EDEH Chapter 46

“Beep—”

 

Huo Yanji answered the communication with his eyes closed: “What’s the matter?”

 

Wei Lan’s voice came through: “Deputy Song sent back information about the ‘hostage case’ inquiry from various shelters and outposts. You might need to come over.”

 

Actually, usually at this time, Huo Yanji would have already gotten up and been on his way to the office, but today was a bit different.

 

This 2.2-meter bed was occupied by less than a third of its space. Huo Yanji lay flat while Sang Jue was sprawled on top of him like an octopus, his tail loosely hanging between his legs, occasionally swaying.

 

Sang Jue was pressed too close, his face buried in Huo Yanji’s neck. If not for feeling the rise and fall of his chest, you could almost suspect he had suffocated.

 

Through the thin fabric of sleepwear, their body temperatures mingled hotly, blending together, indistinguishable from each other.

 

“Sang Jue.”

 

No response.

 

Sang Jue’s body didn’t have much boniness, so while there was pressure when he lay on top, it didn’t feel uncomfortable.

 

It hadn’t been like this when they first started last night. Sang Jue had only wrapped his tail around his waist, and when Huo Yanji couldn’t pull it off, he gave up, treating it like a pillow under his waist. After all, Sang Jue didn’t feel pain from having his tail pressed.

 

But in the middle of the night, Huo Yanji was woken up three or four times.

 

First, Sang Jue’s tail was very strong, and when it was wrapped around his waist, whenever he wanted to turn over, Huo Yanji would be dragged along.

 

After waking up twice like this, Sang Jue became unsatisfied again, progressing from initially having half his body pressed against him to eventually lying completely on top.

 

It was impossible to push him away—Sang Jue clung like an octopus, persistently.

 

Huo Yanji stayed awake, with Sang Jue lying on him, listening to his long breathing, occasionally having to support his sliding waist, continuing like this until dawn was breaking before closing his eyes again.

 

“Sang Jue, stop pretending.”

 

Sang Jue hummed for a while, his breath falling on Huo Yanji’s neck as he mumbled: “Why do you have to get up so early to work? You’re not a dolphin, are you trying to work yourself to death?”

 

Huo Yanji said flatly: “If you had slept more honestly last night, my rest time would have been sufficient.”

 

“I slept very honestly.” Sang Jue slowly sat up on his knees, looking at Huo Yanji with sleepy eyes. “The doctor said I could hold a pillow all night without moving.”

 

“…”

 

By this logic, Sang Jue had indeed slept very honestly, never moving once after hugging him like a pillow—except for that dishonest tail.

 

“Who is the doctor?”

 

Sang Jue immediately became alert.

 

“No, it’s not the kind of doctor you think…” Sang Jue instinctively wanted to lie, but he had promised Huo Yanji not to lie before.

 

He hesitantly requested: “Can I not say?”

 

“Yes.” Huo Yanji looked up and gestured, “Can you get off now?”

 

Sang Jue blinked.

 

He was sitting in a delicate position—below Huo Yanji’s waist and hips, but not quite at the end of his V-line.

 

Sang Jue carefully moved his legs away, saying obediently: “Yes.”

 

No matter how slow he was, he knew that even pure same-sex friends wouldn’t appear in such intimate positions.

 

With the weight gone, the other person’s body temperature gradually dissipated.

 

Huo Yanji got up and went to the bathroom. When he came out, he was already dressed neatly, every button fastened meticulously, as indifferent as usual.

 

Sang Jue sat on the bed: “Are you leaving?”

 

Huo Yanji hummed, putting on his gloves: “There’s food in the fridge. If you don’t like fast food, you can go to the shops downstairs. I remember you have money in your account.”

 

Sang Jue nodded: “Okay.”

 

As Huo Yanji was leaving, there was a knock at the door.

 

Sang Jue sniffed—it seemed to be Adjutant Zhang.

 

After a while, Huo Yanji returned and handed him a backpack: “Remember to get a new ID card.”

 

“…Oh.”

 

Huo Yanji checked the time: “I have to get busy. Sleep more if you’re tired, don’t wander too far.”

 

Sang Jue waved: “Goodbye.”

 

As the steady footsteps departed, the room suddenly felt empty.

 

Last night’s conversation with 007 surfaced in his ears again, making his mind blank, unable to sort out his thoughts or know what to do next.

 

Contact more people in high positions?

 

How to contact them?

 

The best way would be to follow Huo Yanji, go wherever he went, but that didn’t seem proper.

 

Huo Yanji always talked about rules.

 

Sang Jue was dazed for a while, then slowly opened the backpack to find his game console from old Carl, Wu Ke’s diary, and his pen were all inside.

 

Besides these, the notebook they had found at Rift No. 2 was also there. Sang Jue opened it and found a note clipped to the first page that read:

 

[I haven’t decided how to handle this yet, maybe you can help keep it for a while.]

