Chapter 75 : Chapter 75

Chapter 75 : “Family will betray each other, friends will not.”

“The universe is not fair.”

The Allied Military Academy and the affiliated laboratory were separated by a long corridor that required multiple verifications.

This sentence was written on one side of the wall.

On the other side were photos, from color to black and white, and from black and white back to color.

Chu Zu saw a photo of Azul Serrano.

His hair, eyes, and freckles were all hazel.

The photo was taken with a gentle smile, giving the first impression of "ordinary."

All those who had contributed to the cosmic war were left in this corridor.

Under the arranged photos were small metal letters, recording their birth and death dates.

Chu Zu did not have an access card that could pass the verification.

He was now hanging on the speed frame of the ceiling, relying on his lean and small build to avoid the surveillance.

Lu Anji did have an access card that could be swiped all the way.

It would not be difficult to get it, but they were now in a "cold war."

Lu Anji’s one-sided cold war.

He would leave very early every morning.

When Chu Zu woke up, there would only be a glass of milk on the table, with a new toxin every day, and the nutritional coverage was quite balanced.

In class, Lu Anji would also act as if he was not familiar with him and be business-like.

If he talked to him, he would smile at you.

If he got angry at him, he would still smile at you.

Even if you dragged him to the bathroom and looked at him from all angles to see if his brain was broken, when there was no one around, Lu Anji would still have that standard "hope of humanity" look.

After class, Lu Anji would not go back to the dormitory directly.

He had extra training tasks.

After the training, he would go straight to the laboratory.

He would basically go back to the dormitory after Chu Zu was asleep.

Chu Zu had heard his classmates whisper several times that Lu Anji had offended Bennett and now had to spend tens of times more effort to maintain the same status as before.

However, Azul was also quite pitiful.

He and Lu Anji were not the same kind of people in the first place.

Now he was all alone, all day long.

The classmates would at most just sigh a few times and had no intention of getting close to Azul.

The system believed that this was an isolation led by Lu Anji.

“He’s definitely doing it on purpose. This guy is not only a master of the art of tea, but also a master of PUA!”

Chu Zu didn’t care.

He was obsessed with that cocoon.

When he left the research institute before, the star ring’s security had been raised by several levels.

After a carpet search failed to find the hatched Zerg, the security was gradually lowered.

With the system around, sneaking into the research institute was just a matter of a few more turns.

But after entering the laboratory, Chu Zu was no longer in a hurry to find the cocoon.

Under the dim light, huge instruments filled the entire room.

The shadows intertwined into a shape more ferocious than the Zerg, reflecting all around.

In front of each complex instrument was a glass chamber.

A faint light fell from the top of the chamber, illuminating the thing inside.

“What is this?”

Chu Zu stood in front of the glass chamber.

The light in the chamber cast a bright and dark shadow on Chu Zu’s side face.

As he squatted down, the eyes that were originally in the shadow were also lit up.

He placed his hand on the glass chamber.

The creature inside also stretched out the limb that could be called a "hand" in front of it, and through the glass, it wanted to get closer to him.

It was a creature the size of a human.

Its skin was covered with staggered exoskeletons, which were not densely distributed, revealing the flesh membrane underneath.

The flesh membrane was translucent, and one could faintly see the twisted and deformed endoskeleton inside.

Its eyes were slanted and embedded in the flesh membrane.

They were red, just like Azul’s.

The creature’s abdominal cavity was particularly huge, and its almost completely degenerated lower limbs could not support the weight of the abdominal cavity.

It could only crawl on the bottom of the glass chamber.

The system was silent for a while, probably checking for information.

Neither Azul nor Lu Anji knew of the existence of this thing.

It could only look for clues in the background settings and other people’s POVs.

“It’s an experimental subject.”

The system hacked all the surveillance in the room and projected the information it found into Chu Zu’s sea of consciousness.

There were many missing parts in the information, and some of it was garbled.

