Ten minutes later, Lin Xi tidied himself up a bit, then dragged his unusually heavy and sticky body, trying his best to stay alert the whole way—meeting with Taran was no easy task.
Especially considering his strange appearance yesterday, Lin Xi's worries deepened.
What was unsettling was that when he stepped into the captain's cabin through the metal hatch, he found the air even more oppressive than he had anticipated.
In just one night, Taran looked even more haggard than before. He kept sniffling as he spoke, as if his respiratory system was experiencing some minor problems, while the unsettling glint in his eyes grew even sharper and brighter. Lin Xi knew that his thinking was probably a bit harsh, but just seeing Taran like this made him involuntarily think of the rumors about his lineage—it had to be said, Taran did indeed evoke images of insects in many ways, and his eyes were particularly striking now.
His beloved Elisa was also in the captain's cabin. The poor girl looked incredibly haggard, with dark circles under her eyes that seemed to reach the corners of her mouth.
Beside Elisa stood a somewhat unexpected person. It was Shizuo Ando, a short man with a baby face that seemed out of place for his age. Always smiling, he, like Lin Xi, was a mission support personnel sent by the Earth-Moon Joint University. The only difference was that he held a higher position than Lin Xi, and his research focused on Sunu's zoology.
Well, in principle, Ando is Lin Xi's boss, but Lin Xi has always gotten along quite well with him. After all, Ando is the kind of person who can hardly say "no" (Lin Xi is quite convinced that it is this kind of personality that led to him being packed up and thrown onto this damned spaceship to carry out this damned mission). Many times, Lin Xi would even forget that there was a superior-subordinate relationship between the two of them. But at this moment, he was quite certain that the reason Taran called Ando here was because of this relationship.
The moment Lin Xi's feet touched the gray floor of the captain's cabin, worn down by years of friction, she knew something terrible was about to happen.
When he saw Elisa and Ando, he instinctively made eye contact with them. However, the two who should have given him some hints or shown goodwill now seemed increasingly worried. Elisa looked at him with a solemn expression, and Ando Shizuo's signature smile had completely disappeared from his baby face.
"Dr. Lin Xi, I think you need to take a look at this and then give me a reasonable explanation."
Immediately afterwards, a dry sound, like something rubbing together, appeared in Lin Xi's ears.
That was Taran, he said before even allowing Lin Xi to give her her routine report.
Taran carefully pushed something placed in a small, transparent, sealed container to the center of the table.
The sealing device is like a giant glass capsule with complex metal components at both ends. The regularly lit indicator lights on it prove that the life support system inside is operating.
Right in the middle of this giant glass capsule, a strange, spindle-shaped object was quietly immersed in the culture medium.
Through the pale blue culture medium, one could vaguely see that beneath the translucent, egg-white membrane, a layer of slender, oval-shaped eggs arranged in a row.
It looks like some kind of special bean pod.
Fleshy and springy—you won't find this kind of "pod" on Earth, after all, those cute and delicious pods on Earth don't wiggle slightly from time to time like the one in front of him.
Lin Xi frowned as he looked at the thing, especially the egg-shaped core that trembled slightly with an arc that was barely perceptible to the naked eye. He couldn't help but feel that the "pod" looked a little disgusting, but upon closer inspection, the strange feeling of disgust, like the fine thorns of a grass pricking the skin, was completely inexplicable.
More pronounced than disgust was confusion.
Lin Xi could swear that he had never seen such a strange thing before, but judging from the behavior of Taran, and even Elisa and Ando Shizuo, they seemed quite certain that Lin Xi had to give them an explanation.
"What's this?"
Lin Xi asked.
He tried to keep his attitude natural so as not to give the other party an excuse for his confusion.
Taran's sharp gaze instantly pierced him.
"I can assure you, this is the first time I've ever encountered something like this... I really have no way of explaining it to you."
Lin Xi raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, and then he spoke with great distress.
"Is this the first time you've seen it? You promise?"
Elisa suddenly interjected.
"I promise!"
Lin Xi had never been so sincere before.
“My entire schedule is on my personal terminal. If needed, you can thoroughly check those records. I have never seen anything like this before—I would definitely remember something so disgusting if I had seen it.”
He looked at Elisa pleadingly.
Elisa seemed relieved after receiving his assurance, and she turned to look at Taran.
However, before she could speak, Taran stared at Lin Xi and questioned her in a sinister tone.
"Can you guarantee that you made no operational errors when resealing that Sunu statue? I repeat, no 'any' errors or oversights—"
"sculpture?"
Lin Xi opened her eyes wide in confusion.
Oh, right...
Lin Xi remembered that Elisa had mentioned in her message that they had found something in that strangely sculpted sealed container.
His condition was so bad that he couldn't remember anything at all.
But wait, is this the same thing they found in the sealed container of the Sunu sculpture?
Lin Xi stared in disbelief at the "pod" inside the glass capsule.
The thing was about fifteen inches...maybe sixteen inches long, and both its egg-white outer membrane and the egg-like structures within it were quite impressive.
Unless Lin Xi was already blind at the time, it was impossible for him to have missed this thing when sealing the sculpture.
"My actions are also in the task log. If needed, I can give you a more detailed written summary, but—I swear, I absolutely could not have seen it when I was performing the actions!"
Lin Xi said firmly.
"But it's there."
Taran said without any mercy.
"When we went to do some proper finishing work on this priceless sculpture, it was inside the sculpture's container. If we hadn't acted quickly, it would have suffocated in the gel."
