Chapter 63: 41.1

Chapter 41.1

Strangeness

Translated by boilpoil
Edited by boilpoil

 

“Are you really that afraid of me?” Jin Yue watches Cheng Zhaoci from the opposite seat across some food.

“It’s illegal to try to traffic males,” Cheng Zhaoci replies, until he remembers what Wei Zhuo told him once – that Jin Yue has done enough crime to get the death penalty hundreds of times over, so he switches his topic, “I’m picking the Squadron Leader up from work. He’ll try to find me when he can’t see me.”

Jin Yue checks the time on his holodeck, “it won’t be for a while.”

Then he leans forward as Cheng Zhaoci leans back.

Cheng Zhaoci feels like he’s in a precarious situation. He knows he’s Jin Yue already, so would he even be able to make it home alive? Jin Yue is no fool, so he must know he will call the police, or at least, tell Wei Zhuo, whenever he has the opportunity.

“I always wonder what thoughts fill that little head of yours,” Jin Yue says.

‘It’s your head that’s full of unimaginable horror, duh!’ is what Cheng Zhaoci would like to retort. What kind of space pirate would try to traffic a male right on the Capital planet?!

Cheng Zhaoci just feels really frustrated. From the landfill planet all the way to this Capital planet, this guy has been like a ghost. Cheng Zhaoci is scared and anxious, for sure, but he’s also kind of pissed.

“Will there be extra chapters for ‘In a Tiny Flicker’?” Jin Yue suddenly asks.

Cheng Zhaoci takes a short while to realise what Jin Yue is referring to – his last short comic, ‘In a Tiny Flicker.’

“No. The ending is final.”

Jin Yue widens his eyes in disbelief. He seems quite shaken, enough that Cheng Zhaoci can see his eyes almost turning into vertical pupils.

His eyes are blue right now; a rather bog-standard blond with blue eyes, but Cheng Zhaoci still remembers his original golden vertical pupils.

“How could you do that?!” Jin Yue starts chastising Cheng Zhaoci, not that Cheng Zhaoci can understand how the bastard could be criticising him when he’s already been kidnapped by him. Twice.

Jin Yue, though, is clearly no stranger to unreasonable demands, “I won’t accept it!”

“Who cares if you don’t?!” Cheng Zhaoci suddenly toughens up, “the ending is exactly as depicted, that is non-negotiable!” He’s had enough of the ‘wisdom’ of the commissioners in his past life.

“Fuck this. I knew it. You must be that damned pirate trying to put a bounty on my head in the comments!” Getting kidnapped is demoralising enough, getting kidnapped while getting to a date is worse. Never mind even getting kidnapped, away from a date, and threatened along the way, but being told ‘your comic’s ending is shit’ on top of it all?!

Where the hell does this motherfucker get off?!

Now it’s Jin Yue’s turn to start sinking into his chair. Jin Yue is shrinking a little into his clothes, blinking in bewilderment, watching Cheng Zhaoci explode.

He’s clearly spooked – as seen when his eyes go entirely back to ‘normal.’

This only emboldens Cheng Zhaoci, “put a bounty on my head, did you?”

“No, not me,” Jin Yue really didn’t try that. He just showered Cheng Zhaoci with lots of gifts to try to get him to change the ending, only to get them refunded to him.

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“Trying to kidnap me on the Capital planet? Where would you even take me to?” Cheng Zhaoci slams his hands on the desk and stands up. He’s far smaller in frame than Jin Yue, but right now, he’s towering over him.

“I wasn’t going to kidnap,” he thought about it, but gave up on it in the end. He’s just here to tease and scare Cheng Zhaoci, “I didn’t think…”

“Want to kill me, do you?” Cheng Zhaoci shows a less than friendly smile.

“Huh?” Jin Yue seems stunned, and Cheng Zhaoci raises his voice, “speak up!!!”

“No, not at all,” Jin Yue is completely flabbergasted now, powerless to stop… whatever this is.

“Little ugly thing, you say? You’re the fucking ugly thing here!” Cheng Zhaoci walks around the table, and as Jin Yue stares in disbelief, gives him a big hard slap on the back of his head. The golden, fuzzy head gets knocked to the side.

Cheng Zhaoci snickers dismissively, before walking away.

It takes Jin Yue more than enough time to finally get his wits back about him, “he slapped me?!”

The first thing Cheng Zhaoci did after leaving via the exit is call Wei Zhuo. As soon as it was picked up, “he-help! Jin Yue is here!!!”

His initial outburst was completely natural, but not everything after that. He simply took advantage of how Jin Yue was cowering unexpected, and took the chance to escape.

Cheng Zhaoci shares his location with Wei Zhuo, right as Jin Yue runs outside the restaurant for him.

After locking eyes, Cheng Zhaoci warns him, “I suggest you leave me alone now. Run.”

Jin Yue glares at him with a rather gloomy expression for a bit, before saying, “I won’t involve you in my plans.”

“Huh?” Cheng Zhaoci is the one confused this time, “what plan?”

“Nothing to do with you,” Jin Yue throws his drink over to Cheng Zhaoci, “it’s simply a personal promise.”

Cheng Zhaoci grabs the drink without issues, but doesn’t take a sip. He couldn’t know if Jin Yue slipped anything inside while it was out of sight.

Jin Yue escaped in no time, far quicker than Wei Zhuo could hurry here.

He’s already bought what he came here for. Now that the military has been alerted, it’ll be too late to escape if he doesn’t haul ass out of the planet.

When Wei Zhuo arrives, he nervously checks every inch of skin on Cheng Zhaoci for any wounds. After finding nothing, he drags him to a medical pod, and only sighs in relief when he sees the report reaffirming him that he didn’t get any foreign substance injected into him.

Cheng Zhaoci relays the conversation between him and Jin Yue to Wei Zhuo in its entirety, and asks, “do you know about that ‘plan’ of his?”

“We don’t have the details, but we’ve observed the big space buccaneer organisations starting to get cooperative with each other,” Wei Zhuo helps straighten out Cheng Zhaoci’s clothes, “the frontlines out have also been put on alert. There has been an increase in piracy incidents near the border regions.”

And the fact that Jin Yue somehow sneaked onto the heavily fortified and monitored Capital planet can only mean that not all the military’s insectoids are clean.

The piracy issue has grown into a big problem over the centuries, but their dispersed and mobile nature has meant that the military could never stamp them out entirely. The fact that all the major players are cooperating this time spells danger looming on the horizon, but also, an opportunity.

An opportunity to arrest the pirates wholesale, but of course, the possibility that other hostile powers in the galaxy would take advantage of the occupied insectoid army must be taken into consideration.

“Jin Yue might act silly, but his talents on battlefield command and strategy are the real deal,” Wei Zhuo sighs, “he was the top student of his year back in the military academy.”

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