Free Web NovelOn the other side.
Drizzle pattered down, ceaselessly washing over bloodstained scales.
The giant beast in the center of the ruins abruptly woke from its slumber. It lifted its head and glanced up at the gray, dim sky.
Dense, unbroken raindrops wove together into layers of hazy rain curtains, even blocking the giant beast’s line of sight. The entire world around it seemed shrouded in this immense, pounding rain.
This stretch was Kanirila’s rainy season.
The Padar people didn’t like water. In past years, at this time of year, the Padar who lived here would take their whole families and go vacation on the planets they had colonized and occupied, only returning after the long rainy season ended.
But this year, they clearly no longer had that worry.
Because not long ago, they had provoked the notorious Saint Clan, and in less than a few short days they were beaten into a rout. Along with that, this beautiful Goddess Star also became the Saint Clan’s spoil of war.
Now, on this land, the only living creature left was probably the giant beast.
Or maybe not.
There was also one more...
A small figure suddenly flashed through the giant beast’s mind.
—Far too small.
Standing beside it, that one didn’t even reach the height of its leg. It was the weakest lifeform the giant beast had ever seen in its entire life.
At most...
That was a human cub.
Thinking of this, the giant beast opened its eyes and swept its gaze around to the side.
Today, that one seemed to not have come yet. Everything placed here was from before.
The bottle of emergency spray and the candies Wen Yuzhi had put down at the very beginning were now buried at the very bottom under a mountain of accumulated supplies. Instead, the items on the very top layer were all things he had delivered yesterday.
Among them were a little yellow duck plush he’d dug out of a trash heap, a beat-up but still working music box, and two cans of fruit in syrup that looked exceptionally precious right now.
And from the makeup of these gifts, you could also tell Wen Yuzhi’s living trajectory over these days.
At first, he sent things he had brought with him, or things that were inside the escape pod. Later, it became fruit and fresh flowers he could find around this area. Later still, after he learned how to find “treasures” in the ruins, the things Wen Yuzhi delivered became even broader.
From toys and snacks to books and little ornaments, anything he thought was interesting or pretty—while bringing it back for himself, he also brought a portion for the giant beast.
Layer upon layer, stacked there, piled into a towering mountain of gifts.
The giant beast wasn’t someone who had never received gifts before, but this was the first time it had received so many “gifts,” one after another—so many it was like they were going to drown it.
And every single one of those gifts happened to come from the hands of a human cub...
The giant beast didn’t know whether that cub truly wasn’t afraid of it, or was simply too bold.
A human giving gifts to an other-species?
Just saying it out loud sounded absurd.
It swept a cold glance over that mountain of gifts. Before the giant beast could turn its head away, a familiar, needle-prick pain abruptly flared inside its mind.
...Again...
The giant beast’s golden vertical pupils tightened slightly. Behind it, that long tail—like a bone spike—lashed back and forth in irritation. Its aura sank, faintly on the verge of losing control again.
But in the end, it still silently closed its eyes, lowering itself to the ground, no longer sparing even the slightest trace of attention toward the mountain of gifts beside it.
--
The rain kept falling, nonstop.
Listening to the steady drip-drip of rain, the giant beast showed nothing on its face, but a hard-to-describe irritability slowly surged up in its heart.
It didn’t like this feeling.
—This feeling that everything was out of order, chaotic.
It made it instinctively irritable, disgusted, to the point it even wanted to smash and destroy everything in front of it.
To divert the irritation in its heart, the giant beast lifted its head and looked toward the other side of the rain curtain.
Normally, that human cub always came from this direction. But today, it had already been a long time. The human cub who used to appear here on the dot every single day still hadn’t shown up.
The sky gradually grew darker. As the last trace of light vanished, the long night descended again.
The giant beast knew that cub wasn’t coming.
The entire day, that one never appeared.
Maybe it had finally given up, or maybe something else had happened. freewebnoveℓ.com
The giant beast thought so—yet the arc of its tail’s movement ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) only grew larger and larger.
Ten minutes later.
The silver-white giant beast that had been standing in the center of the ruins vanished, replaced by a tall, austere figure.
Fine rain drifted down, but right as it was about to touch him, it was automatically cut off by something, kept outside.
Mansendis never expected that there would come a day when he would take the initiative to worry about a human.
He lowered his eyes. Those pale-gold vertical pupils were indifferent and calm.
Only he himself knew that everything around him made him unbearably irritated.
Early-summer rain poured down. Water drenched and sank into the muddy soil, mixing and blending with the dried blood that had been buried underneath.
The stench that had been pressed down was forced back out, and the air seemed to be wrapped in an inescapable iron-rust smell.
The noisy rain, the bloody stench rising from the earth...
Every one of these things deeply stimulated the Saint Clan’s abnormally sharp senses.
—Disgusting.
...Destroy it. Destroy everything in front of him, all of it.
