“Gui Xu?” Jiang Lijin blurted out.
Chiron’s hand hovered above the control console, pausing mid-motion. He turned to look at her, and behind his glasses, a series of thoughts flickered rapidly through his gray pupils.
Jiang Lijin stared at the solitary coordinate on the screen. In her mind, the clues were forming a chain at an astonishing speed.
The Jiyang Star System, Gui Xu, the final coordinates before Blue Star’s explosion—all converged at this moment.
Her fingertips trembled slightly. Not from fear—from anger.
She couldn’t tell whether it was the lingering emotions of the original host fused with her, or her own fury at such an atrocity against humanity.
A bunch of bastards sitting high up had signed a paper, pressed a button, and wiped out her home planet, her people—zeroed out their existence?
“Lijin.” Chiron’s voice came from beside her, low and steady, like an anchor line.
Jiang Lijin snapped back to reality, realizing her hand was gripping the edge of the table so hard her knuckles had gone white.
She released her grip and took a deep breath.
“I’m fine,” she said, her voice calmer than she’d expected.
Chiron didn’t press her. He just stood quietly at her side, his shoulder almost touching hers, silently conveying something through his body warmth.
“Continue,” Jiang Lijin said, pushing down the roiling fire in her chest. She turned her gaze back to the screen. “On the first day Tianyan moved in, he specifically mentioned he was from the Jiyang Star System.”
Chiron picked up the thread: “It seems likely he had already found something by then, or he already knew you were from Blue Star and was deliberately testing you.”
Jiang Lijin recalled the jarring sense of incongruity she’d felt the first time she stepped onto Gui Xu. Cobblestone paths, upturned eaves, steaming food stalls. At the time, she’d just thought the aesthetic was off—why did a black market stronghold look like an ancient town?
Now she understood. That wasn’t any old town.
It was a group of homeless people, recreating their homeland in the depths of the starry sea.
“And their spirit beasts,” Jiang Lijin said, voicing a doubt that had long weighed on her mind. “One black, one white. Antlers, snake necks, fish scales, eagle claws—that’s a dragon. Not some interstellar mutant species—it’s the dragon from Blue Star mythology.”
Chiron nodded. Though he wasn’t familiar with Blue Star’s mythological system, spirit beasts were the most instinctive projections of one’s genetic depths. They couldn’t emerge out of nowhere from a form with no roots in interstellar civilization—unless it was already embedded in another civilization’s bloodline.
“So these two are most likely Blue Star survivors,” Chiron stated the conclusion. “And Blue Star probably used some method to survive and went into hiding.”
Jiang Lijin didn’t argue.
She leaned back in her chair, new questions surfacing in her mind. The timing of Tianyan and Tianque’s arrival, their way of running Gui Xu, their undisguised disgust for the imperial aristocracy…
“Do they know who did it?” Jiang Lijin asked.
Chiron paused for two seconds. “Not sure. They probably guessed it involved the nobility or high-level Federation officials, but they don’t have a specific list. Coming to the capital planet was likely exactly for that list.”
Jiang Lijin nodded.
“The participant list for Operation Withering.” Chiron’s voice dropped gravely. “To them, that’s a kill list.”
Speaking of the list, Jiang Lijin scrolled back through the page.
She remembered she’d only seen the operation summary earlier, not the full list of participants.
“The list isn’t in the main file,” Chiron said, returning to the console. His fingers tapped rapidly, pulling up the archive’s underlying structure. “Look here—”
Nested beneath the main document was a hidden directory, encrypted at two levels higher than the outer layer.
On the screen, the folder hidden under three levels of directory structure glowed with a dark red light. The code chains wrapped around it were more complex than what they’d unlocked before, even containing trigger conditions for a self-destruct protocol.
“Can you crack it?” Jiang Lijin asked.
Chiron adjusted his glasses, his gray eyes reflecting the dense streams of code. “Yes. But it’ll take time.”
He sat down, his ten fingers landing on the virtual keyboard as he began peeling through the layers of tangled protective barriers layer by layer.
Jiang Lijin watched from behind him. The way Chiron worked was completely different from his usual demeanor. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses, his gray eyes were sharp, his fingertips striking the keys so fast they nearly left afterimages, exuding an intensely focused, cold sharpness.
The first layer of encryption came off, revealing a second beneath it.
Chiron frowned. “This encryption algorithm isn’t standard interstellar code,” he muttered, his fingers pausing for a moment. “It’s custom-made, specifically designed to prevent leaks by insiders. The decryption key was broken into fragments and scattered across different sections of the main document…”
He began reverse-tracking the fragmented keys within the main file, piecing them together one by one.
Five minutes passed. Ten.
The only sounds in the office were the clatter of keyboard strokes and the breathing of two people.
Jiang Lijin didn’t rush him. She leaned against the edge of the desk, arms crossed, letting her mind digest what she’d just seen.
The name “Operation Withering” churned over and over in her head.
When those people signed their names, did they ever think about the living, breathing humans on that planet? The children, the elderly, the people eating, sleeping, laughing…
“It’s cracked.” Chiron’s voice broke through her thoughts.
On the screen, the dark red chains shattered inch by inch. A brief list emerged.
No fancy formatting—just names, titles, and their roles in the operation.
Only nine people in total: three Federation councilors, five imperial nobles.
And the last line. The name was half a size larger than the others, bordered in the imperial family’s exclusive gold trim.
Vera Alduin.
It was the old emperor’s name.
Jiang Lijin’s breath caught for a beat.
“…Well, well,” she muttered softly, her voice laced with an indescribable bitterness.
That aging sovereign, who on her deathbed had entrusted her only child to Jiang Lijin, was the very mastermind who’d signed Blue Star’s extinction order.
Jiang Lijin let out a brief, dry laugh.
“I wonder if she knew that the person she entrusted her youngest daughter to before dying was the one she’d ordered to annihilate her planet—would she crawl out of her coffin?”
Chiron took off his glasses to clean the lenses—a tell that betrayed his own inner turmoil.
“Rowan doesn’t know,” he said.
“Obviously, she’s only six,” Jiang Lijin replied, rubbing her temples as she forcefully pushed down the surging emotions.
She took a deep breath, then shut off the screen.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Go have a talk with those two dragons.”
Chiron stood up and put his glasses back on. As he reached the doorway, he paused. “How are you going to ask?”
“Directly,” Jiang Lijin said, pushing open the door. “We’ve been through life and death together. Beating around the bush is pointless.”
…
When they returned to the villa, Tianyan and Tianque were having lunch at the dining table.
Seeing Jiang Lijin and Chiron walk in, Tianyan took a sip of the tea beside his hand and said with a wide smile,
“Boss is back? Already had lunch? I thought you and Dean Chiron weren’t coming home today.”
Tianque was reclining on the long sofa in the living room, eyes closed, either asleep or pretending to be dead.
Jiang Lijin pulled out the chair across from him and sat down, crossing his legs.
Chiron took a seat at the other end of the dining table, keeping a distance from them, and said nothing.
“Blue Star,” Jiang Lijin said without preamble. “You’re from Blue Star.”
No buildup, no probing—just two words that landed in the quiet room, blunt and direct.
Tianyan’s hand, holding the tea cup, froze mid-motion.
