Chapter 57
Qin Huan's reaction was within Shen Qi's expectations. Since he chose to provoke Qin Huan by unveiling the truth, he was prepared for the imprisonment play.
After all, he had been alone for twelve years. He could endure a little longer. Besides, now he at least had Qin Huan for company.
Plus, it wasn't a dark little room. It was a transparent room filled with whatever he needed. Life couldn't be more leisurely.
Of course, he was disgruntled about one thing — losing internet access.
Without the internet, he felt like a salted fish.
Frustrated, Shen Qi clung to Qin Huan, monopolizing his time, and constantly demanding for his computer for entertainment.
"Ha ha ha…" While gnawing on a sugarcane, Shen Qi watched the latest comedy, laughing to his heart's content.
Qin Huan, sitting beside him, failed to comprehend the amusement in the wildly implausible plot.
Shen Qi didn't care. After all, Qin Huan had cut off his internet access. He tried to steal the recovery tool on Qin Huan's device, but without his superhuman strength, he had to admit defeat.
Regardless, he was only trying to cure Qin Huan by spending more time with him.
Shen Qi figured it out. Qin Huan's insecurity and lack of confidence stemmed from betrayal and subsequent trauma.
Yes, it was about lacking confidence.
Despite Qin Huan's seemingly cold and imposing demeanor when facing outsiders, he had been emotionally hurt. Coupled with his disfigurement, he longed for trust and intimacy, yet he feared both.
Therefore, it manifested as a need to control and possess.
He chose to imprison and restrain Shen Qi out of fear of losing him.
Shen Qi crunched on the last bit of sugarcane before handing the base to Qin Huan. As he watched Qin Huan throw it into the trash bin, he smiled contentedly and gave him a kiss.
These days of being pampered weren't too bad.
Having the crown prince of the empire as a servant — he must be the only one to have experienced such a thing.
Naturally, he felt a sense of pride thinking about it.
It's fortunate that it was him and not someone else. Otherwise, it would have led to a painfully intense love story with heart-wrenching pain and mutual destruction as its ending.
Shen Qi decisively pushed the sugarcane away and arrogantly said, "I don't want sugarcane, I want an apple. Peel one for me."
Immediately, Qin Huan took an apple and a knife from his space belt, dutifully peeling the apple for Shen Qi. The fingers that once controlled a mech suit swiftly carved out a beautifully-peeled apple. He then sliced it, inserted a small fork, and handed it to Shen Qi with a tender look. "Here you go."
"Feed it to me," Shen Qi shamelessly pushed his luck.
Qin Huan, filled with indulgence, forked a piece and brought it to Shen Qi's mouth.
Shen Qi took a bite and couldn't help but feel that life was even more comfortable than before.
However, as soon as two hours passed, Qin Huan promptly switched off the computer and pulled Shen Qi onto his lap. "As we agreed, you get to surf the internet for two hours, then you have to spend an hour with me."
But he hadn't finished watching the show!
Shen Qi, in protest, grumbled, "I've been with you this whole time! Weren't you just here?"
Qin Huan seemed to ignore his words and began undoing his clothes. "Be good and don't make a fuss."
Shen Qi played with the thought, "How about this, get the computer to project onto the ceiling. You do your thing, I do mine. We won't get in each other's way. How does that sound?"
Qin Huan paused, then smiled gently. "Okay."
Half an hour later, Shen Qi laid in bed, wanting to cry but unable to. The projection was up, but in this position, how was he supposed to watch?
The more he struggled to turn over, the more excited Qin Huan became. He left a trail of bites on Shen Qi's back, the stimulation causing Shen Qi to forget about his drama and lose himself to desire.
In another half an hour, the alarm rang. Shen Qi snapped back to reality and turned to look at Qin Huan. "The hour is up!"
Qin Huan licked the bite mark he left. "I'll do my thing, and you do yours. Neither of us will be delayed."
Shen Qi: ...
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After about two months of indulgence, it seemed Shen Qi's docility was affecting Qin Huan's strict regime. Sometimes he would even take Shen Qi out for a walk-about, though that was limited strictly to the mountaintop, when he wanted to expand the glass house and needed Shen Qi out of the way.
After their walk-around, the glass house was nearly doubled in size, evidently pre-constructed and brought over for installation.
The newly expanded glass house now included a desert and snowy landscape, both with astonishingly accurate temperatures. Shen Qi was left dumbstruck.
Life in the star system was good, wonderful, chirping with life.
And thus, Shen Qi's Longyang's Anthology got new experiences, having ventured into both desert and snow plays, a blend of heat and cold.
Shen Qi thought things were moving in a positive direction, until one night he woke to find his bed empty, Qin Huan was gone.
At first, he thought it was accidental, but further incidents revealed a pattern — Qin Huan would disappear every other night and return only in the wee hours of the next morning.
Shen Qi immediately contacted Vick.
He had, before deciding to tell Qin Huan the truth, been communicating with Vick on the matter. Vick had realized Qin Huan's irregularities even before Shen Qi and had personally witnessed several times Qin Huan's violent outbursts.
Vick had met Qin Huan in their fall to the star system. Qin Huan had saved Vick's life and assisted him in avenging his annihilated clan, making Vick's loyalty to Qin Huan beyond question. The same went for He Yun and Dong Yan, all three willingly following Qin Huan, ready to go through fire and water for him.
