Paranoid Alpha Chapter 45: Five years

Chapter 45: Five years

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: CaiCai

Lyss sniffed with amusement, and instead of going right out, he leaned against the bedroom door frame with his arms wrapped around him, watching the two of them.

As soon as Lu Xingye looked up, he caught his gaze and stopped talking on the spot.

Lin Lang’s back was turned to Lyss, and she did not see the situation behind her, and replied with a good-natured yet serious voice, “I have a father, I don’t need a stepfather for now.”

Lu Xingye’s expression instantly became wonderful, Lyss hid the laughter in his eyes and walked over with his feet up.

Hearing the voice behind her, Lin Lang immediately turned her head and said in surprise, “Mommy, you woke up from your nap!”

“Uh-huh.” Lyss walked over and sat down, raising his hand to rub his daughter’s ears, “What did you talk about with this brother?”

Lu Xingye somewhat uncomfortably averted her eyes, Lin Lang obediently opened her mouth, “Brother said that his mom is from Serica, so he can cook Serica dishes, and also said that he can come home to cook for us when he has time.”

“That’s so.” Lyss glanced at Lu Xingye, “Do you want brother to come to our house?”

Lin Lang thought for a moment and shook her head, “We already have brother Pelé at home, we don’t need that many cooks. Teacher says you can’t just let anybody go to your house.”

Lu Xingye snapped his head around, “Who’s Pelé?”

Lyss blandly said, “A cook.”

Not waiting for Lu Xingye to breathe a sigh of relief, Lin Lang added with a wink, “A very handsome brother, who can cook Serica’s food, and tell Lin Lang stories… But not as handsome as you.”

Lu Xingye’s alarm bells went off, completely ignoring the little girl’s last sentence, and then the atmosphere around him changed, but Lyss interrupted him at this moment, and said in a businesslike manner, “Regarding the matter of the empire’s reopening of the Chudai, there are some things that I would like to discuss with His Highness the Crown Prince.”

Lu Xingye paused for a moment before saying, “Okay.”

The two of them brought Lin Lang to the sky garden above the palace, Lu Xingye dismissed the others, Lin Lang just came up and saw the colorful and gorgeous sea of flowers under the sunlight, after obtaining Lyss’s consent, she immediately ran in with excitement and leaping, the sound of bells on the way was incessant, she looked adorable and energetic.

Lyss looked at Lin Lang who was swimming in the flowers without blinking, his mind didn’t know what he was thinking.

“What does the Chief Lord want to know?” Lu Xingye turned to look at the human beside him.

“The Empire’s theoretical number of chips is not enough.” Lyss looked back and opened the door, “Did you give them the last copy of the chips?”

Not hiding his skepticism in the slightest, Lu Xingye couldn’t help but lick his tiger teeth, “No.”

Lyss twisted his head to look at him, “Then why did your Prime Minister swear that the Empire could proceed with the reboot program?”

“How would I know that, the contents of the last chip should be clearer to the Chief than me.” Lu Xingye shrugged his shoulders to play rogue, “As for where they got the ability to do that, that’s something you should ask Lu Jin and yourself, after all, I’m just a stupid dog who didn’t know anything from the beginning.”

His words this time did not cause Lyss to have the slightest mood swing, instead the other just looked at him and nodded half-heartedly, “Indeed.”

There was no more to say after that, and a suffocating silence fell over the garden.

Lu Xingye’s forehead jumped and he couldn’t help but look at him, “Don’t you have anything else to ask?”

Lyss retracted his gaze and faintly said, “You don’t believe what I said anyway, there is nothing to ask.”

Lu Xingye ate him up and immediately said, “What about your late husband? Why don’t you ask him what happened to him?”

“I loved him, but he’s already dead.” Lyss said, “And he told me to forget about him when he was dying, so I guess he didn’t care.”

Lyss’s words were a direct hit to Lu Xingye’s sanity and he tossed out any remaining reason. He was annoyed and reached down to pinch Lyss’s chin as he squeezed out the sentence, “Lyss, don’t you have any heart?”

“Yes, but only for him.” Lyss looked at him calmly, as if he had regained the look of ease when they first met, “I’m afraid I don’t have it for you.”

Lu Xingye’s breathing stagnated, his hand movements unconsciously tightened, only after a long time did he suppress his anger and say, “… You’re lying to me again.”

