Moon Theory (ABO)Ch92 - polaris, the northern star

[inner city, nexus]

Xie Liwei’s combat boots leave bloodied prints. vXqEP5

His uniform is in no sightly state – smeared with grime and gore, the liquids dripping onto pristine tiles. The only undamaged accessory is his golden insignia, one solid bar that rests along his shoulder pads and the collar of his shirt. Holstered on his belt is an obsidian rifle the color of his hair.

He bangs open the door.

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The eminence of his posture is enough to freeze all persons in the room. Or perhaps it may be the unclean state he is in – and Lieutenant Xie Liwei, prim and proper, is never seen with more than a speck of dust on his uniform. His eyes are a harrowing dark brown, brimming red. On the floor are glass shards and detached tubes, fallen stethoscopes and oxygen masks. To the front are thermometers and suction apparatuses, a baby scale not yet used.

“L-Lieutenant Xie,” a nurse calls out to him in fright. “Your… child is…” XLgYCo

To the front is also a beautiful blonde woman. Her blue eyes crinkle upward when she sees him – and she had been expecting him for a long, long time. Xie Liwei arrived late.

His expression cracks. He rushes up to her.

He brushes a palm against her cheek gently. The action is apology and despair all in one. Though he hasn’t said anything yet, his fiancée reciprocates with a subdued smile – ‘it’s alright,’ she seems to hint, ‘at the very least, you’ve come.’

“You are back,” she says teasingly. “To leave your wife alone during childbirth, what have you got to say for yourself, my cold-hearted Lieutenant?”

They aren’t married – only engaged, as their rings indicate.

“Mn,” he cajoles anyway, placing a kiss on her forehead, “I came back just now.”

She shifts her arms and shows him a tiny little thing. And how small the newborn is – premature, barely the size of his two fists. The newborn is nearly swallowed whole by the blanket, buried snug in layers of soft cotton, quietly sleeping in her arms. A docile one, he is.

He’s born with soft tufts of white hair. Purely snow white, just like the color of his skin, and Xie Liwei belatedly wonders if he’d grow up with any more melanin. How odd for the newborn to look this pallid, this fragile, like he’d break with a flick of a finger. peH2d

Perhaps the oddest thing are those ears of his – shaped triangular, grown on the lateral of his skull, above where human ears are supposed to be. The spots under them are covered in more soft white hair. Odd.

Xie Liwei tentatively hooks a finger by his small mouth. The newborn reacts. Two tiny fangs try to prick his skin, but it is futile no matter how hard they try. The lieutenant barely feels the sensation.

“…Hm.” He looks at the newborn with an indecipherable gaze.

Then a pair of eyes open to look at him. Golden on the left, sapphire on the right – the same shade of blue as his mother’s. However, those small pupils are in vertical slits. Unhuman and also astonishingly, hauntingly beautiful. The lieutenant’s expression cracks imperceptibly. aF6Hw1

His fiancée hooks an arm around his neck and pulls him toward her.

“My dear lieutenant,” she whispers with a soft smile. “Will you name him instead?”

We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.

“—Lieutenant Xie,” a nurse gasps by the exit of the room. Her body is trembling in fear – perhaps from him, or perhaps from the unhuman newborn thing. “W-What should we do, Lieutenant? Your fiancée is infected and… and your son… what is he… N-No, what is it…?”

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He turns. Each shot of the rifle is deadly accurate. Five nurses lie lifeless on the floor, their mouths partially hung open in shock. They hadn’t time to scream before he fired.

“’Xing’ for star,” his fiancée says with a smile. “It is fitting, I suppose.” xUhJEK

The lieutenant seems to think about it before shaking his head. “It is the ‘Xing’ of prosperity.”

She laughs, dips her head forward and gives him a long kiss. The infant jostles between her arms and lets out an inaudible whine. Quite a cute noise he lets out – Lieutenant Xie thinks it’s unbefitting of his appearance.

