Haiying intended to leave immediately, but he received a summons from Queen Ubit.

He and Baiying listened for quite some time before lowering their heads reverently.

"We obey Mother's command." Afterward, the two exchanged helpless glances.

Baiying chuckled. "No need to rush after the thought criminal; we're heading to the Brood Hosts planet anyway. Once we've finished Mother's mission, we can just arrest him while we're there."

Haiying ignored him, his entire body radiating icy rejection.

"Don't tell me... you don't want to carry out Mother's mission?" Baiying asked tentatively.

Haiying's expression darkened, and Baiying immediately knew that he'd guessed correctly.

"The Brood Hosts are Mother's property. Mother needs Brood Hosts to breed the next generation. We have always kept that in mind." Haiying's voice was gloomy. "No loyal warrior should share Mother's food. Even if... the Brood Hosts are handed to us in the name of Mother's affection."

As a Nurturer, he devoted his body and soul to the reproduction of the Zerg.

Yet their Mother had not truly reproduced for a very long time, and most newborn Zerg came from thawed cryogenic eggs instead. The wartime reserves were enough to keep the Zerg going for ages, but their Mother's own life seemed to have stagnated.

It filled him with unbearable anxiety. Every cell in his body was clamoring that they had to keep their Mother alive...

One troublesome matter followed another.

First, his armor had been stolen two years ago. Fortunately, he had captured a Grade-S Brood Host by chance at the time, but their Mother didn't even spare it a single glance.

Now, that armor had brought its junior back into Zerg territory. That Level Four warrior was very unusual, and perhaps his permissions should have been reassessed. But that Level Four soldier escaped from prison.

Moreover, a thought criminal appeared among the Brood Hosts, and who knew how many of them had already read it...

And then there was that damned Nesting Assembly.

"Prepare the aircraft. We'll patrol the Brood Hosts' planet."

Despite all his worries, Haiying still obeyed all of the Queen's orders.

...

"A love that burns hot and free... Grade A, are you planning to escape with that guard?" A Brood Host approached Xi Yujin and asked.

Xi Yujin didn't directly admit it.

"That's just a novel."

"I'm not here to report you. After enduring so many years of boredom, I'd almost forgotten that I once had the freedom to travel the universe." The Brood Host spoke in a dreamy tone. Then, with a serious face, he shared something.

"Among the Zerg, to prevent mimicry infiltration by the Intelligent Machines, every electronic device connected to machinery is shut inside a heavily guarded cave prison. In theory, your starship should be on the medium-objects level."

Xi Yujin froze in bewilderment.

"I once thought about escaping myself, so this information is free." The Brood Host waved a hand and simply walked off. "Remember to update before you go!"

Xi Yujin shouted after his retreating back, "I've got a good pit record*!"

Then he muttered, "This is probably the meaning of writing."

The Blue Planet and Zerg's elopement plan finally made new progress.

The Tidal Peace was in a cave prison.

"Cave prisons generally hold outsiders," Gano said. "Warriors are strictly forbidden to enter."

Xi Yujin pondered a vague plan while Gano went off on patrol again.

Suddenly a sound tore through the air in the distance. An enormous aircraft descended like a meteor, its long tail of flame streaking across the sky, the roar rolling in like a tide. Xi Yujin stopped to watch.

Times were tense, but he had to look unhurried. Thus, he decided to grill honey strips.

When he felt that the honey strips were about done, Xi Yujin lowered his hands. That's right, he was baking them with his own body heat.

The Zerg had no open flame. They mostly used biological microwave heating, and the device looked like a three-legged frog on the outside, so Xi Yujin didn't want to use it. He peeled the honey strips off the stone slab, which had been scorched red, and put them into a basket woven from leaves.

"My cooking skills have really improved a lot." Xi Yujin muttered.

"You still have the heart to grill honey," Shayou said softly beside him. "That's a high-rank Zerg ship. They've come early. They're probably here to... observe us."

