"…So and so, and thus and thus."
Stelle and Stelle-Mei busted out a slick Lu-style B-BOX greeting, choreography courtesy of Lü Xiaobu.
"Huh?"
Watching Stelle and the dainty beauty in the dark-teal qipao rip through a stretch of flashy hip-hop, Little March was still frozen in slack-jawed, dog-dumb shock, her brain bluescreening and rebooting.
She didn't understand it, but she was thoroughly staggered!"
"Uh, this…"
Topaz had bobbed along the tides of the Galaxy's commercial seas for years, north and south, seen more than most, and prided herself on a broad resume and broader horizons.
Normally, when someone brought up strange marvels, she could pat her E-rank slimes, execute a tactical lean-back, and say with total confidence:
What scene haven't I seen?
This scene? This one she genuinely had not [expletive] seen!
Her mouth opened and closed, and in the end Topaz could only squeeze out one line, trying to salvage some dignity for a phenomenon she couldn't begin to comprehend:
"As expected of you! As expected of Miss Ruan Mei… truly… unconstrained by convention. A remarkably original line of thinking."
She got Star Rail's brand of absurdity.
But this maneuver of Miss Ruan Mei's was way past the line!"
Everything Topaz knew about Ruan Mei came from rumor — cold, reclusive, an unreadable mad scientist, that sort of thing — and she'd always kept those reports at arm's length.
Especially after last time, when she'd watched Ruan Mei hold a perfectly normal conversation with Star Rail and concluded the gossip was exaggerated.
Now? Now she thought "mad scientist" and "lunatic" were laughably conservative assessments!
What kind of person lends out their own body for that?!
What sort of sky-piercing thought process leads there?
Topaz could feel her brain trembling.
"Wooow…"
Miss Haxxor Bunny's eyes went perfectly round, and she offered a sincere country-girl-from-Arc City observation:
"You… you city folk really do play wild!"
Were the kinks of the interstellar age all this varied?
The Galaxy had tricks to spare, and this particular trick delivered a shattering blow to the worldview of a backwater bumpkin like her.
"Hey! Quit free-associating!"
Silver Wolf couldn't take another second of it and cut in: "99.9999% of the normal people in the Galaxy would never do something like this! Although…"
Her tone shifted, sliding into a technician's analysis: "Given Ruan Mei's mastery of life science, loading another consciousness into her own body and opening up control authority isn't actually difficult on a technical level. But…"
Silver Wolf's face went full subway-Old-Yang-staring-at-his-phone bewilderment as she traced a finger through the air, pale blue Aether Editing datastreams coiling around her fingertip.
She ran Aether Editing: Reality on "Ruan Mei."
In mainstream hacker practice, using Aether Editing on a human being breaks down into roughly five layers.
Active Layer (the flesh): physiological function normal, no intrusion traces. -> Shell intact.
Aether Layer (energy circuitry): ninety percent of the Erudition Path-energy originally belonging to Ruan Mei has vanished, overwritten by Path-energy from Star Rail. -> Energy substituted.
Mental Layer (thought activity): waveform familiar, confirmed as Star Rail. -> Thought patterns overwritten.
Mind Layer (core personality): same as above. -> Personality core overwritten.
Soul Layer (essential existence): unreachable, unobservable, undefined.
Even a super-hacker of Silver Wolf's grade, editing a human target, could reach the Aether Layer at best.
Aether Editing wasn't built for this in the first place.
Of course, while she couldn't operate on the deeper layers, she could still read their general state — useful for testing, and for checking whether a teammate had been compromised.
Right now, the Aether Layer, Mental Layer, and Mind Layer of Ruan Mei's body were all stained through with Star Rail's colors.
As for that unfathomable Soul Layer?
Silver Wolf didn't even bother trying to peek.
That lay far outside the reach of Aether Editing, a forbidden zone no mortal — and no top-tier hacker either — could touch.
Even a Genius like Ruan Mei couldn't truly gift her soul away or fuse it into Caelus's, not even in part.
"Tch. However you slice it, this is completely off the rails!"
Silver Wolf shut down the scan interface, shoved her flashy neon goggles up onto her forehead, and let the complaint fly.
Looking at the beauty wearing Ruan Mei's face and striking a coy, hands-on-hips pose, she felt absurdity shoot straight up through the crown of her skull.
Everything short of the core soul, Ruan Mei had handed over…
This was a straight-up, no-qualifiers lunatic!
Star Rail had become the objective owner of this body, and if you stretched the timeline out far enough, there was no guarantee they wouldn't start interacting with the Ruan Mei soul sitting at its deepest point…
After all, forget studying it — academia still couldn't stop screaming at each other over whether the soul existed at all!
"So… so is this big sister Sister Stelle, or Brother Caelus?"
