Chapter 61: I Know It, Is It Amber?
The Snow Crystal cat mother looked as though she wanted to say something, but when she parted her lips, her voice was so hoarse that no sound came out. She urgently patted her swollen belly, then pointed directly at Su Wudeng, her eyes already swimming with tears.
“Does your stomach hurt?” Su Wudeng asked quickly. She unlocked the cage and carefully scooped the mother cat up into her arms. The creature felt shockingly light. Su Wudeng gently cradled her belly to offer support, murmuring, “Don’t be afraid. Sister is taking you away right now.”
She figured the mother cat was simply terrified because she was on the verge of labor.
It wasn’t just this one; the other cat mothers inside the cages were in an equally frail condition. However, they remained deeply suspicious of Su Wudeng, stubbornly refusing to come out and instead curling up tighter into the corners, shivering uncontrollably.
“Don’t be scared,” Su Wudeng comforted them in a soft, soothing melody. “I’m going to evacuate all of you right now to get you properly examined and treated.”
“Once you’re all patched up, you’ll be healthy and strong again, alright?”
As she spoke, she gently placed the Snow Crystal cat back into the enclosure. Since the others refused to budge, she had no choice but to take the cages along with them. Time was slipping away; she needed to transport them back to the battleship immediately to begin emergency triage. The vessel was equipped with the medical scanners she had pre-ordered earlier.
She had originally procured the gear as a failsafe for Amber and Qingqing, but it was proving to be a literal lifesaver now.
“Forced system recall, execute!”
In a flash of light, she materialized back inside her hotel suite alongside the cages of cat mothers. Without wasting a breath, she ordered an automated hover-car to rush them directly to the battleship’s hangar bay.
“Faster, please!”
The situation was critical. She didn’t dare lose a single second, nor did she have the time to stop and notify the rest of her team.
By pure coincidence, Yu Lan spotted her frantic departure from the lobby. Sensing the emergency, she sprinted after her and managed to slide into the hover-car just before the doors sealed.
The two girls arrived at the hangar in a blur of speed, and Su Wudeng immediately wheeled the cages straight into the battleship’s intensive care ward.
When her eyes locked onto the frail forms laid out across the automated triage tables, Yu Lan gasped in absolute horror. “Where did you find this many pregnant cat mothers?”
The visual impact of the scene was devastating. The cats were emaciated to the bone, making their massive, swollen bellies look profoundly grotesque. Their vital readings were plummeting rapidly on the monitors, flashing crimson alerts that suggested they could slip away at any moment.
“Their biological baselines are in critical decline…” Yu Lan muttered, staring at the telemetry screens with mounting dread.
By then, the medical systems had initialized their scanning cycles, automatically administering micro-doses of a concentrated nutrient solution to stabilize the animals’ failing hearts. Su Wudeng hovered anxiously near the console, her hands clenching as a barrage of red warning windows popped up across the main interface.
The diagnostic reports were universally bleak.
Fortunately, the core world medical tech she had purchased was exceptionally robust. Within seconds, the AI core compiled a complete, multi-tiered emergency protocol. The automated robotic arms engaged silently, beginning the intricate procedures, leaving Su Wudeng with nothing to do but wait.
Glancing over at Yu Lan, a sudden spark of relief touched her eyes. “Yu Lan, thank heaven you followed me. I need you to anchor yourself here and monitor the medical systems for these cat mothers.”
The system imposed a strict weight and volume ceiling on how many living entities she could phase through the map coordinate at a single time. Her only operational choice was to prioritize the felines first, meaning she had to return to the uncharted forest to extract the remaining survivors in waves. Now that Yu Lan was here to manage the triage ward, Su Wudeng could safely execute the remaining extractions.
“Go, Sister. Don’t worry about this room; I’ve got them covered,” Yu Lan responded instantly, stepping up to the monitoring station.
“One more thing—get word to Xiyao and the patriarchs of the legacy families. Inform them that our departure window has been pushed forward. Ask if their logistics teams can manage an immediate launch. If their packing protocols aren’t finished, tell them to stay locked down; I’ll return with a secondary transport fleet to collect them later!”
Leaving her sister with those rapid instructions, Su Wudeng bolted from the ward and phased straight back into the uncharted forest map.
Surveying the ruined compound, she noted that the chained giant bear’s biological signatures were the most volatile, so she prioritized its mass for the immediate next wave. The remaining captives were either deeply comatose or suffering from systemic bacterial infections, but fortunately, none were actively red-lining into code-blue status.
