Chapter 17

What had Carlos just said...?

Su Lin collected himself and remembered that Carlos had said he was going to send him back to Hill.

His heart immediately skipped a beat.

"Please don't do that, Lord Carlos. Lord Hill and I don't have that kind of relationship." Su Lin explained purely on instinct. "I was in Lord Hill's room because I was attacked yesterday, and Lord Hill saved me when he happened to pass by..."

Trembling with fear, Su Lin recounted what had happened yesterday.

Carlos listened expressionlessly to the terrified explanation from the young man beside him, but the fists hanging at his sides unconsciously tightened. As the person in charge of this operation, Carlos had a heavy workload aboard the warship, and the Zerg under him couldn't possibly bother him over an attack on an inferior Zerg. As a result, Carlos only learned what had happened in the medical room now.

A surge of intense fury suddenly rose within him, and his disgust for Black Thorn nearly made him reveal his primordial Zerg form. At that moment, all he wanted was to eat every last one of those stupid Black Thorn Zerg aboard the ship!

But a small detail that slipped out of Su Lin's mouth at that moment made Carlos restrain his surging desire to kill.

"Lord... Hill? He made you call him that?"

Carlos's voice was hoarse as he asked.

Su Lin looked up at the Zerg before him, whose expression had turned somewhat peculiar. Bewildered, he couldn't understand why Carlos had suddenly asked such a baffling question.

"Yes. Lord Hill said an inferior Zerg like me wasn't qualified to call him by name."

"Oh." Carlos's antennae trembled slightly. After a brief pause, he spoke as if nothing were amiss. "Ignore that bullshit he told you. You haven't fully emerged yet, so there's no way to determine your final rank at present."

He faltered again.

Then he added, "You can just call me Carlos. There's no need to add 'Lord.'"

He lowered his head and met Su Lin's somewhat stunned gaze, his expression already turning very gentle.

"Taking in too many male reproductive cells before emergence directly affects your final rank as an adult. I imagine your colony's priest warned you about that before. The pheromones mixed into a male's reproductive cells are too strong and too aggressive. That's originally meant to improve the chances of successful reproduction, but when larvae come into contact with them, they can easily absorb the male's pheromones into their own bodies. That can easily cause low... relatively less powerful larvae like you to develop mutations during metamorphosis."

Carlos explained somewhat stiffly. Of course, he was also well aware that this so-called explanation was merely an excuse for his earlier, terribly harsh tone.

He really was worried that Su Lin would be completely ruined by a scumbag like Hill.

The reality was just as he had described. Once larvae who were already low-ranking traded their bodies for short-term protection, they ended up mutating after emergence, or falling to an even lower rank and being expelled, or even dying immediately after emergence.

Unfortunately, the young male had almost never done anything like "making excuses" before, and that last part had sounded just like a recitation of a priest's warning.

His tone was still stiff and utterly devoid of warmth.

Su Lin didn't pay it much mind, though.

He was about to face a life-or-death crisis. The only "thigh" he could cling to having a somewhat harsh tone was no problem at all.

What he really needed to do now was...

The pale, frail, slender larva walked more and more slowly. Finally, he stopped in the corridor, his head hanging low.

"Carlos..."

His voice was noticeably trembling.

Carlos couldn't help frowning at the extreme panic in the larva's tone.

"What is it?" he couldn't help asking.

"I'm sorry."

Su Lin began to choke up.

Carlos said, "Sorry? What for? Are you saying you still want to be Hill's honey bug?"

As he spoke, a flash of sinister killing intent passed through his pitch-black eyes.

Su Lin shook his head. "No, it has nothing to do with Lord Hill. I just... I wanted to say... I've never heard a priest mention any of this, because I don't have any memories of a colony at all."

The young man bit his lip, his face full of despair.

"I don't know where I came from, and I don't know which colony I belong to. There's no way I can pass the examination." A hint of tears entered his voice. "...You don't need to worry about my emergence. I might not even live to see that day. I'm sorry, I should have confessed sooner, but I was too scared."

Although Su Lin wasn't telling the truth at all, when he said he was scared, he meant it one hundred percent.

He really was scared almost to the point of wetting himself, so even though he hated pretending to cry and acting pitiful more than anything, he, a 183-centimeter man, had thrown all caution to the wind. A certain unlucky human had already noticed that Carlos held a high position among the Zerg. What if, just what if, he really could rely on Carlos to escape that damned bloodline examination?!

He might kick the bucket as soon as he took the bloodline examination, and he was so pitiful and scared right now. Surely Carlos wouldn't just stand by without trying to think of something?!

But after a brief silence, all he heard was Carlos letting out a surprised laugh.

"That's all?"

Su Lin nodded apprehensively.

The tall Zerg finally couldn't resist raising a hand and gently touching Su Lin's back.

Even through his own coat, Carlos felt as though he had touched the frail larva's delicate wing buds.