Chapter 301: The Orphanage

It hurt so much.

The searing pain in his chest wiped Wei Xun’s mind blank. He bit down hard, unable to help it, and the taste of blood spread through his mouth, An Xuefeng’s blood. It was very warm, a gentle heat, and even bitten, An Xuefeng kept kissing him, shifting from forceful to close and tender, until Wei Xun gradually came back to himself.

He was drenched in cold sweat, chest still throbbing sharply, but Wei Xun noticed his Death Countdown had barely dropped; An Xuefeng’s hand was indeed steady. Even so, the suffering had sent emotional turbulence through him, and his SAN value had fallen to fifty points.

Sure enough, the end-of-period penalty’s restored pain response was having a serious effect on his emotional state. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Wei Xun had begun to shift slightly into his alienated form, he was just registering this when An Xuefeng paused. He felt something coil around his wrist, pulling against him with a faint resistant pressure.

Wei Xun’s tail.

The slender tip quivered with pain, supple and strong; where it wrapped around An Xuefeng’s wrist, a red mark had already formed. An Xuefeng only found it pitiable and endearing.

“Keep going.”

Seeing An Xuefeng stop, Wei Xun said hoarsely, “Don’t stop…”

His voice carried a breathless edge. His breathing was shallow and careful; he didn’t dare draw deeply, because every breath pulled at the wound on his chest. He looked at An Xuefeng with a furrowed brow, and found An Xuefeng looking back at him with concern.

A drop or two of blood had landed on An Xuefeng’s face, red falling against the firm line of his jaw, adding an unexpected touch of vivid color.

His blood. Coloring him like that.

Wei Xun noticed it, and became aware of a subtle connection between himself and the blood, deeper than anything he’d felt before. He could almost faintly sense the energy contained in that blood. Or rather, the contamination.

The blood from the butterfly tattoo.

Whether to contaminate An Xuefeng was entirely within his power, he realized.

How strong was the contamination in the butterfly tattoo’s blood? Strong enough to contaminate An Xuefeng?

But this wasn’t the moment for that. The wound in his chest was still open, and the pain was agonizing. Seeing that Wei Xun had recovered some clarity, An Xuefeng adjusted their position, holding Wei Xun at something close to a half-recline, so Wei Xun could also look down at his own chest.

The Return Journey Saber was still set against the wound, holding it open. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] An Xuefeng had made a V-shaped incision, deep but not heavily bleeding. The cut ran precisely through the center of where the butterfly tattoo had just faded.

But… nothing.

Wei Xun’s flesh held no fragment, unlike the Puppet Master’s situation, and unlike the Tour Guides An Xuefeng had encountered who had embedded fragments into themselves.

If Wang Pengpai had been the one cut open there would have been a thick layer of golden fat. Wei Xun was different; going any deeper from here would reach the sternum, and then the heart. Yet An Xuefeng still had not found the butterfly fragment.

An Xuefeng’s expression grew heavier.

Could it really be as he feared, that the butterfly fragment had fused with Wei Xun’s heart?

“Bite me if it hurts.”

Having committed, An Xuefeng wasn’t going to stop. He brought his left arm around from behind Wei Xun’s neck and pressed his hand against Wei Xun’s face, sliding his fingers between Wei Xun’s lips. With his right hand he guided the blade decisively deeper; the pain in his fingers was sharp, but his blade hand remained completely steady; he kept going until he saw a mass of pulsing red flesh, and only then drew back.

Wei Xun’s heart.

The organ had already begun to show subtle differences from a human’s due to the progression of his alienation, but An Xuefeng could still see it clearly.

On Wei Xun’s beating heart, the remnant wing of a blue-violet butterfly was branded.

Blood welled up, but An Xuefeng’s attention was pulled entirely to the remnant wing. It rose and fell with Wei Xun’s heartbeat, as though it had come alive, and that shade of blue-violet, soaked through with blood, emanated a singular, drowning allure.

A pull to draw close, to possess solely; An Xuefeng’s cheeks grew warm, at the place where the blood had touched him. The heat spread from his face to his neck and wound slowly downward, pulling him beyond any ability to resist.

