"Who the h.e.l.l got you here?" Though Jingheng Lin was lowering his voice, his anger showed thoroughly, "Why are you stalking me when you should have been training your dogs in the base?"

The question was quite harsh. Bixing Lu could not find an answer for that immediately.

"Have you ever heard of 'Desert of Death'? Do you have any idea about emergency transfers in the Desert of Death? Can't you figure out there are interstellar pirates when you saw that much wreckage? You just drove such a ..." Jingheng Lin slapped on the bulkhead of the tiny little mech, making the innocent and affectionate flying vehicle burp.

Jingheng Lin suddenly recalled how Bixing Lu put a chip in himself. At the moment, all the grudges from that incident and from now rose up, making his heart hurt from the anger, "You b.a.s.t.a.r.d! A bold, reckless b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

Bixing Lu: "..."

Before he could say anything, he already had nothing to say. All he could do was nod silently and lick his teeth with his useless tongue.

Jingheng Lin meant to teach him a lesson, but Bixing Lu was way too old to be educated again, he had to hold back himself no matter how furious he was.

In less than a month, Commodore Lin held back that impulse twice. The feeling was like "hurting yourself by holding all back into yourself". He said coldly, "Give me the mental network and move aside!"

Bixing Lu smiled to him politely and finally got a chance to say something, "No. s.n.a.t.c.h it if you can."

Several robot hands reached out from the clinic's door right after his words, fastening Jingheng in place eventually - any psychological or physical breakout could happen in the extreme s.p.a.ce environment. The clinic had a special fixing set which can still work under 50 tons of pulling force and follow the orders of the driver entirely, strong enough to calm several crazy gorillas down.

Jingheng Lin: "..."

Is he rebelling?

"Uh-huh," Bixing Lu stepped towards him slowly, commanding the fixing set to put the grumpy patient into the medical capsule to lay down. He said besides Lin's ears, "Well, I heard that it is very harmful to break up the connection with the mental network rudely. Shock is the mildest. The driver might even be caught in brain death if fighting back too hard. I've never tried that yet, is that true? Commodore, do you wanna teach me a lesson?"

Jingheng Lin: "Bi! Xing! Lu!"

"Yes?" Bixing Lu sat beside him, asking the intelligent clinic for a cup of water to make himself quenched enough to deliver at least three lectures at one time, then he started to talk. "Commodore, I think you are not so reasonable and that is not a good thing. Though everyone knows 'don't even try to make reason a soldier', I personally regard it as nonsense. I don't have much energy left in my mech. We can move slower. There will be a few days before arriving at the base. We can make reason for everything during these days."

Commodore Lin had never been so mad since he was a kid. He said furiously, "Let me go. Do you really think I won't hurt you?"

Headmaster Lu's understanding to that was a bit off the truth, but not so far away. Hearing the threat, he was not afraid at all and even threw up his hands to show his indifference, "I'm so scared. Wow. What do you want to do to me! Just come on!"

Jingheng: "..."

f.u.c.k "the affectionate kid". Nonsense. Xin Lu was truly an a.r.s.e always telling lies. You can never trust him. Just have a look at his little beast!

Bixing Lu: "We can start from phenomena to essence, and from essence to phenomena -"

Jingheng Lin: "Get lost!"

Bixing Lu was quite calm, keeping the slow speed of speaking, "No way. I'll go away later when I'm done with talking. Lin, tell me, why didn't you send a message back to the base when you found interstellar pirates on the underground track while Beijing was still in range?"

Jingheng Lin was surely not a good student who would answer everything. He snorted.

"Because you did not trust us - me, and everyone else in the base. You considered it useless to inform us anyway. Fighting with interstellar pirates, these people were basically nothing. They could straight scare themselves to death. That was the reason why you deal with everything on your own, wasn't it? Have you ever thought about why would you risk yourself for some losers you don't even trust and regard as useless?"

"You take killing a Primalien as a risk? I merely did not feel good about him and killed him smoothly. Don't say that again. You are making a shame out of me." Jingheng Lin sneered and took a deep breath to bring out the courtesy he saved for his whole life, "Let me go right now and I won't take what you just did seriously."

Bixing Lu said indifferently, "Thanks, handsome, but you'd better stay here and take it seriously as much as you like."

Jingheng Lin: "..."

Bixing Lu said, "So you had a fever and dehydration 'smoothly', almost became a floating body in s.p.a.ce 'smoothly'. Oh, another thing, you made yourself a skeleton with a muscle dissolving solution 'smoothly'. Did your original plan included dying 'smoothly'? You've achieved so many individual accomplishments and you have the courage to be mad at me, to speak out what I wanted to say to you first - Mr. Lin, your spirit of playing the victim is beyond the textbook sample and straight up the list of world miracles. Do you know that?."

