Can Ci Pin - - - Chapter 137

Chapter 137 – I Picked You Up From the Garbage

Lu Bixing gently pressed on his personal device and fell silent for a few moments before he finally regained his senses. His gaze was fixed on where the red dot was as he pressed his lips together.

It was clearly an expression of anxious, deep thought.

Even though Lin Jingheng played the role of the aggressive character, a sudden sense of distress overwhelmed his body for a split second as he looked at Lu Bixing’s face.

Lin Jingheng’s character was naturally cold and cunning; when necessary, he could take on the role of any character and change his methods to suit the situation before him. He had the ability to fool the old Doctor Hardin for fourteen years without exposing himself. He’d once layered himself with thousands of masks, but had never taken them off over the decades in his life. Ever since Lu Xin died, he hadn’t been able to find a sense of security in anyone else in this world–

He couldn’t rely on his colleagues because they all depended on him as their pillar, and the pillar must always be unbending. He couldn’t rely on his elders, because if anyone was trustworthy, Lu Xin wouldn’t have died so abruptly. His only family was thousands of light-years away to the point where they were almost holding knives against each other’s necks; he couldn’t even rely on Lu Bixing either because the boy was still too young back then. In his eyes, the young man was too wonderful, like a treasure he carried carefully in his arms.

A treasure too precious couldn’t give a sense of security and only burdened him with more insecurities.

Therefore, he learned to grow suspicious of everything over years of building a defense mechanism. He was always locking his emotions inside, never exposing any weaknesses in front of others nor talking about his feelings out loud.

Lin Jingheng had been trudging through life and death for decades, but this was the first time he had ever opened up his heart to someone else.

He gave Lu Bixing everything he had.

“Don’t do this.” Lu Bixing turned off the tracking system on his personal device after a long silence and said in a soft tone, “I won’t use this…how selfish would that be?”

Despite these kind words that could melt a frozen soul, Lin Jingheng’s heart sank at this moment instead.

“Alright, I do have some questions I wanted to ask–I remember when I first repaired Zhanlu, he told me that his main body also perished during the explosion of the commanding ship and portal due to the ambush by the pirates. I’m guessing that he transformed into an emergency ecopod when the ship exploded.” Lu Bixing’s tone was calm and patient, with no signs of hiccups or slurring of sounds in between his words. It was obvious that he was a master of impromptu speech, but his demeanor was strangely stiff as he kept rubbing his hands together uneasily. It was as if his limbs were growing cold; Lu Bixing fiddled with his fingers as he spoke, “An ecopod’s protection is very limited, and transformable material will easily break down under high-energy impact. The main engine and mech core would also burn up due to overheating…right? Were you hurt at that time? Was it severe?”

Lin Jingheng stared into his eyes.

Lu Bixing continued: “Did you check up with a reliable doctor if your health will be affected?”

Lin Jingheng thought, At least no aftereffects would be as bad as the chip you injected into yourself.

The hint of anger flashed across his face and disappeared the next instant: “I don’t think that’s the question you really want to ask.”

“This is what I want to know, and it’s all I care about.” Lu Bixing leaned back slightly and forced himself to relax his stiffened spine, then gave Lin Jingheng a smile. “Of course, the situation in the Union is also important, but it isn’t really a personal issue so we can save that topic for a meeting.”

The other half of Lin Jingheng’s heart also sank.

Don’t you want to ask why I didn’t try to come back during the sixteen years if I knew that there was a wormhole in the Heart of the Rose, even if it was to send out a signal back to the Eighth Galaxy? Don’t you want to know where I took the Silver Ten and what kind of friends and enemies I made along the way? Don’t you want to know if my heart still lingered in the Union, if I will ever leave the Eighth Galaxy again? Don’t you want to ask if I’ve given my heart to someone else during the last sixteen years? What about why I deleted the data inside Zhanlu and kept your family background a secret? Have you not even considered telling me…all of the hardships you went through over these years?

Suddenly, Lin Jingheng felt a strange familiarity inside of him; he discovered that this was the exact attitude he had been giving Lu Bixing all this time. I won’t ask anything from you as long as you let me love you unconditionally in my own way; I don’t need anything in return, I don’t need any promises, and I don’t even need a future.

Even though the method of expression was different, the intention from the heart was the same. Lin Jingheng looked at the young man before him and felt as if he was looking into a mirror.

