Xi Yujin opened his eyes. After confirming that he was still alive, he let out a long sigh of relief.

He slowly sat up. His hair emitted a soft glow, acting as a temporary light bulb that lit the airy room.

Then he realized he was lying on a bed measuring 200 square meters.

He wasn't mistaken. It really was that enormous. The mattress beneath him was so soft that it felt as if he had sunk into a cloud. The blanket covering him wasn't fabric but a strange plastic-like membrane, hard when tapped, yet soft and pliable when left untouched.

The entire room resembled a yurt. Structural ribs converged at a conical ceiling, while the walls were engraved with intricate patterns. The higher they rose, the thinner they became, allowing faint light to seep through.

Where am I?

Xi Yujin threw off the blanket and stood up. On one wall he spotted a raised, U-shaped panel set with four egg-shaped buttons. He poked one, and it felt soft and chewy, like mochi.

That's... an odd texture.

Running his hand along the side, he found engraved illustrations of little figures demonstrating how to use the controls. After studying them for a while and deciding they probably weren't traps, he pressed the first button.

The entire room shook.

A ray of sunlight streamed through a crack overhead. The crack widened, flooding the room with light. The ochre-colored walls unfolded outward with unbelievable softness, like the petals of a flower coming into bloom.

When the petal-like walls had fully opened into something resembling a giant daisy, Xi Yujin stood atop its soft floral bed, staring in shock.

The sky was a crystal-clear sapphire blue. Mountains encircled the distance, while an immense forest gently embraced the clearing. Besides the flower-house he occupied, nearby stood many other bud-shaped dwellings, elegantly clustered together. The fresh scent of earth filled the air.

I've become a flower fairy?!

It had been a very long time since Xi Yujin had seen such lush greenery, and he found himself momentarily captivated.

He returned to the control panel and pressed the second button.

A broad brown leaf about three meters wide extended from the flower's stem. Looking down at the ground more than a hundred meters below, Xi Yujin hesitated before stepping onto it.

The leaf spiraled around the stem three times before stopping beside another large leaf. Once Xi Yujin had steadied himself on the second leaf, it set off again. The process repeated until it had safely carried him all the way down.

"So... I really came down just like that?"

He looked up at the colossal flower-house, then rubbed his foot against the soil, finding the whole experience utterly surreal.

The forest floor received little sunlight, yet countless bizarre plants flourished there. Short, fat mushrooms bore bright red spots. Purple bellflowers the size of fists swayed gently. Pale blue, hollow ring-shaped flowers held circles of sharp fangs inside their openings.

Xi Yujin accidentally brushed against a neighboring yellow flower. The unremarkable blossom instantly ballooned in size and swallowed his entire hand. He hurriedly braced himself against a nearby stone block for leverage before finally managing to yank his arm free.

"Just where have I ended up...?" he wondered.

Bzzzz...

Two winged humanoid creatures descended from the sky. Both wore masks, and most of their heads were embedded inside silver-white egg-shaped shells that looked like living eggs with their casings carefully peeled away. Only the lower halves of their faces were exposed. They wore exoskeleton armor, and two pairs of long, narrow wings beat rapidly behind them, holding them aloft.

Xi Yujin noticed that the wings weren't insect wings but mechanical devices built into the exoskeleton.

The two hovered before him and tried to communicate in several different languages. Xi Yujin picked one alien language he happened to know.

"Greetings, Grade-A Brood Host. Would you care for a meal?" one asked.

Brood Host... He's in the Zerg territory?

The Zerg were somewhat different from what he imagined...

Xi Yujin had countless questions, but this was someone else's territory, and he really was hungry. So he nodded.

The two humanoids quickly set up dwarf mushrooms as tables and long leaves as plates, then spread a layer of sweet fruit across them.

"Please enjoy."

Are the Zerg really this kind to their prisoners? Xi Yujin wondered. Or is it only because they consider him a Grade-A Brood Host?

He took a bite. The sweet-and-sour pulp was almost cloying. Looking over the assortment on the plate, he couldn't resist trying a little of each, and found every one delicious.

The two Zerg warriors showed only the lower halves of their faces, identical to one another and utterly without expression. Once Xi Yujin had finished, they collected the plate and flew off without a single word.

Well fed, Xi Yujin sat cross-legged on the grass in a daze, still unable to process the fact that he had survived.

Suddenly, the yellow flowers all around him began swelling one after another, drawing a few startled yelps.

"I really can't stand these Zerg plants..."

A figure that looked remarkably human emerged from the forest.

Xi Yujin was astonished. Aside from Gano, he had never seen another creature that was so human-shaped: one head, two arms, two legs, the right number and arrangement of facial features, and even hair.

The newcomer lit up just as much. "It's one of our own!"

Xi Yujin blinked. "What?"

