Go Back to Your Big Cat Form! Chapter 4: You Can’t Just Swap Husbands!

Chapter 4: You Can’t Just Swap Husbands!

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: Karai

 

“Chief Engineer Lu, do you want to conduct the internal cavity scan?” one of the technicians asked as he handed over a toolbox. “Or should we handle it?”

Internal scanning was hardly a high-level task—it was tedious, even risky. At the base, such work usually fell to technical laborers.

“No need,” Lu Yao said from the cockpit hatch. He knew every step of mecha engineering inside and out. People often joked that if you gave him enough raw material, Lu Yao could singlehandedly build a top-class mecha.

Taking the toolbox, he moved quickly back inside. As he slipped a floating detection sphere through the torn wall into the mecha’s inner cavity, he strapped on his display goggles, safety harness, and other gear, then swung himself through the breach.

The sphere relayed data to his visor while casting a glow that lit the vast inner space, nearly ten meters across. Using a magnetic clamp to anchor himself to the metal wall, Lu Yao guided the light across the chamber until it fell upon the enormous spherical device at its center.

He narrowed his eyes, studying the bloodstains and the jagged damage across its surface. This was the mecha’s mental-control core—the heart of its operation, the interface between pilot and machine. It was deliberately placed behind the cockpit, in the safest part of the structure. Unless the pilot suffered catastrophic harm, the core should never have been touched.

Yet Lu Yao admitted to himself he had overlooked one possibility when he designed it: the pilot might deliberately destroy the core from the inside.

What he saw now confirmed it. Zhou Yunchen had not been attacked from outside. The blood spattered across the cockpit belonged to him, shed while he forced the core apart with brute strength. And with that realization, Lu Yao saw his soon-to-be ex-husband in a new light.

Has Zhou Yunchen gone mad? Lu Yao’s brow furrowed deeply. Forcing down his turmoil, he advanced across the central bridge to conduct a closer inspection. Signs of insanity piled up before him. The torn metal told a clear story: the General had literally ripped open the casing with his bare hands.

With the beam of his forehead lamp cutting across the fracture, Lu Yao studied the shredded cables, assessing the extent of the damage. By the end, his fingers felt numb. The man had been merciless. The core was destroyed beyond repair. Replacement was the only option.

Drawing a steady breath, Lu Yao circled to the side of the unit, searching for the etched plate that listed the mecha’s model and production batch. Tiny differences existed between production runs of the TL03 series—he needed to know which batch’s core would fit. But when his eyes fell on the laser-etched characters, his expression hardened. TL01/01

 

While two technicians examined the external damage, Zhao Minghe received a call. He stepped quickly into a corner to answer. “General.”

“What is Lu Yao doing right now?” The mechanical voice, filtered from text, came mixed with the heavy, growling breath of the snow leopard.

“Are you preparing to see him?”

“No. I’m only asking.” The line went quiet. Zhao Minghe thought the General would not continue, but at last the voice returned, “He’s just arrived in the fleet. Has he had any rest?”

“No, but Mr. Lu seems in good spirits,” Zhao Minghe replied. “I asked him to look at repairing your Distant Star.”

The silence stretched so long Zhao Minghe wondered if the call had dropped. Then came the reply, flat yet edged with restrained fury, “Why would you let him on the Distant Star?”

Even in the electronic monotone, Zhao Minghe heard the anger. He rushed to explain. “General, our repair crew said they couldn’t handle the damage. I thought perhaps under his hands the Distant Star might still have a chance.”

Zhou Yunchen said nothing. But low growls, pressed back in his throat, rumbled through the channel—an echo of the storm inside him.

“General?” Zhao Minghe ventured.

The snow leopard in the General’s office prowled restlessly before finally answering, “Then let it be.” Zhao Minghe barely had time to feel relief before the voice returned, clipped and cold, “In the next few days, contact a lawyer for me. I want to discuss the details of the divorce agreement.”

“What?” Zhao Minghe froze. What was the General trying to do? The Distant Star had been overhauled countless times in the past decade. Why would its repair provoke such rage?

In his dim, gray office, the snow leopard leapt onto the desk and sat facing the panoramic window. His long tail swept the floor. Countless warships drifted silently in the dark sea of stars. The starlight that touched his body was cold, unreachable.

Lu Yao would uncover the Distant Star’s secret. What would he think of him then? The snow leopard dug his claws restlessly into the desk’s edge, unable to quiet his agitation.

 

TL01/01

In the mecha series naming convention, “T” represented the mecha’s structural type, while the following letter designated the Chief Engineer responsible for its development. “TL” meant the T-type mecha designed by Lu Yao. The “01” marked the development series, and the “/01” indicated its production batch.

The mecha piloted by Zhou Yunchen was a T-type designed by Lu Yao—the very first series, the experimental batch’s first machine. But there was a problem. The TL01 model, due to parameter settings, wasn’t suitable for large-scale deployment and was never put into official production. Lu Yao’s team had revised it multiple times before finally launching the TL03.

Experimental production batches like the TL01 prototypes were never supposed to see combat. They were usually left in storage to collect dust or else destroyed outright. So how had Zhou Yunchen gotten hold of this mecha? And why had he kept it all these years without replacing it?

Lu Yao circled to the side of the core module, his hand brushing against a slightly raised welding point. Even among the experimental TL01 batch, TL01/01 was the earliest prototype. Lu Yao himself had personally modified its finer details, and that welding spot was his handiwork.