Very few people would ever be hurt from giving; the pain was often a result of disappointment from having too much hope. To not have any expectations was the best way to shield oneself from pain.

Lu Bixing used to be like an overzealous monkey in the past that wasn’t afraid to roll around shamelessly in the mud. He had been injured before like everyone else, but the superficial wounds always healed faster than normal and even trained him to be thick-skinned. He was brave and reckless, willing to give anything a try. However, these last sixteen years had almost sliced his soul up in half until he was only holding onto his last breath; he finally experienced a traumatizing pain and had learned to be fearful.

These strands of fate finally looped back into a circle.

Lin Jingheng stood up abruptly as he felt he could no longer keep a straight face.

Lu Bixing quickly pulled at him and said: “Lin, wait! Wait, let me explain…”

Lu Bixing had learned to speak to the occasion over these years and juggle between using force or diplomacy to settle the internal warfare in the Eighth Galaxy. He could tell from a quick glance at the expressions of those cunning politicians what kind of agenda they held and played his cards accordingly. It was obvious that he was more experienced in the department of negotiation than the young man that fed chicken soup in the past.

But he couldn’t understand why he kept tripping up and making mistakes in front of Lin Jingheng.

He wanted to pretend nothing had happened and interact with that person as if everything was still the same, but something kept feeling off, even though he couldn’t put his finger on it. Imposter syndrome consumed his mind as he failed to relearn how to be himself again, like a man with a broken leg learning to get back on his injured foot.

“I…” Lu Bixing was speechless for a solid minute until he managed to force a line out of his mouth in panic, “Do you miss me after all these years?”

Lin Jingheng gazed down at him as Lu Bixing quickly pulled his hand back like he had touched boiling water–he saw Lin Jingheng’s eyes redden before him.

“I…when I had nothing to do at night, sometimes I’d climb up to the roof to look at the stars.” Lin Jingheng wasn’t a talker, succinct and cool was his characteristic style. This short sentence seemed almost like a daunting task for him to express and almost nonsensical. “The transfer portals may have been blown up, but light could still pass through. I was stuck on an unnamed planet in the Sixth Galaxy; the orbit of the planet didn’t follow standard Woltorian time, but I stayed there for fourteen years. A year was about ten months total…you could see the Eighth Galaxy star from the rooftop even though the light you saw with the naked eye was the light from years ago.”

“I would think about what you were doing, and wonder if the starlight of the Eighth Galaxy star would also pass by you when it became visible to me. Though if you really count the age of that starlight, if it really existed and passed by you, perhaps it would be a light that existed before you and I met.” Words rolled out much more smoothly after getting past the introduction. Lin Jingheng paused for a few moments before he picked up the pace. “I figured you would be upset at first and maybe even in denial, but at least Monoeyed Hawk and the Prime Minister would be there to take care of you. The old cat may not be good at anything else, but at least he was still a dependable parent. I thought that…maybe in three or five years, you’d forget about a passerby in your life like me. Every time I recalled, I would regret that I wasn’t good enough to you, but I would also think that perhaps not being good enough was for the best so that you wouldn’t take my leave too personally.”

Lu Bixing mumbled: “Why were you on an unnamed planet in the Sixth Galaxy?”

Lin Jingheng fell silent for a while before he responded: “I won’t tell you today. I’ll answer two questions for you everyday from now on; because you brought up some nonsense today, your punishment is losing your second question for the day.”

Lu Bixing: “……”

“Think about your questions for tomorrow before asking.” Lin Jingheng got up without hesitation after he finished and walked towards the door, “I’m going out to see someone and talk with Turan for a bit, you know how to find me.”

I have to be patient , Lin Jingheng told himself, I just need to take things slowly; everything will get better.

Lu Bixing subconsciously followed him for a few steps, then caught himself being too clingy and stopped hesitantly.

“By the way.” As Zhanlu’s little robotic hand was readily waiting by the door to open it up for him, Lin Jingheng turned his head around. “Give me Zhanlu’s permissions, preferably a higher level where I can shut him up at any given time.”

The chameleon nudged over and poked Zhanlu’s arm; the poor robot then responded in an almost disappointed tone: “That is such an upsetting statement, sir. Look at how much I love you, sweet like honey.”

Lin Jingheng heard this unsolicited confession and responded coldly to his ‘honey’: “Fuck off.”