Once she had successfully cleared out the old, the weak, and the critically diseased, she finally marched toward the high-security courtyard where the flying companions were kept. This sector had been heavily fortified by the syndicate’s elite operators; the low-tier grunts she had tricked earlier hadn’t even possessed the clearance codes to walk through these gates.
The moment she stepped past the threshold, the sheer volume of the haul took her breath away. Staring at the majestic raptors bound to the perches, she whispered, “Snowy Owls… Golden Eagles… Swift Falcons…”
“There are so many commander-class aerial lineages packed into one space.”
Beyond the apex predators, the courtyard housed dozens of other exotic flying species, each possessing striking, highly distinct visual traits—a dizzying tapestry of avian beauty.
Yet, every single one of them was collapsed weakly on the stone floor. As Su Wudeng stepped closer to inspect them, her blood ran cold. The poachers had systematically severed or clipped the primary flight feathers of their wings!
It was a brutal, industrial mutilation designed entirely to render the majestic creatures incapable of flight, ensuring they couldn’t breach the perimeter fences even if they broke their chains.
The moment the massive raptors detected a human shape approaching, a collective wave of absolute fury re-ignited their broken spirits. They let out a succession of sharp, screeching cries, lunging toward her with their talons bared despite their injuries.
At this point, their hatred for the human species has understandably peaked.
Su Wudeng felt a profound sense of helplessness. Knowing she couldn’t reason with wild, traumatized predators, she pulled out her medical injector, systematically administering mild anesthetic sedatives to the birds one by one.
“Shh, please don’t be afraid,” she whispered gently as each raptor’s eyelids grew heavy. “I promise, once we regenerate your wing structures, you will soar through the endless clouds again, alright?”
She crooned words of comfort as she carefully phased the massive avians back to the battleship’s auxiliary holding bays. Releasing them back into the wild in their current state would be a literal death sentence. How could a predatory bird survive on the forest floor if it couldn’t take flight? They would be picked off by ground scavengers within hours.
Once the entire biological inventory had been successfully extracted, she conducted a final, thorough sweep of Boss Wei’s command pavilion, uncovering a reinforced military-grade terminal hidden beneath the floorboards.
Regrettably, the device was locked behind a high-tier cryptographic password grid, preventing her from accessing the data streams. However, she brushed the frustration aside; given the computational advancement of the interstellar era, her tech teams back home should be able to brute-force the encryption without much difficulty.
After verifying that not a single living asset or scrap of vital intelligence had been left behind, Su Wudeng struck a flint, tossing the flame directly onto the oil-soaked canvas tents.
A raging, roaring inferno erupted instantly, its cleansing fire turning the syndicate’s den of sin into a column of pure ash.
She stood on a high branch, staring down at the dancing flames with a heavy, melancholy heart. She had managed to liberate the survivors of this specific camp, but how many innocent beasts had been slaughtered or broken during the initial capture operations across the sector? The numbers had to be devastating.
“Let the wild reclaim it. There should be no monument to human cruelty left in these woods…”
By the time she phased back onto the starship’s bridge, Xia Xiyao and Yu Lan were already waiting for her, their faces pale with exhaustion.
“Sister!” Yu Lan stepped forward immediately to deliver her operational report. “The cat mothers are stabilizing. I had Lu Feng channel a secondary vitality loop through their enclosures. Their immediate life signs are no longer red-lining.”
“The system indicates they require a prolonged, low-stress recovery cycle. They’ve just entered a deep, medically induced hibernation to accelerate cell regeneration.”
Su Wudeng nodded slowly, a weight lifting from her chest. That was optimal. A deep hibernation cycle would allow their hollowed-out systems to rebuild without cognitive stress.
Yu Lan continued, “Also, I managed to relay your message to the Xia, Mu, and Fei patriarchs. They stated their vanguard units are already moving toward our coordinates.”
“However… given the volume of their personnel and biological assets, our transport bay capacity is going to hit its structural limit. Our battleship will likely have to execute multiple orbital transit runs to clear their entire inventory.”
Though they had secured certified Imperial warp lanes and valid transit permits, their planet’s registry currently lacked a dedicated commercial cargo fleet capable of mass-transportation. Their world was simply too impoverished to afford large-scale colony vessels, and no commercial logistics conglomerate was willing to finance a permanent shipping route to a developing, fourth-tier backwater planet. Up until this moment, their entire interstellar transport capability relied solely on the lone battleship General Chu had gifted them.
“That’s an operational non-issue,” Su Wudeng replied dismissively. “We’ll simply delegate the pilot rotations to Chu Feng and his squad. They can handle the orbital runs.”
“Shifting focus—what’s the baseline status on the giant bear?”
