"Hey, Lin Xi, wake up! Lin Xi... now is not the time to sleep..."
With each call, Lin Xi opened her eyes with immense heaviness.
As her vision gradually cleared, the overly bright light streaming into the room from outside the window made Lin Xi squint, finding the familiar face of the man beside the bed somewhat blurry.
"Bryce?"
Lin Xi stared at his brother for a long time before finally calling out his name.
"Oh my god... this is great! You did it! You're back on Earth!"
The moment Lin Xi recognized Bryce, he almost wanted to rush over and hug him. He felt extremely excited and happy, but Bryce looked utterly confused in the face of his ecstatic expression.
"Lin Xi? What's wrong with you? Oh, for God's sake, I knew it—a hangover, right? This is fucking bad. I should have stopped those guys. You've had too much to drink."
Bryce frowned and muttered to Lin Xi with great distress.
"What? No, I didn't have a hangover, I clearly..."
Lin Xi instinctively wanted to retort, but the moment he opened his mouth, his mind went blank. What was he supposed to retort about?
What is it?
Clearly...
Yes, why did he say that just now?
Why was he so fearful and worried? Why did he feel that Bryce was in deep danger?
"Hey buddy, I know this is hard, but you still have to figure out how to come to your senses. Today is your wedding."
Bryce shrugged at Lin Xi, whose expression was strange, and then said.
"wedding?"
Lin Xi repeated it in disbelief.
"My wedding?" He pointed a finger at himself in a daze.
"Yes, it's your wedding... Come on, what's with that look? I don't like that guy either, but since you've chosen him, you have to accept reality. You're not going to tell me you're afraid of marriage at the last minute, are you?"
Bryce looked at Lin Xi in shock, then looked to the other side.
Lin Xi followed his gaze and looked in that direction.
He was in a place he knew best, in his small, simple, yet exceptionally comfortable dormitory room inside the Earth-Moon Union University.
However, the simple dormitory now contains some things that shouldn't be there—a huge, carved, gilded floor-length mirror and a mannequin in front of it.
The first thing Lin Xi saw was the exquisite dress hanging on the mannequin. The white fabric was decorated with fancy patterns and flowers. In terms of both style and color, it was a proper wedding suit.
Just then, Bryce suddenly walked to the bedside and pulled back the curtains. Dazzling sunlight streamed into the room, but the light seemed to come through stained glass windows, each ray imbued with a rich, almost unsettling hue. Under this light, the dress naturally shimmered, like a work of art crafted from jewels.
"I...I..."
Lin Xi rubbed her temples.
Everything before him filled him with utter confusion.
He felt something was very wrong.
"Wait, when was I...?"
Lin Xi said in a low voice.
Wedding - Holding a wedding -
It seemed as if a voice inside him was constantly whispering.
But Lin Xi instinctively felt resistance and disgust.
Just as he was trying to figure out what was going on, Bryce ruthlessly dragged him off the bed and shoved him in front of the mirror.
"Alright, Lin Xi, stop pretending. Although I really want to believe you, everyone knows you can't escape your marriage with him."
With a warm smile on his face, Bryce spoke to Lin Xi.
Bryce's tone was gentle and warm, just as Lin Xi remembered, but... Lin Xi couldn't help but shudder at his words.
Bryce didn't notice this at all. He raised his hand to look at his wrist, and then his expression changed.
"Time is running out, you need to hurry, the wedding is about to start."
"No, wait, let me figure this out..."
Lin Xi wanted to speak, but Bryce was unusually domineering at this moment. He ripped the wedding suit off the stage and immediately put it on Lin Xi. At that moment, Lin Xi felt like a puppet, completely at someone's mercy. When he came to his senses again, the suit was already on his body.
Bryce took a few steps back, tilted his head, and looked Lin Xi up and down before giving her a smile.
“Oh, Lin Xi, you should know that facing reality isn’t actually that difficult. You’re just right for this look.”
He said.
Lin Xi stared blankly at the smile on Bryce's face, a sudden, indescribable fear gripping his mind.
He saw... he saw Bryce's mouth split open, his jaw drooping as if it were about to fall off, revealing a red tongue and throat mixed with dark green and yellow pus, and a row of sinister teeth emerging from his scarlet gums at that moment.
"Bryce?!"
Lin Xi's face turned deathly pale, and he immediately screamed. However, when he regained his composure and looked at Bryce again, what appeared before him was still... still his beloved brother.
It was as if everything that had just happened was merely his illusion.
At this moment, Bryce seemed completely oblivious to the strange behavior Lin Xi was exhibiting.
He gripped Lin Xi's shoulders tightly, forcing her to walk in front of the full-length mirror.
"Look, you are the most beautiful bride today."
He stood there in front of the mirror and whispered something unbelievable in Lin Xi's ear.
"No, no, the bride? Why am I the bride?"
Lin Xi asked blankly, and then, under Bryce's coercion, he looked at himself in the mirror...
All his voices stopped abruptly.
"What is this...this isn't...this isn't me!"
Lin Xi heard himself muttering to himself, his voice trembling.
A powerful fear, like a venomous snake, was coiling over Lin Xi's heart—at this moment, the reflection in the mirror was not himself at all.
That was a complete monster...
His scythe-like limbs, raised high and hunched over his chest, and his swollen lower body, resembling an enlarged worm, all reminded him that something was very wrong.
Lin Xi felt he was on the verge of madness just looking at his reflection in the mirror, but Bryce, who was right next to him, looked so calm, as if there was nothing strange about what Lin Xi was seeing and hearing.
