whhooo!!
Chapter 29
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ Bryce said to Sorian.
His voice sounded very calm.
This is good… he encouraged himself from the bottom of his heart.
Bryce would never wish for himself to expose his horse’s hooves{*} in front of that damn man; he knew that man was observing him carefully, trying to find something from his face. And no matter what Sorian found, it will become his weapon to stab Lin Xi.
{*Something one wishes to conceal; the cat (as in ‘Let the cat out of the bag’)}
And Bryce wouldn’t let a bastard like Sorian get what he wanted.
‘Please excuse me; I still have a lot of work to do.’
Bryce could feel his lips moving, and his voice came out of his throat lightly.
On his side, his fists were clenching silently, and he quietly grasped the metal storage box where all the specimens were placed until his fingers lost all feeling.
He didn’t even know how he had calmly dealt with that difficult man and went all the way back to his medical room — his memory seemed to have been cut off directly after Sorian had said that sentence. It was not until he returned to that enclosed space, alone, that he resumed his normal operations.
But even after returning to the medical room, Bryce still couldn’t calm down. Perhaps even Sorian himself couldn’t have imagined that what he had said would stimulate Bryce to such an extent. Bryce just sat at his desk blankly, looking at the box where the fragments of John Bronson’s body were placed. It took him a very long time to relax his fingers that were so tight that he didn’t listen to orders.
But he was still trembling slightly.
Bryce thought that the nightmare had been covered up long ago, under thick documents and the passage of time, but it had come back, back to Lin Xi and his life. Bryce seemed to be able to see a monster, invisible, huge, invincible — digging out of the past little by little, slowly approaching him and Lin Xi.
[‘That exhibition…’]
Only this sentence was mentioned in Sorian’s demonic whisper. He didn’t say what kind of exhibition it was, but at that moment, Bryce had already understood everything.
Bryce shuddered suddenly, and his breathing became more and more rapid.
‘Darling?’
Just when Bryce felt that he was about to be completely overwhelmed by that huge panic, that warm and hoarse female voice directly dragged Bryce back from the nightmarish past to reality.
‘Alyssa…’
Bryce turned his head in a daze and looked at his lover.
Alyssa was standing at the door of the medical room. She looked at Bryce cautiously with a puzzled and worried expression.
She looked relieved after seeing Bryce finally respond to her. She then walked towards Bryce, stretched out her arms, and forcefully pulled the man into her arms for a hug.
‘I want to ask you, are you okay?’ Alyssa kissed Bryce on the forehead, then said with a wry smile, ‘Well, I already know your answer: you’ll say that you’re fine, and then bury everything in your own heart.’
Of course, she had tried her best to hide it, but Bryce could still easily hear the deep worry in Alyssa’s tone — Bryce’s mood became heavier. He knew that his state must be very bad to make Alyssa worry so much.
He even felt a trace of guilt towards the woman in front of him as a result.
‘Did you get it?’
He forced himself to ignore the urge to tell the other party everything. Completely ignoring Alyssa’s inquiry, he instead directly asked what he cared about most.
Alyssa’s eyes dimmed as a result, she sighed, took out something from her pocket, and put it in Bryce’s hand.
‘This thing took me a little time, but… Yeah, I got it.’
‘All the backups have been processed?’
‘Of course.’
After receiving Alyssa’s affirmative reply, Bryce looked a little more relaxed than before.
He looked around for a while, and then used his authority to lock the entire medical room at the highest level, and then he put the memory that Alyssa gave him into the reader.
Bryce looked at Alyssa, and for a moment he seemed a little hesitant, but in the end, he pressed the play button in front of Alyssa.
[‘The Mother of Insects will turn us all into incubators for her children…’]
[‘Lin Xi — you have to kill Lin Xi — he is an alien creature — look at what he did! He hasn’t woken yet, you still have time! Look what he did! He is the one who attracted the insects! Because they are his family! It will be too late when the Insect King appears, his children… his children… will kill us all!’]
John Bronson’s sharp and rapid cry immediately came out of the player.