“I’m not lying to you.” Lyss looked at him rather seriously, “If you were him, then I love you. But with the color of your eyes being different from his, the subtle physical differences, and the fact that you’re not him by your own words, then sadly, I…”

“I was afraid that you wouldn’t be able to recognize me, so I used the only relics I had remaining from my mother’s life to make an exchange with Qiu to be able to remake this body!” Lu Xingye finally couldn’t hold back and spoke incredulously and aggrievedly, “I poured everything I had into trying to come to see you, and you thought I was a fake just because of a single word, Lyss, you…”

After saying that, Lu Xingye suddenly stopped, because he saw the still calm Lyss suddenly reveal a bitter smile, but even if there was bitterness in that smile, it was still like the moon in the night’s sky, beautiful and unparalleled. Lu Xingye was still angry as he took a first look, then became stunned after a double-take.

Lyss twisted his head to look at him, his tone full of helplessness with imperceptible trembling and bitterness, “… Just as stupid as before, puppy.”

Lu Xingye was dumbfounded, with tears of anger in the corners of his eyes, and only after three seconds did he abruptly come back to his senses and said, “You swindled me?”

The garden suddenly fell into silence, Lin Lang heard this side of the movement, and hurriedly ran over anxiously from the flowers, “Mommy – what’s wrong?”

Lyss’s mind still reverberates with the words that Lu Xingye just said when he was furious to the extreme, he barely regained his senses and softly said, “What do you want to eat tonight, Lin Lang? Let this brother make you Serica dishes, okay?”

The little girl was instantly sidetracked, “Yes!”

Lu Xingye twisted his head to look at him, “When did I say-“

Lyss directly interrupted him, “Go on and play, I’ll call you when you leave.”

Lin Lang did not doubt it, and rather happily turned and ran away, the string of bells on her wrist making a clear ringing sound.

An unspeakable silence once again fell between the two, and after an indeterminate amount of time, Lyss spoke, “It was Dr. Qiu who saved you at that time.”

Lu Xingye did not answer, he knew that he had already let his words slip. Realizing that he would always be a stupid dog in front of Lyss, saying more was better than not saying anything at all.

Lyss continued, “There’s no way your body could have survived an explosion of that magnitude.”

“Yeah, so that means the person you knew is dead.” Lu Xingye just wanted to shut himself up one second, but he still couldn’t help but respond the next, “The level of research on Qiu’s side has already reached a level you can’t imagine, simulating an android based on the brainwaves of the person who lived there isn’t too difficult a task.”

Lyss wasn’t going to be fooled by his words anymore, and sighed at his words, an involuntary wave of heartache welling up as he guessed with deliberation, “Only your brain was saved?”

Lu Xingye’s movements jerked, and Lyss knew he had guessed correctly.

Huge pain and acidity eroded his chest, Lyss almost felt like suffocating, a thousand words clogged his mouth, but in the end only three words came out, “Does it hurt?”

How could it not hurt, it was just like a cyclone of pain.

No one had ever succeeded in remodeling the body, but there were precedents.

No matter which precedent, they all failed during the first step, the brain could not be anesthetized, and no terminally ill patient who voluntarily accepted clinical trials could survive that kind of pain.

True physical remodeling wasn’t just a matter of putting the new body together like a toy builder set and putting the brain right in.

The actual steps were much more complex and painful.

In order to survive, the brain must be awake at all times. And then it was remodeled bit by bit, starting with the head, without the heart and other organs at first, and no anesthetic at all.

The pain of cutting open the heart and having flesh stripped down to the bone doesn’t even begin to describe what it was like.

Moreover, there were time gaps between the transplantations of different organs. Lu Xingye thought about the person who was haunting him all the time, but he couldn’t do anything else.

He was not willing to use that unfinished and broken body to meet the person of his dreams, for fear of scaring the other party, and from then on, nevermind liking, the other party may not even be willing to see him.

But what was even more difficult for Lu Xingye to accept was that in the process of remodeling his body, his brain not only had to stay awake, but also had to keep his mood swings within a certain range.

So he couldn’t even think about Lyss, because once he thought about that person his mood swings would exceed the threshold and bring indescribable hindrance to the surgery, which in turn led to the pain being prolonged continuously.

Depending on the type of surgery, this pain was different. At the beginning, the pain is similar to the ancient “lingchi”, the pain of ** being cut by a thousand cuts is enough to destroy a person’s sanity. Later, after anesthesia could be administered, the pain gradually transformed into a phantom limb-like pain.

Gradually, Lu Xingye felt like Pavlov’s dog, as long as he thought of Lyss, he would recall the unspeakable pain, but he still could not let go of the love he had this person, physical subconscious rejection and emotional deep intertwined, he gradually became unable to control himself.

This kind of surgery had never been accomplished before, and at first Qiu didn’t realize that mood swings could lead to something so serious, because Lu Xingye had been holding back.

The first time this symptom was identified was the day Lin Lang was born, and the whole interstellar was talking about it.