Xi Yujin said, "Observe?"

"You know what nesting means." Shayou plucked two large leaves to imitate a pair of insect wings. "And Queen Ubit's little quirk is holding Nesting Assemblies for her children."

Xi Yujin complained in all sincerity, "What kind of sick hobby is that, handing out the leftovers a Mother didn't finish so the children can amuse themselves?"

Blue Planet's most melodramatic literature can only admit defeat.

"That's not the point!" Shayou grew anxious. "Once nesting is complete, a Zerg warrior's physical constitution rises noticeably. The high-ranking Zerg will all come. Maybe not necessarily to this planet... but the strength of the guard here is going to increase exponentially." What he was implying became obvious.

In the past, nesting Zerg warriors would find some other creature that caught their eye and wrap it up in their insect wings. It was commonly called the "little black room." Once the nesting was finished, the creature inside the wings would either be dead or crippled.

But now, the Queen introduced a more delicious sort of nesting partner: the Brood Hosts.

Warriors looking to raise their strength naturally came, and the "Observation Period" was when the Zerg warriors picked out their Brood Hosts.

With this, Xi Yujin and Gano's escape plan gained another layer of difficulty.

Xi Yujin took out a honey strip to bribe Shayou and asked, "How many Brood Hosts does a Zerg warrior usually pick?"

Shayou's answer was not what he expected. "Roughly one or two?"

"That few? Don't the high-ranking Zerg want to raise their combat strength?"

Shayou shrugged. "How would I know?"

Xi Yujin faintly felt that he'd found something out of place. He asked again, "Then how many Brood Hosts has the Queen eaten so far?"

Shayou thought about it.

"Long before I got here, the Queen had already stopped eating Brood Hosts."

Shayou went on, "Different Queens treat Brood Hosts differently. Some Queens don't manage us at all, while some Queens put us to compulsory labor. Go over that mountain, and the fields there are ones we planted. Only Queen Ubit holds Nesting Assemblies."

Xi Yujin was lost in thought.

What on earth did this Queen want?

What secret were the high-ranking Zerg hiding?

...

Three giant ships landed on the planet one after another. But Xi Yujin never saw a shadow of a high-ranking Zerg, and guessed that they were all observing in concealment. After all, in their eyes, Brood Hosts were frail and couldn't withstand a single blow.

Gano's range of movement grew more and more restricted. Even so, he successfully fooled the high-ranking Zerg and disguised himself as a low-intelligence guard. The two of them secretly met in that tense, thrilling atmosphere.

To avoid trouble, Xi Yujin had been holed up in the flower chamber writing, and this was his new persona: the socially anxious writer!

He updated Third-Rate Lover rapidly, conveying the love between the protagonist and the Law Butterfly, which was tangled up with both interest and ethics.

He found some inspiration in the Zerg Queen and the Nurturers, and added a few more strokes.

[

The Law Butterfly narrated: "I am Mother's child, and also Mother's lover. But one day, the young Mother wanted to end our relationship. She called over several young butterflies and said that she wanted to introduce us to one another... Doesn't my heart count as a heart too? I know she must be testing me. My heart burns like fire, yet I refuse to return to the shore."

]

—This is a love that breaks through worldly convention!

As he wrote, he lifted a crack in the flower chamber and glanced outside. He didn't know the situation on the other planets, but some time had already passed since the "Observation Period" began. So... at this moment, most of the high-level Zerg would be at the Nesting Assembly.

Xi Yujin was struck by a flash of inspiration.

That Egg Brain world, there should be very few high-ranking Zerg in it now, right?

The Egg Brain world was the Zerg's old battlefield, so it was a good place to study them.

Xi Yujin took out the heavy Egg Brain, and his hands trembled slightly. He needed to understand the Zerg to successfully escape with Gano.

So he took a deep breath, placed the Egg Brain over his face, and let his consciousness sink.