He Yun and Dong Yan, one careless, one evasive, temporarily failed to notice anything wrong with Qin Huan. Vick, being close at hand, could not be fooled by Qin Huan's attempts to hide his issue.
Originally intending to find a way to help Qin Huan, Shen Qi's appearance aligned with Vick's motive, particularly with Shen Qi's 90% gene match with Qin Huan.
Hence, when Shen Qi approached Vick, he agreed without hesitation.
They devised a treatment plan behind Qin Huan's back, setting up a secret code for communication should Shen Qi be isolated.
Thus, when Qin Huan was in a video call handling political matters with Vick, Shen Qi pretended to greet him and signaled their agreed diversion. Vick promptly adjusted his decorative glasses in response.
One night, when Qin Huan once again disappeared, Shen Qi woke up, walked into the kitchen, and found a signal scrambler at the bottom of the refrigerator. He deactivated it and immediately connected to Vick via the built-in computer.
The video call connected almost instantaneously.
"What's going on?" Shen Qi asked directly, confident that Vick would understand his intent.
"Is the Crown Princess well?" Despite his overly worried face, Vick didn't forget courtesies, "The prince's condition hasn't improved. It seems to have worsened."
Shen Qi frowned: "Didn't they say this method would work?"
He didn't understand psychology well, so he let Vick bring in a psychological expert. The fact that the crown prince had a psychological problem couldn't be made public, so they couldn't let the psychological expert directly interact with him. They had to find a roundabout way, so Vick found someone with a similar problem for reference.
And the advice given by the psychologist was stimulus therapy — first stimulate, bring the problem to the surface, then comfort.
"Please look at this, Crown Princess," Vick opened a video, "The Prince left in the middle of the night for the Dark Realm. I didn't dare get too close, so I only managed to film it from a distance."
The Dark Realm was a place where interstellar pirates and fugitives gathered. It wasn't fixed and existed in the form of a floating marketplace, with large and small Dark Realms scattered across the entire galaxy. The people there were elusive, roaming from one place to the next, making it impossible to track and eliminate them completely.
The video footage was surprisingly clear. It was unknown how Qin Huan discovered these Dark Realms. Cloaked in black, with a hat covering his hair and a grotesque mask on his face, he silently appeared on a pirate spaceship. He proceeded to the -1 level where the guilty gathered and killed them all.
Shen Qi furrowed his brows. What caught his attention wasn't Qin Huan's killing spree — those criminals deserved death — but his emotional behaviour.
The mask obscured his face, leaving his expression hidden, but his cold eyes gave Shen Qi an ominous feeling. Clearly, this wasn’t just about Qin Huan’s killing; it seemed like self-flagellation.
Before he murdered someone, Qin Huan would let them injure him first. The more wounds he received, the more excited he seemed. By the end, his whole body was drenched in blood, making it impossible to distinguish which was his own and which belonged to his victims. His body was covered in various degrees of wounds.
Shen Qi's countenance darkened. Technically, these wounds were not severe. A trip to the medical pod would leave him without a scar. However, this behaviour was distressing — it was self-inflicted harm!
Qin Huan seemed to have noticed Vick's presence but disregarded it, returning to the imperial star while allowing his wounds to worsen.
As the video ended, Vick’s complexion mirrored Shen Qi's, "I've consulted with the experts; their consensus suggests it's both a good and a bad situation. The good part is that it has stimulated the prince's repressed emotions. The bad part is that if left unchecked, it could worsen. If it goes beyond a certain limit, it will be far worse than superficial wounds."
"So, what now?" Shen Qi almost clenched his teeth, furious that his partner had resorted to self-harm.
Vick suggested, "In that case, I recommend you establish a spiritual bond with the prince as soon as possible."
Shen Qi was taken aback for a moment. As the name suggests, creating a spiritual bond refers to connecting and melding the two parties' spirit realms. Once such a bond is established, the two cannot be separated in this lifetime.
This approach has its pros and cons. On the positive side, those pairs that establish a bond often have high genetic compatibility, and enforcing the bond can effectively calm down their partner's spirit realm and prevent a mental breakdown.
On the negative side, if one party dies unexpectedly, the other one would be unable to receive mental comfort from anyone else, and could experience their spirit realm withering away, eventually leading to their death.
In addition, there's a side effect that might be beneficial to some but detrimental to others. Once the bond is established, both parties will be exposed to each other's thoughts, akin to mind-reading.
For this reason, many people, especially those from aristocratic families, choose to keep their bonded partners at home, away from danger. Some even keep a bonded partner for the sake of family connections while maintaining a separate marriage.
Of course, ordinary citizens don't have these concerns. Most choose to marry someone they love and have an emotional connection with. Only a few, either driven by ambition or coincidentally attracted to someone chosen by the gene bank, choose to marry based on genetic compatibility.
Shen Qi was of course willing to establish a bond with Qin Huan, but the latter had refused him twice, citing the considerable disparity in their spiritual powers as the reason.
Shen Qi previously guessed that Qin Huan feared revealing his deep-seated, dark thoughts after the bond, for fear of scaring him. Now, it seemed that his assumption was correct. If any normal person saw their boyfriend or husband engaging in self-harm due to emotional issues, they'd surely panic.
Biting his finger in thought, Shen Qi decided to discuss a detailed plan with Vick while Qin Huan wasn't present. Following the end of their video call, Shen Qi acted swiftly, modifying the monitoring system. He ensured that no one would notice even if he left his place.
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