 

[Ji left behind.]

 

Sang Jue’s lips curved up, and he wrote “okay” below it.

 

But his smile soon fell. He hadn’t written in a diary for a long time.

 

Sang Jue opened Wu Ke’s diary and, continuing from where he’d last recorded, picked up his pen to write:

 

[Day 1234…n of missing the doctor. I don’t know what day it is today, but it’s only been twenty-something days since I landed on this planet.

 

Time passes so quickly, yet so slowly. I hope it can go faster so I can return to the doctor’s side sooner, but I also hope it can go slower so I can spend more time with my friends.

 

Well, mainly Ji Ji.

 

I slept with Ji Ji last night. He’s more comfortable than a pillow.

 

In just less than a month, I’ve experienced many things. First, I went with Ji Ji to support District 7—

 

It turns out every planet has unreasonable humans like Dr. Millie, and they even make up the majority of humans.

 

Later I experienced kidnapping and met a great villain, though he was tortured terribly.

 

(If I weren’t afraid of Ji Ji getting angry, I’d really like to learn some torture methods from Huo Jiangmin, maybe they’d be useful someday.)

 

I also went to the underground depths of Rift No. 2. There seems to be something down there. I could sense that sound pattern, a strange substance that doesn’t belong to humans… I don’t know what it is, but it seems to be calling me.

 

But I didn’t want to see it, so I ignored it.

 

Finally… I discovered that the doctor seems to have concealed, even deceived me about some things.

 

I’m somewhat unhappy, but not entirely unhappy. There seem to be other emotions that I can’t distinguish.

 

Angry, furious, sad, wronged… none seem quite accurate.

 

Ji Ji put a tracker in my communicator, so he has to compensate me with a gemstone every month. But I never thought about what to do if the doctor deceived me?

 

I thought for a long time—

 

Perhaps I’ll be angry for a very long time, but as long as I see the doctor again, I’ll forgive her, no other conditions needed.

 

The doctor will always be the best doctor.]

 

…

 

Sang Jue put away the notebook. He wasn’t afraid of others seeing what he wrote. He came from another planet, and both his writing and language were different from here. The natives shouldn’t be able to understand.

 

He had a language conversion chip, which allowed him to communicate seamlessly with everyone.

 

Sang Jue took a sandwich from the fridge, slung his bag over his shoulder, and went out.

 

The main city was still the same main city from over twenty days ago, with streets packed with people, full of messy human scents.

 

None of them smelled as good as Huo Yanji.

 

Sang Jue had already gotten his new ID card reissued. Now he needed to go to the Relics Management Office to collect the alcohol old Karl had left him.

 

On the way, he encountered several men trying to chat him up, all of whom he politely declined: “If you were a… female like the highest executive officer, maybe we could try.”

 

Then the passersby would be stunned, then burst into laughter: “Where did this ignorant little thing come from…”

 

“Drunk? A few peanuts got you this high?”

 

“Hahaha did he just say the executive officer is female? Must be high on drugs hahaha!! But honestly, the executive officer’s face, tsk…”

 

“Shut up, aren’t you afraid he’ll suddenly appear and give you a bullet?”

 

Sang Jue knew Huo Yanji wouldn’t do that. He would only imprison people on charges of slandering military personnel.

 

He didn’t like these people.

 

The man laughing most wildly was leaning against a pillar, the keys at his waist swaying with his laughter, making clinking sounds.

 

Sang Jue stared at him, his fingertips gradually becoming transparent, transitioning to a translucent green web-like fungus, as if the slime and human body had perfectly merged.

 

They slowly connected into threads, passed through the crowd, climbed up the man’s loose jeans, and with a “click,” the keys at the man’s waist instantly fell to the ground.

 

Hearing the sound, the man instinctively turned his head, but his moving foot happened to kick the keys into the nearby small drainage ditch.

 

“Damn! My keys!!”

 

Sang Jue was stunned. He came to his senses and quickly retracted the fungal network.

 

The tram nearby announced its arrival, and he squeezed into the crowd to board.

 

The man from before was now lying on the ground next to the station sign, trying to retrieve his keys, but his wrists were too thick to reach into the iron cover of the drainage ditch—he was always just a bit short.

 

His sturdy face was pressed against the ground, distorted by the pressure, just in time to see the tram start and Sang Jue sitting in the first row, watching him.

 

He immediately understood: “You’re the one who did this!!”

 

Although he didn’t know how it was done, his instincts told him it was this little thing!

 

He wanted to get up and chase but it was too late. The tram carried Sang Jue gradually away.

 

Sang Jue looked at his hand, which had returned to normal—he seemed to be able to freely convert the green fungus gene sequence.

