“Oh.” Yunyang turned and left the kitchen.
Some people simply didn’t like being disturbed while cooking, and she wasn’t about to get in the way.
Qin Mo worked quickly. In less than half an hour, three steaming dishes and a soup were laid out on the dining table.
After setting out the utensils, he was about to call Yunyang to eat when he noticed her staring intently at the holographic screen before her. From the shifting colors on the display, it seemed she was watching some interesting video.
Qin Mo didn’t dare disturb Yunyang, but he also worried she might go hungry. After a moment of hesitation, he gritted his teeth and approached.
Then, imitating what he’d seen his father do, he reached out and lifted Yunyang into his arms.
The sudden sensation of being airborne startled Yunyang, and she instinctively wrapped her arms around Qin Mo’s neck.
Once she’d recovered, she looked at the male so close to her, confused. “What are you doing?”
A pleasant scent drifted toward him, as if it cost nothing. Qin Mo’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he tried to ignore it. “Mistress, dinner is ready. It’ll get cold if we wait any longer.”
He felt a twinge of guilt as he said this.
He’d checked earlier: the dining table in Yunyang’s home, just like the one in his own, had an intelligent temperature control system that kept the dishes at the perfect warmth, even if they sat for another hour.
Yunyang knew this too. But since she’d only had three spoonfuls of nutrient solution since arriving in this world, she was genuinely a bit hungry. So she didn’t call him out on his lie.
She glanced at the dining table, a fair distance from the sofa, and said with complete confidence, “Qin Mo, carry me to the table.”
Now that she was a rare female, it would be a crime not to enjoy being waited on by a handsome man!
Besides, he was her legally bonded beast-husband!
The female in his arms was impossibly soft. Even just this touch intoxicated Qin Mo, and he would have been happy to hold her forever.
Of course, the most important thing was that his Mistress had a full stomach.
Qin Mo set Yunyang down on the dining chair, then sat beside her and began piling food onto her plate with a fervor.
Yunyang took a bite of the stir-fried seasonal vegetables. Her eyes lit up. “This is delicious.”
It was way better than the pre-made meal deliveries she’d eaten in her past life!
Qin Mo’s lips curled up at her praise. “If you like it, Mistress, I’ll cook for you every day.”
Every day?
“Don’t you have to go to the battlefield?” Recalling his profession, Yunyang was a little puzzled.
Qin Mo continued adding food to her plate. “I applied for marriage leave, and the Zerg have been relatively quiet lately.”
There was such a thing as marriage leave in the interstellar era?
Yunyang grew curious. “How many days?”
“One hundred and thirty-four. Plus the annual leave I’ve saved up, I can get about half a year off.”
Yunyang’s eyes went wide.
One hundred and thirty-four days!
If that were back on Earth, every working person would be dying of jealousy!
As a former wage slave herself, Yunyang felt a pang of envy and angrily bit into the meat Qin Mo had put on her plate, as if she were eating not food but her wicked boss.
Qin Mo thought he’d said something wrong and immediately became nervous.
Fortunately, Yunyang soon pulled herself together and ate happily.
After the meal, Qin Mo put the dishes into the automatic dishwasher and dryer, then joined Yunyang in browsing the StarNet.
With a full stomach and a warm feeling throughout her body, Yunyang turned to Qin Mo in a good mood.
“Qin Mo, what’s your contamination level?”
As thanks for the meal, she thought she’d help purify some of his contamination.
She was curious about how purifying contamination with mental strength actually worked.
“Eighty-nine.” His tone was perfectly calm.
Yunyang’s eyes widened, though. That was a very high level.
According to the original owner’s memories, a contamination level over seventy began to harm a male’s body.
Over eighty would trigger irreversible beast transformation, unless a female provided purification or he used an inhibitor.
Once it passed ninety, inhibitors had no effect, and there was a constant risk of berserking and harming others. Only a female’s purification could help.
Qin Mo showed no obvious signs of beast transformation, which meant he had been using inhibitors.
But the process of injecting inhibitors was agonizing, and the side effects made males irritable and aggressive. Seeing Qin Mo now, there was no trace of that.
Yunyang recalled the knowledge she’d crammed from the StarNet earlier that day and took the initiative. “Qin Mo, let me purify your contamination for you.”
The statement seemed straightforward enough, but it made Qin Mo’s ears turn red.
“Mi-Mistress, you just ate. It’s not a good idea to… to…”
He couldn’t bring himself to say the word that followed.
Yunyang was taken aback for a moment, then quickly understood what he meant.
Her face grew warm.
There were two ways to purify contamination. The first was to enter the male’s mental landscape and use mental energy to remove the impurities, a method that could only reduce the contamination level to around thirty.
The other way was the one Qin Mo had been too shy to name, which could completely purify the contamination, though the process was, well, a bit more intimate.
But since Qin Mo was now her bonded beast-husband, when she said “purification,” he naturally assumed she meant the second way.
Yunyang rubbed her nose, a bit awkwardly. “I meant the other method.”
Not that she wasn’t curious about trying that sort of thing, but just not today.
She still didn’t know Qin Mo that well. So far, he seemed decent, but what if he was like Weizhuo, that crooked tree who secretly didn’t want to be bonded to her?
That sort of thing should only happen when both parties are willing.
“Ah, I see.”
Realizing he’d misunderstood, the redness on Qin Mo’s face quietly faded.
He pushed aside the faint disappointment in his heart and dutifully opened his mental landscape.
Yunyang studied the process for a moment before releasing her mental energy, successfully entering Qin Mo’s mindscape.
His mental landscape was a forest. But because of the high contamination, the trees were withered and dying. His beast form, a white tiger, lay weakly in the middle of the forest, shrouded in an ominous black mist.
This must be the contamination?
Yunyang’s mental energy approached the white tiger. The black mist seemed to sense the threat and fled in panic.
Reacting quickly, Yunyang wrapped a wisp of black mist in her mental energy and devoured it.
As the black mist gradually dissipated under her power, Yunyang suddenly felt a strange energy surge within her.
Since she was still in the middle of purifying, she didn’t investigate it immediately but continued to eliminate the black mist the same way.
Her mental energy drained fast. After a quarter of an hour, most of it was gone.
She remembered from the StarNet that excessive depletion of mental enery could cause severe discomfort in females. After clearing two more wisps of black mist, she ended the purification.
Just as she was withdrawing from Qin Mo’s mental landscape, she thought she saw the white tiger open its eyes. Its amber gaze, just like its master’s, held a look of gratitude.
The wrist-mounted optical device flashed. Yunyang glanced at it and saw an alert from the built-in scanner.
[Warning: Your mental energy level is below 30%. Please rest immediately!]
She’d already consumed over seventy percent of her mental energy?
How much contamination had she cleansed?
Recovering for a moment, Yunyang looked at Qin Mo. “Qin Mo, how do you feel?”
But Qin Mo didn’t answer.
The higher a male’s abilities, the stronger the contamination caused by using them.
From adulthood until now, aside from the first year his ability awakened, he had relied on inhibitors to keep his contamination level in check.
He had almost forgotten what it felt like not to use them, but today he seemed to have rediscovered that sensation—or even, he had never felt this lighthearted before.
"Mistress, I feel wonderful," he said.
With that, Qin Mo immediately activated the contamination level detection function on his optical brain.
He couldn't wait to find out what his contamination level was now.