Xia Xiyao stepped forward, her head lowering in a somber shake. “The prognosis isn’t great, Manager. We’ve successfully cauterized the vascular bleeding, but the structural trauma inside his shoulder joints is catastrophic… The muscle tissues are shredded. We’ve stabilized his life signs, but that’s the ceiling of our current tech.”
“Even if he survives, a complete kinetic recovery is highly unlikely. His shoulder function might be permanently compromised.”
Though Su Wudeng had mentally prepared herself for a grim medical report, hearing it still caused her chest to tighten with intense anger. Those poachers were absolute monsters. To break the white bear’s magnificent spirit, they had deliberately driven thick iron chains directly through his bone joints, ensuring that even a micro-millimeter of movement would trigger such blinding, agonizing pain that the proud beast was forced to remain entirely immobile in the dirt.
A look of profound pity and rage flashed across Xia Xiyao’s features. “Manager Su, did the poachers truly inflict this level of sadism just to keep him compliant?”
“It’s completely inhuman! How could any sapient being look at a magnificent creature like that and choose to drive iron through his flesh?!”
Su Wudeng’s thoughts drifted back to the historical records of her past life. Many illegal syndicates hunted apex bears solely to harvest their paws and gallbladder fluids for luxury collectors, viewing the living animal as nothing more than a wrapper for the raw materials. The survival or comfort of the beast was never factored into their profit margins.
She let out a long, heavy sigh. “When capital dominates the mind, empathy ceases to exist. On a lighter note, I managed to recover a locked syndicate terminal from the central pavilion. See if our systems can breach the encryption.”
“Let me handle that, Sister,” Yu Lan offered proactively. She had completed advanced cyber-security modules during her tenure at the Beast University.
Su Wudeng handed the sleek device over. “Alright, run an initial diagnostic sweep. If the firewall is too dense, we’ll outsource it to a professional technician once we touch down.”
Right then, the pneumatic doors of the hangar slid open, and the patriarchs of the legacy families rushed onto the deck, accompanied by their core retainers.
The moment he stepped aboard, Patriarch Fei approached Su Wudeng with an anxious, sweating face. “Manager Su, my scanners just picked up Director Lin’s executive fleet moving toward this hangar block! What on earth is going on?”
Hadn’t the manager explicitly stated she intended to remain in Athens for several more days to oversee marketing? Why had she suddenly ordered an immediate, emergency fleet launch? Coupled with Director Lin’s aggressive, uncharacteristic movement across the grid, it was impossible not to suspect a corporate ambush.
Before Su Wudeng could offer a calculated response, Fei Yuanlin’s shocked, echoing shriek shattered the tension from the far side of the deck:
“Holy mother of God! Are my eyes working?!”
“That’s… that’s a Snowy Owl!”
“…And a Golden Eagle!”
“…And a literal Swift Falcon!”
Elder Xia’s hand shook violently as he pointed toward the adjacent holding bays, his voice cracking with pure disbelief. “If my memory of the ancient texts is accurate…”
“Shadow Wind Leopards… Saber-Toothed Tigers… Holy Lions…”
“Manager Su, did you secretly raid a planetary reserve while we were at dinner?!”
“No wonder you ordered an immediate evacuation! If Director Lin catches sight of this inventory, the entire corporate sector is going to lose its mind!”
The corporate syndicates had already been coveting the secret realm maps backing Manager Su’s business model. Now, she had suddenly materialized an entire battalion of legendary, commander-class aerial and terrestrial lineages. The sheer financial and strategic temptation of that room was astronomical.
Humans commit murder for gold, and beasts die for sustenance. If the automated conglomerates witnessed this mythic haul with their own eyes, their corporate greed would override whatever baseline fear they had of General Chu, driving them into a state of absolute, lawless madness!
By then, Director Lin’s executive hover-craft had already anchored directly outside the battleship’s primary blast doors.
His arrogant, amplified voice rattled through the hangar’s external comm-link receivers: “Manager Su, are you truly preparing to depart our sector so unceremoniously?”
“Aren’t you being a bit too impatient, Director? Our regulatory association has dozens of structural policies scheduled for review over the next few hours.”
“If you value my counsel… why don’t you power down your reactors and remain planet-side for a few more days?”
The surveillance assets he had deployed to monitor the pet home’s movements had just intercepted data suggesting she had successfully smuggled a massive batch of unmapped biological assets onto her vessel. However, Su Wudeng’s security protocols were too tight, preventing his grunts from capturing visual confirmation of the species.
