First Research Institute.
Ye Xi rubbed her neck as she stepped out of the laboratory.
To study those red eyeballs, the researchers at the First Research Institute had already stayed up for two consecutive nights.
As one of the heads of the Bureau of Classified Archives, she had no choice but to oversee the entire process and record everything in detail.
Lu Xiu came over carrying two cups of hot tea.
Ye Xi yawned as she took one and glanced up at him. “You always look so full of energy, is it because you love tea?”
Lu Xiu removed the mask of his protective suit, pointed at the dark circles under his eyes, and said with a wry smile, “Sorry to disappoint you. I’m exhausted too. I haven’t had proper rest in ages, the last time I slept well was two months ago. I’d give anything to just lie in bed and sleep for twenty-four hours straight.”
He took a sip of the hot tea and tilted his head back, reminiscing. “Who was it again who told me that working at the Archives Bureau would be easy? Poor, naïve me, I actually believed them and ended up here. What rotten luck.”
Ye Xi cleared her throat and tried to comfort Lu Xiu. “Well, it’s still better than what Xiang Liu has to deal with. At least we get some rest. He works all year round without a break, recognized across seven planets as a Seven-Star Major General, with a workload seven times that of an ordinary person. And just when he finally gets a vacation, he runs into a mutant incident. Compared to that, we really don’t have much to complain about.”
Lu Xiu sighed. “The greater the ability, the greater the responsibility. The seven planets are full of talented people, but how many can actually reach that level of spiritual power?”
Ye Xi sighed as well. “He just finished dealing with the Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish on Aquarius, and now he has to handle the mutants. If they hadn’t suddenly gone into hibernation, our great Seven-Star Major General would’ve been done for.”
She took a sip of her tea, smacked her lips, and made a face. “Why does this tea taste like roses? Lu Xiu, your tastes are really… unique.”
“Rose tea isn’t bad. That kid Jiang Yue likes it a lot,” Lu Xiu said.
Ye Xi looked at him and frowned slightly. “Don’t you think it’s strange?”
Lu Xiu raised his head. “You mean the fact that Jiang Yue wasn’t infected by the eyeball parasite?”
Ye Xi nodded. “It really is strange. Even though we don’t yet understand how the infection spreads, not even Xiang Liu could avoid being infected. So how did an eighteen-year-old college student like Jiang Yue come out completely unscathed? Xiang Liu is a true perfect host, if even he couldn’t resist it, how could Jiang Yue be immune?”
Lu Xiu shook his head. “Let’s wait for the research results. After all, we’re not scientists, anything we say now is just speculation without any scientific basis.”
Half a month later, the results came in.
Ye Xi stared at the report, her voice trembling in disbelief. “The eyeballs are an ancient microbial species? We were infected by microbes?”
The researcher nodded. “That’s right. And it’s a super strain, one capable of penetrating even a level-three protective suit. Thousand Threads isn’t a creature of this era, so it’s not surprising that it carries ancient microbes.”
Ye Xi asked, “Can we identify the species?”
The researcher shook his head. “We can’t be completely sure yet. But after checking some records, we found mention of an ancient microbial species called the Evil Eye. Its characteristics match the eyeballs almost perfectly.”
At the words Evil Eye, both Ye Xi and Lu Xiu shuddered.
“The Evil Eye shouldn’t be this mild,” Lu Xiu said, taking the report with a grave expression. “None of us who were infected have noticed anything unusual.”
The researcher nodded. “That’s true. The Evil Eye is an extremely terrifying ancient species. The eyeballs parasitizing your bodies are merely its spores.”
Ye Xi’s pupils contracted. “So you mean…”
Lu Xiu closed his eyes. “It means at least one fully matured Evil Eye has already appeared.”
The mutant incident was, for the time being, considered resolved. The two eyeballs had vanished without a trace, and Jiang Yue had no choice but to set the matter aside.
After all, a far more pressing issue loomed before him, final exams were just around the corner!
Jiang Yue and Xiang Sui were cramming for their final exams, and heaven knew how many classes they’d missed after spending a whole month at the base!
Biting the end of her stylus, Jiang Yue recited from Current Affairs and Policies. On the desk lay Xi Boyu’s densely written notes. Looking at the sea of tiny characters, Jiang Yue clung to a final thread of hope and asked, “Do we really have to memorize all of this?”
Xi Boyu set down a stack of books and nodded. “That’s right. Every bit of it is important.”
Jiang Yue was utterly crushed.
Xiang Sui was also drowning under the mountain of missed coursework. He sprayed some blastozyme perfume on his forehead to stay awake, clutching his hair in frustration, his face full of despair. “The exams are only a month away, can we even make it? Can we?! It’s not just Current Affairs and Policies; we’ve fallen way behind in Anatomy too!”