“Do you like it?”

He heard Wei Xun laugh softly. The feeling was entirely unlike anything before, and strangely novel. Wei Xun was propped up on both hands, chest bare, blood flowing down, like roses blooming across snow-white skin. Knowing it was contamination, and yet impossibly tempting.

The pull of the blood. The pull of the heart. Coming from the butterfly tattoo and from Wei Xun himself, entirely.

“Do you want it?”

Wei Xun laughed quietly, snow-white lashes lowering like butterfly wings settling, those blue-violet eyes looking up at An Xuefeng with an expression that wasn’t quite smiling. His gaze was different from before; in this moment Wei Xun seemed like someone else entirely. That voice carried a pull that reached to the very depths of the soul and drew out the most primal desire. No one could resist it—

“Come…”

Crack.

An Xuefeng brought the edge of his hand down cleanly and knocked Wei Xun unconscious. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] But he was not as composed as he would have imagined himself to be. His body was hot; a compressed, urgent force tore through him with nowhere to go. An Xuefeng’s breath came rough, countless emotions crossing his eyes.

“Mryaoow— hah!”

A ferocious hiss from the cat jolted An Xuefeng back to himself. He discovered, to his horror, that he had lost control; he had been kissing Wei Xun’s body, his forehead, his cheeks, his eyes, his neck, and lower places…

A sharp scratch from the cat’s claws brought a sting of pain across his hand. An Xuefeng bit hard into the tip of his own tongue; in the shock of that pain, he forced himself to stop, and with rigid control tended to Wei Xun’s wound.

Then he swept the cat away, it had its back arched and was still hissing and locked Wei Xun tightly against his chest. Afraid of pressing against the wound, An Xuefeng shifted into his snake form: the most calm, the most rational state available to him. And yet even so, he could not stop himself from coiling around Wei Xun.

In the dim lamplight, a black-and-white serpent curved and wound around a pale, beautiful man. A forked tongue touched lightly against his lips. The scene was strange, and quietly beautiful.

……

“Hss…”

Wei Xun shuddered, cold and in pain, his mind thick and slow. It took a long moment before he found his bearings. There was a residual ache at the back of his neck, as though someone had struck him there.

More than that, his whole body ached, the way it did after being bound for a long time and then released, or as though something heavy had rolled over him. His eyes felt swollen too; he had cried a great deal from the pain, and cried enough that his eyes were puffy.

When An Xuefeng had opened his chest, the pain had brought his SAN value to the edge of zero, and what came after Wei Xun didn’t remember; he supposed he had blacked out. But everything before that was still clear.

His butterfly fragment was unlike the Puppet Master’s was not embedded in muscle tissue, but on the sternum? The heart?

“You’re awake?”

An Xuefeng’s voice brought Wei Xun’s clarity filtering back. He found himself leaning against the man’s broad chest. The underground chamber by the lake was damp and cold, but An Xuefeng’s chest was warm and dry; he held Wei Xun the way a large bear would hold a small one.

Wei Xun noticed he felt dry and clean, without any of the clammy stickiness of cold sweat; An Xuefeng must have cleaned him up. He looked down at his chest and saw the wound was already neatly wrapped in bandages. He was covered with An Xuefeng’s trench coat, while the army-green blanket, stained with blood and sweat, had been discarded on the ground. The safehouse held only one oil lamp, and its dim amber glow gave the place an unexpected warmth.

“Mew…”

A weak cat sound rang out. Bingbing was curled up pathetically inside An Xuefeng’s trench coat, fur disheveled and puffed out in all directions, looking as though it had just done battle with a dragon. Seeing Wei Xun awake, it immediately shuffled forward, pawed at the coat, and burrowed under it to curl up in Wei Xun’s arms.

An Xuefeng shifted to sit a little more upright, pulling Wei Xun up with him and immediately dislodging the small cat.

“You still have a slight fever.”

An Xuefeng pressed a hand to Wei Xun’s forehead. With his naturally high body temperature, if he felt warmth, the temperature was genuinely not low.

