Chapter 204: Wanting to Know More About You: He Stripped Away His Disguises, and Now He Wants to Strip Off His Clothes Too

Beneath the starry sky, fireflies flew low. Lying on the thick military cloak, surrounded by pleasant scents with a Zerg he trusted beside him, An Ruo found the whole setting so comfortable and relaxing that he became intoxicated by it, almost wanting to fall asleep right there.

Ulysses asked him, "There's a small wooden cabin at the bottom of the hill. Would you like to go inside and sleep for a while?"

An Ruo propped himself up and looked over. Sure enough, there was a small wooden cabin standing at the foot of the hill.

It was built on the grassland beside a stream, looking beneath the night sky like a place that existed only in fairy tales.

He got up and walked down the hill with Ulysses.

Afraid that he might fall, Ulysses held his hand, their bodies naturally staying very close together.

It was the kind of distance that could only exist between two people who trusted each other and were intimately close.

An Ruo still remembered how frightened he'd been when Ulysses first stripped away his disguise, the panic and fear he'd felt as the great villain closed in on him step by step.

He should have been afraid of Ulysses, yet right now, he had absolutely no desire to escape from his side.

He was even willing to go out with him at night, watch the stars on a hillside with him, kiss him, and then explore a mysterious little cabin in the wilderness together.

Trust, intimacy, and affection outweighed everything else.

Even knowing full well that he was the great villain.

His great villain.

An Ruo curled his fingers around Ulysses's hand in return, enjoying the feeling of strolling beneath the night sky with him.

Ulysses turned his head and glanced at him, his attention remaining on him the entire time.

They entered the cabin and turned on the lights.

Warm yellow light filled the room, making the interior seem exceptionally cozy.

An Ruo looked around. The cabin had been decorated with quite a bit of charm, carrying the rustic appeal of pastoral life in the wilderness.

It was just that bed...

Layers upon layers of thin, soft, pale mattresses in different styles had been piled together, making it look like an elaborate, beautiful cake.

It was also quite obvious whose handiwork this was.

An Ruo turned his head to look at Ulysses beside him.

Ulysses narrowed his eyes slightly and coughed before asking, "Would you like to try it?"

He really couldn't bring himself to take the male to stay in a cave.

Only uncivilized wild Tianjia would do something like that.

So instead, he had prepared this cabin.

The bed beside the window had been modeled after the palace-style soft bed in the book, with some rustic patterns and colors added to it, making it fit perfectly inside the wooden cabin.

"Please rest assured," Ulysses promised him. "I would never behave as roughly as that Tianjia."

He would absolutely never act like the Tianjia Emperor, caring only about his own pleasure and pressing the male down into the mattresses.

An Ruo didn't understand the latter half of what Ulysses was saying, though it sounded as if he were talking about Ares.

There really were fundamental differences between the Zergs and Tianjia.

No matter how powerful and proud a Zerg was, he would still respect a Male Zerg and care about his feelings more than a Tianjia would.

As for whether he wanted to try the bed, there wasn't another bed here anyway. Since they'd already come all this way, he might as well give it a try.

He took off his long outer garment, then suddenly realized that since there was no other bed, Ulysses would be sleeping with him too?

After their previous experience, An Ruo wasn't particularly opposed to the idea.

If anything, he vaguely looked forward to it.

He looked forward to sleeping with Ulysses and having a late-night conversation in bed.

Seeing that An Ruo had no objections, Ulysses went to shower and prepare himself first.

Even a little cabin like this had its own dedicated bathroom.

An Ruo glanced at the closed bathroom door. He had showered before coming out and didn't feel dirty, so he decided not to shower again. He changed directly into his pajamas and got into bed.

The sound of running water came from the bathroom.

There was water outside too.

An Ruo paused and looked through the window, only then realizing that it had started raining.

Fortunately, they'd come inside early. Otherwise, they would have gotten soaked.

Outside were open fields and fine, drizzling rain. Inside, he sat in the cozy, quiet cabin, feeling exceptionally peaceful.

Ulysses took rather a long time in the shower. Quite a while passed before he finally came out.

He climbed onto the bed from the other side and hugged An Ruo from behind as he watched the rain.

An Ruo smelled a pleasant fragrance.

"Would you like me to stop the rain?" Ulysses asked.