Little "White" Seele, having taken control of the body back from Seele, had a head full of porridge by now, her big eyes brimming with baffled confusion.
"Hehe~ It's a body the two of us share~!"
Stelle and Stelle-Mei threw up their thumbs at a hundred percent sync rate.
The gesture perfectly exposed her rookie clumsiness as a fresh Ladydriver — like an ordinary person trying to draw a circle with the left hand and a square with the right for the first time, the command streams of the two bodies crossing wires at the neural level, so the motions slid helplessly into unison.
"Like this."
Caelus snapped his fingers.
Ruan Mei's body shifted with flowing ease — slender jade fingers pinched Stelle's soft cheek with pinpoint accuracy and stretched it sideways.
Compared to Stelle, still adjusting to dual-thread operation, Caelus had long since mastered consciousness projection and could puppet several bodies at once with precision. He was hardly going to make a rookie mistake like that.
For him it was just opening one more window.
"Wuwah?"
"Wuwah?"
Caught off guard, Stelle-Mei let out a muffled protest.
Stelle's original body made the exact same sound and face. Devastatingly cute!
Two bodies, one identical reaction — even Caelus got a rise out of that.
Adding Ruan Mei's body had upgraded the pair's whole repertoire.
With both consciousnesses residing in the body, the five senses and six perceptions linked up on their own. Everything Ruan Mei's body felt — the touch on her fingertips, the warmth of skin, the snug press of fabric folds — was transmitted to Stelle and Caelus in real time, synchronized, like a high-speed datastream.
Granted, Ruan Mei's method looked like sorcery to an outsider. But set against Caelus's female body, which crossed space and time, ignored all jamming, and achieved union in the truest sense — or even against Stelle's empathy link — it was more than one dimension lower on the ladder.
Which meant "network" fluctuations, and a chance of the signal getting blocked outright.
But.
For people who lived for fun, a so-called technical flaw could be converted into a brand-new game in about thirty seconds!
Deliberately destabilizing the sensory feed, for instance, to savor the distorted pleas||ure of a bad signal — a decent imitation of so-called breath-play~
Or actively manufacturing network turbulence, banking up eight or ten rounds of clim@x-grade stimulation, then dumping it all at once for the ultimate Elation!
Even Stelle's clumsy fumbling with two bodies right now made for a wonderfully electric experience~
Incidentally, part of Ruan Mei's soul remained inside the body, passively receiving every scrap of sensation it registered.
If Caelus wanted, he could rouse her deliberately and use her as a pocket old grandpa cheat… no, wrong term. Pocket wife.
The drawback stayed the same: stability, and susceptibility to interference.
Take Penacony, the Express's next stop. That place was a dream world formed of Memoria that consciousness entered directly, so Star Rail wouldn't be able to control Ruan Mei from the inside.
They couldn't enter wearing Ruan Mei's form at all — whoever went into the dream would be Ruan Mei herself.
Next, the combat capability of this body.
Not strong. Not garbage either.
Essentially, the Ruan Mei character's MP bar had been swapped for the merged bar Stelle and Caelus split off between them, and the skill pool had gotten a full transfusion, morphing into Star Rail's kit. Ruan Mei's original world-ending techniques were basically gone.
Only the most fundamental life-support and repair functions remained — passive survival tricks like accelerated regeneration.
"For Miss Ruan Mei to go that far, your Simulated Universe test must have gone really well, huh?" March 7th marveled, head bobbing side to side.
"Uh…"
Stelle and Stelle-Mei blinked.
How to put this?
Should they mention that Caelus-cub blew up the Simulated Universe and Herta nearly pounded them into paste?
"Mm. A success. An enormous success! All objectives fully accomplished!" Caelus folded his arms and nodded hard, righteousness incarnate.
It was a success from where he stood, wasn't it?
As for Herta… look how much precious data she walked away with~
That woman had originally planned to drag Ruan Mei over and use her as a tool. Girl, I'm pulling overtime wiping Caelus's backside, and there you are, blissfully poring over data on the Aeon of Propagation.
No. I refuse to swallow that kind of injustice!
And then Herta had seen Ruan Mei hand her body over to Star Rail, and short-circuited on the spot.
She suspected Ruan Mei was dodging the backbreaking labor of repairing the Simulated Universe, but she had no proof.
After bottling it up for a good long while, Herta left behind exactly one word: "6!"
Then she rolled back off without a glance to go patch up her busted-to-pieces Simulated Universe.
When even the famously worldly Herta had nothing to say, that told you exactly how absurd Ruan Mei's move had been.
As for the mountains of data collected inside the Simulated Universe and the unfinished experiments?
Naturally, another of Ruan Mei's slices would come take over — and there was still one half-dead little fox who required her personal attention.
The ancient-beast genes compatible with Tingyun would be shipped to Herta Space Station any moment now.
