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2931 Galactic calendar, Tianque Space Port.
Among the many rivers of stars in the sky.
On Tianque Space Port’s upper platform, ground crews were spray-painting a logo onto the outer shell of the docked mothership — it was a one-winged black phoenix flying high, representing Longque. Tomorrow, this mothership’s central control would be activated, the main engine would go online, and there would be a grand launch ceremony. And after that, her first destination was somewhere thousands of light-years away.
Through a glass porthole, the young captain faced the stars with one hand on his heart and the other on the mothership’s power core, as if he could feel Longque’s heartbeat.
“What do you think, Commander?”
Chu Xiang turned and saluted on the spot. The person behind him had been his direct superior when he was in the special operations team — Shao Yun, a female warrior with a classically oriental face and half her body replaced by machines. She could happily chat about idol dramas with the enemy then turn against them in an instant and mercilessly crush their heart.
“What do you think?” she repeated, grinning.
Chu Xiang was very honest. “Couldn’t sleep, too excited.”
Shao Yun: “I was also very nervous the first day I took office.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Oh?”
“I think I should feel nervous, but I just can’t. I just feel… excited,” Chu Xiang said.
Shao Yun smiled at this. “I understand. Fleet Commander Ye once said something about you, he said that you’re like a dust mote in the starry sky, the meaning of your existence is to one day burn up into stardust.
“Chu Xiang, I wish you good fortune, that your wings can spread far and wide, that your seas be broad and your skies be high.”
Then, Longque’s light would cover the sun and sky; under her wings, all would be clear and cloudless.
* * *
Chu Xiang, abruptly awakened, blocked a gleaming dagger in front of him, pinched his opponent’s tendons, and twisted it. His opponent didn’t expect this move and suddenly found himself missing his weapon.
There were no artificial lights in ancient times, so Chu Xiang could only barely see that there were two figures sneaking around his room.
The next second, another dagger pierced into the mattress. Chu Xiang separated his legs just in time and the dagger fell onto the bed frame. At this moment, Chu Hexing woke up — the girl was a light sleeper because when she slept on the streets, she had to avoid the patrolling night guards. She rushed into the room and, without a word, picked up a chair and smashed it toward the intruders.
The two killers were so shocked — not expecting that this skinny little girl would fight with such desperation — that they were hit by the chair and blood began pouring from their heads.
At the same time, Chu Xiang took advantage of Chu Hexing’s chair throw to jump out of bed, then accurately stabbed the first man in the liver. The man fainted from extreme pain without a sound. Before the second man could understand what happened, Chu Xiang pivoted and plunged the dagger into his heart. He was fast, accurate, and had not one iota of doubt. His single stab separated the killer’s heart into two halves.
Then…
Then the dagger got stuck against the man’s ribs and he didn’t have the strength to pull it out. Instead, Chu Xiang himself stumbled backwards and sat heavily on the edge of the bed, helplessly watching stars fly in his vision.
He woke up suddenly and moved too fast, the stars hadn’t appeared yet during the stabbing, and now he couldn’t move after the stabbing.
“Evil Star!”
“…There’s no evil star here,” Chu Xiang panted. He figured it out, this girl was clearly teasing him!
“You–”
He wanted to ask if she was scared, but Chu Hexing jumped over and, patting his head, asked, “Were you scared? What are these two here for, burglary?”
“…” Child, I should be asking you that. Can’t you act a bit frightened and let me experience comforting you?
This wasn’t an accident, but a real assassination attempt. If Chu Xiang and Chu Hexing hadn’t surprised them, if they had expected a frail scholar to put up a fight, they might have slept through it and never awoken again.
It took a long while before the stars in Chu Xiang’s eyes disappeared.
The corpses of the two killers lay on the floor, filling the room with the smell of blood. After Chu Xiang recovered, he immediately searched the bodies — upon untying their collars, as expected, he found tattoos identifying them as part of the Iron-Clad Guards.
This time, they were definitely the Grand Princess’ people.
He couldn’t remember how he had offended her, but since this was already a fact, then he might as well offend her completely. He knew that the royal family was weak, and the reason why scholars could gain so much fame was because there was no such thing as a literary inquisition.1Also known as speech crime, this was the official persecution of intellectuals for their writings, whether the writing was directly causal or only used as a justification for conviction. It took place in basically every dynasty but the Ming dynasty (1300s-1600s) was particularly notorious for this. See Wikipedia. She wouldn’t dare to openly arrest him for a mocking poem, but she would definitely send more assassins.
A sneer arose on Chu Xiang’s lips — it wasn’t so easy to kill a battle-hardened captain. Moreover, captains weren’t useless without their battleships and mechas; Longque was originally his codename during his time in the special forces, it was only after he became a captain that the name was shared with his mothership. Even if the mothership was no longer with him, it was absolutely impossible for him to suddenly be helpless on a chopping board. The consciousness and instincts he trained through battles in the interstellar era weren’t something people who only used cold weapons could keep up with.
None of the generals commanding spaceships were escorted by guards, because they could fight off an entire platoon of guards by themselves.
* * *
That poem soon spread throughout the capital, and children playing in the streets began exchanging lines from the poem.
It was a poem that lacked literary grace, was troublesome to say, and shouldn’t have received any attention at all.
Chu Hexing, who had sneaked outside early one morning to inquire about news, quickly learned it and came back to recite it to Chu Xiang word by word.
“It’s amazing! Especially ‘all freeze bar none’, it’s so exciting! I’ve always hated those fatties!”
