translator: loop
Chu Si’s life had been far from long.
Planetary law required full criminal responsibility to begin at age 30 and full adulthood at 35, so 60 would be the prime of life.
If he was born somewhere like Butterfly Island or Feijia City, where one could be comfortable all year round, a person of his age would’ve probably just graduated from university less than six years ago.
Six years, in the planet’s general life expectancy of the early 200s, was really too short a moment. It was likely the youthfulness that came with university had not yet completely faded away.
Compared to such a life, Chu Si’s life was indeed a bit too turbulent—
He was born in Xixi City, known as the eye of hell. It witnessed the creation and destruction of the planet’s forces, and was the center of the planet’s unity and collapse. It was the city with the most complex population composition when interstellar immigration was prevalent, and also the place with the most dead bodies when the hundred-year interstellar chaos broke out later.
The year Chu Si was born just happened to be the 20th year after the end of the great chaos. Interstellar immigration was jointly banned, and a full 120 years after its establishment, the general government of the planet had finally cleaned up all messes and stabilized its development.
But the forces of chaos had not yet completely disappeared, and from time to time they would collude with other planetary governments to take the lead, like an endless race.
As the city with the gravest historical legacy, Xixi City had newborn children becoming orphans every day.
Chu Si was one of them.
If Xixi City was the eye of hell, then the city’s orphanage fell into its dark and deep pupil.
But Chu Si could not be considered too miserable, because he only stayed in the orphanage until he was eight years old, when he was adopted.
The person who adopted him was Jiang Qi, one of the three major weapons experts in the military at the time. Jiang Qi studied all his life, had no wife and no children, and was a lonely person. In 5661 he passed by Xixi City to attend a military meeting when he met Chu Si, who became his son.
But the good times did not last long. In the seventh year of his adoption, the Fort Barney Incident broke out, in which Jiang Qi and a number of important members of the military and government were all killed.
The year was 5668, and at the age of fifteen, Chu Si was placed in the White Eagle Military Sanatorium. There he met Sa’e Yang, who was also fifteen years old.
At that time, you could vaguely see a shadow of what would happen later in Sa’e Yang, but at that age, he only seemed extraordinarily rebellious. On the contrary, Chu Si had extremely serious psychological problems at the time, such as being gloomy, reticent, and solitary, and was more like a future prisoner than Sa’e Young.
They spent twelve years at the White Eagle Sanatorium, during which they completed the White Eagle Independent Military Academy. When they graduated they were just 26 years old, far from adulthood.
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.
At the age of 27, nine of them entered the training camp together.
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Chu Si stayed for an unprecedentedly short time, leaving camp after only two years.
But Sa’e Yang took even shorter than him, staying only one year.
In 5681, when Chu Si was 28 years old, he said “goodbye” to Sa’e before he left camp. It was one of the very few conversations they had that was calm and unemotional, and it was the last of its kind.
Two years later, the camp was placed under the Security Building.
Two more years later, they fell apart as opposites, and Sa’e Yang was wanted worldwide.
For seventeen years after that, Chu Si heard all kinds of news about Sa’e Yang again, either in mission files he had received or from the various joint official documents issued by the General Government, the Military Department, the Security Building, and the Space Prison.
It wasn’t until 5702 that Chu Si retired from his position as Executive Training Officer of the training camp because of the high degree of damage to the left side of his body. The first official document he handled after transferring to Office No. 5 as the Executive Officer was about Sa’e Yang—
The outlaw, who had played cat and mouse with the government for seventeen years, was finally in prison.
In retrospect, every important event in their sixty years of life seemed to be entangled with each other, and it was almost like they shared a doomed fate.
However, the connections and entanglements involved could not be explained clearly in just one or two sentences.
Chu Si was too lazy to explain this to irrelevant people, so he casually waved his hand at Jin and said, “Talk less, just keep up, I won’t let you lose your life.”
With such a guarantee, Jin immediately felt more relieved and stopped asking questions. He took the thin wrist of the little mop and followed behind obediently.