The intelligence had filled him with a surge of manic adrenaline. An immediate, predatory strategy took root in his mind: Su Wudeng must not be permitted to clear orbit!
Though he had completely botched the legislative vote earlier, if he could successfully seize the biological secrets or the dimensional coordinates backing Su Wudeng’s supply chain, the high board of the conglomerate would completely erase his prior failures! Even if intercepting an official transport involved a high degree of jurisdictional risk, the astronomical wealth waiting behind that hull made it a risk he was fully determined to execute!
Hearing Lin Rongsen’s echoing broadcast, the faces of the legacy masters turned a deathly shade of grey.
“The bastard is attempting to enact a forced corporate blockade!”
“He must have intercepted our cargo signatures!”
“What is the play, Manager Su? He’s deployed an entire security division to surround our hangar coordinates!”
“Our transport ships lack the weapon matrices to punch through a corporate line!”
Su Wudeng stared at the external feed, a dark, chilling realization settling into her mind. She had traveled across light-years to escape the primeval forest map, yet stepping back into reality, the landscape remained entirely unchanged. The poachers in the woods had been vaporized, but how were Lin Rongsen and his corporate board any different from the scum with the hunting rifles?
Every single one of their actions was single-mindedly driven by the exact same primitive lust for profit. The poachers used chains and wire to extract value from flesh, while Lin Rongsen used corporate blockades and regulatory policy to achieve the exact same goal.
A low, smooth chuckle escaped her lips, her gaze turning cold as ice. “If the Director desires to test our hospitality… let him try.”
Her voice remained entirely calm, but the words carried a terrifying, razor-sharp edge. “S-10000 Battleship, initialize primary combat sequence.”
“Target parameters: Every unauthorized entity impeding our trajectory!”
The exact millisecond the vocal command cleared her throat, the battleship’s central AI core chime vibrated through the deck:
[Biometric scan complete. Authorizing command interface…]
[Identity verified. Commander Node: Su Wudeng.]
[Imperial Registry: Absolute Sovereign of Planet XJ-738.]
[Clearance Level: Maximum Alpha.]
[Command sequence acknowledged: Initiating orbital combat orientation.]
[Grid online. Weapon matrices engaging.]
The heavy mechanical components within the ship’s hull groaned as they shifted into tactical formation, the colossally large vessel vibrating slightly as its defensive sheets retracted. Hidden missile pods, plasma batteries, and heavy rail-gun turrets slowly rose from the polished hull plating, their black barrels swiveling in perfect unison to lock directly onto Lin Rongsen’s executive fleet.
Director Lin’s jaw dropped as he watched the telemetry feeds inside his command vehicle. “What on earth is that?!”
“Is that a starship? No… that’s a fully armed military battleship!”
Su Wudeng’s voice cut through the localized radio channels, her tone airy but lethal. “Director Lin, if your security units advance another micro-millimeter across my hangar boundary, Planet XJ-738 will officially categorize your actions as an unprovoked declaration of interstellar war.”
“Under the Imperial Defense Act, my vessel retains absolute authorization to unleash a total, unrestricted counter-strike!”
Dozens of heavy plasma muzzles glowed with a faint, terrifying blue charging sequence, all pointed directly at his chassis. In a fraction of a second, the blood drained entirely from the faces of Lin Rongsen and his corporate board members.
The battleship’s complete, terrifying combat profile instantaneously vaporized whatever grand illusions of a corporate blockade they had been entertaining.
“What are our orders, Director Lin? That’s a military-grade warship! Our security vehicles will be turned to ash if they fire a single tracking missile!”
“Director, I just bypassed their firewall to pull the vessel’s hull registry. That is an S-10000 dreadnought variant! It was listed as an active asset under the personal command of General Chu!”
“General Chu?! Damn it… the madman actually backed her play.”
“They’re working hand-in-glove!”
Lin Rongsen’s stomach dropped. If they had been dealing with a conventional commercial starship, his corporate lawyers could have tied them up in customs for weeks. But blocking a military dreadnought registered to a frontline warlord like General Chu? If a firefight broke out, his actions would be legally categorized as an armed assault against the Imperial Military Grid.
If General Chu utilized the incident to declare martial law over the sector, re-allocating the local asset boards to his own jurisdiction, Lin Rongsen’s corporate backers would execute him themselves for provoking the Ether War Zone! It was a treasonous offense that carried no corporate insulation.
His expression turned completely black. He hadn’t anticipated this backwater girl would possess such a vicious, uncompromising survival instinct. She had traveled to a peaceful trade conference while secretly packing a strategic nuclear deterrent in her pocket.