Coupled with the particularly ferocious and deformed face from the angle of the monitor, this old man with a horribly miserable look of death seemed to still be alive in a corner of this world, still shouting crazily at them.
Even if it was just a data record, the kind of madness he showed… or perhaps something more terrifying than madness, still had Bryce and Alyssa tightening their muscles involuntarily.
‘Oh my god.’
Alyssa frowned and sighed softly, then drew a cross on her chest.
Thank God, this video did not last long, and soon, the verbal abuse and cursing with a crazy aura came to an abrupt end.
‘…The technicians said that the pipeline for transmitting audio and video was inexplicably broken.’
In the medical room, Alyssa was taken aback for a moment, and then she recovered. She looked at Bryce and said.
‘This is the last video we collected that night, and it is precisely because of this that we still don’t know how John died and what killed him. Damn it, when I received the Helios, I proposed to replace these old antique systems, but no one wanted to. They would rather spend time and effort to expand the warehouse than spend more budget on other facilities, and now… Just look at this mess.’
Alyssa became a little chattier than before, probably because what she had done today made her feel nervous.
After a pause, she continued: ‘I covered this section with the previous video. No-one should find anything off…’
‘Thank you, Alyssa… I really don’t know what I could do without you.’ Bryce said gratefully.
However, Alyssa just looked at him, but there was a touch of bitterness in the smile at the corner of her mouth.
‘I don’t know if I did it right,’ she whispered softly.
Before meeting Bryce, Alyssa would never believe that she would do such a thing — she used her highest authority to directly steal the surveillance records of John Bronson in the surveillance facility before his death, and then replaced them with the previous records.
In this way, except for Bryce and Alyssa, no one knew the last words John yelled before he died.
And all Alyssa did was because of Bryce’s plea.
‘You also saw the attitudes of those people, especially Sorian’s,’ Bryce sighed. He turned off the reader, and then said gloomily, ‘John and Sorian have always been hostile to Lin Xi, with that kind of strange… enmity. However, the rumours they had spread indiscriminately are affecting those in the exploration team, as well as the mercenaries… I’m terribly afraid that we have been stranded for too long, and these people who’ve stayed on the ship have become more and more abnormal. Under this kind of high pressure situation, if they really push Lin Xi out and assume that he is the culprit of all these tragedies… You know what will happen, this kind of thing was not uncommon in the past.’
‘Things won’t be that bad,’ Alyssa comforted in a weak voice.
‘I also hope things won’t be that bad,’ Bryce lowered his voice, looking very worried, ‘but in order to avoid trouble, this kind of thing, I mean, John’s nonsense, it’s best not to spread it out again. We have had enough trouble, and now the most important thing is to maintain a stable state in the ship.’
After speaking, Bryce tapped the buttons and directly destroyed the storage device.
Alyssa pursed her lips, she watched Bryce finish his actions, and suddenly said, ‘Bryce?’
‘What?’
‘Lin Xi…’ Alyssa’s lips trembled slightly. She spent a long time considering her words then said, ‘What happened to him?’
‘He —’
‘Oh, don’t hide it from me, you know my “special ability”,’ Alyssa said. She stood up from Bryce, and then slowly took a few steps back, ‘I can always feel that there are some things… there were some things that made you utterly unable to control your overprotective behaviour. And this time, your behaviour is particularly strange. I have violated my professional ethics for you; I destroyed and forged monitoring records to protect Lin Xi. I have the right to know what happened in the first place… For example, this exhibition?’
‘What the hell are you talking about!’
Hearing the last word, Bryce jumped up from his seat at once, and he almost knocked over the box on the table.
‘You know… what do you know?’ He asked in shock.
Alyssa’s eyes flickered, ‘Not much, but, but, Sorian came to me before, he said some things, and those things made me very upset…’
‘All he said was just gibberish,’ Bryce said decisively.
‘But…’
‘Oh, no, I don’t want to continue this topic, darling, there is no “but”, you just need to know that no matter what those people say, it’s just nonsense.’
Alyssa stopped talking, she just looked at him in silence, with an emotion in her eyes that made Bryce feel piercing pain.
