Can Ci Pin - - - Chapter 149

Chapter 149 – Am I Not Allowed To Take It Just Because I Dislike It?

“Piss off!” Lin Jingheng elbowed him back in rage. “Let go!”

But this elbow felt like it landed on a brick wall. Lu Bixing didn’t even bat an eye at the sudden gesture.

Lu Bixing felt a vein in his head about to pop and instinctively grabbed onto Lin Jingheng tighter before he could think. He then buried his own face in the commander’s shoulders and felt the warmth of the body heat through the thin cotton shirt.

The weak scent of the man’s warm body flowed into his nose and filled his head like a tiny needle pricked right into his brain.

Lu Bixing’s foot lost balance during the struggle and knocked over the small tea set resting on the little coffee table, spilling hot tea onto the whole floor. The two then fell onto the armchair together.

It was certainly an indecent position; Lin Jingheng couldn’t break out of Lu Bixing’s grip and was almost choking from the Prime Minister’s tight hold on his waist. He sneered in response and finally spoke up without any reservations: “This? An injury from the jailbreak; it sure was a fucking mistake of a blow. If only it was a little bit higher, both you and Jingshu could rest in…”

Lu Bixing’s expression darkened as his voice cracked in horror: “What kind of nonsense are you saying!?”

Lin Jingheng: “I don’t know what I came back for!”

When Lu Bixing had spoken earlier, his tone was so calm, as if he were ready to fully let go of that hand without any regrets .Now, the hands holding that hand were nothing but gentle and willing: “I never asked you back in the Heart of the Rose; I was the one that barged in the middle and took you back. I was the one that purposely ignored the fact that you urgently ordered the Silver Ten to support the Union’s citizens back then and almost locked yourself out of the Eighth Galaxy forever! I’m the one that doesn’t want to give you back to the Union, I’m the one that’s been doing everything my way this whole time; I’m the one that’s been trapping you here, is that enough!?”

Lin Jingheng lowered his head and skillfully turned Lu Bixing’s wrist in a certain way, forcing those fingers grappling him to loosen up. Those hands subconsciously turned to grab onto his jacket with no luck–Lin Jingheng quickly took his jacket off and tossed it in Lu Bixing’s face. Those hard metal buttons on the jacket kissed the bridge of the Prime Minister’s nose without a word.

The biochip strengthened his body enough to not feel any pain; he only felt the cold metal of the button, as if it was covered in a layer of frost that could only be found on planet Beijing-β.

Lin Jingheng’s dress shirt underneath the jacket was pulled out halfway by this young man, wrinkled up like Doctor Hardin’s face. A few of the buttons on the shirt fell off as he stood up a few steps away in the most disheveled fashion he’d ever been in as of late.

He stood in silence for a while while controlling his breathing, his chest heaving, only to find that he couldn’t let out the breath stuck in his throat. He finally lifted his head slightly as his neck stiffened up, while those rugged markings on his skin peeked out from behind the fabric. He was more than furious.

Lu Bixing held tightly onto that jacket and bit his lips to calm himself down, then lowered his head and admitted defeat: “Lin…I…sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Lin Jingheng looked at him from above, his voice still tight in his throat: “Then what do you mean?”

Lu Bixing pressed his lips down harder as he began fiddling with his fingers over his knees.

Sharp features weren’t uncommon on the face shapes of many adult men, but Lu Bixing’s facial structure in the past had seemed to be covered in an extra thin layer of skin. It wasn’t baby fat, but a healthy level of extra flesh; it wasn’t a lingering adolescent look from puberty, but looked like an extra layer of paint that softened his face. The young man’s eyebrows were also naturally stretched out from his glowing eyes, and the natural curl at the corner of his lips gave him an extra friendly and gentle appearance.

Perhaps the biochip affected his metabolism or perhaps he was simply too overworked, but that extra layer of fat on his cheeks had sunk in. The corners of his face were no longer as rounded as before, and his features had grown sharper with more distinct angles. When he didn’t smile, it almost created a strange air of intimidation around the young man.

Lin Jingheng took another step back to lean against the wall and closed his eyes.

Lu Bixing had been much more relaxed in front of him lately and had even begun to display rare signs of curiosity as he attempted to probe more information out of old Doctor Hardin. The day when the Expedition Team successfully passed through the Heart of the Rose and the on-land support was celebrating in a frenzy, he had seen Lu Bixing hiding amongst the crowd and secretly gave him a thumbs up in midst of chaos….that instant, he almost thought he was slowly but successfully rebuilding the bridge to the past.

But before he could have time to nourish this small joy in his heart, that vague shadow of a bridge was crushed by the voice from the Union.

The Union was a lone ship sailing in a vast sea surrounded by danger; the Eighth Galaxy yearned to become independent from the Union.