He brooded in silent fury, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that maintaining the blockade at this juncture would yield nothing but his own destruction.
Su Wudeng monitored the chronometer. After three minutes of absolute silence from the corporate frequencies, she knew the Director had backed down.
“Engage thrusters. Clear the bay!”
Predictably, the moment the dreadnought’s fusion engines roared to life, the corporate security vehicles scrambled to disperse, scattering across the grid like insects to clear their flight path.
It wasn’t until the glittering city-lights of Athens dissolved entirely into the dark sea of space that the passengers on the bridge finally let out a collective breath of relief.
Xia Xiyao collapsed into a nearby pilot chair, clutching her chest. “Holy mother of God, my heart almost exploded. I genuinely believed we were about to start an interstellar war.” She had never experienced a high-stakes standoff of that magnitude in her life; the adrenaline surge had left her limbs feeling completely weak.
“A firefight was mathematically impossible,” Yu Lan analyzed calmly from the secondary console, her fingers tapping away at the data streams. “That ship carries General Chu’s personal coat of arms. The moment they fired a single shot, it would be categorized as a direct act of treason against the military command.”
She looked up at her sister. “Sister… this was the absolute safety net you had engineered before we even left the planet, wasn’t it?”
Su Wudeng nodded subtly. Ever since she had allowed the netizens to speculate regarding her access to an ancient, uncharted dimensional realm, she had been acutely aware that every powerful faction in the galaxy was watching her from the shadows. With so many predatory eyes tracking her supply chain, and given that this was her very first off-world trip, she would have been suicidal not to prepare an absolute nuclear option.
If General Chu’s battleship had failed to clear the line, she would have simply bypassed reality entirely, using her system interface to execute a forced mass-teleportation back to her home world coordinates. But protecting her system secrets from public exposure remained her highest priority.
“We are clear of their local sensor arrays now,” Su Wudeng said, rising from her seat. “I am going to conduct a personal check on our new companions.”
The rescued beasts had been distributed across adjacent holding bays, each receiving preliminary automated medical treatment. The individuals displaying the most volatile vital drops had already been stabilized by Lu Feng’s vitality loops, ensuring their immediate survival was guaranteed.
Stepping into the first room, Su Wudeng felt the tension drain from her face as she watched dozens of exquisite butterflies drifting lazily through the climate-controlled air. Their symptoms had been the mildest; they had merely suffered from acute dehydration and required nothing more than a baseline nutrient mist to restore their energy.
“Well, at least you little ones got out relatively clean.”
The secondary partition of the enclosure had been customized for the rescued honeybees. She had extracted them right before the explosion, though their ancestral wild hive had been entirely destroyed by the poachers’ smoke.
“Don’t worry, fat little bees~ We will engineer a magnificent, massive new hive for your colony back on our planet!”
The chubby insects buzzed contentedly through the space, their translucent golden wings glittering under the artificial lights. With their fuzzy, plump bodies and docility, they were undeniably adorable.
The atmosphere in the adjacent room, however, was far more somber. This was the enclosure housing the white Spirit Foxes. Every single fox bore severe lacerations and puncture wounds across their limbs, and one of the younger vixens had already slipped into a deep coma. Most heartbreakingly, their trauma had made them deeply phobic of human shapes; the moment the doors glided open, the entire pack scrambled to huddle tightly into the furthest corner, staring at Su Wudeng with wide, terrified eyes.
Su Wudeng let out a quiet sigh. “We will have to take it slow with their rehabilitation.”
The psychological scars those poachers had carved into the beasts’ consciousness were massive; a trauma that deep couldn’t be dissolved overnight. Furthermore, their basic physical health was a mess—how could an illegal poaching syndicate be expected to invest in proper animal welfare? Chronic malnutrition was the least of their medical concerns.
Stepping into the final room, she approached the medical pod housing the white giant bear. Because his injuries were the most severe, he had been hooked directly to the intensive care systems to allow the automated scanners to monitor his vitals twenty-four hours a day.
Approaching the reinforced glass console, Su Wudeng’s breath caught as she reviewed the structural damage across his frame. This was undeniably an exceptionally rare, ancient lineage of the Polar Mountain Bear, yet his massive paws were ringed by deep, blackened grooves where heavy carbon-wire had systematically strangled his circulation, leaving horrifying, necrotic scars.
And then there were the ragged, hollow cavities driven through his shoulder joints, a sight so gruesome it made her skin crawl.
The sheer physical agony he had endured was unfathomable.
