Chapter 183: But This Way, He Still Can’t Bring Yuanxiao Back
Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations
Editor: Karai
Lin Xu slapped him again. Alfred coughed out a mouthful of blood mixed with shattered teeth. “Lin Xu,” he rasped, “look… in the back-right corner.”
Lin Xu’s gaze was sharp and dangerous. Before turning, he crushed Alfred’s wrist bone in his grip, ensuring he couldn’t pull any tricks. Alfred’s shrill scream echoed through the ruined cockpit as Lin Xu finally turned his head. And there it was—
The shattered white egg. Split in two. Inside… empty. Nothing. Lin Xu’s mind went blank.
“Where’s Yuanxiao?! What did you do to Yuanxiao?!” His voice tore through the air like a blade.
Alfred laughed, blood bubbling at his lips. “So you can lose control for the ones you love. I thought you’d keep pretending to be cold!”
Lin Xu’s chest tightened painfully. Panic surged like a living thing, clawing at his lungs. His grip on Alfred’s collar trembled. Alfred noticed it too, and his laughter only deepened, twisted and mocking. He had made Lin Xu afraid. Terrified.
The sheer, suffocating dread was so intense that Lin Xu’s skull ached, his vision swam, and his stomach churned as if he might vomit. For a heartbeat, it felt like he couldn’t even breathe.
He should have come earlier.
He should have come earlier.
From the moment he knew Alfred had taken Yuanxiao, he should have stormed the palace, ripped this lunatic apart, and thrown his mangled corpse into the moat for the fish to devour.
Yuanxiao. Yuanxiao… but now— Now he couldn’t bring Yuanxiao back like this. His fingers dug deep into Alfred’s collar, drawing blood.
“What did you do to Yuanxiao?!” Lin Xu roared, voice breaking with fury. Alfred’s head tilted back. His bloody smile was hideous. “It’s a dragon. A little dragon. Harmless… my first time seeing one. Tell me, Lin Xu—if you saw a dragon, what would you do?”
Lin Xu answered with a fist. The blow cracked against Alfred’s face, followed by another, and another. His fists rained down like a storm, smashing bone and flesh. Alfred’s jaw shattered. His nose broke.
Lin Xu was no longer a soldier. He was a monster. Alfred’s head hit the cockpit wall with a sickening thud. Pain fogged his mind, and yet, some deranged thought slithered through: This was it. This was the demon he worshiped.
If Lin Xu wasn’t a monster, Alfred would drag him down into hell and make him one. As Alfred’s breath weakened, Lin Xu’s fury cooled just enough for icy precision to return. Panting hard, he gritted his teeth and reset Alfred’s broken bones just enough to keep him alive.
A broken jaw couldn’t speak—but Lin Xu didn’t need him to.
There was another way. He tied Alfred to the pilot’s seat, secured him with brutal efficiency, and jammed a mental-link headset over his head. Then Lin Xu donned the second one himself, his expression cold and merciless. He would rip the truth from Alfred’s mind.
The moment Lin Xu connected, the mecha’s AI spoke:
“Authorization confirmed. Welcome, Mr. Lin.”
Lin Xu froze for a fraction of a second. Alfred had registered him as the mecha’s second pilot. His expression darkened further. Then—white light. The mental network flared to life. Alfred’s mental defenses were laughably weak. Lin Xu tore through them like a blade through silk, ignoring every chaotic memory, every deranged obsession. He searched only for one thing. Yuanxiao. He saw—
The creation of the fake eggshell. The moment Alfred laid his hands on the real egg. Alfred’s twisted attempts to cut it open with tools. The egg… sitting in Alfred’s study. And then— Lin Xu’s breath hitched.
…
Lin Xu’s brow furrowed deeply. In Alfred’s memories, he had never managed to open the dragon egg. Not once. Not until now—when the egg shattered from the resonance—only to reveal its hollow, empty shell.
Alfred had never even touched Yuanxiao. He didn’t know where Yuanxiao was… Yuanxiao had escaped on their own.
Lin Xu held his breath and combed through every shred of memory again, meticulously confirming there was no mistake. Alfred’s shock and rage when the egg split open had been genuine, unfeigned. Even Alfred hadn’t expected Yuanxiao to vanish. Relief and dread twisted in Lin Xu’s chest all at once. Yuanxiao was alive. But where were they?
Lin Xu forced himself to breathe slowly, steadying the storm in his mind, and began searching through Alfred’s memories again—this time for Zhou Pingbo’s location and the Zerg controller.
Zhou Pingbo… He was locked inside the military police interrogation chamber. Exhausted, his mental state frayed—but he hadn’t been tortured. Lin Xu immediately linked LH818’s damaged comms unit to the approaching Alliance fleet and transmitted the location.
“Extract him. Immediately.” The reply was sharp and quick: “Understood.” Then Lin Xu delved deeper. And he found it—The truth of the Zerg. Three thousand years ago…
From the very beginning, Zerg researchers had implanted controllable factors into the Zerg genome, ensuring their stability as living weapons. But the emergence of the uncontrollable zombie virus had turned that experiment into a catastrophe that ravaged Earth.