It said that the experimental subject’s bone marrow had been injected with a virus carrying the Zerg gene sequence.

Because the gene editing did not achieve the expected effect, the experimental subject was repeatedly edited fifteen times, and finally, a mutation broke out, and it was completely deformed within 17 hours.

In the upper left corner was the original photo of the experimental subject.

She was a young woman with brilliant golden hair.

Her face was pale.

She was a little shy when the photo was taken.

Her light brown eyes glanced to the side, not looking at the camera.

“The experimental subjects are all death row inmates. They signed a voluntary form and were sent to the star ring in large batches.”

The system said, “The laboratory had previously extracted gene information from Zerg remains. It could not be correctly expressed in humans. The off-target effect caused the experimental subjects to develop cancer in batches, with severe immune rejection and serious organ failure.”

“Later, they…”

“They extracted genes from my cocoon.”

Chu Zu stroked the glass.

The creature inside also moved its limbs to follow his palm closely.

The cocoon originally contained the biological information of an unhatched Zerg, but I dug it out and threw it away.

After I crawled in, the cocoon recognized my identity and synchronized with me.

The Zerg itself could represent an abnormally terrifying level of biotechnology.

At that time, the Mother Bug had made preparations for five years to adjust Azul.

But Azul had been on the star ring for less than three years.

This experiment had been going on even before he came.

After they got the cocoon, they adjusted the direction of the experiment.

The cocoon contained not only Azul’s biological information, but also that of the previously unhatched larva.

Chu Zu hadn’t noticed what species it was before, but now he knew.

It was the "Devourer."

The "Devourer's" digestive system had an embedded nervous system.

To facilitate mimicry, its exoskeleton was not as hard as other Zerg, and its structure was very complex.

A similar trait in humans would cause the entire abdominal cavity to mutate and the exoskeleton to dislocate.

It wouldn't have lived long, and the trait might not have even been expressed, but Azul’s genes had a buffering effect.

The system was sure that the host was in a very bad mood.

His face was pale, with no sadness or joy.

The joints of his tail were fully extended, and the tip was taut.

“So ugly.”

Chu Zu tapped on the glass and said to the female death row inmate in the glass, “Although I don’t know what you did to be sentenced to death, don’t believe them again next time… humans are not worthy of your trust.”

Chu Zu got up.

The creature in the chamber tried to get up with him, but was pulled back to the bottom by its abdominal cavity.

She let out a painful and terrifying hiss, her limbs reaching out to Chu Zu.

This body instinctively wanted to get close to the person in front of it.

There were twenty-eight such creatures in the entire room.

They were all pressed against the glass.

Those with barely any mobility desperately rammed against the glass, making a dull sound.

Chu Zu sighed: “Wait for me for a moment, just a moment. I’ll be right back.”

The creature in the chamber couldn't understand.

Chu Zu turned around and, following the map given by the system, passed through three identical laboratories, and finally found his cocoon in the room at the end of the corridor.

The petal-like biological cocoon had already been stripped of its outer layer, revealing the dark green flesh layer.

The flesh layer was covered with fine black pipes.

The outer openings of the pipes were pried open and fixed with fine metal needles.

The three layers of protection were useless against Chu Zu.

He didn’t have the system try to cancel the alarm.

The moment it was canceled, the laboratory would probably sound an alarm.

His tail hung on the metal frame of the ceiling.

After a few leaps, Chu Zu landed quietly.

The cocoon had no smell of home or his mother.

It was rotting and had been injected with an excessive amount of formalin solution.

Humans no longer needed to extract biological information from it.

They kept the cocoon just to try more research.

Chu Zu couldn't think of what else they could research, but the experimental subjects in the room outside proved that it seemed that human imagination had no bottleneck.

At the same time, they were bold and crazy.

Looking at the cocoon, Chu Zu thought for a moment and sat down in front of it.

He took the initiative to contact the Mother Bug.

***

POV Azul:

The universe was not black and white, which Azul only saw after he left the sun.