Is something wrong?
He would even smile and say this to Lin Xi, his mouth splitting open as he spoke, his entire jawline extending down to below his ears.
"Bryce, Bryce?"
"This is you, this is what you were originally like... this is your destiny."
As Bryce whispered, Lin Xi watched as his beloved brother gradually transformed into a different person right before his eyes.
He transformed into a severely damaged, decayed artificial human.
Lin Xi couldn't recall the guy's name, but just seeing that shadow filled him with intense disgust and hatred.
"No……"
Lin Xi screamed, shoving the monster that had transformed into Bryce aside and running frantically outside. But when he opened the door, he discovered that outside the sunlit dormitory was an incredibly long corridor of an old spaceship.
The mottled metal walls and the dim lighting felt incredibly familiar to Lin Xi, as if he had lived there for many years. But when Lin Xi tried to recall carefully, he still couldn't remember anything.
Countless pale figures stood straight at the edge of the corridor, their gray eyes staring intently at Lin Xi.
They were all dead people, dead people that Lin Xi knew, but Lin Xi couldn't remember who they were or why they died here.
He could only run and run, driven to near madness by fear, trying to escape this bizarre dream. But when he finally reached the end of the corridor, the scene around him repeated itself again.
He found himself in a cave.
His body became very small, extremely small. Lin Xi looked down at himself in disbelief and discovered that he had turned into a little boy who was only a few years old.
Standing before him was an enormous monster with scarlet compound eyes and countless outstretched fleshy tentacles. Most striking of all were its magnificent wings, which the monster spread out behind it, shimmering with a variety of mesmerizing colors.
Then it started dancing in front of Lin Xi.
Lin Xi's breathing became increasingly rapid.
He felt fear, but what terrified him even more was the sudden, overwhelming hunger coursing through his body. Everything before him seemed so familiar, yet he had no energy to think or recall; he only felt utterly hungry…
...
Planet AS192, the wreckage of the Helios.
A thin, pale shadow darted skillfully through the abandoned corridor and then into a well-preserved warehouse near the stern of the ship. It looked like a hybrid of a mantis and a butterfly, except that it was unusually large, with two thin, white wings covering its back and two feather-like antennae on its head that would twitch from time to time.
The warehouse was pitch black, but to the white shadow, everything was crystal clear. What had once served as a storage room for human supplies was now filled with bulging silk sacs, composed of countless interwoven threads and slime. Through the thin silk sacs, one could barely make out the contents—nothing more than a gigantic monster.
However, the monsters have long since become indistinct and unrecognizable—they are all covered in secretions expelled by the white shadows, which has allowed them to barely maintain their freshness over such a long period of time.
Of course, "freshness" might not be important to them, after all... they died a long time ago. And now, their remains can only hang layer upon layer on the wall like this.
The white shadow's red eyes shifted slightly, and it accurately located what it had come to obtain.
It quickly climbed up the wall and cut off a white, thread-like egg sac about two meters in diameter.
Then it carried the silk pouch on its back and quickly left the warehouse. It took it a long time to return to the hole at the bottom of the Sun God. It followed the tunnel it had dug for a long time before finally returning to its nest.
This is a cave located deep underground, resembling an anthill, and in the very center of the cave is a spacious and special "room".
In the very center of the "room" was a high platform built from discarded metal parts; of course, in the white shadow's view, that thing could also be called a kind of throne.
On the high platform, a semi-transparent, fleshy membrane formed a huge fleshy sac.
A pale, swollen, and terrifying monster was curled up inside its fleshy sac, breathing slowly.
The white shadow's tentacles twitched, and it stared intently at the monster for a long time.
Only after confirming that the other party was in a stable period did it carefully remove the remains from its back.
It seized the opportunity and very quickly pushed its prepared carcass...or rather, food... toward the fleshy sac.
In this process, it inevitably reveals the various scars on its body.
There were many wounds, some even penetrating its body. Although the fatal wound had long since healed, the gruesome marks alone showed that it had survived purely by luck.
Well... it's been quite lucky all along.
The weapon that caused these wounds was actually near that fleshy sac; it consisted of a network of fleshy tendrils resembling thorns or shrubs, with their roots tightly connected to the bottom of the sac.
As the monster inside the fleshy sac breathed slowly, the fleshy tendrils appeared calm and harmless, but the white shadow knew that, driven by the instinct of hunger, these tendrils were actually quite terrifying.
The shadows piled beneath the fleshy tendrils testify to this—they are mountains of monster carapaces, still faintly revealing the monsters' former ferocity and terror. But now they are merely dull, fragile empty shells, their nutrient-rich flesh long since sucked clean by the tendrils.
However……
Even knowing the place was extremely dangerous, the white shadow couldn't help but linger for a while near the fleshy sac and the fleshy tendrils it was feeding on, staring intently at the monster still sleeping inside the sac.
"Lin Xi..."
Then it cautiously called out the monster's name.
The moment it finished speaking, the previously calm sac suddenly convulsed and swelled violently.
The white shadow suddenly retracted its wings and tentacles, and it sprinted towards the edge of the earth to ensure that it could escape the feeding range of those terrifying fleshy tentacles in the shortest possible time.
Then it hid its body behind a large rock at the edge of the ground, and after a long time, it cautiously poked its head out from the edge of the rock.
It looked at the still twitching fleshy sac, its tentacles constantly waving above its head.
"Hiss..."
With a wet sound, the white shadow suddenly opened its eyes wide.
It was shocked to see a pale hand part the surface of the translucent fleshy sac and then grope its way out.
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