Jiang Lijin froze at his call.
In the original owner’s memories, there was hardly any impression of this man, but he clearly recognized her.
“You know me?” Jiang Lijin let him hold her arm without pulling away, instead studying the middle-aged man who had just crawled out of a cryo-coffin.
Seth gasped for air, his chest heaving violently. His gray pupils contracted sharply as his gaze locked onto Jiang Lijin’s face, emotions surging fiercely beneath his eyes.
“You’ve grown up…” Seth’s voice was hoarse and dry. He released her grip and braced himself against the edge of the hibernation pod to sit upright, then his expression shifted to one of extreme shock and bewilderment. “No—what are you doing here? Didn’t your parents send you away?!”
Tianyan stepped forward, frowning slightly. “Uncle Seth, Boss just woke you up. What are you talking about, all scrambled like that?”
Seth turned to look at Tianyan and Tianque, his gaze lingering on their identical faces for a moment. He gave a bitter smile. “You two have grown up, too.”
Jiang Lijin sensed the weight of his words. She pulled over a chair, sat down, and crossed her legs. “Explain clearly. What ‘send away’? What energy?”
The restricted zone was silent, broken only by the faint hum of Xiao Yi’s treads.
“The Source Core. You thought it was just the core energy of Blue Star?” Seth took a deep breath and pointed vaguely in the direction of the underground city’s dome.
He shook his head, scattered gray hair swaying with the motion. “No. It’s the incarnation of Blue Star’s life force. It’s alive.”
“The energy of the Source Core isn’t just used to maintain the ecological cycle.” Seth paused to catch his breath before continuing. “It bred mutated plants like Star Emblem Flowers, and more subtly, it’s been reshaping the genes of Blue Star natives.”
Seth glanced at Tianyan and Tianque, then back at Jiang Lijin. “You two are probably 3S-level now, right? 3S is the Empire’s measurement ceiling, not your limit. Because when you were still embryos, Blue Star’s Source Core was in its most active energy burst phase. Your parents were among the closest guardians to the Core back then.”
Tianque tightened his grip on his blade, his red eyes narrowing.
“You absorbed the purest Source Core energy in the womb. That was Blue Star’s gift to you—and its curse.” Seth closed his eyes, recalling the scene from back then. “Now those bastards have drained most of it. Once it completely extinguishes, every Blue Star bloodline baptized by its energy—their genes altered—will suffer genetic collapse.”
Tianyan’s usual smile vanished completely. “You mean if the Source Core dies, all thirty thousand of us—including Tianque, me, and even Boss—will die?”
“Yes.” Seth was resolute. “It’s a bond etched into the very fabric of your genes. As long as Blue Star lives, the Source Core lives. When the Source Core dies, Blue Star’s people die.”
Beside them, Xiao Yi’s screen flickered with yellow warning lights, its mechanical arms fidgeting nervously. “This setting is way too broken for the system! So this butler has to die alongside the host? No way—I need to file a report to the mainframe!”
Jiang Lijin slapped Xiao Yi’s metal shell to silence it. She looked at Seth. “If it was a dead end, how did you guys solve it back then? Don’t tell me cutting off this continent was enough to stop the Core’s depletion.”
Seth covered his face with both hands, shoulders trembling slightly.
“Before I fell into a coma ten years ago… I proposed a theoretical solution.” His voice was muffled in his palms, thick with despair. “It required a top-tier powerhouse with the purest Blue Star bloodline to use their flesh and soul as filler to mend the Source Core’s cracks.”
At this, Seth lifted his head abruptly, bloodshot eyes fixed on Jiang Lijin, his voice shaking terribly. “Doing the math, you turned eighteen three years ago—the Empire’s legal matching age. Did they… match you out?”
Jiang Lijin stared at him, brow slightly furrowed, and nodded.
“I knew it… I knew it!” Seth closed his eyes in pain, tears streaking down his aged cheeks. “Knowing their personalities, there’s no way they’d watch the Blue Star people die in vain. They must have waited until you came of age and came under the Empire’s protection. Then they went back to Blue Star themselves to plug the hole!”
The moment he finished speaking, the entire restricted zone fell into dead silence.
A sharp stab of pain shot through Jiang Lijin’s brain. Memory fragments buried deep in the original owner’s subconscious surged up without warning.
Three years ago, at the spaceport. A colossal starship was docked at the boarding bridge, the icy wind mixed with the roar of engines rushing past her ears.
A couple stood at the boarding gate, seeing her off.
“A Jin, when you get to the Empire, be obedient. No matter how they treat you, survive.” The woman’s eyes were red-rimmed, lips clamped tight to hold back her sobs.
The man simply patted the young girl’s head and turned around, his back resolute.
Back then, the original owner thought she had been abandoned. She screamed and pounded on the starship’s hatch.
But that couple never once looked back.
Jiang Lijin massaged her temples, suppressing the bitterness rising in her chest. That was the residual emotion of the original host, but now, she could clearly empathize with that pain.
Tianyan and Tianque both looked at Jiang Lijin simultaneously. Tianyan opened his mouth to say something to lighten the mood, but found his throat tight, unable to utter a single word.
Seth gritted his teeth. Leaning on his frail body, he turned around and rapidly tapped the control panel of his hibernation pod.
“Beep—connection to bottom-layer database successful.”
A holographic screen projected above the panel. Seth pulled up an old, encrypted surveillance recording automatically captured from the underworld’s bottom-layer network.
The screen flickered a few times before the image gradually sharpened.
It showed a massive underground furnace. In the center of the furnace churned a dazzling, piercing white light.
Standing at the edge of that light were two people.
Jiang Lijin looked up. The man and woman in the image wore Blue Star’s distinctive protective suits.
They weren’t wearing helmets. Their faces were clearly visible—they were exactly the same as the parents from the original owner’s memory at the spaceport, the ones who had turned away forever.
They stood at the edge of the furnace. The white light below illuminated their faces brightly. Energy storms surged around them, tearing at their clothes.
The man turned to the woman and reached out a hand. The woman smiled, taking it. Their fingers intertwined.
No hesitation. No turning back.
With smiles on their faces, they leaped together into that churning, glaring white light.
The image froze the moment the light swallowed them, then dissolved into static.
Silence enveloped the restricted zone, broken only by the faint hum of the hibernation pod’s life support system.
Jiang Lijin sat motionless in her chair, her pose unchanged.
A dull ache spread through the area near her heart.
It wasn’t a residual reaction from the original host—it was something she genuinely felt herself.
She had always believed the original owner was an unlucky soul abandoned by her parents, a discarded pawn in an arranged marriage.
But now she understood—that starship bound for the Empire had never been a prison vessel of exile.
It was a lifeboat, bought with her parents’ lives.