Savage hostility kept growing and spreading inside his heart. Mansendis irritably pinched at the space between his brows, and a layer of cold, grim frost slowly covered his expressionless face.
Yet just as he was about to sink into losing control again, a trace of an extremely faint sweet scent pulled him back in time.
The tension in his emotions abruptly loosened. Those sharp sounds that made his head feel like it was splitting instantly receded like a tide. His frenzied mental sea seemed to grow quiet again.
Mansendis lifted his eyes, his gaze complicated.
Through layers of rain curtain, his eyes landed precisely on the escape pod not far away, shaped just like an eggshell.
This is...?
Even though that sweet scent existed only briefly, fleeting in an instant, Mansendis still keenly caught its source—
The place where that human cub was.
.......
After an Omega enters the developmental period, until death, an Omega must always wear an inhibitor.
This was important knowledge every Omega was taught from childhood, meant to prevent pheromone leakage from luring Alphas into heat.
But after it was confirmed that his pheromones couldn’t attract a single Alpha, Wen Yuzhi tore the neck ring off on the spot. Anyway, those Alphas couldn’t smell his pheromones, so why should he wear this thing around his neck every day like a dog leash?
And because of that, when Wen Yuzhi was fighting off a high fever, he never imagined that his own pheromones would leak out—much less that they would be smelled by an existence that wasn’t even an Alpha, and that, by sheer accident, they would drag the other party back from the brink of losing control.
"Huff..."
First cold, then hot. freёweɓnovel.com
Wen Yuzhi “luckily” got to experience a full ice-and-fire double heaven inside this wilderness shelter.
Not long after he built up the firepit, he realized he seemed to have caught a chill—and worse, there wasn’t a single medicine in the first-aid kit that could treat the symptoms.
From the very beginning, an escape pod was designed as a life-saving tool for emergencies. Its primary function was to ensure passengers could safely escape a dangerous place. Only after that came a few basic supporting facilities.
Clearly, when this escape pod was originally designed, those people never once imagined that a delicate Omega could survive out in the wild. What they stocked were only sprays and bandages commonly used to treat external injuries.
And Wen Yuzhi also hadn’t expected he would suddenly fall ill. These days, when he went rummaging through trash, he was picking up daily-use items—so now he had reached a point where he basically had no medicine he could use.
He could only try to drive the cold out of his body by repeatedly forcing down hot water.
But as time passed, Wen Yuzhi’s body still gradually burned up into a high fever.
"Mm...!"
Hot... so hot...
On this cold rainy night, the only thing that gave Wen Yuzhi a sense of safety was this shelter he had painstakingly built with his own hands over these days.
Right now, he lay on a pile of dry grass, covered with a cotton quilt he’d dug out of the ruins. Conditions this crude obviously weren’t suitable for recovering from illness.
But this was already the best he could achieve after doing everything he could.
He clutched the quilt tight and curled into a ball. The misery brought by the high fever even made Wen Yuzhi forget how rough the dry grass underneath him was.
He only felt like his insides were about to catch fire. His throat was parched.
"Wu... Mom..."
With his consciousness sinking into haze, Wen Yuzhi could no longer clearly tell where he was. Instinctively, he called out that form of address he had once buried deep in his heart. Like an anxious young beast, he yearned to be held again in his mother’s warm embrace.
So when Mansendis finally tracked him down, what he saw was a little tabby cat that was almost crying itself to pieces.
This frail little tabby cat pitifully nestled on the straw pile, eyes shut tight, brow faintly furrowed. One hand clenched into a fist, still gripping the corner of the quilt in front of him so hard that even his fingertips were going pale.
It was like even in sleep, he couldn’t relax. The corners of his eyes were damp and red. On his crow-dark long lashes, a teardrop hung wetly—about to fall but not yet falling—like he had just cried hard, that pitiful look making him seem unbearably miserable.
Just yesterday he had come to bring him flowers with a smiling face. In only a single day without seeing him, his state had turned this bad...
Mansendis unconsciously pressed his lips together in displeasure.
He looked around at this environment that could only be described as extremely crude. Without realizing it, his brows knit tighter and tighter.
Of course he could tell that this thing built from wood planks and metal couldn’t even be called a house. At most, it could block a bit of sun.
A slightly heavier rain probably could wash this place down in one careless surge.
And that wasn’t an exaggeration. Mansendis had already seen several spots overhead where seams hadn’t been sealed properly, starting to seep water.
If he hadn’t come today, by the time Wen Yuzhi woke up tomorrow, he would probably find himself soaking in rainwater.
A “house” like this clearly couldn’t withstand the torrential rain outside that was only getting heavier.
Thinking of that, the figure standing in the doorway grew even more silent.
Firelight leaped, yet it couldn’t drive away the cold around him.
Mansendis didn’t want to meddle in other people’s business. He had never cared about the life or death of a human.
But...
He lowered his eyes, his gaze falling straight onto Wen Yuzhi’s body.
