Under the silent accusation of the little pink moneybags' pitiful stare — the sorrowful eyes of a classic doujin heroine whose love had just been stolen out from under her —
Ruan Mei kept her serene smile and towed him straight toward the door on the station's lower deck that led to her private laboratory.
Caelus could feel Asta's gaze clinging to his back, reluctant to let go, but the slender hand in its silk glove gave him no room to escape.
Just as the weight in Asta's chest was about to brim over, a gentle voice, brimming with profound consolation, spoke up:
"Asta, this is for you."
Asta turned her head blankly and caught the thing Stelle shoved at her on reflex.
It was heavier than expected. She blinked, baffled.
Rings of vertical grooves ran down the silver barrel, accentuating its slender figure, holding a viewer's eye as firmly as a dancer mid-performance.
The grey-black spots and rust freckling that graceful body only lent it an air of refined elegance.
A classical beauty beyond the grasp of ordinary people.
Asta was an ordinary person. She could not comprehend the beauty of a trash can.
"If you ever feel cold all over, and hollow inside — just climb in and lie down!"
Stelle laid a hand over her heart, mimicking Caelus's earlier theatrics, delivering the line in the quivering tone of a soap-opera heroine standing in the rain.
"The trash can will warm your body. And so will I."
Then she gazed at Asta tenderly and said nothing more.
"Er, ahaha…"
Faced with consolation that hardcore, Asta's lips twitched into a stiff, forced smile.
There was really no need!
Truly!
Asta still remembered how, inside the Simulated Universe, Stelle had borrowed Caelus's Propagation Emanator authority and forced the Swarm to breed a variant made for exactly one purpose — rummaging through trash cans. The Trash Can Bug.
Marketed, of course, as a way to raise her scavenging efficiency and make her the true King of Garbage!
For a while there, in any civilization within the Simulated Universe that still had survivors, lifting the lid of any trash can meant finding one of Stelle's bugs curled up inside.
As for what the girl kept muttering about — something like "the bat-swinging vigilante of the Realm of Sin finally ascends to King of Garbage" — Asta had never understood a single word of it.
"Maybe you could try dressing yourself up as a trash can?"
Watching the gloom still hanging over Asta's face, Stelle had a flash of dark inspiration and deployed her world-shaking wisdom.
If it matched her own XP, it absolutely had to match Caelus-cub's XP.
And if it didn't, that just meant Caelus-cub's XP hadn't been patched to the latest version yet.
"…"
Asta went quiet. It wasn't the first time Stelle had enthusiastically played wingman for her, but this one time…
Asta decided she'd pass, thanks!
Squeezing an adorable little whimper of misery out of her throat, she could only watch as Ruan Mei's elegant, unhurried figure — and the grey-haired one she led by the hand — vanished into the dim glow behind the laboratory door.
"Asta, trust me — 'I' love you!"
Covering for 'herself,' Stelle flashed Asta a thumbs-up, the Kuuga salute that meant go watch more Kamen Rider Kuuga, then went scampering happily after them.
How could a thing like this possibly go on without her?
Leaving Asta alone in the empty corridor, hugging that reeking trash can, thoroughly undone.
The Confinement Section.
A secret compartment of the space station, known to only a handful of people.
It was normally used to receive non-humanoid guests of a special nature, and had a shuttle line connecting directly to open space. Once Herta had granted Ruan Mei access, she had never asked about it again.
With a graceful, swaying stride, Ruan Mei led Caelus and Stelle straight into a laboratory where plum blossoms bloomed indoors.
"May I begin?"
The voice was crisp, gentle, lovely — and utterly out of place given the circumstances.
"Craving my body that badly?" Caelus couldn't resist needling her.
"Mm. I very much want my dear's genetic serum." Ruan Mei stated it plainly, as though she were merely fetching a lab mouse.
"Ohhh~"
Caelus smiled and studied the ethereal, gentle woman before him.
Ink-black hair fell like a dark waterfall, bound by a few hairpins into an intricate looped braid; two strands clung beside cheeks so delicate they seemed liable to break at a touch, trailing all the way down to her full chest.
"Then let's get to it."
Caelus relaxed and stretched out on the lab's custom ergonomic chair, his posture carrying a lazy sort of candor.
