Chapter 62: Baby, Did You Gain Weight?
Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations
Editor: Karai
After returning home from work, Lu Yao first cooked some meat for Snow Leopard, then tried to contact Zhou Yunchen. But the communication didn’t go through. Lu Yao sat on the sofa in thought. Snow Leopard, lying at his feet, suddenly leapt over the sofa and began howling not far behind him.
“Good baby, the meat will be ready soon. Don’t worry,” Lu Yao said to soothe him. But Snow Leopard continued to howl hoarsely, and immediately Torque joined in, letting out sharp meows. Lu Yao had no choice but to turn and see what was happening. He discovered that the pot of meat was producing thick black smoke that rose toward the ceiling.
He rushed over and saw that the water had boiled dry and the meat had charred to the bottom of the pot. Without wearing his olfactory stimulator, he hadn’t noticed the smell coming early. When he grabbed the spatula to scoop out the meat, the metal spatula pierced straight through the bottom of the pot. Lu Yao froze for a moment, then quietly set it down.
“D, take care of the trash on the stove,” Lu Yao said, rubbing his forehead. “And turn on the smoke alarm.”
Previously, to prevent dust and smoke from the garage lab from triggering the alarm, he had shut off the system that connected all the alarms in the house. It seemed he’d need to rewire it to turn off only the lab alarm. He sent an email to Carriedo, asking for a copy of the villa’s internal structural design. Carriedo and Yan Jiujiang were planning to tour New Blue Planet a few times before returning.
Though they had lived on this planet most of their lives, they had never explored its rivers and mountains together. As he prepared to turn off the light screen, Lu Yao suddenly noticed the previous email he had sent from his personal account—to Zhou Yunchen.
“Howl—”
“Meow meow meow~”
The two cats, one large and one small, circled Lu Yao’s legs, rubbing against him.
“All right, all right,” Lu Yao said, closing the light screen. He scooped Torque up from the floor and placed him on Snow Leopard’s back. “I’ll make you guys dinner.”
Lu Yao fetched Torque’s cat food and canned meals, while Snow Leopard carried the white long-haired cat along at his feet.
Torque’s dinner remained as usual. Snow Leopard would have to make do with nutritional fluid tonight. Lu Yao gave him a portion of canned food as well, but Snow Leopard seemed uninterested, licking a few bites before lifting his head to look at Lu Yao, then persuading himself to continue eating.
Torque stared longingly at the large can of food meant for Snow Leopard. Halfway through, Snow Leopard pushed the can toward Torque with a paw, then ran to the bathroom to quickly clean the grease from his mouth before returning to the living room and leaping onto the sofa.
He lay down next to Lu Yao, curling his tail around himself, the tip of his black tail resting on Lu Yao’s thigh. Lu Yao was composing a new email to Zhou Yunchen, his fingers repeatedly pressing the backspace key on the virtual keyboard, unable to finalize the content.
Snow Leopard flicked his tail against Lu Yao’s leg, but Lu Yao, absorbed in thought, didn’t grab his thick tail as usual. Snow Leopard lifted his upper body, trying to nuzzle Lu Yao’s hand with his head, but his internal chip suddenly received an email that automatically opened, startling him enough to crash headfirst into Lu Yao’s lap.
Lu Yao nearly suffocated under the weight. He grabbed Snow Leopard’s front legs to lift him up. Snow Leopard tried to turn his head aside, apparently embarrassed—but in doing so, Lu Yao noticed that the fur on his neck had layered in several folds.
Lu Yao furrowed his brow and set Snow Leopard down, reaching back to touch him.
Snow Leopard didn’t understand why Lu Yao, who had seemed slightly annoyed just moments ago, was now holding him. He instinctively rubbed the side of his face against Lu Yao’s neck, smelling faint traces of catnip and medicine. But the next moment, a pair of cool hands pinched his belly, kneading back and forth.
With Lu Yao’s warm breath nearby, a teasing voice whispered into Snow Leopard’s ears: “Baby, have you put on weight?”
Snow Leopard leapt three meters high, spreading all four limbs midair like a feline pancake. He couldn’t hear that! Zhou Yunchen refused to believe it. How could he be fat?
Although his recent life had consisted of waiting to be fed, leisurely pacing in circles, and napping, with the last physical training several months ago… he couldn’t be fat! Just a few days ago, he had transformed back into human form and perfectly fit into his complex military uniform with no strain.
The only explanation: the Snow Leopard form didn’t share the same stomach as the human form. In other words, Zhou Yunchen wasn’t fat, but Snow Leopard probably had gained weight. Snow Leopard started thinking he might need to run a few laps on the hill every day.
Lu Yao pulled the fallen Snow Leopard back and, this time, didn’t poke his belly—just gently combed the fur on his forehead with his fingers.
“Maybe you’re growing meat and fur because the weather’s getting colder,” Lu Yao said.
It was a possibility. But if that was the reason, no matter how much Snow Leopard exercised, could he not escape a future in which fat and fur grew together? Snow Leopard let out a whine and flopped dejectedly onto Lu Yao. Lu Yao began drafting a second message. Zhou Yunchen quietly opened Lu Yao’s email via his chip.