He had encountered very complex nebulae, which were so beautiful under the black curtain that they broke his heart.

Azul’s small ship traveled through the gas and dust.

The gravity here was unstable.

He floated up and down in the cabin, his eyes wide open as he looked at the various colors outside the window.

Complex things always presented a chaotic beauty, a beauty that the sun did not possess.

Everything on the sun was very simple, the unchanging scenery, the unchanging species.

Black and white were the main tones, with a layer of light blue, and Azul’s eyes.

This was completely different from Lu Anji’s world.

There were many colors on Earth, which Azul had seen in his memories.

They even had many different skin colors, which was also a kind of complexity.

Earth was a much more complex place than the sun.

Perhaps it was also more beautiful than the sun.

The academy’s teacher said that the star ring basically simulated the environment of Earth, but you couldn’t rely on gravity.

The universe was never fair and would not give you the peace of mind of having your feet on the ground.

Gravity was not the most precious thing on the star ring.

Azul thought that he preferred the warm feeling of the sun on his body, and the oily green trees that would rustle when the wind blew.

He lay on the lawn, listening to the noise of the humans passing by.

Those sounds were far away from him, as if from another world.

At that time, the first question Azul encountered was: why did humans think the sun was red?

This question became the most insignificant of all of Azul’s doubts.

When Azul saw his dissected cocoon and sat in front of it, he could no longer feel the fluctuations from his mother when he placed his hand on it.

He thought of Lu Anji.

The relationships between humans were so complicated.

They seemed to be independent individuals, but they shouted the same slogans, and what they shouted did not represent their hearts.

It turned out that not all complex things were beautiful.

In front of the dead cocoon, Azul raised his head, as if he could see through the thick building to the dark and deep universe.

He invoked the unique senses of the Zerg.

The senses rippled through the entire star ring with a fluctuation that could not be captured, and finally rushed towards the sun.

The first thing he said to his mother was: “I don’t understand.”

“On the sun, most of the life hatched from the cocoons is to die. Humans seem to be the same. This academy is like that. In order to procreate, they leave a group of people behind and arrange for another group to die.”

His mother answered in his mind: “You want to come back.”

Azul didn't know.

He still wanted to bring his family back.

Lu Anji couldn't stay here any longer.

Every moment he spent with humans was strange.

It was as if he was split in two.

One part conformed to human expectations, emitting a wavelength that only dying Zerg would emit, which humans could not capture, but Azul could hear clearly.

The other part was constantly cursing.

Azul originally didn't understand what hate was, but after seeing those strange humans with some Zerg characteristics, and after seeing the dead cocoon, he instantly felt the "hate" that was soaking Lu Anji.

Extreme dissatisfaction, rejection, and refusal.

There was no similar situation on the sun, but humans could easily create it and try to make every uninvited guest experience it personally.

“I don’t understand. Why does he hate me too?”

His mother asked, who is he?

Azul was silent for a long while, and then answered: family.

His mother still said: only we are family.

Azul didn't want to argue about this.

He believed that as long as his mother saw Lu Anji, she would understand.

“Humans want to kill us, and they are also destroying themselves. Why is that?”

Azul said dejectedly, “My cocoon is dead. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken it away from the sun.”

His mother answered: because they hate us and will do everything they can to destroy us.

His mother also said, so do we.

“Are we going to kill all humans?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will humans kill all of us?”

“If they can.”

“Their living environment is sometimes gentle and sometimes harsh, but they can’t set foot on the sun. Humans can’t kill all of us.”

“They can.”

His mother said, “They’ve already done it once.”

Azul didn't understand.

His communication with his mother was different from the communication between humans, and also different from with Lu Anji.

There was no tone, no emotion, just a simple transmission of information.

He didn't know if his mother felt the same as he did when he saw the dead cocoon.

But now Azul felt much better.

Azul: “Who is Lei Jingan?”

His mother did not answer.

Azul: “Has she ever contacted us?”

His mother still did not answer.

