"Jump!"
The male voice was deep, and the tone was calm.
Jump?!
In Su Mi's previous understanding, "jump" was just a simple verb. But after joining the military, she knew that this word also represented something she had never had the chance to experience – superluminal space jump.
She opened her eyes and saw a hazy white mist and the vaguely brown cabin ceiling behind the mist.
She wasn't dead. She was lying in a refrigerated cabinet, and the refrigerated cabinet was on a Cheetah spacecraft. The light enveloped the Cheetah – they were in the midst of a superluminal jump.
As she woke up, the chill became instantly more pronounced, and she had to huddle up. Then she saw a tall figure approaching the top of the refrigerated cabinet.
It was Mu Xiting.
"Miss Su." He looked down at her. "This can slow down the hatching of the larvae in your body."
"Where... are we going?" Her teeth were chattering violently.
At the moment of waking up, she was very nervous. She thought she was already dead. And when she woke up again, she thought she would be back on Earth.
Shang Zheng hadn't killed her after all. It must have been a stun gun.
Mu Xiting glanced in the direction of the cockpit and, when he looked back at her, his face grew even uglier.
"I really want to shoot you dead." He didn't answer her question. This was the first time Su Mi had seen such murderous intent on his face.
She was silent for a moment and then said, "So, is the director going to save me?" There must be a certain price to pay, otherwise why would Mu Xiting want to kill her? He was only loyal to Shang Zheng.
Mu Xiting didn't say anything, and Shang Zheng's deep voice came: "They're here to pick her up, Xi Ting."
Su Mi was slightly startled – so it was Shang Zheng who had just executed the jump? He was a high-ranking official. Could he actually pilot a Cheetah? And even perform such a complex piloting skill as space jump?
Mu Xiting almost immediately replied, "Director, let me take her!"
Su Mi looked at his rare excited expression. Take her? Where to?
However, Shang Zheng didn't answer, clearly rejecting Mu Xiting's proposal. After a while, Su Mi saw Mu Xiting leave with a sullen face.
There was a noise in her ears. The cabin door was opened, and there were many people's footsteps. They greeted Mu Xiting. The footsteps sounded again, and the cabin door closed again, and the inside of the Cheetah was suddenly quiet.
Then, only his footsteps, steady and step by step, came over.
Shang Zheng finally came to her. He raised his hand to open the refrigerated cabinet, grasped her waist with both hands, and lifted her out.
Su Mi was in a daze. This was the first time she had seen Shang Zheng like this.
He was wearing a silver-gray spacesuit and a helmet. The bulky and clumsy spacesuit looked neat and trim on him. Behind the visor, his face was as calm and handsome as ever.
Su Mi was freezing cold. Her face was bluish-purple, her hair was covered with ice chips, and her hands and feet were numb. She almost subconsciously wanted to burrow into his warm embrace, but as soon as she moved, she froze.
There were bugs in her body.
In a flash, his powerful hands grasped the base of her thighs – he had picked her up horizontally. There was even a hint of a smile on his somewhat blurred face behind the visor.
"Director..." She murmured. Was he really going to save her? What method did he have to save her?
"You said it yourself..." He carried her and sat down in the pilot's seat. "Death isn't可怕. Because we don't know where we'll go after death."
Su Mi was stunned.
A sense of foreboding welled up in her heart. She had seen his madness and his disregard for his own life. A bizarre thought rose in her mind –
Wasn't he going to save her? Was he going to die with her?
Her body gradually regained some warmth, but just thinking that the bugs in her body could wake up at any time made her shudder with fear.
At this moment, Shang Zheng took off his helmet, removed half of his upper garment, revealing his muscular arms. Then he reached out to remove her military uniform and grasped one of her slender arms in his hand.
"This is an anti-radiation agent." He said calmly and injected a dose of the drug into both her and himself. "The bugs can't absorb this drug."
Before Su Mi could react, he had already reached out with one hand to touch the control panel.
"Jump." His voice was calm.
Instantly, a dazzling light shone. Su Mi propped herself up on his thigh and was surprised to see that the Cheetah was surrounded by a sea of silver light.
The space transfer was completed in an instant.
Almost immediately, Su Mi felt a strong sense of nausea and dizziness.
"This is a nebula with severe nuclear radiation pollution, three hundred light-years away from the Eternal Galaxy." Shang Zheng's voice was calm. "Whether you or the bugs die first... It depends on luck."
Su Mi coughed violently several times and looked up to see that outside the Cheetah was a vast expanse of grayish-white, as if shrouded in mist. And in the vastness, there seemed to be faint orbs of light.
The nebula with the most severe nuclear radiation?
Su Mi slowly looked up at him: "Director, you're crazy!"