How great would it be if Lin Jingheng was an average man; how natural and easy would it be to keep him if that was the case. But he represented the Silver Ten. The Silver Ten that could still turn the tables of the war even after becoming a fleet of broken mechs after a decade of conflict with the Freedom Corps. His alliance and status meant a lot of things for many people; but where did personal feelings rank in his list of priorities?

Now that they thought about it, the problem between them had existed since the beginning, perhaps even as early as the time they were in the Old Fart’s space station—

Lin Jingheng had needed to repair the Model 3 at the time, so under strategy theory he negotiated three months grace for Lu Bixing. Those three months were gone within a blink of an eye, but the station was still filled with hopeless garbage; Lin was ready to summon the Silver Ninth Squadron waiting on standby outside and give up on these people in the station. The young Professor Lu was caught in a dilemma, wavering on the night of New Year’s Eve, unsure where he should stand.

Luckily, the Cayley Pirates discovered the station due to Primal Alien’s death and charged in at the right time to save them from choosing one evil for another.

The second time was the outbreak of the mutated Rainbow Virus—if they hadn’t had Hope’s help at the time, they would never have been able to obtain the vaccine for the mutated virus. Would Lin Jingheng have ordered Turan to leave the plagued Eighth Galaxy with the Ninth Squadron at the very end? He had once answered “yes” very clearly: it was Lu Bixing himself that stubbornly refused to believe those words…and another fortunate turn of events once again turned them away before Death could witness their answer to this fateful decision.

The third time was when Lin Jingheng’s identity was exposed. The Eighth Galaxy was put under the spotlight. Lu Bixing suggested blowing up the transfer portals and closing off the Eighth Galaxy. Lu Bixing should’ve known already that even though Lin was the ‘Commander of the Eighth Galaxy Defense Forces’ in name, he was still Commander Lin of the Silver Fortress and did not agree to blowing up the portals. He didn’t want to truly betray the Union. Even when he received messages from the Silver Ten, his first order was for them to uphold the Pledge of Freedom and not to protect their own boss…Lin Jingheng never openly opposed the closing of the Eighth Galaxy at the time, perhaps because he only had so many troops in hand and the whole world was putting pressure on him.

Facts had proven that even when the world was against him, he had still almost died for the Union.

Recalling everything now, Lu Bixing suddenly felt a sense of guilt. If he would have been more sensitive, thought about the situation a bit more back then, would he have been able to foresee the eventual deep fracture in that vague line of fate between the two of them ?

Fate had been generous to him and had given this peace-loving people-pleasing man two valuable chances to run. But perhaps the third time was not the charm; he never took these two coincidences as warnings and even foolishly took it as his own charismatic ability to satisfy all parties. Thus, Fate gave him a good slap in the face and piled up all these unavoidable problems right before his face.

The two sat and stood wordlessly for a long while before they almost felt the warm temperature of the room cool down, like a fire that had passed by, leaving trails of ashes on the ground.

The digital clock on the wall of the guest room ticked by the second; those few seconds of time felt like a painful eternity.

Lu Bixing finally opened up his mouth and said with a slightly hoarse voice: “Can we stop fighting? Let me say something real quick.”

Lin Jingheng responded in silent approval as he gazed down at him.

“Doctor Hardin said that you tried over 2,000 times to break the signal barrier when you were locked in the galactic prison,” Lu Bixing said. He had already managed to piece together a good half of the puzzle from the little information he probed out of the old doctor. “I’ve calculated it before, there were at least 30 minutes of time from the moment Zhanlu’s mental network disappeared to the time the Freedom Corps captured you. People can’t survive for that long under cosmic rays, so I’m guessing that you used some method…to create a protection layer over your broken ecopod and suffered severe brain damage during this process. Doctor Hardin and his team didn’t think you’d survive this injury…so just how bad was it? How long were you unconscious?”

“Two years,” Lin Jingheng answered frankly, then as if he wanted to emphasize something, added, “It’s not as long as you think, I meant in Woltorian time.”

The words ‘Woltorian time’ pierced through Lu Bixing’s ears as he pressed his hands together tighter.

A guess was still a guess and could never match up to the harsh truth spoken by the man himself. Lu Bixing felt his throat drying up as he asked: “Two years…the Doctor said that the person who saved you didn’t attempt to help you out of the coma, she wanted to keep you in that vegetative state.”

“That’s incorrect, she did attempt to help out,” Lin Jingheng said, “She wanted to turn me into a living corpse.”

Lu Bixing’s knuckles cracked with a clear sound.

Lin Jingheng leaned his head against the wall as he looked up and stared at the ceiling for a short while. The pattern on the ceiling was clean and simple, nothing too extravagant or excessive like a standard guest room for the Prime Minister.