Chu Xiang held his forehead. How is it exciting? Child, your education level urgently needs to be improved.
On the starnet’s virtual mecha battle platform, a skilled player could spit out a dozen lines of this rubbish trash talk in a single match! In the Galactic Federation’s Chinese district there was someone who became famous online for his trash talk, and later he was confirmed to be a colleague, an ace pilot from the Beidou Fleet. This made his commanders furious and he was punished to write a thirty thousand word self-reflection essay. Thinking of the past, Chu Xiang couldn’t help but remember that this person wasn’t only good at trash talk — once, when their army confronted another, he wrote a scathing condemnation of the other side, but because he didn’t know their alien language, it could only be studied internally as an essay model.
“Gege, do you want me to drag these two out and bury them?” Chu Hexing said menacingly, having pulled out a shovel from nowhere and was now advancing towards the two bodies with ‘I’m a professional at killing and robbing’ written all over her face.
“Forget it, we can’t live here anymore anyways, why bury them? Let the guards have this headache.”
Chu Hexing nodded obediently, but spat on a corpse as she passed by.
“You… Aren’t you scared?”
Chu Hexing shook her head. “I’ve seen people who died much more miserably than this, last winter, next door’s Granny Zhang froze to death in her home and I was the one who found her when spring started. Stray dogs had eaten most of her body. Granny Zhang was very good, I really wanted to kill the dogs to take revenge for her, but then I thought, it wasn’t the dogs’ fault, dogs don’t understand human things, and besides, they’re starving in winter too.”
When Chu Xiang heard this, he didn’t know how to respond.
Then Chu Hexing said, “Gege, you’re the evil star, did you come down from the sky to deal with that bunch of bastards? Those big lords are super afraid of evil stars!”
“Which bastards?” Chu Xiang asked subconsciously.
“It’s those officials who made coal so expensive last year, the tax collectors who would beat us if we couldn’t give them money, and… and the guards who would randomly kill people on the street! If the guards hadn’t played Granny Zhang’s grandson to death last winter, she wouldn’t have frozen to death without anyone finding out.”
“…” Chu Xiang fell into silence, and Chu Hexing happily took his silence as acquiescence.
“I know fate isn’t something you can talk about, I won’t tell anyone, not even my favourite carp! That was the first fish I ever caught, it was super big. I thought that it wasn’t easy for it to grow so big, so I let it go, then later it killed a smaller fish and gave it to me!”
She seemed to believe from the bottom of her heart that Chu Xiang was the evil star who came from the sky to, to… to overthrow this depraved world, but what about after that? The girl who grew up in the slums had never thought of what would happen in the future, she only thought that if all the bad people she met died, life might be a bit better.
But Chu Xiang knew that the various lords were all restless, and the drama of a chaotic world was about to unfold. King Qin’s army had already raised a rebel flag, and although they hadn’t yet gained any significance, who knew who was truly standing under that banner. The heroes fought for nothing more than fame and fortune, while the lords were divided and didn’t dare to covet the highest throne but wanted, at the very least, power and wealth.
No one would ever give girls like Chu Hexing a stable, peaceful world.
Unless.
It was the evil star.
Strange happenings begat strange responses. In the eyes of the royal family and nobles, Yinghuo’s rise would lead the world into chaos, terror, and endless killing, but in the eyes of the common people who lived hand to mouth, it was a sign of salvation.
But it’s a pity, Chu Xiang thought as he gently shook his head. “Little girl, I’m really not the evil star.”
Chu Hexing looked at him quietly with her big eyes, and for a moment, Chu Xiang felt like he was looking at a million galaxies shining through Longque’s porthole.
“But I didn’t lie to you, I did come from the sky,” he said.
From among distant stars and brilliant galaxies.
“Where I’m from, girls like you can grow up without any worries. She can have the most beautiful pink lace dress and the latest spaceship model launched that year, and when she grows up, although there won’t be an owl to bring her an acceptance letter from a school for magic, there might be a drone flying in from the space port to her neighbourhood which uses holographic projections to play an admission invitation video for Starfleet Academy. In a few more years, she can walk in space and fly above the sky, and wherever she goes, the sun will always shine on her family.”
Chu Hexing couldn’t understand the terminology used in the future, but her eyes still lit up.
Taking her small hand, Chu Xiang said, “I hope you can fly too.”
…If someone wants to break your wings, I’ll kill him for you. If someone wants to lock you in a cage, I’ll help you get rid of him. If it is this world that limits you, I’m willing to try, I’ll be the Evil Star you speak of. I don’t have my main cannon anymore, but I can still destroy everything.
“Gege.” Chu Hexing suddenly forgot the gender segregation in this era — like a child who truly did grow up innocently among the stars, she held her brother’s hand and said, “I know it, you’re a lord from the stars, you must be Yinghuo-xingjun,2Xingjun, meaning lord in the same way you might see Zhenjun in xianxia stories. you can’t lie to me.”
“That’s not quite right,” Chu Xiang said. “I’m Longque.”
Author:
In fact it’s Lan Jue who profits from this, today he gives a little sister, tomorrow he gets the kingdom and a beauty…
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- 1Also known as speech crime, this was the official persecution of intellectuals for their writings, whether the writing was directly causal or only used as a justification for conviction. It took place in basically every dynasty but the Ming dynasty (1300s-1600s) was particularly notorious for this. See Wikipedia.
- 2Xingjun, meaning lord in the same way you might see Zhenjun in xianxia stories.
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