Shang Zheng's voice was cold: "I said I like the feeling of being on the verge of death."
These were the most uncomfortable ten minutes in Su Mi's twenty-three-year-old life.
Under the perturbation of the nebula's airflow, the Cheetah jolted like a sieve. The inexplicable dizziness and nausea hit her like waves, one after another, getting stronger each time. Soon, she was exhausted by these feelings.
But it wasn't just that. The muscles all over her body felt as if they were being ground down bit by bit by a roller. It was a rotting pain, as if the muscles on her body were disappearing bit by bit.
She looked up in horror and saw that Shang Zheng's face was terrifyingly hideous – his usually handsome tanned face was now bluish-black all over. Especially around the eye sockets, it was instantly black and sunken, like a dying person. In just a minute or two, he looked as if he had been seriously ill, his whole body emaciated, with a dense layer of sweat on his forehead.
It wasn't hard to imagine that she looked just as hideous as Shang Zheng at the moment.
But he was looking at her, his eyes deep and dark, as if he were not on the way to death, but to a feast for her and him.
Time passed minute by minute, and the two of them endured bit by bit.
Su Mi was so dizzy and nauseous that she could only use her last bit of strength to grab Shang Zheng's arm to prevent herself from sliding to the floor. Although Shang Zheng's situation was better than hers, his face was getting uglier. When the plane jolted violently, he raised his hand to support the control panel to avoid falling.
They were both almost at their limits. But only six minutes had passed.
However, just when Su Mi's resistance and willpower were about to reach their limits, an uncontrollable pain suddenly came from the muscles that had lost consciousness.
"Ah!" Su Mi, who had been clenching her teeth tightly, suddenly let out a shrill scream. Pain, it was so painful! It was as if someone was tearing her muscles apart bit by bit.
The larvae! It was the larvae! They had woken up from their deep sleep in the low temperature and were making their final struggles.
Su Mi could hardly describe that pain. She could almost feel small foreign objects wriggling all over her body. And each of their tiny struggles brought her a tearing pain, making her roll around in Shang Zheng's arms.
"Kill me! Kill me!" She grabbed Shang Zheng's lapel, sweating profusely. "Please kill me!"
"Shut up!" His cold voice rang in her ears. "Endure it!"
But Su Mi could no longer hear his words clearly. She felt that same terrifying pain in her head too. Tears blurred her eyes, and the fine veins on her forehead began to bulge. She almost grabbed Shang Zheng's narrow waist with a hideous expression and opened her mouth to bite his muscular chest.
But at this moment, her chin was firmly pinched by him, forcing her to look up at him. Immediately after, his arm suddenly tightened, as if he were going to embed her into his body.
She saw his face up close, and suddenly, strangely, she calmed down.
The pain in her body was still there, and she was trembling all over like a spasm. But Shang Zheng's resolute face was like a dark lightning bolt, instantly illuminating her muddled consciousness.
The coldness, arrogance that she was familiar with, the ruthlessness, unruliness that she was afraid of, all disappeared. Only the man with a strong and handsome face, as handsome as the lonely starry sky, was deeply engraved in her eyes.
His eyes were pitch-black and deep, as if they could hold the whole universe. He was holding her so tightly that his broad and solid chest enveloped her small body.
At this moment, she seemed to hear his silent but resolute declaration – they would not die.
As long as he was there, fate would bow its head.
"Shang Zheng..." She heard her own voice, softly calling his name. She saw her black nails and bloodless fingers slowly stroking his cold and resolute face.
At this moment, she forgot the threat of death and ignored the sensations in her body. In the turbulently jolting radiation nebula, she only saw the resolute and unyielding look on the man's face, as if he was fearless of any threat from the universe.
So this was the real Shang Zheng.
Such a Shang Zheng was full of a reassuring power without even having to say a word.
"Like a ghost." He stared at her, his voice low.
Su Mi wanted to speak. She opened her mouth but found that she had no strength at all. She looked at him and suddenly wanted to laugh.
And Shang Zheng, looking at the faint smile slowly blooming on her face in his arms, said nothing.
He suddenly lowered his head, and his already bluish-black and cold lips gently pressed onto hers.
Why...
She silently questioned in her heart.
He could have any woman he wanted. Why did he keep saving her again and again?
Why was it her?
However, Shang Zheng seemed to understand the doubts in her eyes. Ignoring the harsh environment around them, a hint of a smile actually rose in his deep black eyes.
He didn't answer but began to bite her lips and tongue heavily, as if he wanted to swallow her whole without leaving a trace. At the same time, he punched the control panel with his fist.
Su Mi's vision was filled with a brilliant white light. Had ten minutes passed? She relaxed in her heart, and then her eyes went black, and she slid weakly into his arms.