Lin Xi insisted that he had never seen the "pod," but judging from Taran's attitude, he seemed to firmly believe that Lin Xi should be held responsible for it.
The situation remained deadlocked until Shizuo Ando, who had been silent all along, suddenly spoke up.
"Excuse me, I actually have a very small assumption."
He said it with an embarrassed smile.
Then he tapped the electronic screen and enlarged a section of Lin Xi's mission log.
Those are images of Lin Xi resealing the statue.
"Dr. Lin Xi mentioned before that the spare container he found was smaller than the original sealed container, and he had to use some rather rough methods to barely fit the sculpture into the sealed container—"
Taran's aura suddenly turned cold and terrifying, and the way he glared at Lin Xi looked like he wanted to devour her.
Heaven knows why he cares so much about this alien sculpture... Lin Xi suspected that even if he had touched Taran's woman, this guy wouldn't have shown such obvious hatred.
As Lin Xi thought about it, she defended herself, saying, "That thing was already starting to turn black at the time, I had no choice but to do it!"
Shizuo Ando nodded.
“Yes, we can see that the Sunu statue had already shown some degree of hardening at that time…” He looked at Lin Xi reassuringly, “Actually, this is normal. In Sunu, all the star god statues must be preserved in a special viscous liquid. Once exposed to the outside world, they are prone to this hardening phenomenon, but as long as they have enough time to be soaked in the liquid again, they will return to normal. It’s just that people who see the hardening phenomenon for the first time will inevitably think that the condition is a bit serious. I can understand the actions that Dr. Lin Xi took to alleviate the hardening phenomenon at that time, and I also believe that the egg case had not appeared at that time.”
"Egg sheath?"
Lin Xi asked in surprise.
He couldn't help but look up at Taran and Elisa, whose expressions showed that Ando wasn't talking nonsense.
Lin Xi finally understood why he felt uncomfortable when he saw the "pod"—after all, he had just discovered his insect phobia yesterday.
"Oh my God..."
Lin Xi almost instinctively took two steps back to get away from the egg case.
"Why are there egg cases here? What kind of creature has this egg case?"
He asked, frowning.
"That's what we want to know too."
Elisa sighed and then said.
However, Ando immediately followed up by saying, "We don't have enough instruments on this ship to conduct the test, but in my humble opinion, this should be an egg case of a Sunu Star Butterfly."
Lin Mao shuddered very slightly when he heard the word "Sunu Star Butterfly".
He vaguely felt as if he had remembered something.
Something slippery, dark, and unpleasant. But the fragments of memory were so scattered that they flashed quickly through his mind, and when he tried to recall them, his mind went blank.
"...I thought the Sunu Star Butterfly was extinct?"
Lin Xi said, somewhat dazed.
He remembered that when he was a child, he liked Sunu Star Butterfly very much. He bought several encyclopedias about Sunu in an attempt to find more information, but Sunu Star Butterfly was an extremely mysterious existence even among the Sunu people.
All that Earthlings know is that it is extremely sacred, the spiritual totem of the Sunu people, originally considered a "minor star god," and that its population has been declining, having been on the verge of extinction for over thirty years.
And when the Sunu people started to go mad, those large insects that already required very meticulous and tedious care died even faster.
But now, Ando tells him that there is a fresh star butterfly egg case on the Helios?
“At least as far as we know, yes, all the Sunu Star Butterflies on Sunu Star are now extinct, but I suspect that this egg case was produced much earlier.” Ando said, nodding his head.
Now even Taran's gaze fell upon him.
Ando's face flushed slightly: "I'm a Sunu fan... well, everyone knows that. A long time ago, I vaguely remembered seeing some records in a document about Sunu culture. When the Sunu people encountered a pregnant woman having a difficult labor, they would take her into the temple and bury her under the throne of the star god. Those Sunu people firmly believed that this treatment would allow the difficult child to be born smoothly."
Elisa raised an eyebrow in surprise, then quickly realized what she meant: "You mean to say..."
Ando continued, becoming quite eloquent once his interests were involved: "Yes, we all know that the Star Butterflies encountered reproductive problems centuries ago, yet they are so precious and important to the Sunu people. Considering this, it's quite possible that the Sunu people buried those egg cases inside the statue in an attempt to restore their reproductive ability." At this point, Ando gave Lin Xi a sympathetic look, "The shock of the forced landing may have loosened some parts of the fossil statue, and when Dr. Lin Xi resealed the statue, the egg cases that were already buried inside slipped out."
As he spoke, Ando magnified the image of the resealed statue on the electronic screen. Soaked in the sealing liquid, the black hardening marks on the eerie surface of the statue were slowly fading.
Ando pointed to a very inconspicuous dent at the tail, in the middle of which was a very shallow crack.
“We all thought this was a crack that appeared when the container broke and the egg case fell out. But after observing it closely, I suspect this is where the egg case was released. There should have been a larger opening here when it hardened, but now that there is enough mucus, it is less noticeable.”
After Shizuo Ando finished speaking, there was a brief silence in the captain's cabin.
"On the bright side, this star butterfly's egg case should be quite valuable?"
Lin Xi blinked and cautiously probed at the silent Taran.
He admitted that he had fully accepted Ando's explanation, even though it did sound rather outlandish.
However, if you eliminate all the impossibilities, what remains are the possibilities.
Lin Xi vaguely remembered seeing a sentence like this in a book many years ago.
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