Normally he would have reached immediately for a tool item, but this time An Xuefeng produced ordinary fever medicine instead.

Real-world medicine. Taken with warm water. Fed to a listless Wei Xun.

“Get used to it early.”

Watching him shiver with chills from the fever, An Xuefeng pulled Wei Xun closer and tugged the trench coat sleeve around them both:

“In a Latitude 30 Degrees journey, many tool items cannot be used.”

“You probably noticed it already in the Xiangxi journey, those Tourists found the effects of their tools cut in half, or worse.”

“Mm.”

Wei Xun was feverish and fuzzy, but managed to hook the cat which had made another valiant attempt to climb up into his arms and use it as a warm compress.

Right. Miao Fangfei had nearly been incapacitated by her abdominal pain before even reaching the first scenic spot. Word was she had come in with extensive preparation and multiple tool items, and all of them had their effectiveness slashed by more than half.

“In a Latitude 30 Degrees journey the problem is severe. Agency-sold tools are essentially unusable.”

An Xuefeng spoke unhurriedly, the way someone tells a story, keeping Wei Xun’s attention occupied.

“Except for titles, title-exclusive items, and personally exclusive items, everything else the Agency sells, including various hemostatic agents and recovery agents, stops working.”

This was one of the reasons Latitude 30 Degrees was near-Unsolvable. Without the Agency as a support system, fighting through countless contaminated monsters and completing the journey was extraordinarily difficult.

“So… Wang Yushu is very useful?”

Wei Xun coughed twice, his voice a little rough. He smacked his lips; the faint, lingering taste of An Xuefeng’s blood was still there. His lips were slightly numb, he wasn’t sure whether from blood loss or from the kissing.

“Exactly. Replicated titles are very useful.”

An Xuefeng remarked, genuinely impressed. Wei Xun could always cut to what mattered. What Wang Yushu replicated could be considered derived from his title, and in a Latitude 30 Degrees journey it remained marginally functional. Bringing Wang Yushu in was essentially bringing a compact mobile supply depot.

“Tour Guides have a harder time in Latitude 30 Degrees journeys, but since Dreamchaser opened the Sahara, there should be some advantages built in for the opening.”

An Xuefeng talked Wei Xun through a few more details, and once he saw that Wei Xun had largely recovered his alertness, he brought out the photographs.

Taken while Wei Xun was unconscious, focused on his heart. Ordinary cameras couldn’t capture the butterfly tattoo; An Xuefeng had used a special tool item, and it had only managed to capture a faint outline. Even that was somewhat distorted compared to what he had seen with his own eyes.

Wei Xun looked at the photograph: his chest, bloody and split open, and at the heart; a dense, malformed black fog drifting, the pure Abyss aura as rendered by a specialized camera.

But in An Xuefeng’s description, the tattoo on his heart was a blue-violet butterfly.

A butterfly tattooed on the heart.

“It was malevolent. It was tempting me to cut your heart out.”

An Xuefeng said it lightly, glossing over the dangerous moment in a few words. Wei Xun let out a low, suppressed laugh and leaned against An Xuefeng’s arms with lazy ease, playing with his fingers, teasing him:

“Captain An’s willpower is quite something, isn’t it?”

“You weren’t behaving normally either. Do you remember what happened?”

“I don’t remember.”

Wei Xun was curious.

“Did I enter a deeper alienation?”

“Not exactly.”

An Xuefeng shook his head, then paused.

“Except for the tail, every other sign of alienation on your body actually disappeared.”

The tail… Wei Xun only now noticed that although his SAN value had almost fully recovered, his tail was still out. And furthermore…

It was coiled firmly around An Xuefeng’s thigh, pressed skin to skin.

Wei Xun’s gaze shifted slightly. He rubbed the cat in his arms. Behind him, An Xuefeng gave a small cough and reached down to take firm hold of the restless tail.

“Can’t retract it?”

“Can’t retract it.”

Wei Xun said innocently.

Indeed. The tail seemed as natural as if he had been born with it; even with his SAN value restored and no active alienation, it simply would not go back in.