A moment later the familiar, pleasant scent of plum blossoms washed over him. The alluring beauty, wrapped tight in an ink-wash cheongsam with a high slit and an open back, had already pulled over a rolling stool and seated herself in front of him.
The tableau bore a faint resemblance to a school nurse examining a student with heatstroke.
From Caelus's angle, the snow-white line of her slender neck and the exquisite sweep of her collarbones lay fully exposed.
The gold-leaf lace edging her neckline already drew the eye, but what truly commanded attention was her waist, covered only by fine, half-sheer black gauze — the balanced lines of her abdominals surfacing and vanishing again in that mysterious sheen, and that small, delicate navel serving as the finishing stroke, a blurred temptation showing through the black.
Ruan Mei had always been direct, so Caelus saw no reason to stand on ceremony either.
He raised a hand, settled his palm naturally over the smooth black silk across her lower belly, and with a questioning fingertip traced one slow, full circle around the region the black gauze half-concealed — the Vision Hunt Decree zone, as it were.
"Mm~"
A soft sound, like a feather brushing the tip of the heart, escaped from between Ruan Mei's slightly pressed lips.
It was quiet, but at this distance it came through with unusual clarity.
Behind them, Stelle — who had been craning her neck to watch the show — snapped bolt upright, every nerve at full attention, as if someone had flipped a switch. The empathy link that bound their five senses had relayed that subtle little signal to her too.
Not a trace of embarrassment showed on Ruan Mei's face; she seemed to have done it on purpose. Then, just as she raised her hand to set out once more on the road west, something occurred to her.
"Dear Stelle, you—"
"Ahem, ahem, ahem!"
Stelle instantly put on her best well-behaved face, scratching the back of her head with cutesy sheepishness. "Don't mind me! Just pretend I'm not here! You two carry on! Carry on!"
She had the empathy link anyway — round it up and that basically counted as participating in person!
"No, what I mean is, in a little while I'll need a genetic serum sample from you as well." Ruan Mei's finger pointed elegantly at the empty seat beside Caelus.
Stelle and Caelus being one and the same was, for a Ruan Mei besotted with the mysteries of life, a subject of enormous research value all on its own.
"Huh? Oh!"
At that, Stelle came trotting over eagerly and sat down beside Caelus.
Then her eyes rolled, as if she'd hit on something far more entertaining, and she sprang back up, swung one long pale leg across, and straddled Caelus's waist, her rear pressed snug against his abs.
"Heehee~"
"Heehee my foot."
Caelus flicked the Stellaron spirit lightly on the forehead. Judging by the way Ruan Mei's lovely eyes widened with a flash of surprise, Stelle's stunt had made things considerably more convenient for her.
He tilted his head to look past Stelle, grinning at Ruan Mei. "Samples have to be taken either way, so a little hands-on work… amounts to the same thing in the end, right?"
"It's all getting taken anyway. Hands-on, hands-off — same difference."
"Oh?"
Ruan Mei lifted her beautifully sculpted chin a fraction. "Dear, what exactly are you referring to?"
"Leg up." Caelus beckoned, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Ruan Mei didn't hesitate for an instant; she obediently raised one long, straight leg, her fine skin gleaming like premium mutton-fat jade under the lab's cold lights.
Caelus caught her by the ankle and slipped off the pale green high heel with a gentle, practiced motion.
Her expression stayed calm and mild, as if what had been removed were some irrelevant object rather than something worn against her skin.
She watched him placidly, waiting for his next move.
"The other one." Caelus repeated the trick.
Freed from their confinement, Ruan Mei's jade feet lay fully revealed.
Perfect in shape, snow-pale and tender, the arches smooth as satin, the skin fine-grained and flawless, the soles tinged with a soft blush — soft, white, exquisite, radiating a purity that nonetheless set the imagination running. The sight was frankly appetizing.
"So then." Caelus lifted his gaze from that pair of jade feet, which could have passed for artwork, and met eyes as still as lake water. "You wouldn't mind… collecting it with them, would you?"
"If dear doesn't mind, then neither do I."
Perched on the stool, Ruan Mei let those flawless feet touch lightly together, her toes crossing and brushing against each other a few times without conscious thought — a tiny motion that, in the hush of the laboratory, was outrageously provocative.
"I certainly don't mind." Caelus's smile deepened as he held the gaze of those eyes like plum petals on a lake.
Geniuses really were all oddballs.