‘I have a hunch that those rumours… may not be just nonsense, something is indeed happening, and their centre point is Lin Xi. Bryce, do you know? I haven’t had a good night’s sleep for a long time, because every night I wake up in a nightmare, then I don’t even know if it’s because of my mental stress, or I really saw something.’
Bryce’s lips curled slightly. He should have continued to deny it, but in the face of such Alyssa, his reason finally surrendered.
Originally, he planned to carry that heavy secret for the rest of his life, but now he can’t hold it anymore.
‘We once swore not to speak of this matter; yes, it was Lin Xi. When we were children, a very terrible thing happened to him…’
Twenty years ago —
Country A, Arizona, Songhu Town{*}
{*I think there might be typos here: a国利桑那斯州松湖镇}
The weather was very sunny; it was the best weekend had in months.
The temperature was pleasant, the breeze was warm; people came and went near the newly completed Science Exhibition Hall in Songhu. It was quite lively; the air was filled with music, the smell of popcorn and the noisy frolic of humans.
This wasn’t a celebratory holiday, but judging from the atmosphere, it wasn’t much different.
On normal days, this neighbourhood wouldn’t be as lively as it was now. After all, since the construction of the Science Exhibition Hall, there are usually only shabby astronomical exhibitions or dinosaur fossil exhibitions in that glamorous building — Bryce’s father once said with certainty that the planets hanging above the exhibition hall with fine steel wires were nothing more foam balls and that the dinosaur fossils were merely fakes made of plaster.
This wasn’t to blame the curators of the Science Exhibition Hall. Songhu was just a small town after all, and the exhibition hall, beautiful on the outside yet ruined inside, was the product of a bribery scandal between the previous mayor and a member of the Songhu Town Public Foundation.
But in any case, it wasn’t always a bad thing to have such an exhibition hall. After all, since it was built, the extracurricular activities of Songhu Public Middle School finally have a place to go… And occasionally, a piece of flatbread will fall on the heads of the residents of Songhu. For example, the particularly famous and high-end Sunu-Earth Civilization Exchange exhibition will soon tour Songhu Town for half a month for the first time.
This was a big deal for residents of a town who had little else to enjoy than football and weekend barbecues.
Bryce had been looking forward to the exhibition almost from the day he saw the exhibition poster. Like all little boys of that age, he was full of curiosity and love for aliens.
After his repeated pleas, his mother finally let go and agreed to his request, but there was a serious agreement between them — in public with so many people, Bryce must keep an eye on the newly adopted boy in his family to prevent the latter from getting lost or having a panic attack.
‘Xiao-Xi is a child who has encountered a lot… He still needs some time to adapt to his new life, but you also know that I have to take care of Jessica. She is still a little baby, so I have to focus on her. So, promise me that you will take care of Xiaoxi for your mother, okay?’
The words of his mother were even in Bryce’s ears at the time, but now, Bryce almost cried when he thought of the agreement between him and his mother.
The reason is very simple: Lin Xi, who was previously his side, had disappeared.
It must be said that this is not entirely Bryce’s fault. There were too many people in this Sunu civilization exchange exhibition. They, their parents and several other new brothers and sisters{*} were quickly dispersed by the surging crowd. Dispersed.
{*If you know Chinese culture, you should know that we often call ppl of our generation ‘brother/sister’ regardless of their relationship. That’s probably the case here as well.}
Bryce had firmly remembered to hold Lin Xi’s hand before, but accidentally, he had let go of Lin Xi’s hand, and then his exceptionally silent and shy Asian brother was instantly wrapped up by the crowd and pushed towards the inside of the exhibition hall.
‘Bryce… Bryce…’
From a distance, Bryce could even hear Lin Xi’s fearful call.
Bryce wiped the sweat from his forehead. Maybe he could wait for his parents in the same place again. They might come back to find him, but Lin Xi — Lin Xi was lost by Bryce, so after a short hesitation, Bryce ran towards the place where Lin Xi’s voice came from.