Gurgle, gurgle. Gurgle, gurgle.

The Egg Brain seemed to be sucking up his brain fluids.

After a roller-coaster wave of dizziness, he found himself on the streets of the old battlefield, and the usual prompt popped up before his eyes: Wata Battlefield.

The artillery on the battlefield made his ears hurt. He tested it and found that his stellar energy couldn't be used inside the Egg Brain world.

Gano brought him here before, so he followed Gano's example and went to the rear of the battlefield first. He took a suit of ordinary guard armor and walked out into the streets openly.

Ordinary guard armor really was heavy. He couldn't trigger the flight device and could only walk the streets stiff-limbed. Fortunately, nothing happened along the way.

He only encountered Botanical Officers wearing veiled hats.

"A very large portion of the Zerg warriors are responsible for planting. But it doesn't seem to be for better living conditions. When they fight a war, they still live aboard starships." Xi Yujin mused.

"What kind of race plants greenery everywhere they go?" Xi Yujin thought over it again and again. He even tried comparing the Zerg with the various races he met.

The many-headed higher race, the Green Clan? They didn't look fond of green at all.

The La who lived aboard the starships? But their planting habits came from the Zerg in the first place.

The Flash Clan? The Longhair Clan? The Four-Sided Clan?

The creatures of this universe did not love plants the way people of Earth did.

"That's not right." Xi Yujin suddenly froze. "In this universe, a creature who finds a new planet and immediately wants to plant things on it..."

"That's me..."

When Xi Yujin took part in the starship belt's Planetary Art Exhibition, his very first work was Seed Odyssey. He expressed countless times that he wanted to remake that climate-suitable planet into a blue and green color.

Because his hometown, the hometown he could never return to, Earth, was blue and green.

More confusion welled up in Xi Yujin's heart.

He continued walking.

"This is... a Zerg subspecies!"

Xi Yujin's eyes went wide as he watched eight transport officers leading an unimaginably huge worm.

It opened an abyss-like mouth, the sharp teeth inside unfolding like a lotus. The transport officers wore armor as thick and heavy as stone, holding what looked like fishing rods for reins, guiding the Zerg subspecies behind them along.

Besides the space worm with its mouthful of fangs were floating space jellyfish, dense swarms of tiny scout insects, and sand worms like volcanoes on the verge of eruption...

The Zerg's gene modification technology was famous throughout the universe. The Zerg Queen was an even greater master of biological modification.

With Gano's past warnings guiding him, Xi Yujin avoided the Botanical Officers and the transport officers and slowly edged over to that gigantic Nest Tree.

The green mosaic Queen was resting at the very top.

Sure enough, there was no sign of those Nurturers anywhere near the Nest Tree. Far from the battlefield, the place was steeped in a strange stillness.

"Along the way, apart from military intelligence, I haven't seen any writing Zerg. Does the Zerg really have no literature at all?" Xi Yujin found it odd, and in the spirit of being already there, he took a look inside the Nest Tree.

He was at the very bottom level, where densely packed eggs were heaped into little mountains. It was enough to set off his trypophobia.

Looking up, he found that the interior of the Nest Tree was hollow, and he could glimpse the scene on the upper levels. Crisscrossing passages linked the nests at their different heights.

Xi Yujin walked in and nearly got lost. It was too quiet there, quiet enough to be uncomfortable.

Winding past mountain after mountain, he suddenly discovered that at the center of the Nest Tree stood a towering trunk running all the way to the summit. Its smooth surface was carved with vivid murals, and beside them stood row upon row of unfamiliar characters made of intricate strokes.

Up close, the trunk measured over two hundred meters in diameter, and at such scale, even the fine, delicate murals took on a sweeping force that made the visitor seem small and insignificant. At the very bottom of the murals, an alien creature stood upon the land, spreading its wings toward the star in the sky.