Jingheng Lin closed his eyes, pretending he was deaf. Meanwhile, in his mind, he was whipping and las.h.i.+ng that little son of b.i.t.c.h to calm his unending anger.

Though Admiral Lin refused to cooperate unless one forced him to, Bixing Lu was professional at speaking to the ones who would not listen. After handling so many teenagers full of angst, he was quite good at dealing with this kind of person. Even if Jingheng Lin responded or not, he could still give the speech in a proper speed and keep talking all the time. He would even repeat several times when he came to something important.

He eventually talked Jingheng Lin to sleep.

Then, Bixing Lu stopped and let go of the fixing set after a moment of observation. He checked carefully whether Lin's wrists and ankles got injured.

Luckily, they did not. Jingheng Lin did not even try to struggle. He never tried things that were meaningless.

Bixing Lu bent down and put his elbows to his knees. Hands crossed against forehead, he breathed in.

"I was so mad that I did it even better." He thought.

Fortunately, a certain someone was being unreasonable, otherwise, Bixing Lu really would not know how to get along with him at that time.

Bixing Lu spent almost his whole lifetime fighting against his destiny and the world. When others were experiencing the concept of love for the first time, he was struggling to stand up despite the pain. When others were indulging in worldly desires, his wildest dream was to break free from the atmosphere .

His time was way too precious. He was running all the time and he never even stopped to glance at the beautiful views along the way.

Jingheng Lin was the first one who broke his calm mask for all these years.

Bixing Lu looked down at him, thinking about the skinny body full of scars under the s.h.i.+rt and suddenly he calmed down again. Instead, a complicated feeling with a mix of fear rose up. He thought, "How should I treat you?"

For a while, Bixing Lu was like an explorer full of curiosity and fear. Holding his breath, he caught up Jingheng Lin's drooping hand with the caution of handling a carnivorous plant.

The hand was so cold - probably because of his anger - and so hard. The stone-like knots showed the strength of his hand even if it was relaxed. The nails were neat and clean. His palm was full of rough calluses and countless scars though.

Bixing Lu rubbed his hand gently and slowly breathed out. Closing his eyes to feel it for a while, he had a clear feeling that some mysterious energy was burning from where their skin touched all the way to his chest.

Bixing Lu got thrilled by simply touching Lin's hand and out of embarra.s.sment, he drank himself another cup of water.

He wandered around in an agitated way and calmed down a little bit later, opening the travelling notes in his personal terminal to write down his first exploration in "the mysterious field" in the format of experiment reports. In the end, he added some subjective feelings that were not so professional -

"Physically, I was sitting there, but my mind was flying out of my head to outer s.p.a.ce and circled around the whole mech. The afterglow continually stimulated my endocrine system. My chest felt like swelling. As if I had sucked too much laughing gas, I wanted to laugh even when I'm merely breathing."

"Is every connection between people so subtle and intriguing? What a shame that one of the social courtesies for adults is to keep a comfortable distance from one another. It sounds perverted to admire someone's hand if the two are not in a very close relations.h.i.+p. I can't find any control group."

"'Love', what else would it make me feel?"

However, his undecided "love" had a short temper, starting a cold war right after waking up the next morning.

Jingheng Lin had a healthy and strong body. After 48 hours, either the Rainbow Virus or muscle dissolving solution were both cleared. The rare two nights of good sleep perfectly fixed the bad effects of mental network overload. It would be easy-peasy for him to kill two more Primalien.

Bixing Lu had no reason to tie him in the clinic. But obviously, he had more methods to deal with Jingheng Lin.

One should know, in the mech - especially small mechs - the driver controls all.

Stepping out of the clinic, Jingheng Lin was surrounded by "Interstellar Travelling Safety Notice" recorded by Headmaster Lu himself.

Jingheng Lin sat down, then a small audio player raised automatically from the seat. He stood up, then a small recorder climbed above his head. He walked around the s.h.i.+p. Lu's voice from the broadcast system could be a textbook for standard broadcasting.

Finally, Lin wore a pair of noise-cancelling earphones. Once he put it on, he was so depressed to hear a pa.s.sionate voice, "Good morning, Lin. I'm genuinely sorry to take over every electrical equipment except Zhanlu, including your personal terminal - cheer for the great technology. Now, I will announce the latest version of Interstellar Travelling Safety Notice. Chapter One ..."

Jingheng Lin: "..."

Was he having fun from his cheap tricks?

Bixing Lu was afraid of being beaten, hiding in the restaurant on the second floor and watching Jingheng Lin sneakingly through the mental network.

At that time, the map showed that they were back to the underground track and in the range of the base. Before Bixing Lu could breathe easier, the communication device almost exploded from the information flow — Monoeye Hawk was hungover, and when he got up in the morning, he found that his son ran away from home, suspected him of eloping, and became angrier than a wild boar. Over a billion swear words were sent over in total.