The location of Fort Barney was very remote, far away from human settlements, surrounded by undeveloped primitive forests.
If there wasn’t anyone leading the way, it was impossible to get around this kind of forest, and there may not even have been a place to stretch one’s feet.
Even with Tang leading the way, they still had a hard time keeping up.
Jin pushed aside the dry grass that was as tall as a person, and huffed, “These grass stems are full of fucking thorns. If I make a fist with my left hand, it’ll look like a hedgehog.”
“Unfortunately, no hedgehog wants to look like you.” Tang jumped over a trunk on the ground, turned around, and reminded, “Watch your step.”
“I can’t see clearly even with my eyes wide open.” Jin said angrily.
Chu Si looked up between the gaps of withered branches and fallen leaves, and saw a close yet distant sea of stars spreading from one side of the fragment to the other.
Like this dark night, it had no end.
He accurately stepped where Tang had stepped and crossed over the trunk. Just two steps later, he heard the muffled sound of a blunt object hitting the ground.
Jin fell down on the ground with a loud “ow”.
“Shhh…!” Tang snapped his head back and gave him a warning glare.
Jin’s cry stopped abruptly. “I jumped over the fallen tree, but I never expected that there was a smooth branch ambushing where I landed, and I slipped…”
Half of Tang’s face was hidden by his oxygen mask, but there was a nine-out-of-ten chance he was gloating. He raised an eyebrow and asked, “Where are you sitting?”
Jin said with a gloomy face: “Sitting on a grass stalk that fell on the ground. I think I’m probably going to die.”
“No, at most you’ll have a thorn in your butt, there’s medicine at the base.” Tang couldn’t hide the smile in his voice.
Jin gave him two silent middle fingers.
The little mop was still standing behind the trunk of the tree. She raised her foot and considered, then silently retracted it. With her short legs, she probably couldn’t cross. If she accidentally slipped on the trunk, she would suffer the same torture as her dear father.
“You really are a talented person.” Chu Si said coldly, lifting Jin, whose limbs were stiff, then crossing the tree trunk to pick up the little mop. “Alright, let’s go.”
“I’ve noticed you’re much gentler with the kid than you are with me.” Jin pouted and shuffled behind them.
Chu Si didn’t speak, but in front of him, Tang laughed and replied casually: “You should be glad you haven’t been in the training camp. If you were trained by our executive for five years, your legs would go weak whenever you saw him. But he’d have some patience with the little brats, especially the ones that seemed to have been raised badly.”
Jin: “…”
They walked for about ten minutes before they finally saw a little light.
It was an assembled modular house. Judging by the light from the windows, there were about seven rooms, arranged into a circle, surrounding a dark courtyard.
The opening of the circle became the courtyard door.
Such a base seemed… a little too simple.
As soon as they approached the base, a few windows were pushed open, and several heads popped out, calling: “Tang! Did you find a flyeye—wait a minute! Why did you bring people back?!”
“Where the hell did you find them?”
“Dug them out of the ground?”
The rush of questions was not at all joyful, but for some reason, it made people suddenly relax.
After coming out of the cryo-capsule, Chu Si realized for the first time that they were indeed alive and well, and maybe if they lived a little longer, they would be able to return to normal again.
“Let’s talk about the flyeyes later, you don’t want to know who I found,” Tang said to them. “Get ready to line up and shout grandpa.”
Everyone: “…”
Chu Si: “…”
The moment the three of them stepped fully into the base, Chu Si heard the “ding” of messages ringing in those rooms one after another.
Someone muttered: “God, could you extend the range more?! People have already stepped into the base before our communicators alert us, a fucking bullshit defense!”
Hearing the word “communicator”, Chu Si subconsciously glanced down and pulled out his communicator, swiped a few times, and brought up the message interface. The message he sent to Sa’e Yang by mistake was still lying quietly at the top, without receiving the slightest reply.
Chu Si: “…” Well, after so long without any movement, the escaped prisoner Mr. Yang was basically furious.
loop: Don’t forget to divide all ages by 2 to get the age in our time.
I forgot to read this chapter! 😭