“How could anyone look at a majestic soul like this and choose to drive iron through his bones…”
The white bear remained locked in a deep coma, his respiratory readings dangerously shallow on the monitor. If Su Wudeng hadn’t executed that rapid extraction and initialized the nutrient drip, the magnificent beast would have likely succumbed to systemic sepsis within forty-eight hours.
“Wait… something about these joint markings doesn’t align,” Su Wudeng muttered, her eyes narrowing as she zoomed the medical camera onto the shoulder wounds. She detected a series of precise, micro-etched alignment vectors burned into the fur bordering the lacerations.
“If the poachers’ sole objective was to transport the bear to a black-market buyer for a high premium, why would they intentionally inflict permanent, crippling structural damage to his primary joints?”
“They were actively letting the tissue necrotize. They were preparing to let him rot.”
From a purely financial perspective, destroying the kinetic value of a rare, commander-class apex beast before a sale was a massive loss of capital. It made zero operational sense.
What were they truly manufacturing in that camp? She knew the answers were locked inside the encrypted terminal. She would simply have to wait for Yu Lan to bypass the firewall.
Right then, a soft, tentative knock rattled the door, and Yu Lan stepped into the ward, holding the cracked syndicate terminal in her hands.
“Sister, the encryption has been neutralized. Do you want to review the ledger files immediately?”
“That fast?” Su Wudeng asked, surprised. She stepped away from the pod, taking the device and setting it onto the central prep table.
Yu Lan explained, “The hardware itself is a legacy model from the previous century. Its processing core is entirely obsolete compared to modern military systems. I simply linked it to our battleship’s main tactical mainframe and executed a brute-force decryption matrix. The firewall collapsed in under two minutes.”
Her expression suddenly darkened, her voice dropping to a tight, strained whisper. “But… the data packages inside this directory… Sister, you need to brace yourself before you hit enter.”
Su Wudeng’s fingers paused over the interface. Steeling her resolve, she tapped the primary directory.
A series of encrypted logistical manifests materialized on the screen, dominated by a file titled ‘Asset Identification: Rock-Armored Bear.’ That had to be the official taxonomic lineage of the white giant bear.
She clicked the folder, and the raw text fields inside caused her face to instantly twist into a mask of pure, unadulterated fury.
“No wonder they didn’t care if his internal organs failed…”
“They never intended to export a live specimen. A high-tier luxury collector had placed a private bounty for an elite pair of apex bear paws—specifically requesting an oversized, ultra-rare albino variant. The cash bounty for the severed paws alone was triple the market value of a live, intact bear!”
That explained the absolute sadism of their containment methods. To ensure the white bear remained entirely silent and compliant during the prolonged extraction window, they had driven industrial iron pins directly through his bone matrices, keeping him half-dead and paralyzed so he lacked the physical strength to resist or alert the orbital patrols. As long as the primary paw tissue remained healthy until the harvest date, his survival was entirely irrelevant to their profit margins.
Yu Lan’s face was pale with disgust, her eyes tracking the diagrams on the screen. “So those black wire rings around his wrists… they weren’t constraints. They were surgical guidelines? They were marking exactly where to amputate?”
Su Wudeng closed her eyes, exhaling a long, ragged breath that rattled her chest. “Yes.”
“Wait… a Rock-Armored Bear?” Yu Lan asked, pointing a trembling finger toward the comatose beast inside the medical pod. “Aren’t all recorded specimens of the Rock-Armored lineage strictly earth-toned? Their hide is supposed to be a deep, rocky brown. Why is his fur a pristine, winter white? Is he an albino mutation?”
The Rock-Armored Bear was an apex terrestrial species renowned for its near-impenetrable, slate-like skin density. Due to their evolutionary camouflage, ninety-nine percent of the population possessed dense brown or charcoal coats.
“It’s highly probable,” Su Wudeng analyzed quietly. “Because of his genetic mutation, he was likely driven out or abandoned by his original clan the moment he matured. In the wild, animals displaying stark color variances are frequently ostracized by their packs because they compromise the group’s natural camouflage.”
And that isolation was precisely the vulnerability the poaching syndicate had exploited to track and capture him without alerting the main territory.
“What a heartbreaking existence…” Yu Lan whispered, leaning against the glass.
If their hypothesis was correct, this magnificent white bear had endured a lifetime of brutal isolation and struggle just to survive in a hostile wilderness, only for his unique, beautiful coat to ultimately become the exact curse that marked him for a corporate harvest.
“The nightmare is over now,” Su Wudeng murmured, stepping up to the pod and gently placing her palm against the glass, right over the bear’s scarred flank. “Don’t give up on us, big guy.”
“It doesn’t matter how the rest of the galaxy judges your color. On our planet, you are going to live a long, beautiful life.”
