Editor and proofreader: Oceanblue

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A herd of grass-mud horses galloped through Ye Qingyun’s mind.

“What did he just hear? The scumbag and his pirate crew… gone?”

Perhaps his expression was too incredulous, so Gu Shenyuan even tried to comfort him: “Once a person is dead, they cannot come back to life. Don’t be too sad.”

Ye Qingyun buried his face in the blanket, pretending to be heartbroken and unable to speak, while desperately calling out in his mind: “System? Do you hear me? The scumbag is gone! He’s gone!”

The system responded in a voice that sounded like it was about to crash: “…I heard you.”

Ye Qingyun asked again: “What should we do next? He’s gone, and I can’t keep being infatuated with his corpse, can I?”

The system paused for a long time before saying: “Please maintain your state of profound grief first. To confirm whether Pu Tian is dead. If he is… I’m sorry, but we need a bit more time to analyze the situation. This is not your problem, so please don’t worry.”

Ye Qingyun was overjoyed. He detected the system’s implication: he might soon no longer need to play this damned malicious cannon fodder role!

Receiving such good news while needing to maintain a façade of grief was a bit challenging.

Ye Qingyun silently laughed so hard his body trembled. He struggled to calm himself down, rubbed his eyes fiercely, forced out a couple of tears, and then raised his face from the blanket, trembling in his voice as he said, “No, I don’t believe it! You must be lying to me! Pu Tian can’t be gone! I need to go back and see!”

Ye Qingyun jumped off the bed and rushed out the door.

Behind him, Gu Shenyuan’s gaze deepened even further.

For such a worthless person, he cried.

If he had known, he should have let Pu Tian die a more miserable death.

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Ye Qingyun returned to the spot where the pirate ship had docked earlier.

The pirate ship was still in place, the hatch wide open, and there wasn’t a single lookout in sight.

Ye Qingyun cautiously approached and stepped inside.

As soon as he entered, he saw a heap of bodies sprawled out haphazardly, the scene quite bloody.

Ye Qingyun took a deep breath, trembling legs moving unsteadily as he navigated through the pile, trying to find Pu Tian’s figure.

“Over here.” Gu Shenyuan’s voice rang out.

Ye Qingyun quickly walked over and saw a figure lying face down on the ground at Gu Shenyuan’s feet.

Ye Qingyun couldn’t see the person’s face at first, but the clothes were familiar—they were the same clothes worn by the person who had disguised themselves as Gu Shenyuan and tried to hand him over as a plaything.

“This… this is Pu Tian?”

Ye Qingyun felt as if he were suffocating. He bent down and turned the person over.

The person’s face slowly revealed itself—it was a face he recognized.

It was Pu Tian.

At that moment, Ye Qingyun’s emotions were extremely complicated.

“Was it also Pu Tian who had disguised himself as Gu Shenyuan earlier? Why had he suddenly tried to harm him? Was Pu Tian’s death due to being bound and unable to move?”

“Ding—Detected target’s death!”

The system’s voice suddenly rang in Ye Qingyun’s mind. It rushed to say: “Host, we have completed an urgent analysis, and here’s the plan: You will first pretend to be unable to accept this fact, act heartbroken, and fly a small spacecraft to a remote planet to distance yourself from the plot. After some time, once the investigation is complete, we will provide you with the conclusion.”

Ye Qingyun secretly let out a sigh of relief.

Distancing himself from the plot and living a calm life, doing whatever he wanted—this was exactly what he had been hoping for.

“Wasn’t it just a breakdown? He could act that out!”

Gu Shenyuan looked at Ye Qingyun’s profile, a thought stirring in his mind.

Now that Ye Qingyun knew Pu Tian was the one who had wanted to harm him, he shouldn’t feel sad for Pu Tian anymore. Pu Tian wasn’t worth his tears at all.

Don’t cry. He was such a good person; there would be even better partners in the future. Pu Tian should be completely forgotten.

However, the next moment, Gu Shenyuan saw Ye Qingyun’s eyes turning red.

“Pu Tian, how could you die…” Ye Qingyun covered his face, his body bending in pain as if he had just received unbearable news. “I can’t accept this! I can’t accept this! This must all be fake. You must be alive somewhere, right? Wait for me; I’m coming to find you!”

Ye Qingyun turned and ran toward the place where the small spacecraft was stored on the pirate ship.

He successfully arrived at that spot, opened the cockpit door, and sat down, starting the spacecraft and closing the open door.

As long as he flew out, he would be free! To hell with the plot!

However, just before the hatch closed, a person jumped in and took the co-pilot seat.

The spacecraft powered up and shot out of the pirate ship, soaring into the sky.

Ye Qingyun looked at Gu Shenyuan: “…”

“Big brother, what are you doing here? With you here, how can I distance myself from the plot?”

The system weakly said: “Host… for safety reasons, it’s best if you don’t collapse your persona in front of the protagonist for now. We can’t afford another breakdown!”

Ye Qingyun expressed his understanding, then glared fiercely at Gu Shenyuan and said, “What are you doing following me?”

Gu Shenyuan still had little expression and replied blandly, “Class. You haven’t finished teaching yet.”

Ye Qingyun: “?”

“My man is dead. And you, my rival, want me to teach you?” Ye Qingyun said incredulously.

“He’s not your man.” Gu Shenyuan instinctively rebutted.

Ye Qingyun: “…Is that the point? The focus should be that he refused to teach!”

Ye Qingyun pretended to be very angry: “What do you mean? He’s dead, and you’re still mocking me? You’re following me just to irritate me?”