“In the past, I’ve always thought that there was someone that I must see and a place I must return to even if I had only a breath of air left. There was a promise I had to keep at all costs, so I was fearful of death. I needed to grab onto every bit of hope for survival I could through the cracks of fate, not even daring to let the last bit of my consciousness glued to that mental network perish. I needed to wake myself up with the help of that little disturbance from the rare solar storm. I needed to pretend I lost my memories, pretend to be a clueless lost lamb, pretend to have a kind heart only to win over some breathing space from the hands of those pirates…I couldn’t even bear to think that this pirate I was trying to hide from was my own little sister.”

Lin Jingheng stopped abruptly as he felt the words that would follow after were too hurtful and shouldn’t be said. But those words were like the awful taste of acid rolling up his throat as if he was ready to vomit, and it took Lin Jingheng all of his might to keep the rest of those words down his throat. Yet before he could digest them, Lu Bixing suddenly added: “You used to think that way ‘in the past,’ but what about now? You think that everything is meaningless now, right–I can tell that’s what you want to say.”

He was too good at reading the room and pulled those words out of Lin Jingheng’s mouth and laid them out on the ground.

“I’m not worth it.” Lu Bixing continued calmly, “I also don’t know what I should do to not make all of your efforts in these last sixteen years end in vain; so can you tell me? Jingheng, I…I really can’t carry such a….such heavy expectation. That person you once loved no longer exists; I really want to return him to you, but I can only give you a wretched version of your desires.”

Lin Jingheng turned his head as if he wanted to speak, only to have Lu Bixing interrupt him once again.

Lu Bixing’s voice was calm and gentle like how he spoke with his students patiently in the past. He said: “Can you be completely honest with me, and not tell me that you’ll love me no matter who I become?”

“Let’s both be honest here, Jingheng. I’ve known you…looking back now, I don’t even know how to calculate based on either calendars anymore–let’s just say at least twenty years? We were acquaintances back on Planet Beijing, then I started harassing you after the war broke out…then, you left. So I pulled out everything Zhanlu had about you on his database and rewatched them countless times. I’ve one-sidedly walked beside you since you were a little boy up until you became the Top Commander of the Union for…just a few hundred times. I know and understand you, more so than you think.”

“Do I sometimes remind you of the Chief in the Union and that person in the Freedom Corps? Then you’re right, I used to think they’re both psychopaths, but now I’m starting to empathize with them.”

“The man you love was ‘him,’ and you’re scared to look back at him in front of me, but you still love him. I know; you don’t like someone who’s constantly calculating in their minds, always tiring you with worries, and could potentially become someone like them in the future, someone who would force you down a path you never wished to take, right?”

Lu Bixing lifted his head. There was something frightening hiding in his eyes, like a silent storm in the depths of darkness.

The suffocating silence once again filled the room.

Moments later, Lin Jingheng finally confessed.

He said, “Yes.”

This single word finally ripped through the harmonious facade between them.

Lin Jingheng said: “I don’t like to guess what you’re thinking everyday, nor do I like having to weigh in and choose what I should or shouldn’t say to you. I hate personal relationships that feel like walking on a steel wire, nor do I have the patience to do something like repairing a Model 3 all by myself; I’m too tired.”

The blade of the guillotine dropped mercilessly and sliced through the fragile neck of the punished.

Lu Bixing wanted to give him an understanding smile but failed. His throat rolled up and down several times and couldn’t even make a sound; he felt his heart freezing up as if he was walking closer and closer to death.

Lin Jingheng opened up the door of the guest room and walked outside. The little repair robot waiting outside rolled in and began checking up on the damaged door and wall, creating some noise in the quiet space.

Lu Bixing closed his eyes. That man’s footsteps were clear and audible in the darkness; he wanted to run and cling onto him like grabbing onto the last ray of hope in life, but he had no more strength left. The cold river water poured from the top of his head and devoured his whole body, pulling him deeper into suffocation as he watched himself drown.

“But what can I do?”

Lu Bixing opened his eyes suddenly and pulled himself back to reality.

Lin Jingheng hadn’t left the house and instead walked up the staircase. He was standing halfway up the stairs when he suddenly turned his head around and howled back at the young man: “This is the only bit of meaning I have left in my life, am I not allowed to take it just because I dislike it!?”

Lu Bixing was completely dumbfounded. He didn’t know when he stood up, but by the time his mind returned to reality, he was greeted by the sound of Lin Jingheng slamming the door to the study. Before Lu Bixing could manage to think of how to deal with the situation, Lin Jingheng walked out of the study with a cold expression–he remembered that as the Prime Minister of the Eighth Galaxy, Lu Bixing often needed to use the room to call up remote meetings for work. He didn’t want to risk his chances and, under Lu Bixing’s hesitant gaze, walked up to the attic and locked the door.

The large fish tank in the living room glistened under the light as a colorful tropical fish blew out a bubble under the water; thus began a cold war in the household.