Suddenly, Xia Xiyao burst into the intensive care unit, waving her arms with an expression of wild, manic excitement.
“Manager! The cat mothers! Their hibernation cycles are dropping—they’re slowly waking up!”
What? The cats were conscious?
Su Wudeng and Yu Lan immediately followed Xia Xiyao, rushing down the corridor toward the auxiliary feline ward.
Amber was already inside the room, her thick tail wagging lazily against the linoleum. The moment she spotted Su Wudeng’s entrance, she let out a soft whine. “Master… don’t you think her facial structure looks almost identical to Baiyun’s?”
Su Wudeng approached the primary medical table. Now that the automated systems had washed away the layers of industrial grease and groomed her matted fur, the Snow Crystal mother’s coat had returned to a stunning, silken white. At first glance, her profile did trigger a sharp sense of familiarity in Su Wudeng’s memory.
But then again, perhaps all purebred Snow Crystal cats simply shared an identical genetic template?
The moment Su Wudeng stepped within her field of vision, the mother cat slowly lifted her head, her watery blue eyes locking onto her shape.
Then, to Su Wudeng’s absolute, paralyzed shock, a soft, telepathic vibration echoed directly within her consciousness:
“Meow~”
“I… I recognize that scent. And that brave Sword-Heart Husky beside you… you are Amber, aren’t you?”
Amber’s eyes transformed into giant saucers, her ears popping straight up. “What?! You actually know my name?!”
The husky began frantically pacing around the medical table, her tail wagging at high speed. She instinctively reached out a paw to nudge the cat, but remembering how fragile the feline’s bones were, she quickly retracted it. “How do you know who I am? Did you recognize me from the streams?”
“Wait… were you stolen from our home forest?!”
Having been pumped with high-density automated nutrients and stabilized by Lu Feng’s flora-birth currents, the Snow Crystal mother appeared infinitely more alert than she had in the cages. Though her telepathic voice remained slightly strained, the communication was clear.
“Yes,” she vibrated sorrowfully. “I had just given birth to my first litter of kittens in a hidden valley when the poachers’ tracking hounds pinpointed our nest.”
“I managed to stuff my babies deep into a hollow root system before the nets descended, but I couldn’t draw the hunters away in time.”
At that point, a tiny, ragged cough rattled her throat, tears spilling from her large blue eyes. “Ever since that day, I have been locked inside that metal box… forced into a non-stop, hormonal breeding cycle to produce litters for their market…”
“Every time my babies were born, the guards would rip them away from my chest within hours. I have no idea where they were sent, or if any of them survived the transport…”
Suddenly, her telepathic aura spiked with an intense, frantic desperation. “But you… your uniform carries the exact spatial scent of my first nest!”
She stared at Su Wudeng with a mixture of burning hope, raw terror, and crushing anticipation. She desperately prayed to receive intelligence confirming her first-born kittens were still alive somewhere in the universe, yet she was deathly terrified of hearing that they had perished in the wild. Even though she knew the mathematical probability of their survival across months of abandonment was virtually non-existent, a mother’s heart refused to abandon the fantasy.
What if… what if by some cosmic miracle…
What if they survived!
Su Wudeng felt a sharp, agonizing pang slice through her chest as she connected the pieces.
An ancient primeval forest… a litter of newborn kittens hidden inside a root system right before a capture operation…
The timeline was a perfect, absolute match to Baiyun and the other kittens’ origins!
She frantically pulled up her Starnet terminal, tapping her local media archive. “Look at this feed, mama. Tell me… are these your babies?”
The holographic video package displayed a lush, vibrant forest floor, cutting to a heartbreaking shot of a group of feverish, shivering Snow Crystal kittens huddling together inside a hollow log. One of the tiny kittens, struggling through a severe respiratory infection, had forced itself to stand, stumbling blindly through the grass in a desperate, futile search for its mother.
In its delirium, it had reached out, its tiny claws gripping the hem of a familiar leather uniform.
The moment the first frame flashed before her eyes, the Snow Crystal mother broke down completely, a soft, agonized wail echoing through the telepathic link.
“Yes… oh god, yes! Those are my babies!”
“They… they’re alive? They’re actually alive?!”
The mother cat wept tears of pure, unadulterated relief. Su Wudeng frantically reached out, using a soft cloth to wipe the tears from her fur as she coaxed her. “Please, don’t cry, mama! Your cellular walls are too weak to endure an emotional spike right now. Your babies are waiting for you back on our planet!”
“The second we drop out of warp, you are going to hold them in your arms!”