But after rounds of patchwork and improvements, TL01/01 bore no shortage of scars and repairs. It had never been flawless. Its combat and flight parameters had been set too high, making the machine overly costly and difficult to operate, well beyond what the military’s acceptance officers expected. The TL01 had been rejected during the test flight stage.

Lu Yao’s mood grew complicated. As a mecha engineer, he could never feel sympathy for a pilot who would rip apart a mecha with his bare hands. Yet that same “brute” had once flown the Distant Star across the galaxy—an obsolete relic that should have been buried in the dust of time—so that it could shine with flowers and honor.

All the accolades of high performance and robust structure, even victories in mecha design competitions, meant less than a combat mecha that had once cut through the sea of stars. That was the highest award it could ever receive.

Lu Yao’s hand traced the welds and scars across the core module’s metal surface. Zhou Yunchen couldn’t possibly not love the Distant Star, his companion through so many battles. And neither could Lu Yao. TL01 might have been abandoned, but it remained his labor of love.

When he finally left the mecha bay and rode the lift back to the ground, Zhao Minghe approached quickly. He asked, “Major General Lu, can the Distant Star be repaired?” 

Lu Yao shook his head. “The psychic core has been completely destroyed. There’s no way to fix it.”

He didn’t ask Zhao Minghe how Zhou Yunchen had ever gotten his hands on the TL01 in the first place. By the time Zhao had become the General’s aide, the Distant Star was already famous.

The answer hit Zhao Minghe hard. His mouth fell open, caught between Zhou Yunchen’s blow and Lu Yao’s verdict, unable to contain his disappointment.

“This mecha series has been in service for nearly ten years,” Lu Yao added. “In cases like this, our usual recommendation is for General Zhou to switch to a newer model.”

When a pilot destroyed his own mecha with his own two hands, he had to accept that he might lose her forever. Many mecha pilots chose to buy back their wrecked units, keeping them at home as mementos. It wasn’t a bad way to preserve the memories.

Lu Yao was about to make that suggestion when Zhao Minghe—usually calm and courteous—suddenly blanched. “No, General Zhou’s Distant Star can’t be replaced! A mecha to a pilot is like a spouse. How could anyone replace a spouse?”

Lu Yao frowned and asked, almost instinctively, “Then what does that make me?”

Zhao Minghe froze, then shut his mouth abruptly. The man in front of him was, after all, the General’s legal spouse. What on earth was he saying?

A moment later, Lu Yao’s brows knit in faint puzzlement. “Does that make me the father-in-law to you all then?”

Zhao Minghe was speechless. Lu Yao hadn’t expected Zhao Minghe’s explanation, but he quickly shook the thought aside. That wasn’t the point. “Major General Lu, is there really no way at all to repair it?” Zhao Minghe asked.

That was exactly what Lu Yao had wanted to say. “There is one method,” he admitted. “I could completely dismantle the Distant Star, replace the psychic core, and then reassemble it.”

Every mecha developed at the base came with an anti-dismantling system. Standard repairs only allowed modular disassembly. Unless one was a senior engineer who knew the exact assembly patterns, anyone who tried to take a mecha fully apart and rebuild it would never succeed in putting it back together.

If it hadn’t been Lu Yao himself, the Distant Star would probably have been consigned to the mecha display hall by now. “However,” Lu Yao continued, “the specific psychic core model the Distant Star once used has long been discontinued. I can only replace it with a similar type and then fine-tune the parameters. But when General Zhou pilots it again, it won’t feel quite the same as before. Will he be able to accept that?”

Zhao Minghe sent a message to Zhou Yunchen to ask. The reply came back quickly: anything was fine, and all decisions were to be left to Lu Yao.

After Zhao Minghe relayed the response, Lu Yao nodded. “There’s one more thing, Aide Zhao. Can you tell me what General Zhou did inside the mecha at the end? Those bloodstains…”

“Major General Lu… that’s classified military information,” Zhao Minghe said helplessly. “The General has ordered that it must not be disclosed for now. He’s already deleted all video and data records from that time.”

That included the footage of Zhou Yunchen’s sudden transformation—from a living man into a massive snow leopard—when he had smashed through the cabin wall in desperation. Only a handful of people who knew the truth had been ordered to keep it strictly secret.

“I see,” Lu Yao said at last, no longer pressing the matter. “Please, just tell General Zhou… don’t destroy his mecha again.”

 

In the days that followed, Lu Yao threw himself into the Distant Star’s repairs. He began by scrubbing every trace of blood from the cockpit, then directed the repair drones as they dismantled the towering thirty-meter machine.

The limb modules were detached and sent off for technicians to refurbish, while Lu Yao himself disassembled the torso into tens of thousands of tiny parts. Beyond replacing the psychic core, he swapped out every outdated component, corrected old hidden damages one by one, and polished and oiled the structure until it gleamed.

After nearly a week of nonstop work, the day finally arrived for him to calibrate the new psychic core’s data. But when he woke that morning, his head was clouded, his body overheated. One glance at the date told him why—his estrus cycle had arrived.

For once, he was relieved Zhou Yunchen wasn’t aboard the Ares. Otherwise, they would have had no choice but to complete a marking.

 

Author’s Note:

Zhou Yunchen: secretly keeps mementos of his spouse and quietly shows them off to the whole world.

 

 

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