"Haha! Unlucky traveler! Surprise! You've landed in a star system no one ever escapes, the Land of Abundance, the Zerg Galaxy!" The stranger flung his arms wide, eagerly awaiting Xi Yujin's reaction. "You'll become the Queen's food, just like me!"

"Oh."

"..."

"My name's Shayou. How can you be this calm? This is Zerg territory! The terrifying Zerg, who slaughter without blinking and wage endless war!" His gestures were enormous.

"They just brought me breakfast," Xi Yujin replied. "And they called me a... Grade-A Brood Host?"

Just from the name, it didn't sound like anything good. Xi Yujin began to suspect he hadn't become a flower fairy at all; he'd become a premium meal for the Zerg Queen. Still, one step at a time. He usually managed to get what he wanted in the end.

Shayou explained that the Zerg, broadly speaking, came in two kinds: broad-type and narrow-type. The narrow-type were the ones with only a single pair of arms and a single pair of legs, and they were further divided into three sexes.

The Zerg Queen stood in a class of her own. She alone gave birth to the warrior caste. Queen and warriors shared the same base DNA but differed in their number of chromosomes: the Queen carried a hundred and sixty times the warriors' ploidy, which made her vast enough to blot out the sky.

The warriors themselves were infertile, like the haploid drones of a bee colony. Among their ranks ran a strict hierarchy that no one ever overstepped.

It was the warriors who carried off breeding stock for the Queen from the outside world, captives collectively known as Brood Hosts. Brood Hosts weren't taken to provide energy; they were reserved as the Queen's nourishment, her breeding food. And the Queen had standards: the more a captive resembled a Zerg, the better, and they were ranked by appearance. If a warrior judged a creature's quality excellent but found it not similar to a Zerg, they would put it through a shell-changing surgery before presenting it to the Queen.

"I'm a Brood Host, the Queen's food," Shayou said. "Truth is, I'm a soft-bodied thing with eight tentacles. I used to be quite something, you know." He brushed back his flowing short hair. "But the moment I got here, they graded me a Grade-D Brood Host. They cut out my brain, peeled open my nerves, and packed me into this Zerg body... and every time I start to age, they just swap me into another one. They'll keep at it until my mental power runs completely dry."

Xi Yujin listened without moving.

Shayou poked him. "Scared stiff? Relax, you look so much like a Zerg so you're a Grade A with no surgery needed. Besides, their pain management is quite refined."

"I..." Xi Yujin said, "I was in a spaceship crash a moment ago. I haven't quite recovered."

"I ended up here from a navigation deviation myself," Shayou said.

Xi Yujin hesitated. "I want to leave this planet..." He wanted to find Gano.

"Do you even know what the Zerg Mother Nest is?" Shayou looked at him with pity. "The Zerg, the strongest race in the universe, war maniacs. We can't leave. I've been here... for eight hundred years."

Strangely, the words left Xi Yujin a little relieved. At the very least, this really was the Zerg homeworld, which meant Gano was somewhere in this star system. He would find him eventually.

"Whoa, hold on!" Shayou sprang up as though he'd discovered a new continent. He pointed at the enormous flower-house, then swept his arm across the vast forest. "This, this, all of this is your territory. You really are a Grade A! Your place is so much bigger than mine. How about I throw my next new-body party here? My life is unbearably dull, and it's so rare to get a newcomer..."

"A party?" Xi Yujin gathered himself; only his voice came out a little hoarser than usual. "Sure."

Shayou pointed out the nearby brood nests as they went, each with its own dwellings.

Xi Yujin walked the path utterly awed by the scenery. Towering green trees massed into dense forest, their long tendrils trailing down into pools of water. Low bamboo and shrubs were scattered at uneven heights, like natural staircases. A babbling brook gathered itself among the tree roots.

Xi Yujin had seen no shortage of interstellar landscapes: mineral-rich worlds in the outer systems, sprawling city-ecosystems stitched together from countless spaceships, places buried in yellow sand where mechanical lifeforms tirelessly impersonated civilization. But he had never seen a planet so vivid and yet so utterly untouched. It was as lovely as a fairy tale, and as warm as home.

The Blue Planet Two he had dreamed of building should look exactly like this. Or rather, this place was already like Blue Planet itself.

"Do all the planets here look like this?" Xi Yujin asked. Shayou nodded. "Pretty much. The Zerg adore green growing things. Honestly, after staring at green every single day, I'm starting to forget what my own homeland looked like."

Along the way, they passed a patrol of Zerg guards. All of them were in the same plain armor and the same egg-like shells over their heads, indistinguishable from one another. Xi Yujin slowed his step, but Shayou tugged him onward. Warriors never harmed Brood Hosts; if anything, they kept them well fed and watered. The Zerg ran on their own fixed set of rules, and the Brood Hosts had little to fear from them.

Xi Yujin felt his curiosity about Zerg society swell.

"I've brought a newcomer! He's a Grade A!" Shayou called, leading Xi Yujin to the upper reaches of a river.

