Wang Luan carefully straightened the wedding dress and put it away. It was probably one of the most meaningful keepsakes of her life—something that, when she lived to seventy or eighty and one day rummaged through her belongings and found it again, she would still clearly recall events from decades earlier, and then reveal a knowing smile.
“If I had known Miss Wang Luan was going to treasure this as a keepsake, I should have done an even better job,” Yan Qiongyu said, sitting on the edge of the bed with one leg crossed as he watched her pack things away.
“It’s already good enough,” Wang Luan said. After putting away the wedding dress, she chose a spot and set out the image photo.
This “image photo” was more like a short video. It showed Wang Luan wearing the wedding dress as she hopped up a step, reached out to take Yan Qiongyu’s hand, and pulled him—wearing the Victory Flame Flower pinned to his chest—up onto the step. The two looked at each other, then, without prior agreement, turned to look at the camera.
Their faces were covered, but just by looking at their eyes, anyone could tell they were smiling.
This was the commemorative photo that the first-place winners of every wedding competition on the l99 Legion planet would take. There was also a number below, representing the shooting location and date.
“All right, I feel like I’m brimming with energy now, and my mood is very good!” Wang Luan said briskly to Yan Qiongyu. “I’m fine now. If you have anything to do, go do it!”
Yan Qiongyu said, “But I’ll be staying at home for the near future.”
Wang Luan looked at him with a face full of surprise.
Wasn’t he someone who left after staying a few days every time? Saying he would stay for a while all of a sudden actually made her a little unaccustomed.
Yan Qiongyu said, “Didn’t Miss Wang Luan say that in your hometown, there’s a honeymoon period after getting married? Let’s just treat this as the honeymoon.”
He had thought of this, and she was quite happy about it, but… what were you supposed to do on a honeymoon?
“How about changing the paint job on the ship at home,” Yan Qiongyu suggested.
Wang Luan fell silent for a moment. “Why are you so eager? Be honest—haven’t you long thought that the ship paint job I did is especially ugly, so ugly you can’t stand it anymore?”
Yan Qiongyu said, “No.”
Wang Luan thought that after getting married, his survival instinct seemed to have increased a bit—he actually denied it.
Yan Qiongyu said, “For now, it’s still bearable.”
Wang Luan: …So that’s what you were denying?!
The two carried big buckets of paint to where the ship was docked.
Wang Luan unwillingly continued to ask, “The cat and bird I painted, and that red heart—are they really that ugly?”
Yan Qiongyu didn’t answer directly, but said tactfully, “If you really like this pattern, how about I repaint it for you so it looks better?”
Wang Luan handed the tools to him. She had originally rolled up her sleeves, wanting to help, but an old client with a broken ship came rushing over, urgently asking her to fix it. Yan Qiongyu coaxed her away with an attentive expression: “Go quickly, I’ll be fine on my own.”
Did this guy think that if he put on that expression, she wouldn’t be able to tell that he was actually thrilled to send her away so she wouldn’t get in the way?!
Wang Luan left with a stiff face. Things were delayed for a bit in between, and when she rushed back to the ship parking area, she saw at a glance the ship that had been completely transformed.
The impact was too strong. It shocked her into standing there dumbfounded, mouth agape, for a long time, not daring to believe that this was the ship she had left earlier.
This was really… her ship?
Yan Qiongyu had his sleeves rolled up, with some paint smeared on his body. Like an artist who had just completed an oil painting, he stood at the top of the lifting platform, appraising the ship.
Wang Luan walked over in a daze. “The cat… and bird patterns, where are they?”
Yan Qiongyu rubbed the paint on his fingers and pondered. “Let me look for them.”
So even you can’t find them anymore in these abstract color blocks, is that it?!
Wang Luan rubbed her eyes, feeling that the dazzling colors had stabbed her vision, her tone still dazed: “I imagined countless possibilities, but I never guessed that this time you’d go with an abstract style.”
She had trusted Yan Qiongyu’s artistic talent too much! It was worse than her first rustic version!
Yan Qiongyu looked regretful. “I didn’t expect this kind of accident either. Painting a ship really is different from painting on a canvas in the usual sense. But sometimes, we can also try to appreciate accidents.”
Wang Luan said, “So, you messed up, right?”
Yan Qiongyu revealed a polite smile. “Haha.”
Wang Luan didn’t know how this ghostly artistic genius had produced such an effect. All kinds of strange color combinations covered the ship, along with inexplicably twisted vortices and color blocks. Staring at it for too long made her suddenly dizzy, making it impossible to look at it for long.
In the end, they still kept Yan Qiongyu’s work. The two of them did the finishing touches together, both covered in paint, holding hands as they went home.
“This ship doesn’t have a name yet. You name it, abstract master painter,” Wang Luan teased.
Yan Qiongyu pretended not to hear the mockery in her words. “Mm, how about calling it the ‘Planting Flowers’?”
At night, after Wang Luan had fallen into a deep sleep, Yan Qiongyu was still unable to sleep. He looked at Wang Luan’s peaceful sleeping face for a while, then opened his smart brain.
Inside his smart brain was a blurry photo of Wang Luan’s ship.