Bixing Lu closed the communication device quickly. Heading up, he lost track of Jingheng Lin.

He scanned the cabin, the clinic, the bedrooms ... even sneakily through the bathroom, but found nothing. He almost thought Lin was so annoyed that he jumped out of the cabin. He soon ran out from where he hid to find Jingheng Lin.

Unexpectedly, he got caught once he opened the door.

The hand he admired last night made him understand its own "power". He was pulled and grabbed, smashed onto the door.

Bixing Lu immediately gave in, "Surrender! I surrender! Be polite. Humans are stepping in a new era, so bright. It is not for you to use violence ... uh ..."

Jingheng Lin: "Shut up."

Bixing Lu then shut up but still turned his head hard to give Jingheng Lin a bright smile.

"One more word I hear from you," Jingheng Lin pushed him fiercely against the door and said calmly in his ear, "And I'll make it your last."

"I still have to say my last words though." Bixing Lu stopped smiling, looking right into his eyes, "Lin, I started worrying about you as soon as I got the news that Prince Cayley was bombing the Egret planet, I was so panicked that I could not wait in the base and I had to find you right after the high-energy particle flow. I saw hundreds of broken mechs at the dead transfer point ... and bodies. I let the mech scan the communication and bodies of Beijing. Do you know what I was feeling back then?"

Jingheng Lin paused.

Bixing Lu breathed out slightly, "I think I've never had such a nightmare in my entire life."

Jingheng Lin let him go in reflex.

"Probably because I was connected to the mental network that I could not sleep well these days. I keep on waking up again and again. Yesterday, I dreamt that I could not catch you when the net was broken. I knew Zhanlu was running out of energy but I could not reach you no matter how hard I tried." He turned and make his clothes neat again, throwing up his hands. A too trusting posture. Like he could show Jingheng Lin everything even if it's his beating heart.

Jingheng Lin stepped back unconsciously.

Bixing Lu kept a few seconds of rare silence, then he said, "I'm not blaming you by saying these. I just want you to know how I feel. In my heart, I feel so upset."

Jingheng Lin's face flashed a trace of shock but quickly covered that with his usual calm again. He turned without saying a word, walking away faster and faster as if being chased by enemies he had never seen before in his life.

Bixing Lu held his 'too trusting' posture for a while and looked at Jingheng Lin's back in dismay, thinking, "Already running away? I haven't even done any big moves yet."

The young scientist Lu soon finished his second experiment report: "I found that he is actually a very pa.s.sive person. He never faces his feelings, let alone express them. But he is easier to get along with than what I imagined. You just need to find out his weakness and be able to judge which of his threats are real."

After a series of scientific methods, the young scientist Mr. Lu discovered that he himself was the weakness of Commodore Lin. When being with him, the fierce roars of Lin the tiger all turned into kittens' meows. Therefore, in a planned and gradual process, Bixing Lu became more and more reckless —so reckless that he didn't care about being beaten. According to the data which Bixing Lu had sneakily collected, Jingheng Lin would not even hurt his hair. The most violent body contact was less than 100 Newton, which was the same as tickling for a male adult.

In the end, Lin was kind of afraid of him on a certain level.

Zhanlu the Artificial Rubbish kept sleeping while Bixing Lu was everywhere in the tiny cabin in which he had nowhere to hide. He expected to go back to the d.a.m.ned base for the first time, even felt relieved upon seeing the base through the mental network.

"Look!" Bixing Lu held his shoulders from the back unexpectedly, trying to push him looking out of the window.

Lin was doing recovery training - the dissolving solution was cleared but he had to build his muscle again by himself - and was sweatily sticky so he hated bodily contact, moving to get away from Bixing Lu.

Bixing Lu did not care, sniffing at his neck, "It's okay. Neither too sweaty nor smelly. Why are you turning the temperature here so low again?"

Jingheng Lin felt it was alarmingly wrong and pushed him away, "What's wrong with you?"

Bixing Lu looked back at him innocently with a friendly expression, "It is not healthy to exercise in a cold environment anyway. I don't want to talk about this today - look outside."

A line of small mechs was wandering around the base. They changed speed again and again to form different shapes.

Bixing Lu connected with the intranet with great enthusiasm. Sat.u.r.day's face showed up immediately.

"You're back..." Sat.u.r.day was excited at first. Noticing Jingheng Lin beside him, he became serious, announcing aloud, "We're training. All the drivers attending the construction of the protective s.h.i.+eld are all in the Self-Defense Force now. And there are a lot of people signing up for it every single day. The mechs are almost not enough. We are arranging to make sure everyone can be trained!"

Jingheng Lin raised his eyebrows slightly.

Sat.u.r.day: "We can defend our own home!"