Lotus leaves two meters across floated on the water, humanoid figures sprawled across them with their eyes shut, resting listlessly without a sound.

"You should try it too, Grade A," Shayou said. "It's our newest pastime." He flopped onto a leaf and casually tugged an especially large one over for Xi Yujin.

Xi Yujin was full of questions. "...What are you all doing?"

One of the figures tilted its head. "Having fun."

Sleeping on a lotus leaf counted as fun?

The figure chuckled. "It's the most time-consuming entertainment we've had in ages. It took three whole months just to get the warriors to grow lotus leaves sturdy enough to hold our weight. Come on, lie down. Savor it while the novelty lasts." Shayou nodded along in deep agreement.

Xi Yujin stood on the bank for a long while before finally pulling a leaf under himself and lying back, only half-convinced.

From this new angle, the sky's light was gentle rather than harsh. The running water hummed a soft white noise by his ears, and a coolness rose through the leaf beneath him. The little leaf-boat rocked along with the current, now quick, now slow, like a cradle. Xi Yujin had to admit it was extraordinarily comfortable.

A long while later, the drift of lotus leaves had carried them off to somewhere unknown.

Unable to hold back, Xi Yujin sat up cross-legged. "So we just... lie here? That's the whole day?" He had pictured a crowd swapping stories, trading pleasantries, and gathering intelligence over drinks. Who would have guessed that here, the Brood Hosts wouldn't say a word?

The almost-human faces turned toward him one by one, breaking into good-natured laughter.

"So you really are new."

"Give it time. The chatter will drive you up the wall later."

"Poor Grade A."

None of the Brood Hosts asked Xi Yujin's name; they just used "Grade A" as his codename. He guessed the rank was a rare one.

One Brood Host looked at him with a pained sort of look. "You look a lot like that Grade S."

Xi Yujin turned toward him.

"Two years back, the Zerg caught a sleeping Grade S. They said he was the Brood Host who looked the most like a Zerg." The speaker closed his eyes, folded his arms, and went back to enjoying his drift. "But up close, you don't really seem like him after all. He's got black hair. Yours is silver, and it glows, doesn't it? You look more like a mineral."

Xi Yujin replied flatly, "I'm a diamond, not some ordinary rock."

The Brood Hosts around him cracked up with wild exaggeration, covering their faces and howling at the tiniest joke, their laughter almost unnerving in its force.

Unable to draw anything out of them passively, Xi Yujin took the initiative. "Is there really no other entertainment here at all? Not even novels?"

The instant the word left his mouth, the listless Brood Hosts finally stirred.

Now and then, it turned out that they wrote clumsy little novels to amuse one another, the flower-house Brood Hosts writing about the ones who lived on the cliffs, and the cliff-dwellers writing right back. But none of them wrote particularly well, so they mostly ended up just chatting instead.

Xi Yujin soon learned that the Brood Hosts kept two settlements: the Forest Flower Houses, where he lived, and the Fruit Houses built into the cliffs on the far side of the planet. With nothing else to do, they had split into two camps and were forever inventing reasons to bicker.

That part didn't interest him. "So... where exactly do you publish these novels?" He wanted to get back to familiar ground as fast as he could.

"Oh, right, you don't have an Egg Brain yet." Shayou climbed up onto the bank, plucked a spindle-shaped object from a bellflower, and blew hard. A crisp, cuckoo-like call rang through the forest.

A Zerg warrior in exoskeleton armor dropped down from the sky. "Fetch the new Grade A an Egg Brain," Shayou said.

Before long, Xi Yujin was holding a soft, egg-shaped device, identical to the pale-white egg-shells worn over the warriors' heads. The first time he touched it, it was warm and soft, as if it wanted to draw his hand inside. The hairs on his neck rose on their own. He stammered slightly. "...Why is it called an Egg Brain?"

He remembered that the Glimmer particles carried aboard starships were actually cremated ashes. So this Egg Brain...

"It's made from an egg," Shayou said lightly. "Only the brain part gets specially cultivated. Fit it over your own head, and you'll connect straight to the Zerg network." Catching Xi Yujin's expression, he looked genuinely puzzled. "What processor could ever beat a living brain?"

Oh... so it's an egg grown with a brain of its own... Xi Yujin told himself to stay calm. This was the interstellar age; this was perfectly normal. Even so, he couldn't quite keep the astonishment from his voice. "...Is it alive?"

"Of course." Shayou lay back on his lotus leaf. "Our flower garden, Egg Brains, and Zerg warriors. Everything that moves in the Zerg Galaxy was made by the Queen. That's exactly why we like to stay in wild, natural places."

Xi Yujin cradled the Egg Brain, feeling its faint pulse. Looking closer, he could see soft, fibrous strands drifting inside it.

Everything that moves here was made by the Queen...

This was the Zerg Mother Nest, the eternally bountiful land.