuzhi blinked, stroked the rabbit in his arms, and quietly defended the white wolf.
“A-Wu is very well-behaved.”
A-Wu?
Xi Heyan froze for a second.
Only then did he realize that A-Wu was the name Wen Yuzhi had given the white wolf.
It was just...
why A-Wu?
As if noticing the confusion in Xi Heyan’s eyes, Wen Yuzhi explained, “Because every time it makes a sound, it goes awu, awu.”
As he said that, the white wolf very cooperatively let out a howl beside him, the tone ingratiating and fawning.
“........”
Listening to that white wolf’s voice, sweetened to the point of near distortion, Xi Heyan fell silent for a moment.
Compared with this shamelessly flattering wolf, Xi Heyan suddenly found that the rabbit in Wen Yuzhi’s arms looked much more pleasing to the eye.
So, without changing expression, he said, “This rabbit’s fur color is pretty good. If you keep it, it could make a pet.”
Xi Heyan remembered that rich young masters from wealthy families liked raising this kind of cute, fluffy pet the most.
But Wen Yuzhi shook his head.
“I already have A-Wu. And I’ve already decided—this one’s going into rabbit stew. It’s so fat, it has to be delicious!”
Xi Heyan: “.......”
Shivering rabbit.jpg.