Gu Shenyuan looked at Ye Qingyun and fell silent.

Of course, he wanted to stay by Ye Qingyun’s side, whether logically or emotionally.

Logically, he needed Ye Qingyun’s help to successfully create the drug to suppress emotions or to break the bloodline constraints.

Emotionally… he simply didn’t want to leave.

When a person walks alone in a cold world for too long and suddenly encounters a warm and bright flame, they will always want to linger for a while, even if they know they will have to leave eventually.

But now Ye Qingyun didn’t want to stay by his side.

This fact made Gu Shenyuan furrow his brow.

Of course, he had many ways to keep Ye Qingyun with him; he could easily use force to suppress him and make him continue teaching.

But he didn’t want to do that; he didn’t want to resort to violence against Ye Qingyun at all.

Gu Shenyuan looked at Ye Qingyun’s profile, at his curled lashes, at his crimson lips, at his light amber eyes filled with warmth.

How could someone like him be treated with violence?

Anyone who dared to use violence against this person would find Gu Shenyuan more than willing to let them experience the taste of violence themselves.

Besides violence, there was another method.

Although Ye Qingyun was tough on the outside, he was soft-hearted; Gu Shenyuan could easily exploit Ye Qingyun’s kindness to forcibly stay by his side.

With this thought in mind, Gu Shenyuan used his ability, stirred it within him, and immediately spat out a mouthful of blood.

Ye Qingyun was shocked to see Gu Shenyuan suddenly spit blood: “What’s wrong with you?”

“Cough…” Gu Shenyuan covered his mouth and coughed lightly, weakly saying, “When those enemy pirate groups attacked earlier, I was on the ship too. They were numerous and strong; I couldn’t fight them off, so when I escaped… I got seriously injured. I’ve been holding it in, but I finally couldn’t anymore.”

After Gu Shenyuan finished speaking, he closed his eyes, his face pale, and lay motionless.

Ye Qingyun screamed in his mind but still coldly asked, “Gu Shenyuan, are you dead?”

Gu Shenyuan didn’t respond and remained motionless.

Ye Qingyun trembled as he reached to check Gu Shenyuan’s breathing, finding that he was still alive, and couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.
Thank goodness! He just fainted—he wasn’t dead; he probably just closed his eyes to ignore him, right?

Ye Qingyun thought for a moment and pinched Gu Shenyuan’s cheek: “Hey, don’t play dead.”

Gu Shenyuan remained still.

It seemed he had fainted.

Ye Qingyun let go of his hand and hurriedly searched the small spacecraft for any emergency medicine, but despite searching the entire craft, he found nothing.

“What should he do? What if something happened to Gu Shenyuan…?”

Looking at the spacecraft’s energy levels, which were running low, Ye Qingyun irritably pounded the control panel and selected the nearest habitable planet to land.

He needed to give Gu Shenyuan emergency treatment here; he couldn’t let him die.

The spacecraft landed steadily, and Ye Qingyun propped Gu Shenyuan up and stepped out of the craft.

Ye Qingyun remembered there was a village not far from where they landed, so he headed in that direction and soon reached the edge of the village.

At the village entrance, an old man was sitting and smoking. Ye Qingyun approached him and asked, “Hello, may I ask…”

The old man looked up and saw Ye Qingyun’s face, and his eyes widened in shock. He turned and ran into the village.

Ye Qingyun: “?”

“What, did he look that frightening?”

Before long, Ye Qingyun saw the old man return, followed by a large crowd of people.

They looked at Ye Qingyun with excited eyes, their voices rising as they got closer.

The people weren’t speaking in the common interstellar language but in some obscure regional dialect. Luckily, Ye Qingyun had happened to learn it, so he could still understand.

“He’s so beautiful; the god will surely like him.”

“It looks like next year’s harvest will be good.”

“Oh, I was worried Nina wouldn’t be pretty enough, but now I can finally relax.”

Ye Qingyun sensed something was off and asked, “What are you talking about?”

Perhaps Ye Qingyun seemed too unthreatening and too weak, so those people answered his question.

“It’s almost time for the ten-year divine meeting, and at this time, we have to present the most beautiful young people to our god,” a man leading the group said, a joyful smile on his face. “We’ve been worried about not finding any good candidates this decade, and then we saw you. Haha, you’re very lucky, young man.”

“Lucky?” Ye Qingyun felt overwhelmed. “A god?”

“In this age of interstellar travel, how could there still be such a backward place?”

The people clamored, replying to Ye Qingyun:

“Yeah, those who follow the god live a life of luxury, much better than the people in the village!”

“They don’t have to work, and their skin is whiter than snow!”

Ye Qingyun certainly didn’t want to go; it was obvious there was something wrong with this. He thought for a moment, then put on a happy yet puzzled expression and said, “Really? That’s great! By the way, your god wouldn’t demand purity, right?”

The crowd paused in surprise.

Ye Qingyun pointed to the unconscious Gu Shenyuan: “I’ve shared a bed with this guy more than a dozen times… um, a few times… once. That should be fine, right? The god wouldn’t mind, would he?”

The scene fell into an awkward silence. After a long while, someone asked, “You… are you partners?”
Seeing their reaction, it was likely they didn’t want someone “impure” like him.

To increase his credibility, Ye Qingyun, taking advantage of Gu Shenyuan’s unconsciousness, mustered up his courage and leaned in to kiss Gu Shenyuan on the cheek. He then turned to the villagers and smiled, “Yes, he’s my man.”

Gu Shenyuan, pretending to be unconscious: “…”