He flipped through the schedule, sharing in Jiang Yue’s despair. “We’re still short twenty-four hours in the holographic training module! Oh god, does that mean I’ll have to get beaten up by those virtual fighters for twenty-four hours straight?!”
Jiang Yue whimpered, lifting a thick stack of review papers. “It’s worse than that. We’ve also missed the lessons on armored beetles, chameleons, and something called the Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish.”
She flipped through the information on the Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish. “That’s odd, are Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish part of the Zerg species too? Why are we even studying these things in Anatomy class?”
Jiang Sen looked up from the pile of books, his messy green hair sticking out in all directions. “Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish are actually a type of creature that just looks like jellyfish. Their bodies are more than five times the size of ordinary ones. The juveniles we dissect in class are already ten meters long.”
Kuri suddenly grew excited. “When we turn off the lights in the dissection room, the Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish in the tanks glow this dreamy blue! It’s like being inside a holographic game!”
Bai Wang pointed at him accusingly. “You really can’t live without games, can you? Why didn’t you just major in gaming instead of enrolling in a military academy?”
Kuri pouted. “The military is a symbol of power. Which Alpha hasn’t dreamed of turning their life around?”
Jiang Yue rubbed her aching head and groaned. “I haven’t.”
Jellyfish were once beautiful marine creatures, and the Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish had belonged to the oceans of ancient Earth. By the interstellar age, they had gone extinct, hence why their name was later used for Zerg species.
Jiang Yue went back to memorizing the data on the Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish. If the descriptions in the report hadn’t been so horrifying, the creature might actually have stirred her girlish fascination.
The creature was breathtakingly beautiful, almost dreamlike. The waters where they gathered would shimmer at night with an ethereal blue glow. Of course, since they were highly venomous, they were anything but friendly to other marine life, wreaking havoc on the ocean’s ecological balance.
Jiang Yue studied the dissection course materials until one in the morning, and after class the next day, still had to make up the missed holographic training hours.
Their combat simulations had reached an advanced stage: the virtual fighters in the holographic system were getting fiercer, their attacks trickier, their fighting style increasingly reckless.
The pain felt in the holographic world was entirely real. After being mercilessly beaten by a virtual fighter for three straight hours, Jiang Yue stumbled out of the simulator in tears.
Xi Boyu handed her a tissue. Jiang Yue, with tears and snot running down her face, clutched her stomach and groaned, “Can you check if my intestines are spilling out?”
Xi Boyu replied calmly, “They are not. Please, Jiang Yue, learn to distinguish between virtual and real.”
But Jiang Yue remained sprawled on the floor, too weak to move, clutching Xi Boyu’s sleeve feebly. “It’s so unfair… why can’t the military academy’s holographic pods reduce the pain settings? I’m already a broken Yue…”
Xi Boyu hauled the limp, dog-like Jiang Yue back into the simulator and gave her an encouraging pat. “Come on. What combat student hasn’t been utterly crushed by a virtual fighter? Hang in there, you’ve still got three training hours left today.”
With tears in her eyes, Jiang Yue reached out and clutched the edge of the holographic pod like a drowning person grasping at their last strand of hope. Xi Boyu, utterly merciless, pried her fingers loose and reminded her, “You still have fifty short-answer questions from Current Affairs and Policies to memorize.”
Jiang Yue’s eyes rolled back, she nearly fainted on the spot.
To free up time to study those fifty questions, she endured another three hours of brutal beatings inside the simulator.
On the way back, she walked bent over, her expression pained and speechless, and returned to the dormitory looking like she’d survived a disaster.
Jiang Sen glanced at Jiang Yue calmly, speaking with the tone of someone who had seen it all. “Got kicked in the crotch by a virtual fighter, didn’t you?”
Jiang Yue hunched over in her chair, gasping in pain. “Worse than that.”
Her face twisted, the corner of her mouth twitching as she forced out five words: “Chickens fly and eggs break..”1It’s a Chinese idiom used humorously or bitterly to mean a total loss or utter disaster, that everything went wrong, nothing was saved.
Her roommates winced in collective sympathy, all donning expressions of shared suffering.
Bai Wang muttered bitterly, clutching his lower abdomen. “That chain shadow kick combo is pure agony, it makes you want to die and live all at once.”
Kuri shuddered at the memory. “After my total devastation incident, I was stuck in bed for an entire day. You know… the psychological trauma runs deep.”
Jiang Sen let out a pained groan. “Those virtual fighters are getting sneakier by the day. Every single one of us in the combat division has taken a hit to our lineage at least once.”
Everyone turned to look at Xi Boyu, waiting for his take on post-devastation recovery.
Xi Boyu gave them a cool glance and said, in his usual icy tone, “Sorry. I rank first in the entire division’s holographic simulations. Human suffering is not something I can relate to.”