Bryce was still a child; it was difficult to move quickly in the crowd. When Bryce was finally able to see Lin Xi’s back clearly, he realised that he had already squeezed into the interior of the exhibition hall with Lin Xi.
There were fewer people in the exhibition hall than outside, at least now Bryce can clearly see Lin Xi’s appearance.
Bryce raised his voice, looked at his brother and shouted, ‘Lin… Xi… Lin Xi! Wait for me, I’m here! Hey, I’m over here —’
Bryce could guarantee that his voice was loud enough for Lin Xi to hear clearly. What surprised him was that the other party had no intention of stopping.
Lin Xi didn’t even look back at Bryce.
He looked… looked frightened, or rather, trapped in a nightmare.
From Bryce’s perspective, Lin Xi’s face was clearly seen covered in cold sweat, even his lips pale. The thin boy’s eyes were wide and his pupils dilated, making his eyes look dark, completely without brilliance or focus.
Lin Xi was originally the thinnest boy in the Derleth family, but at this moment, he seemed to be thinner than ever before, as though someone could smash him to pieces the moment they touched him.
Then, just under the sight of Bryce, Lin Xi turned around. He walked straight towards the deepest part of the exhibition hall. The crowd was obviously so packed, when Lin Xi passed by them, seemingly unconsciously, they would turn around or move a step to make way for him, forming a narrow passage.
It seemed only a few seconds or less had passed when Lin Xi’s original voice seemed to disappear behind the crowd again.
‘Lin Xi —’ Bryce yelled, and he struggled to run in Lin Xi’s direction.
He felt that his heart suddenly became heavy and his breathing had become difficult.
It was a very strange feeling; in the words of the woman he deeply loved a long time later, it was an ‘ominous feeling’.
Perhaps one should have thanked God for Bryce was still a thin child, which allowed him to smoothly pass through the gaps between the crowd.
He didn’t lose Lin Xi, but rather followed him to the deepest part of the exhibition hall.
The setting of this exhibition hall is very hidden. After thinking about it, this layout was actually quite weird — it was so inconspicuous, and the door is plastered with signs that mislead others. It is difficult for normal people to imagine that it turned out to be an exhibition hall open to visitors.
What is displayed in that exhibition hall is the most worshipped sacred object of the Sulu people… or, in other words, their god.
And that thing… was called a Star Butterfly.
There are very few spectators in the exhibition hall where the Star Butterfly was located. In contrast to the bustling crowd outside, it was increasingly dark, cold and quiet.
The few visitors crowded next to the cage, stretching their necks and staring curiously at the contents of the cage.
And that thing just shrank motionless in the cage, as far as it could from the humans, with only two small red dots flickering slightly in the shadows.
Bryce only glanced at it during the moment he rushed into the exhibition hall, and then couldn’t help but shudder and quickly looked away.
He was already a big boy, and his age and self-esteem didn’t allow him to show timidity and fear in front of others like a child.
What’s more, he didn’t have time to be afraid.
His younger brother was walking towards the visitors who were gathered in front of the cage.
‘Lin Xi —’ Bryce shouted.
Lin Xi still didn’t look back.
Bryce ran a few steps, then he stopped hesitantly.
He stood about ten metres away from those people, looking at them with confusion.
The air conditioner in the exhibition hall was turned on very coldly. Yes, it must be for this reason, otherwise he would never shiver as he did now.
There was no communication between those people, and they didn’t even turn their heads back, but when Lin Xi approached them, they naturally gave way to both sides, giving Lin Xi a passage.
Their movements were so full of tacit understanding that the few normal visitors mixed between them seemed a little at a loss.
They looked at the people around them and Lin Xi in surprise, and then gave in a little blankly.
When Lin Xi stood in front of everyone in silence, the Sunu man standing in front of the cage also showed his appearance in the gap between the people.
That should’ve been a person who is acting as a guide, but it{*} definitely wasn’t a qualified guide.
{*The author intentionally chose ‘it’, ‘that’ to refer to the Sunu guide.}
‘*&%… ￥#￥3…’
Its words are extremely vague, sometimes sounding like English, but if one listened carefully, those words were more like meaningless mumbling.