Lu Bixing cleared his throat awkwardly: “……Let me ban him from searching up random content on the web right now.”

Commander Lin returned in a battered-up state with only a dress shirt on him that had been ripped open by Prime Minister Lu, so he could only borrow a suit that Lu Bixing just washed from the washing machine. The black and white suit on him almost made the man look like he was about to go on an assassination mission as he walked right out the door.

Lu Bixing’s fingers trembled as he watched Lin Jingheng’s silhouette disappear from his sight. The moment the man left, the urge to pull up the tracking system from his personal device suddenly exploded in his heart as the desire to keep an eye on Lin Jingheng burned inside.

But he couldn’t let his desires win.

Lu Bixing pressed his tongue to his teeth and calmed himself down for a few seconds before forcing his attention elsewhere, then turned to Zhanlu: “Where did you pick up these inappropriate readings?”

Zhanlu responded: “Headmaster Lu, I referenced the books kept in your personal device.”

Lu Bixing: “……”

Who said an AI with high parental permissions could slander its master?

The little robotic arm pointed a finger and pulled up Lu Bixing’s personal device. Moments later, an anthology that even its owner had forgotten about popped up; a book called “That Kind of Story.”

It was that small collection of adult fiction.

Lu Bixing remembered the habit of his students borrowing books from him and cold sweat suddenly covered his body; he frantically attempted to delete this sinful evidence from his device and said: “How did you manage to pull up something like this…wait, no, why are you flipping through this? Did you get a virus infection?”

“I did not read this book,” Zhanlu answered. “This was the book that you read to Master Lin the year you picked up his ecopod outside of planet Beijing. I was in sleep mode at the time, so the ecopod automatically recorded your reading to him.”

Lu Bixing stood dumbfounded.

A blurry, old memory resurfaced in his mind; Lu Bixing remembered this book.

There was a story in the anthology about an unnamed god in religious history who fell into the hands of the devil. The devil cloned himself, each clone representing a different sin that committed various forms of blasphemy against the god. The writing itself was rough, giving off a sense of absurdity and sinful lust through the words.

Lu Bixing recalled a specific part from Zhanlu’s line–

“He kneeled before that perfect body, lowered his head in reverence and kissed the god’s feet. His mouth mumbled words of madness as he said ‘I love you so dearly, sweet like honey; I am a follower that died on my knees and reached my filthy hands out to you, hoping to be blessed by your salvation.’”

Lu Bixing remembered this part very quickly after Zhanlu’s hint. The image of Lin Jingheng inside the ecopod strangely overlapped with the description of the god in the story, and his embarrassing nosebleed episode that happened to drip at this particular scene. Of course, the subject of his dirty fantasy woke up in time to catch him during this embarrassing moment.

It was almost impossible to forget such an embarrassing event in life.

With a blink of an eye, it had already been two decades since that day.

Perhaps the light of the Eighth Galaxy Star was barely reaching places outside the galaxy; the world had already been turned upside down too many times.

The chameleon and robotic arm tilted their heads to see the corner of the Prime Minister’s lips slowly relax into a reminiscing smile; it was very faint and disappeared as quickly as it lifted.

But it was a real smile.

He had been chasing after the light outside of the galaxy for years, and finally mustered the guts to turn his head to face the past even if it was only a small glance.

Lu Bixing pulled back those documents that he almost destroyed and password protected them in his device. He then pointed a finger and poked at Zhanlu in warning: “Delete those records right now, do you want to be told to shut up for the rest of your life?”

The world was truly unfair to AIs.

Lin Jingheng stopped by the Milky Way City Base to greet his old subordinates and let Turan take him to the public cemetery.

Turan had kept her hair short but regrew those two little antennas on her head. Despite that, her demeanor seemed much more sophisticated and dependable than how she was sixteen years ago.

“Commander, is Minister Lu really Commander Lu’s son?”

“Yes.” Lin Jingheng nodded.

“…..So you already knew?”

“I did,” Lin Jingheng said, “I asked Zhanlu to delete all related data on it already; I didn’t expect him to pull it back up on his own.”

Turan pondered for a bit before she spoke in a complicated tone: “What happened to your aloof, kingly character, Commander? Didn’t they say don’t shit where you eat, but you even deleted his own DNA analysis so that you can eat him secretly?”

Lin Jingheng: “……Are you going to die if you don’t shit talk for a day?”