Everyone immediately booed in unison.
Amid the noise, Xiang Sui pushed open the door, limping and clutching his crotch. Grimacing in pain, he unleashed a string of curses that extended to the virtual fighters’ ancestors for eighteen generations.
But worse than the holographic training was the dissection class. When a student asked the professor to “highlight the key points,” the anatomy instructor slammed a hand on the podium and shouted, “All you ever think about is highlighting key points! When you’re on the battlefield facing the Zergs, are you going to ask them to mark the key points for you too?”
Every first-year student was on the verge of tears. In desperation, they crowded into the print shop to photocopy past exam papers, hoping to memorize their way through.
At precisely eleven o’clock, the military academy cut the power as usual. The dormitory corridors, however, were brightly lit, Alphas in long-sleeved pajamas of all colors stood silently along the hallway, clutching stacks of notes and mouthing their lessons.
In Dorm 2708, the six Alphas had set up their own little desk lamps, and the piles of review materials on their desks had grown into miniature mountains. Under the warm glow of her lamp, Jiang Yue wiped her face and nudged Xi Boyu at the next desk. “Hey, does my face look oily to you?”
Xi Boyu, unusually drowsy, let out a small yawn. His gaze drifted slightly as he glanced at her. “It’s fine, just a little around the sides of your nose.”
Jiang Yue pulled a small pink box from her drawer, took out a strawberry-scented oil blotting sheet, and gently pressed it against her nose.
Xi Boyu shook his head to clear his mind, then stared at Jiang Yue in disbelief. “What are you doing? That stuff’s meant for Omegas, isn’t it?”
Jiang Yue pulled out a small, intricately carved round mirror from her drawer, gazing at her reflection with exaggerated self-admiration. “Come on, you all already know I secretly sew my socks. Besides, what’s wrong with an Alpha being a little refined?”
Jiang Sen turned around with a look of exasperation. “Please. That thing of yours is already huge, super eye-catching. Yet you still insist on hiding a sewing kit down there? You’re only making it more obvious!”
Jiang Yue: “…”
Kuri joined in the teasing. “Exactly! At first, we all thought you were just a young Alpha overflowing with hormones, so spending a bit longer in the bathroom made sense. But when it kept happening, way too often, we couldn’t help wondering what was really going on.”
Bai Wang nodded in agreement. “Then Xi Boyu, with his eagle eyes, noticed your socks had been patched.”
Jiang Yue glared at Xi Boyu, full of righteous indignation. “So that’s how you traced it back and discovered my sewing kit?”
Xi Boyu gave a small, tactical cough, looking slightly embarrassed. “Uh… there was a period when I was staying up late. One night when you got out of bed to put away your sewing kit, I just happened to catch a glimpse.”
Jiang Yue used the little round mirror to fan herself, too annoyed to speak. With an indignant huff, she crumpled the used oil blotting sheet into a ball and tossed it into the trash with perfect aim.
But soon, every Alpha who had mocked the oil blotting sheets ended up eating their words, proving once again that the “Wang Jingze Law”2a humorous Chinese internet meme. It comes from a viral clip of a reality show contestant named Wang Jingze, who once angrily said: “I, Wang Jingze, would rather starve to death than eat this!” …but a little later in the same episode, he was shown happily eating the food anyway, saying: “True fragrance!” (真香, zhēn xiāng) So online, people started using “the Wang Jingze Law” or “the True Fragrance Law (真香定律)” to describe the universal rule that people often end up liking or doing exactly what they swore they’d never do. of inevitable hypocrisy was universal truth.
After all, even someone as pristine and untouchable as Xi Boyu couldn’t avoid an oily face after staying up all night.
During exam week, everyone had basically turned into walking oil fields. Time was precious, and no one wanted to waste it washing up, so Jiang Yue’s little pink box of strawberry-scented blotting papers suddenly became the dorm’s hottest commodity.
Because of the heavy pressure from final exams, and the large number of classes they’d missed, Jiang Yue and Xiang Sui could only skim through their roommates’ notes without really understanding much. The resident study god, Xi Boyu, had no choice but to tutor them late into the night.
To stay awake, they sprayed the dorm full of high-concentration blastozyme perfume.
Every time Jiang Yue opened the door, she felt as if she’d stepped straight into the nest of a blue-eyed millipede.
After the first semester of their freshman year came to an end, exam week finally arrived.
Everyone was buried in endless review, studying until their vision blurred. At one in the morning, Jiang Yue lay sprawled over the desk, murmuring the short-answer questions for Current Affairs and Policies under her breath.
As she organized her papers, the sleeve of her long-sleeved pajamas slipped slightly down, revealing the red eyeball on her wrist.
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Sam Williams On TYMIMA Chapter 152
omg im so late, but thank you for the updates 💕