Just like all the Sunu people, its appearance was a bit weird — face pale, limbs uncomfortably slender, facial features so abnormally flat it seemed to stick to the face — just like a poor handicraft. There were just a pair of conspicuous and awe-inspiring red eyes.
The pair of red eyes kept turning and scanning the exhibition hall.
However, when Lin Xi appeared, its eyes stopped on Lin Xi all of a sudden.
‘Lin… Lin Xi…’
The Sunu guide suddenly stopped the completely meaningless muttering, and a weird call came from its throat… No, that wasn’t a sound it had made.
It was made from behind it, the sounds of the huge Star Butterfly.
It was at that moment that the alien bug suddenly fell from the top of the cage.
Some people screamed as a result, but Lin Xi didn’t move. He stood quietly in front of the metal cage, with his dark eyes open, calmly watching the Star Butterfly slowly unfold its awe-inspiring wings towards him.
‘Do you want to touch the Star Butterfly? Oh, how rare, he likes you very much.’
The Sunu guide’s face suddenly filled with a weird smile. He bent down and stretched out his hand towards Lin Xi.
‘He likes you very, very much.’
Then, right in front of Bryce’s eyes, countless fleshy tentacles with bright colours stretched out from behind the cage. They were more terrifying than the most terrifying monsters described in horror novels, and then…
They wrapped around Lin Xi’s body.
After many years, Bryce didn’t remember whether he screamed out loud, but he was sure that he was about to be frightened into madness by the scene he saw in front of him.
Immediately after, the Star Butterfly easily tore open the metal cage, and two thin fleshy wings stretched out from inside its weird body. It wrapped Lin Xi in those fleshy wings and flew up.
‘Later —’
In the medical room of the Sun God, Bryce suddenly stopped talking, his face pale.
His breathing was extremely heavy.
For so many years, he would only ever recall the details of the accident to such an extent in his nightmares.
And every memory made him feel a kind of intense fear — the doctors said it was a kind of stress, a kind of accident trauma. After all, the science exhibition hall in Songhu Town collapsed and many people died, and Bryce was one of the few lucky ones.
Bryce heard Alyssa ask, ‘What happened next?’
His lover was obviously by his side, but for a moment, Bryce felt that she was so far away, so far away that she seemed to be in another dimension.
Suddenly, Bryce felt a soft and warm embrace. He turned his head and found that Alyssa gave him a hug.
She said to Bryce, ‘Hey, darling, no matter what happens, it’s a thing of the past, you know that.’
Bryce nodded, he stretched out his hand and tightly wrapped his arms around Alyssa’s waist, as if this gave him the courage to continue.
‘The Star Butterfly took Lin Xi and directly flew away — our buildings looked like they were made of plastic cardboard before it. The structure of the exhibition hall was destroyed, so the entire building collapsed. Everything was in chaos, many people died, and the National Guard arrived to maintain order, but it took them almost a month to find the Star Butterfly — to find Lin Xi.’
Bryce controlled his emotions, he tried to get his thoughts away from his memory, and tried to just tell the things that happened afterwards in a flat and straightforward manner.
‘Wait, you mean, one month? You only found Lin Xi a month later?’ Alyssa asked in shock.
Bryce nodded.
He took a deep breath before continuing to speak.
‘Yes, there is a camping park about a hundred kilometres away from Songhu Town. Business there is not very good. The administrator will only seriously inspect the entire park before the mountain is closed every winter.He smelled a stench next to a natural cave…’
Twenty years ago —
Huishan Camping Park
Robinson Wiley walked quickly on the rugged mountain road with the police officer.
In the past, he was a fat, even a little silly, little old man. Few people saw a sad expression on his face, but now, his face, which was red from alcohol, was crumpled. He looked sad and full of worries.
He said with a sharp voice, ‘I swear… when I patrolled there before, there was nothing there.’
“But now, it stinks so much that even dogs don’t want to get close. Oh, this is not my exaggeration. You just saw what Anne and Mary looked like, right, sheriff?’
The sheriff nodded at him breathlessly, but his physical exertion made him unable to say a word.