Azul: “I heard that there are also humans on Earth who don't hate us that much.”

Mother: “Yes.”

She broke the connection.

Azul hugged the dead cocoon.

After a long while, he pulled Lu Anji into his consciousness, his tail wrapped around his wrist.

The surging memories made the frowning Lu Anji’s face turn pale, and his breathing became more and more rapid.

He seemed to have experienced a long death, but he was still breathing and his heart was still beating.

The shared sea of consciousness environment was decided by Azul.

There was no sound in the dark room, as if it were the universe.

“Let’s go back to the sun.”

Azul whispered.

Lu Anji did not answer.

Azul wanted to persuade him again, but just then, Lu Anji grabbed his tail, his hand trembling a little.

He heard Lu Anji say quickly: “Where are you?”

Azul answered truthfully.

Lu Anji said in a low voice: “Don’t move. I’ll come and find you.”

The sea of consciousness dispersed.

Azul slowly climbed into the cocoon and curled up.

He was a little tired of humans and of war.

Azul wanted to go home, with Lu Anji.

Fifty Billion Years of Solitude: Son of the Sun

***

Lu Anji came quickly.

He swiped his access card directly.

The laboratory was completely open to him, but it would leave a record, and Lu Anji no longer cared about these things.

He passed through the rooms he had seen in Azul’s memory, rushed quickly through the countless "monsters" to the room at the end, and found Azul.

This stupid bug was lying in the cocoon.

After being pulled up, he smelled formalin all over.

He just stared at him, motionless, more like a specimen than a specimen.

“You want to go back to the sun.”

Lu Anji said.

Azul did not speak and nodded quietly.

Lu Anji’s gaze lingered on Azul for a long time.

The corners of his mouth trembled twice, and he smiled, then opened his mouth.

“Because you can’t stand those things outside?”

He said, “But we are all that kind of thing. You are luckier, and I am second. Not only on the star ring, but also on Earth, there are countless monsters. They are created by humans and then abandoned by humans.”

As he spoke, Lu Anji’s smile deepened.

There was not a trace of light in his black eyes, only dead silence.

Azul did not say "we are different" again.

Lu Anji would not accept it.

He looked at Lu Anji.

The young man's face revealed a subtle madness.

The two parts that had been split in two overlapped and blended here, emitting a bone-deep hatred.

“What do you want to do?”

Azul said softly, “You always say you want to kill mother, but you’ve never seen her. You also hate humans, but you are willing to participate in the war for humanity”

He paused.

“I don’t understand, but you can’t be like this, Lu Anji. You can’t put yourself in the position of a ‘worker Zerg’ that humans talk about. You and I, we were not born for this.”

Lu Anji couldn't answer most of Azul’s questions, but this last sentence was like a continuous roar in the silent world, a barrage of bombardment.

Lu Anji opened his mouth to say something, but in the end, it only came out as a dry "I."

Azul waited for him to answer.

All kinds of indescribable emotions surpassed anger and hatred, climbed up his spine, and spread densely to his limbs.

Lu Anji could only identify paleness from it.

“We were not born for this.”

It seemed that only Azul could say this damn sentence so openly.

Delete the "not" in the sentence, and this sentence would become the best declaration of the laboratory.

“I was born for this.”

Lu Anji said indifferently, a cold and fierce aura falling from his gradually clearing brow bones.

“I am a worker Zerg in the hands of humans, a thing that can be hanged to death without any consequence. The person I hate the most here is you, but you can’t die.”

His tone became colder and colder, but without his usual venom.

“No matter how many coupling agents I give you, no matter how many sedatives I give you, you won’t die. I dream of seeing your corpse. The next dream is to drag your corpse to your mother and ask her, Is this the thing you took care of for over forty years?”

Lu Anji’s hand tightened on Azul’s arm.

His fingers were still trembling, just like in the sea of consciousness.

“But I need you.”

He said, “You can’t stand the things outside, and neither can I.”