Once the shock wore off, everyone in the living room managed to digest the ridiculous plot twist.
The mood eased, and the chatter drifted back toward the everyday.
"Oh right, did you two see the message? Big sis Himeko's summoning us home — the Express is heading for the next stop~"
Little March was playing Jungle Chess with Stelle while chirping away about all the fun things that had happened on Jarilo-VI over the past two days to the freshly returned Star Rail, then said it as if the thought had just struck her.
"Reporting in! General Great Bucket and Corporal Little Bucket are ready to depart at any time!" Caelus threw an arm around Stelle's shoulders and fired off a goofy salute with the other hand.
"You're heading to Penacony next?" Topaz asked, one lush leg crossed over the other. "Makes sense. The Charmony Festival opens there soon, and the Family sent invitations to a lot of factions — no way they'd leave out the Trailblaze camp."
Topaz smiled. "A friend invited me to come on as project manager for a big Penacony venture."
Honestly, she hadn't expected Diamond to settle on Aventurine in the end. She'd assumed it would be Opal or Dragon Crystal… a deal like that needed someone P45 or above fronting it.
"Eh? You're going too, Topaz? Want to hitch a ride with us?" Little March invited warmly.
"Thank you for the offer, but I'm still on the fence about signing on."
With that, Topaz rose to her feet. "I only came by to say goodbye."
"You're leaving?"
Stelle and Stelle-Mei lifted their heads together.
"…Ha. Yes, I have to head back and file my report."
Caught off guard, Topaz genuinely could not get used to being looked at like that by "Miss Ruan Mei"; her professional reflexes nearly kicked in.
"Hope we meet again on Penacony. I'll get you a qipao that actually fits when we do."
Caelus handed over a batch of synthetic snacks with special effects as a parting gift.
"Then thank you kindly~"
Topaz waved with a smile and turned to go.
"Penacony, the land of sweet dreams… I can't wait!"
Seele had taken back control of her body, acting turned up to maximum, little stars glittering in those sea-blue eyes as if the road ahead filled her with hope.
Why the performance?
Because, obviously…
Hearing that, Silver Wolf froze for a beat. Back to the train. Traveling. Trailblazing. And she herself was a Stellaron Hunter.
While that rabbit was now a Nameless aboard the Astral Express, which meant she'd be glued to Seele for a good long while.
Oh no!
Sure enough, Silver Wolf and Haxxor Bunny were at each other's throats again in seconds.
Starting a war with one perfectly ordinary sentence — now that's what being a Masked Fool means~ (tactical lean-back)
Silver Wolf summoned her four Heavenly Kings to back her up.
"So cuuute!"
Seele returned control to White Seele, and Little "White" Seele was instantly captivated by the adorable chibi dolls.
No need to act the part at all~
"Hiii~ Seele~"
Friend Little Yuan, Wage Slave, Demon King, and Effort promptly swarmed White Seele, hamming up the cuteness to win her over.
"Damn it!"
Silver Wolf's eyes went wide. I brought you out to cover my flank, not to fight me over Seele!
"What are these little things?"
Little Duck was content to sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight. Seele was her little sister — she was the real Bronya!
To make sure both sides came out mangled, Little Duck stayed out of the open war and quietly raided the enemy base instead.
"Huh? Who do you think you are, calling me a little thing?"
Currently enjoying Seele's embrace, the Demon King took offense and craned his head as far back as it would go, hunting for the source of the voice.
"Holy crap! Another BOSS?"
"Sorry sorry sorry!"
"Ain't right!"
"She looks way more grown-up, and the proportions don't line up at all."
"A mega-b○○b boss like that? Without Aether Edit||ing the reality data you couldn't hit those numbers in a lifetime!"
"Holed up in her room every day eating junk food and gaming — not getting fat is already an achievement, and she still wants a body like that."
The four little Silver Wolves jabbered on, yelps rising one after another.
Utterly failing to notice the Haxxor Bunny biting back laughter behind them — and the Silver Wolf radiating thick killing intent, black flame roaring around her, red light flickering in her eyes.
"You little bastards… drop dead!"
One punch each, and Silver Wolf knocked all four virtual friends back into Prometheus.
When her gaze followed the trail of their lingering stares and landed on Silver Wing's magnificent monster rack, Silver Wolf turned her face aside without bothering to hide it, mouth twisting, regret written all over her.
Silver Wolf maintained that she didn't actually care much about her own figure — at most she'd thought about using Aether Editing to nerf every monster rack in the universe down to A-cup. But looking at a Bronya who wore the exact same face and carried an absolutely detonating rack, Silver Wolf felt distinctly unwell.
Same face, both of us! So why do you get the rack and I don't!
Aaaaaargh!
She wanted to blow up the whole universe along with her!
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