The Anne and Mary from Robinson’s mouth were his two dogs. They were two pretty good hound dogs; they were good helpers for Robinson when hunting every spring. They almost never made mistakes, but since they discovered the abnormality near the cave, they have never wanted to approach the mountain again — there were still several kilometres away from the cave, and they are all wailing, holding on to the ground with four paws, unwilling to go forward anyway.
‘Maybe they are just scared,’ A middle-aged police officer guessed behind the sheriff’s back, ‘after all, you found so many Sunu corpses.’
When he mentioned this, Robinson couldn’t help trembling.
When he was patrolling the mountain a few days ago, he found an anomaly next to the ‘rabbit hole’ (this is his nickname for that cave).
The side of the cave entrance was covered with muddy liquid, and it exuded a suffocating stench.
Robinson had never smelled such an unpleasant smell in his life. He thought it was a bear who died there, but when he approached, he realized that it was not a fucking bear, it was… a large corpse…
Those are all Sunu corpses, not rotting, but worse than rotting corpses, they are all turned into a weird, sticky syrup-like thing.
Only the bones could be barely seen under the melted skin and muscles.
And just as Robinson looked at the corpses so scared that he couldn’t move, he felt something seemed to be moving around in the cave.
He didn’t dare to stay there at all, and immediately ran away with the dog that was also trembling with fright. He felt that this matter was ‘very evil’ and would definitely cause a lot of trouble. He almost wanted to escape it — but a few days later, he still got through to the police station to report the matter.
‘Maybe it was suicide.’
Before they were about to arrive at the entrance of the cave, some people guessed so.
‘I heard… those Sunu people have been keen to commit suicide recently… they’ve all gone crazy one by one. Congress is in confusion, struggling with this matter.’
Another police officer pretended to be relaxed and said, ‘Yes, the Sunu people are crazy, and so are the things they raise —’
Their small talk stopped immediately when they arrived at the ‘rabbit hole’.
For a second or two, everyone looked at the scene in the rabbit hole, unable to move, unable to speak or make any sound.
The stinking mucus had already dried up a long time ago, but the bones were carefully collected by something and piled up inside the shallow cave.
The bones were piled into a shape similar to a nest, and in that nest, a chrysalis as tall as one person was standing there, squirming slowly and gently, as if breathing.
“What… the hell… is this…?’ A police officer murmured.
He turned on the flashlight and shone towards the pupa in the dim cave.
His original intention was just to let himself be able to see clearly, but after turning on the lights, another thing that made everyone feel incredible was revealed.
‘Oh my god, that, that’s…’
‘Do you think that’s a person? Or did I see it wrong…? God, I think it’s a person…’
The shell of the chrysalis was translucent, and under the light, the outline of the boy wrapped in it appeared.
After a period of panic and disbelief, the group of police finally bit the bullet and cut the chrysalis apart.Then, the young Asian boy, mixed with a large amount of slime, fell to the ground from the nest made of Sunu bones.
‘Oh my god, that boy!’
Until this time, someone finally recognized Lin Xi.
‘The boy they’ve been searching for —’ He shouted in fear.
‘They found Lin Xi and gave him a very detailed physical examination. In the next few months, he was locked up in a secret national laboratory for investigation. Of course, those guys generally call it “treatment”,’ Bryce said to Alyssa with a livid face, ‘But they didn’t find anything on him, he was just a little malnourished. After losing the value of in-depth research, Lin Xi was sent home again. He seemed to be doing well, but occasionally, he would have nightmares at night… In the end, we went to a psychiatrist, went and had hypnosis and other things for him. Anyway, in the end, Lin Xi didn’t remember anything. He only knew that he had a very pleasant exhibition when he was a child, that’s all.’
Bryce ended his memories of the past as calmly as possible.
The author has something to say:
Suddenly I felt……
In this story, the members of the protagonist group are all very serious villains.
If you appreciate what I do, please consider buying a me a coffee!
AhrihnTranslations 
One response to “[29] Mother of Insects”
So scary ! I can’t wait for next chapter ! Thanks for your work
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