Lu Anji followed Azul’s arm, held his hand, and led him out, to the center of the glass chambers.

The experimental subjects surged again, trying to pass through the glass to get to Azul.

“Because it’s unbearable, unacceptable, with extraordinary anger and hatred, that’s how war starts.”

Azul saw Lu Anji’s gaze wander among the various glass chambers, and finally looked over, their eyes meeting.

In those pitch-black eyes, Azul could actually find a small version of himself.

“I’m going to start my war, Azul.”

His facial muscles were twitching, his hatred mixed with disgust, disgust for who knows who.

“I’ve had enough.”

“I’m going to destroy all of this.”

Azul could probably understand the concept of death, but he was still clueless about war.

It seemed to be a war of attrition between species and species, but Lu Anji said he was going to start his war.

This also seemed reasonable.

If only his mother, Azul, and Lu Anji could be called family, could they be called a new, smaller species?

Lu Anji saw Azul’s concerns and said: “Not family.”

His hand tightened, “We are friends, Azul. Family will betray each other, friends will not. Friends can hate each other, but they can also trust each other, as long as they still need each other.”

“What do you need me to do?”

Azul asked.

On this night, a violent explosion occurred in the affiliated laboratory of the Star Ring Allied Military Academy.

The burning building quickly consumed the oxygen inside the star ring.

In the ruins that had been almost flattened, there were bloodstains everywhere, and something that resembled Zerg remains.

Precision instruments had been dismantled into scrap parts, rolling in the dust and smoke, leaving scorch marks.

The emergency plan was activated.

People woke up from their sleep and rushed to the laboratory screaming.

The area had already been cordoned off by firefighters, who were spraying chemical fire extinguishers inside.

The doctor was only wearing a coat over his pajamas.

He spotted two figures in the flames, Lu Anji and his roommate.

Lu Anji’s coat was draped over the child named Azul.

He held his thin roommate completely in his arms, lowered his head, and walked out of the fire, avoiding the sparks.

“Stop! Stop!”

The doctor screamed.

He didn't care if the laboratory staff on duty were dead or alive, but spraying chemical agents on Lu Anji?

Absolutely not!

Lu Anji, who should have been under investigation, was quickly pulled over by the doctor.

The doctor's authority was quite high, and the people at the scene couldn't stop him.

“Anji, how are you”

“If I kill all the Zerg, can the experiment be completely shut down?”

Lu Anji said.

The doctor glanced at the soldier who was staring at them with a frown and quickly covered his mouth.

“You go back first. I’ll find you tomorrow to get the details.”

The doctor whispered in his ear, “Don’t tell anyone what you saw, not even the military. And your roommate, he…”

“He came to find me.”

Lu Anji said coldly, “Are you going to investigate him, or are you going to investigate me? I can explain everything in a military tribunal.”

The doctor was taken aback and looked at Lu Anji with an incredulous expression.

He had always been very obedient and accepted all the experiments.

The doctor didn’t take the small squabbles he had with the other children on Earth seriously.

They were all children, and it was normal for them to have disputes.

But Lu Anji was now looking at him with a very deep gaze, so deep that you couldn't see the bottom.

The threat in his attitude was all too clear.

The doctor gritted his teeth: “You all go back first! You bring him to me tomorrow.”

However, this was the last time the doctor saw Lu Anji.

Because that night, he died under the dormitory building where he was assigned.

Chu Zu stepped on the floor, his tail wrapped around the struggling human.

He gently pushed open the window, and the wind brought the smell of scorched earth from the star ring into the room.

The system was still sorting out everything that had happened tonight.

Azul had witnessed the truth of the experiment.

He couldn't process this information and fell into chaos.

Communicating with the Mother Bug made him feel better, but the fundamental problem was not solved.

He wanted to go back to the sun and return to his simple life, but Lu Anji had passed on his anger and hatred, which directly ignited Azul’s emotions.

It could be called a night of breaking down.

Both the person and the Zerg had exploded for their own reasons.