At that time Lu Xingye was in the early stage of recovery, no anesthetic could be used, just as all the indicators were normal and Qiu intended to carry out the operation, in order to make Lu Xingye’s desire to survive a little bit stronger and increase the success rate of the operation, she opened her mouth to the other person to congratulate him, “Today all the major media are reporting that Triss Chief Lyss Silverfang gave birth to a daughter today, should it be your daughter? It should be your daughter, right? Congratulations on becoming a father.”

She didn’t know what the doctor had said about Lu Xingye and Lyss not being able to have children, so she subconsciously thought of Lin Lang as Lu Xingye’s daughter.

Unexpectedly, this sentence almost caused a big disaster, the indicators skyrocketed, and in the end Lu Xingye even vaguely appeared to be brain dead.

The time was so short, of course, Lu Xingye could not have misunderstood that Lyss and some other person were having a child. Simply thinking about it for a few seconds after he found all the information and he should have come to the correct conclusion – the doctor had lied, Lyss was pregnant with his own child, and he had a lovely daughter.

Joy sometimes becomes a tragedy instead. The brain, which was barely awake, lost its response in two major functional areas directly due to the excessive emotional flucuations, and before the machine’s external circulatory blood supply could keep up, signs of brain death appeared.

In order to save Lu Xingye, the surgery naturally failed.

Unlike ordinary failed surgeries, this one was performed with no anesthesia at all, and the immense pain exceeded human limits, causing the brain to subconsciously avoid everything related to this message.

After the operation failed, Qiu did not figure out what the mechanism was at first, and occasionally mentioned a few times about Lyss giving birth to a daughter, but Lu Xingye’s reaction was bigger than the first time, and in the end there was no way around it, Qiu never dared to mention anything about Lyss again.

But like wood that has been turned to stone, in order to keep himself alive, in order to allow himself to see that person again, Lu Xingye’s brain had no choice but to produce a mechanism similar to self-protection.

Memories were distorted in shape by the pain of his body, and he began to be unwilling to believe in all the overly rosy possibilities, instead believing in some of the most unlikely things.

The effect of this almost self-destructive approach was remarkable, as Lu Xingye’s brain miraculously calmed down.

Lyss had a child with someone else… He abandoned me because I was disobedient.

My genes don’t match his, there’s no way I could have a child.

He probably… Has forgotten about me, and it’s probably better that way.

All sorts of complicated thoughts are rubbed together, and the self-destructive tendencies and grief are increasing day by day.

But that’s how it is with people. The more you think about something, the less you get of it.

On the contrary, those who are self-disgusted and self-destructive are more emotionally stable, because there is nothing to be happy about, and naturally, there will not be any more accidents as before.

Lu Xingye spent five whole years to recover, during which time he underwent countless surgeries, and the pain has even been engraved into his mind, and various parts of his body still ache faintly when he dreams at midnight.

Pain molds a person’s memories, and he had completely and utterly forgotten the surge of pleasure he felt when he heard of Lin Lang’s birth, and in the end had even forgotten that Lyss had given birth to a child, with only a trace of lingering emotion left to soothe his hurt when he dreamed in the middle of the night.

Yet even five years of pain hadn’t erased his memories and feelings for Lyss. So when he tries to return to Lyss with hope, he learns that he already has a daughter.

Lu Xingye can accept that Lyss doesn’t love him, so that he can comfort himself by saying that it’s not that he doesn’t love himself, he just doesn’t know how to love people.

But this kind of self-deception and self-congratulation collapsed when he saw the photo of Lyss and his daughter standing together.

The man looked at his daughter’s eyes full of love and pity, he is not unable to love people, he just will not love me.

Lu Xingye, who lost that memory, never thought about the possibility that Lin Lang was his daughter. It was something like a self-protection mechanism, and although the painful memory  disappeared along with the joyful one, the residue left behind was a possibility he didn’t want to think about.

Besides that there was another reason, that feeling of wagging one’s tail and begging for mercy while holding one’s heart in self-righteousness only to be abandoned like a puppy in the end, Lu Xingye didn’t want to go through it again.

In the month before he met Lyss again, Lu Xingye had even done a good job of psychological construction.

This is good, he has a lovely daughter and supreme status, the beautiful as a god Triss chief, he does not need to be like a dog skin plaster sticking up, plainly annoying people.

But all that went up in smoke after the first sight of Lyss.

He seemed to have changed nothing and everything.

Every cell in Lu Xingye’s body screamed to snatch him up, to take back the one who belonged to him.

So what if he had a daughter? Lyss’s alpha never existed anyway.

Lu Xingye felt like he was going crazy, and there was even a moment when he pondered the question: what if Lyss really did have an alpha, and he was just afraid of involving his own alpha and purposely not letting the other person show his face out there?

So let’s find a chance to get that alpha dead, don’t let Lyss find out, Lu Xingye himself was surprised by his own moment of indifference and paranoia.