“Hold him?” his fiancée murmurs by his lips. “He is your son, after all.”

He nods. YVNX8r

Before she hands the newborn over to him, they hear a low shuffling outside the door. Immediately, Xie Liwei raises his rifle and shoots with disregard. The bullet ricochets off an EKG machine and misses by a frightening inch. The person yelps – an unfamiliar female voice – but she doesn’t sound scared nor unnerved.

“…My goodness!” The woman wipes away a bead of sweat. She dons the same blue scrubs as did the other nurses, but she seems older, more mature and experienced. The head of this ward, most likely. She walks inside the room and doesn’t glance at the bodies on the floor. With her hands raised up, she says, “I am Dr. Edith, the head obstetrician. I was the one who helped deliver your son, Lieutenant Xie, so it wouldn’t be proper to point that thing at me.”

“Elena Edith,” he reads off her nametag. He continues to point his rifle at her and says coldly, unhesitatingly, “Cover up the incident. If any word gets out, there will be no proper ending for you.”

The woman swerves her sight to the corpses on the floor, looks back at him, and only sighs softly. “As you like, Lieutenant Xie, but your own ending… will be plighted.” AKjvQ7

Some hours later, the nurses’ deaths are recorded as accidental – one person’s exposure to infectious chemical samples, leading to more unfortunate, undetectable deaths. The Nexus issues a notice for the ongoing maintenance of a more secure radioactivity-screening system. Soon, officials say, automated systems will be in place.

Some days later, rumors circulate that Lieutenant Xie’s son had been born healthy and that his fiancée, suffering from postpartum complications, would retire from the military. A brown-haired, blue-eyed child, they’d reported on the official records, is kept away from the eyes of the public for reasons unknown. And unrecorded, those who pried had begun to disappear.

A week later, Brigadier General Price dies in an ambush by the Equatorial Plains. The public had gone into an uproar –  ‘who would take his place?’ Speculations hold it would be the young Lieutenant Xie, a genius ahead of his time. Speculations also hold that Lieutenant Xie had instigated for the brigadier general’s death in a selfish pursuit of power. He had deserted his team, they say. If not for that, a skilled general would not be lost, and humanity would not be shredded of hope.

It is then that the infamous Xie Liwei would amass hundreds of thousands, millions of kills all on his own. And no one would dare doubt his power, nor would they question the mysteries of his past. OVyYH4

—

[five years later]

The beautiful woman grabs the small boy by the base of his neck and sinks him low into the bathtub. Bubbles form out of his mouth. He tries to struggle out of her grasps but in futility, and soon, he remains pliant and hopeless underneath.

“I’m going to kill you,” she speaks with a sob. “I’m going to kill you… I’m sorry… I will…” yHwOxv

The water is pinkish, spreading redder where he is being drowned. It isn’t only his blood. The woman, too, is bleeding profusely out of her neck. A patch of white fur covers from the lateral of her head to down. There is a deep claw mark cutting down to collarbone. She looks crazed. And so does her child with a pair of angled ears protruding out of his head, a pair of sharp bloodied fangs, black claws in lieu of nails.

The water is clouded an ugly, murky color. It stings his unfocused eyes.

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The woman is crying beside him. “You should not have been born, Xie Xing. I’m sorry, Xie Xing. It won’t hurt anymore… your mother will promise…”

Xie Liwei had opened the bathroom door to such a scene. RWiLs7

The walls are scratched up, the concrete cracked – signs of a heavy struggle, a conflict that is still ongoing. His fiancée is specter-white, even paler than his child is.

“Luna,” he speaks waveringly, “what is wrong?”

His lover turns to look at him – her blue eyes glow in the dark.

“…Oh…” She has trouble focusing. “Oh… Liwei… our child has turned… No… it was me… I don’t… I don’t know… Liwei… what should I do?” rkThu9

“We…” Xie Liwei’s words are caught in his throat. “We will find a way.”