“Furthermore, they haven’t just survived—they are thriving! Look—”
She rapidly brought up the kittens’ developmental logs. The screen filled with footage of the Snow Crystal kittens bounding through open meadows, napping under giant spiritual plants, and executing training drills alongside their dedicated, loving human owners.
The mother cat stared at the screen, her gaze so intense it felt as though she was trying to permanently carve every pixel of her children’s faces into her immortal soul.
“Thank God… thank God…”
She extended an incredibly thin, emaciated paw—the fur shaved away in neat squares where poachers had driven continuous hormonal injectors into her veins—and gently hovered her claws over the holographic projection, her touch so tentative and cautious it was as if she was terrified of accidentally fracturing the digital image.
Her tiny paw looked absurdly small compared to the robust, healthy kittens bouncing on the screen, yet her micro-movements were infinitely gentle, tracing their digital shapes over and over again.
“I spent every waking hour in that cage drowning in guilt… terrified that they had starved to death in that hollow log, or been crushed by wild predators…”
“I kept imagining them cold, hungry, and crying out for a mother who never came…”
“It was my fault… Mom is so sorry, my babies… I’m so sorry…”
Su Wudeng’s eyes flushed a violent red, and she had to forcibly avert her gaze, a heavy, agonizing knot tightening in her throat until she couldn’t breathe.
The mother cat’s limbs were an absolute map of scars and pinholes—the physical monument to a corporate operation that had systematically violated her biology to maximize cub production until her reproductive system was completely hollowed out. As a mother, she had already sacrificed everything, keeping herself alive through pure, unyielding willpower just to ensure her species continued, yet her first thought upon awakening was to beg her lost children for forgiveness.
The true criminal was the corporate machine that had commodified her flesh.
“Don’t say that,” Su Wudeng choked out, wrapping her arms gently around the feline’s fragile torso as her own tears fell. “You are the bravest, most magnificent mother in the galaxy. Your babies are perfect. Every single one of them is a good, beautiful child.”
“Let’s dry those tears, alright?”
“Focus on resting your body today. The moment the engines cycle tomorrow morning, we are going home.”
“Then, you can walk out onto that grass and see for yourself exactly how grand your children have grown, okay?”
The Snow Crystal mother nodded heavily against her shoulder.
“Yes… yes… thank you…”
How could she possibly say no? This was a reality so beautiful she hadn’t even dared to construct it in her dreams…
However, she was intimately aware of her own biological limits. Her internal organs had been systematically eroded by years of continuous, forced labor. After delivering her final litter inside that syndicate camp, her life force was virtually depleted; she likely had less than a few weeks left to live. But to be granted the privilege of looking into her first-born children’s eyes before her consciousness dissolved into the universe? The absolute certainty of that resolution filled her with a profound, unshakeable peace.
“Thank you…” she vibrated again. She gently lowered her small head against the mattress, attempting to execute a formal bow of absolute gratitude to the human before her.
Su Wudeng quickly reached out her slender hands, tenderly supporting her forehead to prevent her from straining her neck, before pressing her own brow gently against the cat’s crown.
“If you truly wish to repay me, then fight to stay with us a little longer,” she whispered. “Stay with me forever, okay?”
The mother cat instinctively rubbed her cheek against Su Wudeng’s palm, utterly docile, but she didn’t offer a telepathic promise.
Su Wudeng felt a sharp, physical ache tighten around her heart.
Once the mother cat’s emotional levels settled into a safe zone, the exhaustion of her recovery cycle caught up to her, and she drifted back into a peaceful, natural sleep. Su Wudeng tucked the blankets around her before quietly slipping out of the ward.
The moment the pneumatic door clicked shut behind her, she leaned her back heavily against the corridor wall, her face a mask of absolute, icy fury.
“Filthy, parasitic corporate scum…”
The minute they touched down on their home world, she was going to have Yu Lan extract every single financial routing code, buyer profile, and corporate shell company logged inside that poacher terminal. Every single executive involved in this biological trafficking ring would be systematically hunted down and forced to pay the absolute maximum price for their crimes!
Right then, a frantic flurry of wings echoed down the corridor, and Qingqing came rushing toward her, her chest heaving as she skidded across the metal floorboards.
The falcon let out a panicked, breathless shriek: “This is bad, Sister! Emergency!”
“The Swift Falcons! The Snowy Owls! The Golden Eagles!”
“Their sedation cycles just expired… and the moment they regained consciousness, they began frantically self-mutilating their own wounds!”
Su Wudeng’s expression shattered, her voice cracking in pure horror. “What?!”