His tone was so casual and matter-of-fact that it sounded as though he were talking about turning the room lights on or off.

An Ruo knew that advanced planets such as Capital Star could intelligently regulate their weather and even their temperatures.

But hearing a Zerg mention controlling the rain so casually still left him blank for a moment.

Only afterward did he shake his head and say, "No. I like the sound of rain. It's pretty good as background noise for falling asleep too."

Ulysses committed that to memory, then kissed him amid the sound of rain.

Without realizing it, they gradually lay down, sinking into the soft blankets.

It was a long time before An Ruo finally got a chance to catch his breath.

"I want to know more about you," Ulysses whispered beside his ear.

An Ruo found it a little ticklish and uncomfortable. Laughing, he turned his head away and asked, "What part of me?"

"All of you. Everything."

Ulysses spoke quietly. Beneath the blanket, his hand rested at An Ruo's waist and hips, brushing over the soft hem of his pajamas as his silver eyes gazed deeply at him.

Everything.

That sounded terribly greedy.

"You already have a lot. Leave me a few secrets."

An Ruo had never met a Zerg as perceptive and intensely curious as Ulysses.

On their first visitation, he'd stripped away An Ruo's disguise as a Male Zerg. On the second, he'd stripped away his disguise as the author.

And now he actually wanted to keep digging deeper!

An Ruo really didn't have any clothes left for him to strip away. Please have mercy.

Ulysses, however, had no intention of stopping there.

Desire was endless. Once you obtained a little, you wanted more.

Once you received someone's favor, you wanted to become their favorite. Once you became their favorite, you longed to go one step further.

"What if I'm insatiably greedy and want even more?" he asked.

What else could An Ruo do?

Of course he could only satisfy him.

He pulled Ulysses's hand away from his body, held it in his own, and thought for a moment before saying:

"All right. Let me think about how to explain it..."

"You know I'm not a Zerg, and I'm not a creature from this world either," An Ruo slowly began.

Ulysses thought he was about to say that because they came from different species and different worlds, they couldn't be together.

For a moment, he became anxious and wanted to say that none of that mattered. Even the virtual Male Zerg Roy could be together with Morris.

But then he heard the male continue:

"I'm a human. Humans are... Mm, actually, there isn't that much difference in appearance. We just don't have your original forms."

Male Zergs themselves had long since forgotten what their original forms even were, so put that way, the differences seemed even smaller.

Ulysses wanted to know more about him, so An Ruo began telling him about his past.

For as long as he could remember, he'd lived with his grandparents. He rarely saw his parents even once a year, and their relationship was distant.

Ever since childhood, he'd loved novels, comics, and all kinds of stories. His imagination would run wild inside his head, though only a small number of those ideas ever made it onto paper.

In middle school, he'd had his own story notebook, where he recorded his characters, stories, and settings. Every page even came with simple little illustrations he'd drawn himself.

The earliest version of Ulysses had been born during that time.

He didn't like sharing his stories with people he knew in real life. Those stories remained sealed away inside his mind and inside that notebook he would never show anyone.

Then, after the college entrance examination, he was abruptly freed from the crushing burden of schoolwork, and his life suddenly became empty.

He reorganized his stories from the beginning, added new settings and background lore, then published them online.

And so, his first book in the true sense of the word came into existence.

His writing had been immature back then, and everything was still inexperienced. He wrote entirely by instinct, but perhaps the passion he poured into the story was particularly moving, because he gained his first group of readers.

He had poured too much effort and emotion into that first book. He had made himself cry many times while writing it. He was always the first person to shed tears over his own words—for the protagonist, for each of the minor characters, and for the villain.

When the great villain in the story finally reached his predetermined ending, An Ruo felt as though his own heart had become empty as well.

Afterward, it took him nearly half a year to recover. He continued writing new books throughout university, but he never opened that first book again.

Then he graduated from university.

His grandparents passed away one after another. When he returned to sort through their belongings and handle their affairs, he unexpectedly found the story-and-setting notebook he'd kept as a child.

When he opened it, intending to reminisce, he...

Transmigrated.

"You already know everything that happened after that..."

An Ruo said, "The moment I opened my eyes, I was in a courtroom. The judge sentenced me to 999 years and ordered me taken to the Military Region Prison to serve my sentence. Before I could even say a single word, they put a suppression collar on me and dragged me away. In the middle of all that chaos, I saw you... and at that moment, I understood."

