Mother of Insects

Chapter Ten

Draft
____

After ten minutes, Lin Xi took care of himself a little, dragging his extra heavy and sticky body. He tried his best to cheer himself along the way—meeting with Talan wasn't an easy task.

Especially thinking of his strange appearance yesterday, Lin Xi's worries became more intense.

What's disturbing is that when he stepped into the captain's cabin through the metal hatch, the scene he found was more dignified than he expected.

After just one night, Talan looked even more haggard than before. He kept sniffling as he spoke, like there was some small problem with his respiratory system, the uncomfortable light in his eyes became sharper and brighter. Lin Xi knew that he might be a little mean thinking like this, but just from seeing Talan, he couldn't help but think of the rumours about his blood— it had to be said that Talan does look like a bug in many places, especially his eyes now.

His dear Alyssa was also in the captain's cabin, the poor girl also looked very haggard, with dark circles under her eyes that seemed to hang around the corners of her mouth.

Next to Alyssa, there was a somewhat unexpected person. Shizuo Ando is a short man with a baby face that doesn't match his age. He's always smiling, and like Lin Xi, he's also a mission assistant sent by the Earth-Moon Union University. The only difference is that his status was a level higher than Lin Xi's, and his research direction was Sunu's zoology.

Well, in principle, Ando is Lin Xi's boss, but Lin Xi's always gotten along with him quite well, after all, Ando's the kind of person who could hardly say "no" (Lin Xi's very convinced that it's because of this that he was packed up with him and thrown into this damn spaceship to carry out this damn mission), and many times Lin Xi would even forget that there's a hierarchy between the two— but at this moment he was very sure. The reason Talan asked Ando to come here was because of this.

As soon as Lin Xi stepped inside the captain's cabin, which had been worn grey due to years of friction, he knew that something was wrong.

When he saw Alyssa and Ando, ​​he instinctively looked at the two of them, but the two who should've been giving him some hints or gestures were becoming more and more worrisome now. When Alyssa looked at him with a dignified face, Shizuo Ando's permanent smile completely disappeared from his baby face.

"Dr. Lin Xi, I think you need to look at this and give me a reasonable explanation."

Immediately afterwards, a dry sound, like something rubbing against something, appeared in Lin Xi's ear.

That was Talan, and he spoke without even allowing Lin Xi to make a routine report.

An object contained in a small transparent seal was carefully pushed by Talan to the centre of the table.

The sealing device was like a huge glass capsule, with complex metal parts at both ends, and the indicator lights lit up regularly to signal that the life support system inside was in operation.

And right in the middle of this huge glass capsule, a weird fusiform thing was quietly soaking in the culture fluid.

Through the light blue culture fluid, you could vaguely see that under the protein-coloured translucent film, there's a layer of slender oval-shaped eggs wrapped in a row.

It looks like some kind of special pod.

Meaty, elastic— there'd be no such "bean pods" on earth, after all, those cute and delicious bean pods would never be like the one in front of him, vibrating lightly from time to time.

Lin Xi frowned and looked at the thing, especially those egg-shaped cores that trembled in an imperceptible arc. He couldn't help but feel that the "bean pods" looked a little disgusting, but when he thought about it carefully, that strange feeling of nausea, like prickly thorns of miscanthus piercing the skin, had no reason at all.