Xi Yujin was certain this was important information. He quickly noted down the murals and the characters, and felt a hazy sense of understanding of some of it. He logged out at once and copied the text down in the flower chamber.

When Gano slipped into the flower chamber that night, he translated it into a language Xi Yujin could understand.

It turned out to be the Zerg's early history.

Xi Yujin's heart pounded like a drum.

When a Queen builds a Nest Tree, she builds the central trunk herself. Some painted well, some wrote badly, but all of them told this same history. They needed this first-generation history to remind themselves of the significance of their journey into the universe.

Long, long ago, many civilizations in the universe moved beyond the isolated-planet era and entered the era of violent colonization. Higher civilizations plundered lower ones at will, and even disregarded their lives.

Among them was one higher civilization that treated carbon as an essential resource. They discovered a planet with active carbon resources on it. Although the journey to collect it was somewhat long, they broke through every difficulty to establish a mining fleet. The results were gratifying. The carbon resources there were not only active, but they were even renewable.

The only trouble was that the carbons were too active. Occasionally, a phenomenon called a "carbon eruption" would occur, in which the carbon resources actively heated the surrounding environment until the mining fleet suffocated to death. The higher civilization called this situation the Carbon Calamity. Thus, the citizens of the higher civilization regarded mining as bitter work.

The Carbon Calamity could not stop the higher civilization's development, and they grew more and more powerful. In order to take possession of this carbon-rich planet, they decided to send out mining fleets in still greater numbers, and ideally to build company facilities nearby.

Then, one technical consultant suddenly said, what if those active carbon resources were carbon-based life? What if the so-called Carbon Calamity was a lower civilization fighting back?

The higher civilization roared with laughter. They had explored the surrounding region for so long and had never seen a single carbon-based lifeform.

"As everyone knows, only sulfur-based life can endure the oxygen-free environment of the universe."

"The environment on the 'carbon planet' is far too harsh, but there's a huge amount of oxygen. If we're going to collect carbon resources on a large scale, we should fire a planet-destroyer cannon and burn all their oxygen away."

"Good idea. But to be safe, let's use our highest technology to build a precision survey ship first."

And so, this ship, carrying survey missions like "large-scale collection of carbon resources" and "burn away the oxygen," headed into deep space, sailing toward that planet.

One day, it crashed on the planet. The higher civilization thought nothing of it and prepared their next project.

But it was in that brief gap of time that the nightmare of the universe was born.

An enormous creature raised its head out of the hydrothermal water, its mouthparts giving off a high-frequency hum. Its tentacles were soft at first, and a few seconds later, they became as sharp as blades. It shook itself several times and flung off a layer of wet membrane. As the sunlight evaporated that mucus, the membrane gradually transformed into wings like steel.

"Morality will only become my shackles. In this universe, only savagery endures..."

"No civilization is needed! I exist for revenge alone!!"

The Zerg Queen spread her enormous wings, broke free of gravity, and her silhouette gradually merged with the star. Behind her, the planet that had raised her was already riddled with holes, without a single life left on it.

As she flew across the heavens, all of the past was already forgotten, every trace of civilization stripped away, and she became a monster of raging fury.

In her hazy memory, the name of that planet would flicker now and then like a star. And so, she named herself after that planet.

The fireworks of vengeance burned across the universe, and wherever she went, not a single civilization survived. She landed on a lonely wilderness planet and gave birth to armies of her own. Some children were responsible for raising the next generation, some for fighting on the front lines, and some for planting, trying to restore the blue sky and green trees of that distant dreamland...

No civilization dared to call her the Carbon Calamity again. The creatures of the universe called her and her children the "Zerg."

From then on, the Zerg stepped onto the stage of the universe.

"Revenge and rage are the original intent of the Zerg's birth..."

Xi Yujin sat in the flower chamber, leafing through several translations. The name of the first-generation Queen was consistently pronounced in every translation.

"The first-generation Queen was called... Ers."