It was his story.

It was the plot he'd personally written, even though that particular trial had never been directly depicted in the novel.

Everything had already been decided.

A brutal Male Zerg deserved to be imprisoned. There was no changing it and no room for negotiation.

An Ruo believed that as the author, he also bore a certain amount of responsibility for having written that part of the plot.

And so he had simply allowed himself to be taken away.

Even if he hadn't wanted to go, he couldn't have broken free or escaped. There had never really been another choice.

Fortunately, prison life turned out much better than he'd expected.

He actually liked it there quite a lot.

"I'm sorry." Ulysses gently held him, his brows tightly furrowed as he said remorsefully, "I didn't realize it back then..."

Actually, he had noticed something slightly unusual.

That one glance the "Male Zerg" had given him at the time had made him sense that something was wrong.

But he hadn't investigated further.

He'd been too busy then. It had been right in the middle of the Marshal's succession, and he hadn't had the time or energy to investigate someone thoroughly just because of a single glance. Nor could he possibly have imagined that the Zerg had been replaced by someone else.

It wasn't until report after report arrived and more and more suspicious details accumulated that he watched the surveillance footage and decided to personally meet that "unknown life-form" inside the prison.

He had thought of many possibilities back then and formed countless hypotheses. Even after he later tricked An Ruo into revealing his identity as the author, Ulysses had still only been speculating—this time, speculating that An Ruo was a "God."

But the version of himself described by the male was completely different.

He didn't believe himself to possess the mighty power of creation.

He didn't think he was some higher-dimensional deity.

In his own account, he sounded like an ordinary individual just like Ulysses, someone who had lived his own life until one day he accidentally stumbled into this world...

And was subjected to inhuman imprisonment.

An Ruo was cuddling close to Ulysses to comfort him, smoothing away the furrow between his brows, when Ulysses suddenly sat upright.

An Ruo looked at him in confusion.

"Would you like to leave the prison?"

Ulysses asked him, then continued urgently without even waiting for an answer:

"I'll handle it immediately and bring you out. None of this has anything to do with you. You never should have been imprisoned there in the first place."

He had originally believed that remaining in prison was part of God's game, and that performing Psychic Soothing was some sort of daily game quest.

Looking back now, he'd been far too presumptuous and had failed to notice far too much.

At the thought that the male had been imprisoned against his will for so many months, Ulysses's face turned slightly pale.

An Ruo stared at him blankly.

How had they suddenly gotten onto the subject of leaving prison?

"But... but what about my sentence?"

"That has nothing to do with you. It was never something you should have had to bear. I'll take responsibility for it," Ulysses said.

An Ruo could tell that he wanted to bypass normal procedures and simply get him released.

That wouldn't be easy, even if Ulysses was the Marshal.

Too many Zergs knew about the case. The long-term Psychic Soothing sessions and the group Psychic Soothing had also drawn far too much attention to him. Even while he remained inside prison, countless eyes were focused on him.

If he were suddenly released, it would create a terrible impression and have extremely negative social repercussions. It would also be unfair to Ulysses. If people learned that Ulysses had personally released him, it would damage his reputation and undermine the public's trust in him.

An Ruo refused.

"I really like prison. I don't want to leave."

That was the truth.

He was very familiar with the place and satisfied with his current environment. If he were suddenly forced to leave, it would be like being dragged out of his safe haven. He wouldn't know what to do with himself.

He had no home outside.

He trusted Ulysses, but not yet to the point where he would leave his own little nest for him.

Trust was one thing, but he couldn't simply intrude on Ulysses's life.

He couldn't demand that Ulysses take responsibility for him.

Ulysses couldn't understand how any Zerg—or any human—could possibly like prison.

But he could tell that An Ruo was telling the truth.

There was genuine fondness there, but it was mixed with many other reasons.

Rather than saying An Ruo liked prison itself, it would be more accurate to say he liked the stable environment the prison gave him.

Ulysses understood him very well. Once he removed the filter of believing An Ruo possessed divine power, it was easy to see what he was thinking.

Ulysses hadn't given him an environment secure enough to rely on.

An Ruo didn't trust the world outside.