—

“He is covered in bruises. I think it can be written as domestic abuse, Brigadier General Xie.”

The person who speaks is a young boy no older than ten years old. He has soft black hair and amber-brown eyes. A pair of thin rimmed glasses is propped on his nose bridge. The boy’s facial features are not yet matured, but he holds scholarly exquisiteness, an intellectual aura far beyond his age. yddN0g

His genius is reflected by his way of speech as well – certainly, young children are raised to be intelligent in an era of selectivity, but this boy can hardly be compared to.

It should be amusing to see a preteen sitting on a too-large swivel chair, tapping his fountain pen on the office desk. In front of him are piles of textbooks, more piles of documents, notepads that may be stacked taller than he is. Somehow, the boy still looks refined.

“It is not something she can control,” replies Xie Liwei in front.

“Because your wife is not abusing him out of free will, so the crime can be ignored.” AxjW b

“My reasoning is there is no other safe place I can send him.”

“But you don’t care about his wellbeing,” the preteen says. His amber eyes are all-knowing. “It is ironic that you brought him here for me to… make ‘friends’ with.”

Hiding behind another chair to the left is a frail young child. His heterochromatic eyes peek out from the back frame. The boy is clearly scared to be here in this fluorescent laboratory. He stares at the countless sharp objects around them – scalpels, glass shards, scissors – and his figure slightly shakes.

“Treat him as an experimental subject and nothing else,” Xie Liwei says. “But it would not do to get attached, Shi Luo.” 2j7zlm

“Why is that?”

“Because when he dies, there will be needless sentimentality.”

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“It is interesting,” Shi Luo says. “And you were hoping that I will grow up to find a cure for your son. Suddenly, you no longer care.”

“There is little hope for his survival,” the man responds. He turns toward his son. “Xie Xing. Come forward.” 8VdMHt

The child jolts upon being called. He moves very hesitantly. Shi Luo watches attentively.

“He is obviously scared of you,” Shi Luo notes down. “Your son isn’t developing healthily, Brigadier General Xie. Children should not act like this at the age of five.”

“And children your age are hardly as developed as you,” Xie Liwei says factually. “You are an outlier as well.”

“Of course,” Shi Luo responds. “I was raised by you.” Xn386d

“Regardless,” the man only replies to change the topic, “I leave him to you.”

He leaves.

Inside the laboratory, only the two of them remain. Shi Luo pushes up the frame of his glasses and examines the other for a long time. Pindrop silence overtakes the vicinity, and the younger boy begins to shift in discomfort. Through Shi Luo’s critical lens, he can measure a multitude of things – the boy is constantly fidgety, frightened, nervous, everything negative. The boy’s appearance on the other hand… is one of a kind.

“Xie Xing,” he calls out to him. “Your name is Xie Xing?” HuzJwZ

The boy may be startled into nodding hesitantly.

“I am Shi Luo, five years older than you,” he says. “Come here.”

Xie Xing comes over, flinches when he’s patted on the head and stays motionless when his hair is ruffled. It is a minute long of placating him with gentle kneads that Xie Xing’s eyes brighten visibly – and oh, there is a surge of interest, a sudden need that wells up deep inside Shi Luo’s core.

A need to protect, maybe, for the young boy looks so easily broken. Perhaps a need to study, for the experimental subject is so different from all others. DLrddt

When he takes the young boy in a hug, the latter seems to freeze before reciprocating. Small hands reach out for him, slightly trembling but so very eager – and oh, the boy is the type to latch onto any person mildly friendly. How trusting of him. Desperate the boy is, like he hadn’t ever been shown affection. Shi Luo feels certain sympathy.

Or perhaps what he feels is something much darker – a sort of undefined compulsion.

Be it a product of his scientific mind, Shi Luo is very fascinated with unknown things.

Author: and this chapter concludes general xie’s backstory, with a bonus cameo of shi luo ~
what is going on inside the general’s head? his character is quite vague, and his actions are a little contradictory ! FtfwXp