Among them, Herta genuinely came off as the most human of the lot.
"Before that, though, let me run an experiment."
"Oh? What sort of experiment?" Ruan Mei's lashes fluttered; interest had been piqued.
"An observational study on the effect of excessive narcissistic affection upon the unity of personality."
As he spoke, Caelus flipped the Potara Earrings out from between his fingers like a magician, and fastened one of them, casual as anything, onto the tender earlobe of the Star-baby riding him.
Then he held the other out toward Ruan Mei. The earring lay quietly in his palm like a golden pearl, a mysterious luster turning through it.
At his words, Ruan Mei's willow brows — dark as distant mountains — arched a barely perceptible fraction, but her gaze had already been captured by the strange earring resting in his hand.
Deep in those eyes, still as a fathomless pool, burned a fierce curiosity.
"A fusion first? Very well."
Without a moment's deliberation Ruan Mei picked up the earring and fixed it to the ear that mirrored Stelle's.
Stelle at once toppled backward, crashing full-length into Ruan Mei, and white light bloomed.
The radiance faded.
Caelus's pupils contracted for a heartbeat.
What a magnificent face!
As the saying goes, a beauty glancing back with a smile births a hundred charms — but the woman before him had no need whatsoever of a smile.
Her expression was cool and noble, and that unearthly, absolute beauty stole the wits even of a Caelus who could face a naked woman without blinking. Infatuation surfaced in his eyes beyond any power to suppress it, his soul drunk and adrift.
She was so beautiful, so perfect, so bewitching… no, wrong!
Thanks to his multi-core processor, Caelus jolted back to lucidity.
That drunken, soul-stealing fascination didn't stem solely from the woman's looks and his own narcissism.
There was also a peculiar allure intrinsic to her.
Calling it a power might be unfair. It was the pursuit of beauty written into biological genes; no carbon-based life could be exempt from a beauty like this, beauty that represented the ultimate state a living thing could reach.
"So this is… fusion?"
The voice was languid, unhurried, lovely. A beauty with back-length hair of a deep grey near to black stared, faintly dazed, at her own flawless hands — hands that hit the golden ratio both biologically and mathematically.
"What a marvelous power."
Her eyes were a clear, luminous blend of mint green and pale yellow, the pink-violet in her pupils like petals drifting down onto Cha'ersen Lake.
Inherited from Ruan Mei, the power of Erudition had already begun taking effect during the fusion itself, sculpting her body toward perfection.
Any male without ironclad self-control, the moment he came near her —
whether he saw her figure, heard her voice, or caught the scent of her body — would go into helpless rut, desperate for a Grand Harmony of Life with her. Even just holding her hand once would be worth dying for!
"A natural Charm Aura? And a brutally strong one at that." Caelus drew a thin breath through his teeth.
Even he hadn't been granted a charm check.
This wasn't a mental-type ability at all.
It was every organism's instinctive pursuit of beauty… every gene in his body craving her.
That was genuinely terrifying.
"What's your name? Ruan Stelle? Stelle Mei?"
It had been a long time since Caelus last had to clamp down on his own emotions this hard.
The beauty shook her head with a soft laugh. "In the assembly of life, both parents are equal — which is why Ruan Mei's name takes a surname from each of hers."
"When you address her from now on, remember the little pause for breath in the middle. It raises affection points. Probably."
Three thousand strands of black hair spilled down her back, the ends curling around the crook of her slender knee. She was sitting on Caelus now.
"My name shall be Ruan Stelle Mei."
"Sure thing, wifey. No problem, wifey."
Caelus found a three-part name with pauses in it far too much trouble.
"You~"
Ruan Stelle Mei extended one finger of flawless white jade and tapped him lightly on the forehead.
"Then let's start by testing the power you gained after setting foot on the Path of Propagation — and collect some genetic serum for Ruan Mei while we're at it."
Her toes, soft and lustrous as pearls, flexed and lifted one after another, hooking the waistband of Caelus's trousers and drawing them slowly down.
In the fused state she shared a complete empathy link with Caelus; she could feel with perfect clarity how powerfully her own body pulled at him.
He wanted it, so she would give it to him.
Because she was half 'himself.'
Besides, this made collecting the genetic serum Ruan Mei wanted that much easier.
If there had been more time, she could have filled an entire womb with it.
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