Turan gave it her best shot to make a nasty expression back, only to have her facade crushed before she could force it out. She quietly turned around and wiped off a teardrop rolling from her eyes.

“The Captain of the Ninth Squadron sure is becoming more respectable,” Lin Jingheng said hopelessly. “You’re playing yourself to tears now…there, that’s enough already.”

Turan was speechless for a short while, so Lin Jingheng waited patiently for her to collect her thoughts.

When Lin Jingheng left, the cemetery was still young and fresh with only a few isolated tombstones.

Now, the gravesite was filled with tombstones in an orderly fashion, most of them being lives lost during the internal war.

“The Eighth Galaxy’s economy was at a breaking point back then, which was why the old Prime Minister took on the loans from our neighbor.” Lin Jingheng asked quietly, “What happened after that?”

“The economy really collapsed after that,” Turan said. “The transfer portals had all blown up, the Eighth Galaxy was in shambles; large amounts of refugees from the Seventh Galaxy came in and added on more problems for us. It started off with the conflict between the refugees and Eighth Galaxy residents, then the supply of the nutrient syringes ran down low, so the currency system completely broke down as inflation soared and smugglers regained control. When the old Prime Minister was still alive, he was patching up the leakage with duct tape; after his death, the young Minister Lu wasn’t able to hold anyone aside from his Engineering Department down. Countless planets and space stations declared independence one by one…at the worst, we only had the Milky Way City Base in our control like a helpless command post. The entire planet of Qiming outside of the base was filled with danger. We managed to survive six months with the little resources we had left in the base from the AUS–all the heavy mechs filled their little greenhouses inside with vegetables and edible plants. Rumors even had it that it was a glorious tradition you left behind.”

Lin Jingheng lit up a cigarette and slowly walked down the small trails into the cemetery.

“During that six months, we actually still had some arms on hand, but Minister Lu kept pushing us down and stopped us from attacking outside. Our arms became tools for self-defense.” Turan said, “He said he didn’t have the ability to rebuild order within the entire galaxy, so we needed to slowly work our way up by taking care of local businesses first, then expand our influence. Zhanlu gave us a detailed report on how the AUS expanded outside of the Union back in the days–natural planets outside the Union weren’t suited for humans to live on, so they developed a self-sufficient mini ecosystem within their mechs. We borrowed some ideas and played around with it, then virtually took back Qiming and its surrounding satellites peacefully and built our first military factory on Ema 3.”

Turan scrunched up in grievance as she continued: “I’m just a vanguard team Captain, but they were also making me handle all the back-end stuff. They made me take care of the overall strategy planning and everything else that followed; I felt like I was being burned alive by them. I’ve been meaning to quit the job already, Commander; I feel like I’d be even better off switching careers to be a pirate living off hunting and gathering.”

The ardent and fierce Ninth Squadron vanguard team became a defensive force in the Eighth Galaxy and had to carry the burden of the entire galaxy on their shoulders.

That year, there was…a self-proclaimed weak-minded young man who liked to avoid all conflicts and wars to pretend everything in the world was well, until he was roped into the self-destructive internal warfare of the Eighth Galaxy. Nobody would ever be like Lin Jingheng and step out to appease his naive desires to find a happy balance; he had to make countless decisions on his own and point his guns at numerous people. He trudged down the endless paths between all the tombstones and memorials of the past, cultivating himself into a powerful Prime Minister who was able to stand against the Union on equal ground.

Lin Jingheng suddenly stopped as he saw a familiar face.

Monoeyed Hawk still had his characteristic aquiline nose, thin lips, and sharp chin. His eyebrows were naturally pressed close to his heterochromatic eyes; even though he had quite a handsome face from the side profile, there was an air of thuggish judgement if you looked at him face to face. The old Persian cat obnoxiously looked out from his stone memorial as if he was ready to jump out and give the commander in front of him a harsh scratch on the arm.

The tombstone was engraved with his name: Monoeyed Hawk, Surname Lu (I picked it at random, my name ain’t Lu Monoeyed Hawk).

According to reliable sources, this was the full official name he registered on his citizenship card in his personal device.

The quote on his tombstone was quite unique, and beneath that was another hand-carved message in response to his quote–the message was slightly off-centered and looked as if it was written by someone that wasn’t particularly skilled in crafting. The two individuals sent each other little notes across life and death that read–

“I picked you up from the garbage.”

“Lies.”