He had accumulated countless pains and envisioned countless possibilities, but he had never imagined that Lyss would seriously and intently tell him, “My late husband was you, and it was you that I loved.”

Lu Xingye couldn’t believe it; the wolfhound with a thousand holes only wanted to prey, unwilling to believe he could be loved. That’s why he’s been camouflaging himself with indifference.

The uncontrolled speech is actually the aftermath of trauma, words he used to paralyze himself with.

Until Lyss asked, “Does it hurt?”

The wall built up by pretending to be cold collapsed at this moment, Lu Xingye suddenly couldn’t hold back, he subconsciously grabbed Lyss’s shoulder, the strength of his hand was so strong that it could almost break a person’s bones.

The memories that were subconsciously forgotten by the body suddenly came back, as if the pain of being crushed inch by inch from the fingers was still fresh in his mind.

Countless sleepless nights, no eyes, no ears, nothing to see.

He could only bear the pain of being executed in the darkness. In the abyss, the only person who could bring him comfort was Lyss.

But whenever he thinks of that person, the lingchi transforms into a meat grinder, crushing his senses inch by inch.

Yet he’d rather the pain bury his sanity than tell Qiu about it, fearing that Qiu would take the last shred of comfort away from him in order for the operation to succeed.

It was the one he loved the most, so he resigned himself to it.

Lyss didn’t resist in the slightest, but just looked at him quietly, repeating the question again, “Does it hurt?”

Lu Xingye did his best to appear comfortable, not to look like a puppy wagging its tail and begging for mercy as he did five years ago.

But he opened his mouth without being able to utter a single no, and along with the pain came a minuscule amount of sweetness as he recalled everything.

Lin Lang was his daughter, of course he knew that, he just didn’t want to face it.

Knowing everything himself, but choosing to forget and even misunderstand Lyss because of those insignificant pains, Lu Xingye’s heart was almost trembling and dripping blood, a complete and utter coward who could not be forgiven.

Lyss didn’t feel the same way, for him, mental pain could never compare to physical pain.

Although he didn’t know exactly what Lu Xingye had gone through, the trials he had heard about were enough to give him a glimpse of the tip of the iceberg.

An unspeakable suffocation filled Lyss’s chest, and he couldn’t bear to close his eyes, his fingers unconsciously curling up.

Unspeakable heartache and pain filled his heart, almost crushing it.

Lyss fluttered his eyelashes and opened his eyes, looking at the person in front of him earnestly, “Untie me, let me take a good look at you.”

Lu Xingye’s breath stuttered but did not move, Lyss added another sentence, “Be obedient.”

The familiar tone, as if there had never been a five year gap between them, Lu Xingye immediately broke, he couldn’t help but turn his head sideways, not wanting to let Lyss see him lose face, but his hands slowly sent Lyss’s shoulders away.

The air seemed to freeze, Lyss looked at the man in front of him without blinking, he looked good, as good as if he had never been hurt.

But… Only those pure black eyes reminded Lyss of what the other man had been through.

Lyss was happily chasing butterflies through the flowers, a species unique to the Empire, and it was very beautiful.

The little girl’s carefree nature made it so Lyss couldn’t help but think back to the past five years.

The thoughts were naturally there, as was the sadness.

But Lin Lang was like a healing angel, and whenever he was about to sink deeper into the past than he could pull himself out of it, his daughter’s lovely smile and the sound of her clear bells would pull him back to reality just in time.

But what did Lu Xingye have?

He had nothing but endless pain, and he really didn’t see much hope, because there was no precedent of success for this kind of five-year-long surgery, and everything was unknown.

Yet in the silence, it was Lu Xingye who spoke first, “I’m sorry.”

A voice with a hint of bitterness in its hardship rang in his ears, and it carried a strong sense of remorse and deep emotion.

“You’ve never been sorry.” Lyss looked up at him, “That’s not what I want to hear.”

The moment he gazed with those golden eyes, Lu Xingye abruptly snapped back from his monstrous remorse, and he realized with shock that the bottom of the other man’s eyes were drenched in water.

–I made him cry.

Lu Xingye instantly panicked, everything he had thought about before was all thrown to the paws as he subconsciously blurted out, “I love you . …Lyss.”

So much so that every night, every day, every moment of these five years I’ve thought about you. Thinking about whether you’ve eaten properly, whether you’ve slept properly.

Thinking about you… Will ever really forget me.

The author has something to say:

The puppy’s condition is somewhat similar to PTSD.

Some people who have been in a car accident will actively forget that memory because it hurts so much. Some moms do the same thing when they give birth; it hurts at the time, but the memories are fuzzy afterward instead. Puppy’s case is pretty much the pain of having his whole body crushed and reassembled, so it’s not like he did that to his wife on purpose, but it’s time to educate.