“Possibly a butterfly tattoo issue.”

An Xuefeng considered.

“Your heart’s blood also carries butterfly fragment contamination. A fragment fusing with an organ is truly very rare. Some creatures in Latitude 30 Degrees journeys have this kind of situation.”

“How did you come to have the butterfly fragment… can you tell me?”

An Xuefeng thought for a moment and asked, his tone serious.

“My parents left it as part of my inheritance.”

There was nothing that couldn’t be said about that; Wei Xun was puzzled.

“Didn’t you find out when you questioned You Ziming?”

“Even if you told him, the Agency would have interfered with his memory.”

An Xuefeng shook his head. Matters involving the Maria Butterfly could not be known outside the Agency. Even if Wei Xun said the words “Maria Butterfly” aloud to someone, what they heard would become something else entirely.

“Your parents, I couldn’t find them.”

An Xuefeng said honestly.

“What I found was that you and Wei Xuechen were orphans. The company was also built entirely by Wei Xuechen; his methods weren’t entirely clean, and there are many things hidden beneath the surface. Not something achievable through normal means.”

“…Is that so?”

Wei Xun turned it over in his mind.

“I have some memories of my parents, but they’re blurry.”

But…

What did it mean, not something achievable through normal means?

“Your background is unusual.” An Xuefeng said.

“Do you know about what’s called a ‘battlefield orphanage’?”

******

How many decades does a life contain? For the Tourists and Tour Guides drawn into the Agency, their decade was almost always the youngest and most vigorous one of their lives.

Dangerous journeys. An uncertain future. It drove many to live for the moment, to drink today’s wine today. Relationships, fleeting encounters, a single night; there were many such pairings inside the Agency.

Some even became pregnant. The Agency extended particular accommodation to pregnant women: from four months of pregnancy to four months after giving birth, no journey participation was required.

In practice, many used this to avoid journeys, to escape danger. But where did the children they gave birth to go?

Even if a child was born in the first year inside the Agency, by the time the decade ended and the battlefield came, the child would be at most ten years old. Where did those children go?

Into the battlefield orphanages.

‘For more detail, you could ask Black Widow.’

Wei Xun and An Xuefeng were still talking on the way back.

‘I’ve heard that Black Widow once gave birth to a child, though that’s not confirmed. Either way, female Tour Guides would certainly know more about battlefield orphanages; the Agency occasionally gives them tasks related to caring for children.’

He and his brother, from a battlefield orphanage?

Blurring memories. Parents who left for a battlefield?

No. The timing didn’t work.

The age gap between Wei Xun and his brother was not small. If they were truly biological brothers, their parents would have had to conceive the Puppeteer in the first or second year, and then, right before heading to the battlefield, conceive Wei Xun too and even that didn’t quite add up. Though there was no disputing that he and his brother looked very alike.

Whatever the truth, An Xuefeng had provided an extremely important lead.

“Oh, thank god, you’re finally back!”

When An Xuefeng and Wei Xun returned to the team base, Wang Pengpai was almost beside himself with relief. Finally. Finally, he was free. Heavens above, Yin-Yang Butterfly had been laughing and crying in turns at Return’s entrance for an entire day. Wang Pengpai had started to feel like passing Tourists were looking at Return oddly.

They were finally back. Finally—

“Captain An, Bing… ah?!”

The moment he saw Wei Xun, Wang Pengpai’s smile locked on his face.

This, this, this; how did they leave with Bing-1 and come back with Wei Xun? This… the two of you… couldn’t you have done some minimal amount of disguise or something?

And why were Wei Xun’s eyes so red? He looked about on par with Yin-Yang Butterfly right now!

From behind Wang Pengpai came excited voices, Qi Le’chen and the others.

“Captain An!”

“Captain An is back?”

“You’re finally here, we’ve been waiting all day— what the—!!”

The excited greetings cut off abruptly. In the strange silence that followed, they looked at Wei Xun with his reddened eyes, then looked at An Xuefeng with what appeared to be scratches on his face…

Wang Pengpai put on his expression of profound suffering.

It was over.