This photo hadn’t been taken by him, but had been given to him by Yan Mu.
The last time he returned to the CON base, Yan Mu had met with him once.
She showed him this photo, smiling as she softly asked him, “Guess how much longer it will take me to find her?”
At that moment, Yan Qiongyu understood.
Earlier, Yan Mu had deliberately brought up Wang Luan to force him to make the first move. He thought that by orchestrating the elimination of Guan Shunan, the head of the defense corps in Yan Mu’s hands, and secretly triggering unrest at the CON base, he could make Yan Mu overwhelmed and divert her attention. As it turned out, Guan Shunan was nothing more than a piece of bait Yan Mu had abandoned.
While he was leading Guan Shunan and the defense corps toward death, Yan Mu’s eyes were still watching him, seeing him enter Wang Luan’s ship.
The fringe star region had almost been completely infiltrated by the forces of the Utopia. With such obvious traces, it was only a matter of time before Yan Mu found Wang Luan. He even suspected that when he stood by Yan Mu’s bedside and saw that photo, her people might already have found Wang Luan.
“Worthy of you, Mother—able to casually abandon anyone for the sake of what you want,” Yan Qiongyu remembered saying with a smile at the time, without taking another look at the photo.
And his mother, still wearing that detestable, cold gaze that seemed to see through all his weaknesses, said to him, “You’re still unwilling to personally bring her to me?”
Yan Mu was dissatisfied with the progress of his experiments. She needed more we substance. After confirming that the we substance mutation capable of altering AO pheromones came from Wang Luan, once Wang Luan was captured by her, what awaited her would be even more terrifying experiments.
Wang Luan would be forced to mark other omegas… making her do something like that, she would probably suffer even more than he would.
“Then let me see just how many loyal dogs you still have left to use, Mother,” Yan Qiongyu said calmly as he left under Yan Mu’s gaze.
That same day, Yan Mu suddenly fell into a coma, vomiting blood without end.
She had always exercised extremely strict control over the drugs she used. Over such a long period before, Yan Qiongyu had been unable to tamper with her medication at all, but Yan Mu’s body was growing weak, and she no longer had the energy to maintain total control over everything.
When she hurried to use Guan Shunan as bait, Yan Qiongyu had also used himself as bait… those who remained in the base, taking advantage of the weakened defenses, successfully released the inducing agent into the circulating water system of the building where Yan Mu was.
This inducing agent targeting Yan Mu had been carefully prepared by Yan Qiongyu. In order not to let this keen godmother discover it, he had spent a great deal of time and effort.
With something happening to Yan Mu, the Yanlan Star bandit group forcefully took over the CON base, seized control of the ground armed forces, and began a forceful purge of everyone in the base they deemed suspicious, including the godson Yan Qiongyu, whose surface obedience masked inner dissent.
The base, which had just gone through a rebellion war, descended into chaos once more. Under the cover of another group within the base, Yan Qiongyu escaped from the CON base.
Before he went to see Wang Luan and took her to attend another wedding, he had only just escaped the pursuit of the Yanlan Star bandit group and gone to a legion-garrisoned planet to meet Fu Qi.
This omega, who had originally escaped the Utopia with Yan Qiongyu’s help, had then, with the cooperation of Wang Siyu and the Ninth Imperial Princess, successfully obtained part of the authority over the Third Legion of his biological father, Li Zhichang.
l99 Star was precisely the planet where the troops he led were stationed.
They held a conversation and reached a cooperation agreement. Only then did Yan Qiongyu wash away the smell of gunpowder and blood from his body and rush to the Little Wu District to see Wang Luan, as if nothing at all had happened, standing at the doorway and asking her, “Does Miss Wang Luan not like this ring?”
And after he took Wang Luan to attend the collective wedding and left l99 Star, many Li-family legion soldiers on l99 Star gathered under Fu Qi’s conscription and headed for the planet where the CON base was located, attacking the Yanlan Star bandit group stationed there.
Tonight, that stretch of starry sky ought to allow no one to sleep.
Yan Qiongyu lay with his eyes open, holding Wang Luan’s warm, soft hand beneath the covers.
ততততততততততত
On a peaceful morning, Wang Luan made vegetable wraps for breakfast. She held a wrap in one hand and took bites while pinching the hose in the other to water the vegetables, asking Yan Qiongyu, “What do you want to do today?”
Yan Qiongyu sat in a rattan chair, holding his wrap and eating with elegance and slowness. “Today, let’s go buy a few things.”
Wang Luan said, “Last time you said you were going to buy a few things, you ended up buying back a whole roomful of stuff and changing all the soft furnishings in the house. Today’s ‘few’—does that also mean a whole roomful?”
As it turned out, today’s “few” really was just a little. Yan Qiongyu bought a haishi qin.
This was a kind of musical instrument, looking a bit like a piano but somewhat larger. They cleared out a large area of the living room specifically to place this haishi qin.
The keys were thin white stone pieces arranged in a stepped formation. Sound was produced through finger strikes and resonance, the tone crisp and clear.
No one knew where Yan Qiongyu’s sudden interest came from.