 

Just like when he became an evil dragon, he could transform completely or just partially.

 

Just now, hearing those people laugh loudly, he wanted to teach them a lesson. Before he could even think about it, his body had reacted instinctively ahead of his brain.

 

Sang Jue secretly tried again.

 

Sunlight streamed into the tram, and the slime his index finger had become crawled on his left hand, becoming nearly transparent in the sunlight. It felt ticklish and somewhat fun.

 

Sang Jue kept his head down, his eyelashes gilded golden by the sunlight.

 

If he were on his home planet, he would probably be happily running to find the doctor now, telling her: “I have a great discovery!”

 

But now he was on a distant planet, with no one to share this moment of small joy with.

 

Not even Huo Yanji.

 

On this planet, he was alone.

 

The car stopped.

 

Sang Jue got off with the crowd and saw the Relics Management Office in the distance. Many people came and went here. Unlike hundreds of years ago when people would leave inheritance to family and children, now everyone left things to friends, neighbors, or even like old Karl, to someone they’d only known for a few days.

 

The atmosphere here was relatively solemn. People of all kinds came and went—some silent, some expressionless, some who had just received notification of relic collection and couldn’t believe their friend had died, shouting at the staff.

 

Perhaps everyone here was lonely.

 

But Sang Jue was the loneliest.

 

If one day he removed his chip and left 007, he wouldn’t even understand what people here were saying.

 

The staff member didn’t look up: “ID card.”

 

Sang Jue handed it over. After waiting a while, the other person told him: “Your friend left you quite a lot of things, they’re in the warehouse.”

 

“Turn left then right, queue at the end to find the warehouse manager, he’ll take you there.”

 

The staff member handed him a token: “You’d better bring a cart with cargo boxes.”

 

Sang Jue said: “Thank you.”

 

He didn’t know where to find a cart, so he decided to first see what old Karl had left him.

 

There were few people on the warehouse side. Most people only lived thirty to forty years, and even when they died, they didn’t leave many relics.

 

It just happened that old Karl was a collector of fine wines.

 

The warehouse manager brought him to warehouse No. 4: “Everything inside is yours, all fragile alcohol. Why didn’t you bring a cart?”

 

The warehouse wasn’t large, about big enough to fit three or four adults.

 

At this moment, old Karl’s alcohol filled it completely, along with some miscellaneous items.

 

When they were distributed throughout the house, Sang Jue felt crowded, but when they were packed into this small warehouse, Sang Jue felt it was so empty.

 

When he left this planet, what relics would he leave behind?

 

That probably couldn’t be called relics. If he died one day, what could he leave behind?

 

Even on his home planet, he seemed to have no relics—the doctor had put all his favorite gemstones into the spacecraft.

 

A shout came from behind: “Old Mac! Which large warehouse is empty?”

 

Sang Jue turned around to look and saw a short-haired woman in a leather skirt and a gray-haired man pushing a cart full of cardboard boxes.

 

Both wore work badges on their chests—

 

【Relic Organizer: Old He】

 

【Relic Organizer: Shiwei】

 

Old Mac was the warehouse manager. He looked at the list: “Warehouse 9 is vacant. Who died? So many things?”

 

Sang Jue stepped aside to make room for them.

 

Shiwei said lazily: “Lu Tiancong, captain of the eighth team of the Deviant Special Operations Squad.”

 

Sang Jue suddenly looked up. He had heard the name Lu Tiancong before—the man with a broken leg who had stayed in the hospital room next to his.

 

“How did he die?”

 

“Suicide.” Old He skillfully distributed the relics into the warehouse. “All his team members died, and he stayed alone in the hospital for twenty days. Still couldn’t get over it. On the day he was discharged, he stabbed himself in the heart and specifically chose the shower room—water washed everything clean, leaving nothing behind.”

 

Old Mac sighed: “He could have just gotten some medicine from the hospital to kill himself. Why make it so gruesome?”

 

From their conversation, Sang Jue roughly understood that ‘relic organizer’ was also a profession. Strictly speaking, they were a department of the Supervision Bureau.

 

Most people nowadays were alone—no parents, no children or relatives. After they died, their houses became ownerless property with no one to handle their affairs.

 

So many people would write relic commissions in advance, leaving things to be confiscated or given to someone after death.

 

If someone went missing in the wilderness for too long, they would be automatically deregistered, and specialized people would organize their homes.

 

Three days before his suicide, Lu Tiancong had called the relic organization office. He didn’t say who he was, only asking them to go to a certain apartment in a certain building three days later to clean up the estate of a soldier named Lu Tiancong.

 

Old He shook his head with a slight sigh: “I took that call. I asked him who the relics should be left to.”

 

The other end of the phone was silent for a long time, the voice hoarse and quiet: “They’re all dead. There’s no one left to leave them to.”

 

**

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