Alfred, born into a family steeped in military and political power, had witnessed the classified trials himself. He knew the truth. He knew how to control the Zerg. When he was aboard Ark Fleet, he had activated the controller for the first time, directing a swarm to attack several ships whose commanders opposed him. He then staged “heroic” rescues from lesser, controlled Zerg incursions, cementing his iron grip over Ark Fleet.
After the Marion Empire was founded, the Zerg were herded into the Ent Nebula to breed. The controller’s access passed down through imperial heirs. Whenever the Empire needed an enemy to unite against, the Emperor would unleash the Zerg— To divert attention. To enforce martial law. To bind the people to the throne through fear and dependency.
It was the ultimate imperial weapon. And if a foolish or incompetent Emperor took the throne, the frequency of Zerg wars only increased, drowning the stars in blood. Empire, cemented in conspiracy and slaughter.
Lin Xu saw it all. Each secret, recorded in the journals passed from Emperor to Emperor. And the Zerg controller? It was hidden one level beneath the imperial archives, accessible only through the Emperor’s biological signature.
No time to waste. Lin Xu memorized every procedure. Then he severed the mental link. Alfred groaned faintly, dazed from the brutal psychic intrusion—before Lin Xu grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out of the cockpit. “Capricciosa,” Lin Xu growled into comms, “I’m heading for the Emperor’s study. Clear my path.”
“Understood.”
A storm of armed drones surged ahead of him, sweeping the palace corridors clean with precise, lethal fire. Three minutes. Two kilometers. Lin Xu hauled Alfred’s broken body like dead weight, descending into the hidden mechanisms of the imperial palace until the secret passage opened before him.
The second basement door sealed shut behind them just as his comm crackled to life.
“Lin Xu,” Meng Zhenhua’s voice was clipped and urgent, “the Alliance fleet has entered the Crescent District airspace. No resistance from Imperial forces—but Zerg numbers are spiking. Fast.”
“Alfred,” Lin Xu spat, dragging the man like discarded trash. “He’s trying to take the Alliance down with him.”
“Shut it down,” Meng ordered. “Fast.”
“I will.” Outside, the frontlines burned. Even Heinrich’s Blizzard was battered, its hull scorched and torn, yet it stood alone against an S-class Zerg queen. The monster loomed like a living nightmare, three times the size of Blizzard.
Each swing of its barbed scythe-limbs tore through the void, nearly rending Blizzard apart. One glancing strike sheared away a plate of armor.
Inside the cockpit, Heinrich’s hands never faltered. Sweat rolled down his brow, stinging his eyes. He didn’t even blink. He couldn’t afford to. Blizzard’s power reserves dipped to 25%.
The Zerg queen raised its spined tail again, ripping through clouds of cosmic dust as it descended in a killing arc— And Heinrich braced for impact.
Lin Xu stepped into the second underground chamber where the Zerg controller was kept.
The space was vast—nearly a thousand square meters—packed with conduits, server racks, cooling units, and arrays of frequency emitters.
He dragged Alfred’s half-conscious body across the floor, smearing blood over the tangled cables, until they reached the control console at the center. Pressing Alfred’s hand against the screen, Lin Xu verified his fingerprint and DNA. A window popped up: “Iris verification required.”
A small probe rose from the console, aligning to eye level. Lin Xu hauled Alfred upright, forcing his head toward the scanner. He pried open Alfred’s swollen eyelids—only to be met with a rolled-back white eye, the iris hidden. The scanner refused to register.
“Two attempts remaining. Failure will trigger a 72-hour lockdown.”
Lin Xu’s expression darkened. He conjured a sphere of water in his palm and splashed it over Alfred’s face. The cold shock made Alfred jerk faintly, but he didn’t fully wake.
Lin Xu glanced at the probe. His jaw tightened. Then, without hesitation, he extended his claws and carefully cut open the probe’s metal casing. Beneath the protective shell, the mechanism matched what he’d seen before—an iris scanner housed in a hollow metal hemisphere, wired into the console. Inside the cavity, the tiny aperture of the camera lens gleamed faintly.
Lin Xu gripped the exposed device, yanked it free, and slammed Alfred’s head down onto the console. Prying his eyelids apart again, he pressed the scanner directly against Alfred’s bloodied eye.
Squelch— Metal punctured flesh. The hollow hemisphere sealed over Alfred’s eyeball, and blood welled, dripping down his face. Lin Xu remained cold, unshaken. He tilted the device, adjusting its angle until the lens aligned precisely with Alfred’s iris. The agony wrenched Alfred back to consciousness. He convulsed violently, a hoarse scream tearing from his throat—raw, animal, like a fish gutted alive yet refusing to die.
“Stay awake,” Lin Xu said flatly, pushing down harder. The scanner chimed. “Iris verification complete. Access granted.”
The heavy doors guarding the Zerg controller disengaged with a low, resonant hum. Lin Xu shoved Alfred aside like a broken doll and stepped into the core chamber. Before him loomed the heart of the Empire’s nightmare: a towering crystalline construct, cables webbed around it like veins, pulsing faintly with golden light. This was the device that had chained humanity’s greatest enemy for three thousand years. And now it was his to destroy.
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