At the same time, this was the first time they had a real resonance.

So they, as friends of each other, destroyed the laboratory together.

In the original work, Lu Anji never mentioned anything about the experiment after he got on the ship.

The conflict was focused on humans and the Zerg, and there was no conflict in the plot.

But…

“Lu Anji doesn’t seem to have intended to make a move on the doctor.”

The system said, “He probably wanted the doctor to solve the accident at the laboratory.”

“From the doctor’s reaction, the military had no idea about his experiment—the information I found said that this proposal was rejected at the very beginning. A small number of people secretly supported it, which was how he was able to carry out the experiment under the guise of other things.”

Chu Zu was blowing in the wind, standing on the window sill.

He looked down at the height of the floor.

“If he doesn't do it, I'll do it.”

Chu Zu said, “A good friend is someone who provides help when appropriate and helps solve the troubles created by the other party. Without me, he couldn't have destroyed the laboratory. Now it’s his turn to help me clean up the mess.”

The system heard the host sneer: “The wall of the corridor is hung with their heroes. Further in, are the living people whose true faces only exist in photos, and they even used my genes?”

The system watched as the host ruthlessly threw the doctor down.

A short scream ended with a heavy thud.

The laboratory had taken away most of the manpower from the star ring.

Even the students from the academy were called to help.

No one noticed this death.

Chu Zu jumped directly from the window.

His tail hooked onto a nearby streetlight, buffering some of the gravity in the air, and he landed steadily.

He tucked his tail away, hiding it in his loose coat.

“Lu Anji has already started to go crazy, but it’s different from what I originally expected. I didn’t plan to go crazy with him.”

Chu Zu walked towards the dormitory.

All the surveillance along the way was tampered with by the system.

Explaining these things was also Lu Anji’s job.

Since he wanted to drag Azul down with him, he should also be prepared to clean up the mess constantly.

“Didn’t I say before that his destructive power is definitely countless times stronger than Lei Jingan’s?”

System: “Yes… he’s writing an application in the dormitory now, requesting to graduate early and go to the front lines. Does he want to end the war?”

“On the contrary.”

Chu Zu said softly, “He wants to detonate the war.”

“He didn't finish his sentence. 'I'm going to destroy all of this.' This 'all of this' includes the laboratory, the Zerg, all of humanity, me, and himself.”

Chu Zu smiled faintly: “A war with four standpoints.”

The system was puzzled: “Humans, the Zerg, Lu Anji… who’s the other one?”

“It’s me.”

Chu Zu walked to the dormitory.

It should have been lights out, but now the entire building was lit up.

The sound of the broadcast could be vaguely heard from the open windows.

Lu Anji was standing on the windowsill, looking down at him from dozens of meters away.

Chu Zu closed Lu Anji’s coat and walked slowly inside.

“Mama’s boy Zerg saw something he shouldn't have. Lu Anji said it was our own kind—this is the first time he has admitted that he and I are the same kind.”

“These ‘same kind’ instinctively moved closer to me. I could receive the weak frequency band from them. This in itself is evidence.”

He said, “Tell me, what would a Zerg who has lived in a simple worldview for over forty years think at this time?”

System: “I don’t know…”

The dormitory door was open.

Chu Zu took off his shoes and closed the door after entering.

There was a cup of hot milk on the table.

The system said that no "seasoning" had been added.

Chu Zu didn't touch it and took off his coat and gave it back to Lu Anji.

Lu Anji took the coat, told him to take a shower, and go to bed early.

“Do you still hate me?”

Chu Zu asked him.

Lu Anji nodded: “I do.”

Chu Zu said: “I hate you a little too.”

Lu Anji still nodded, the corners of his mouth turned up: “This is the first time I’ve seen you so pleasing to the eye, my friend.”

After taking a shower and curling up in bed, the little yellow chicken’s feet were curled up by this increasingly twisted relationship.

Chu Zu thought about Azul’s character design and closed his eyes: “Let’s look at the forum.”

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