“You once returned to the past with Distant Star. The person who met me that day was Li Mo. He witnessed the P999 incident, and he knows about this too. The three of us need to meet.”
Zhou Yunchen replied, “Fine.” Lu Yao’s taut nerves relaxed instantly at the sight of that single word. He leaned back against Snow Leopard and lay down. Snow Leopard’s breathing was faster than a human’s, his thick fur radiating warmth. Lu Yao buried his face in the patterned coat.
Not wanting to trouble Mr. Shang a second time in a short period, Lu Yao discussed with Zhou Yunchen and decided to meet in the private viewing room of the Federation Exploration Museum for privacy. Li Mo accepted the invitation immediately.
On the agreed day, Lu Yao drove alone to the Federation Exploration Museum in the central district. A cast-sword-to-plow sculpture, passed down from the Earth era, stood in front of the museum, protected by a vacuum dome.
Yet past this symbol of peace, the museum’s collection consisted almost entirely of weapons from humanity’s interstellar age. From massive warship models to heavy mecha, from energy particle cannons to orbital ring cannons—every symbol of violence had been gathered here.
Originally, the museum had been called the Military Museum. In humanity’s early space age, war still raged between colonies. Stars became new trenches and fortresses; asteroid belts were guerrilla battlegrounds, leaving countless lives as cosmic dust and empty corpses.
In Stellar Year 1203, the Federation unified human civilization across the galaxy. War ended, and before the emergence of extraterrestrial beasts, humanity entered a rare period of peace. The preserved military forces were fully repurposed for off-system exploration, and the Military Museum was renamed the Exploration Museum.
History books claimed that humans destroyed all weapons in this era of peace. Yet artifacts continued to be sent to the newly renamed museum. The so-called exploration tools of this period included ground-core detectors capable of causing magnitude-eight planetary quakes, protective field generators able to instantly shred comets, metal flame analyzers heating near 8,000°C, and atomic mining hammers capable of turning a thousand-mile mountain range to ash.
Federation records also noted that when the first wave of beasts arrived, even though humanity had tasted years of peace and was nearly defenseless, they still defended their homes with unity and courage.
At the Morningstar Military Academy’s space weapons design program, every designer began their studies with these terrifying “exploration tools” of the peace era.
Even now, the Federation’s exploration legions possessed weapons comparable in number to those at the front lines fighting beasts. The museum still tried to create a warm and lively atmosphere amid these steel giants.
Lu Yao passed the fifty-meter-high crescent-shaped “Nuclear Scythe” in the exhibition and arrived at the private viewing room, where Zhou Yunchen was already waiting. Lu Yao nodded and sat beside him.
Li Mo was the third to arrive. He glanced at the seating arrangement along the long table and quietly took a seat across from Lu Yao and Zhou Yunchen. His expression remained somber. Though neatly dressed, he showed little care for his disheveled medium-length hair and stubble.
Zhou Yunchen recalled hearing someone at the military discuss Li Qingshan’s attempt to bring his eldest son back into the military, which Li Mo had refused. He had neither returned to school nor begun work again.
He hadn’t come for any of that. Li Mo scanned Lu Yao and Zhou Yunchen, then asked, “Have you two already talked?”
Zhou Yunchen exchanged a glance with Lu Yao. “What do you know?”
Li Mo raised his head slightly, staring at Zhou Yunchen. “I know nothing. Everything I say is merely speculation, a risky guess.”
Or, more precisely, he was gambling. And gambling, or taking risks, always required a target. Zhou Yunchen furrowed his brows, sensing the implication. “What do you want?”
“I want to know how you traveled through time,” Li Mo said bluntly, revealing his hand without hesitation.
“And once you know?” Zhou Yunchen asked.
“I want to save my mother. Thirty years ago, she was killed by space pirates during an interstellar voyage,” Li Mo said. Both Lu Yao and Zhou Yunchen paused for a moment. Not because the reason was shocking, but because it was… simply emotional, utterly unremarkable in scope. They had assumed Li Mo might use this secret to demand political, military, or technological leverage. If that were the case, they had countless ways to handle it.
Yet Li Mo said he had gone through all these efforts solely to save one person. Lu Yao and Zhou Yunchen had no preplanned response for such a request.
“During the CROSS lab riot, I was injured and captured. I escaped with some of the fleeing criminals aboard a ship. They were apprehended by the Star Police, but I was captured by space pirates. They destroyed all my identification, and I lived in utter chaos for a time, until these past ten years when I finally settled on the fringe systems, working as a private mercenary hunting pirates.
“I thought I would live out the rest of my days like that, until recently, when I saw details of the Distant Star in the ‘Steel Titans’ documentary. I recognized it—it was the mecha I saw on P999 twenty years ago. When I cross-checked the timeline, some things didn’t align, which led me to speculate that the Distant Star might have come from the future. That made me determined to return to New Blue Planet and see if I could find a way back to the past.”
Zhou Yunchen remained silent for a long moment, his sharp alpha pheromones reining in. “It’s not as simple as you think.”
Li Mo noticed his hesitation. “I guessed. If time travel were easy, you would have returned to an earlier past to prevent the CROSS lab tragedy. I know it’s difficult, but I still want some hope.”
Author’s Note:
How could Chief Engineer Lu possibly dislike a chubby Snow Leopard? Right~
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