Chapter 45: The Greatest Pain of This Lifetime Part 1

The faint trace of a smile on Yan Xinfeng’s face froze instantly. His posture, looking down from above, did not change, but for the first time, a clear glint of scrutiny swept through his bottomless eyes.

He asked in a deep voice: “What secret?”

The air in the room seemed to solidify. Artificial light slanted in from the gaps where he blocked it, drawing a glaring band of light on the floor that fell right on Lin Tao’s slightly trembling fingers.

She gave a miserable laugh, regretting for the umpteenth time why she had meddled in the first place: “He’s an omega. What else could it be?”

“Wei Tingxia is pregnant.”

“……”

Dead silence.

Absolute dead silence swallowed the entire room in an instant, even the faint hum of the artificial light source outside the window seeming to vanish.

The expression on Yan Xinfeng’s face vanished completely, leaving only a cold hardness like rock.

After a long while, Yan Xinfeng blinked his eyes extremely slowly and asked softly: “……What did you say?”

Lin Tao’s breath hitched. She tensed her body and forced herself to say loudly: “He’s pregnant! Wei Tingxia is pregnant!!”

In hindsight, Lin Tao really shouldn’t have let her curiosity get the better of her and peeked at that medical report.

……

Four months earlier.

The internal personnel checkups at Deep Blue Base had all concluded. As the on-duty staff that week, Lin Tao was responsible for systematically organizing and filing these medical reports for easy future reference.

She sat in the office watching the reports auto-sort on the data screen, idly flipping through the paper documents under her hand, her thoughts drifting who knew where.

Most of the time at the base was actually steady and a bit boring. Yan Xinfeng was not a belligerent, greedy leader; his plans always included long periods of recuperation, so for Lin Tao, most of what she could think about revolved around the base.

The papers flipped repeatedly under her hand. Unconsciously, Lin Tao thought of that omega.

The beautiful omega, the bad-tempered omega.

Yan Xinfeng’s omega.

From three years ago when Wei Tingxia appeared, Lin Tao had always felt a curiosity toward him. It was more like an unconscious prying, wondering why he had appeared, why he had paired with Yan Xinfeng, and why he knew so much knowledge.

This was an utterly pathetic base instinct that should be stamped out with all effort, but on such an unmanaged late night, Lin Tao suddenly let that base instinct grow wildly.

She sat up straight quickly, took over the auto-sorting on the data screen, and after a simple search, found Wei Tingxia’s personal medical report.

These reports were theoretically viewable only individually; unless there was a major illness or injury, only the examinee themselves could see them.

Lin Tao looking at the report now was useless anyway; she just wanted to satisfy her pointless, annoying curiosity.

Then she saw several lines of text she should never have seen.

【Comprehensive Physiological Scan:

Discovered in uterus: Single active gestational sac

Estimated gestational age: 12 weeks + 3 days

Embryonic development indicators: Consistent with current gestational age

Risk Assessment:

Progesterone levels low.

Internal hormone levels imbalanced.

Overall Assessment:

Significant risk of threatened miscarriage exists; early treatment recommended.】

Lin Tao couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

Wei Tingxia was pregnant. She thought. The leader was going to have a child.

This was good news. The report had been out for three days—why hadn’t Wei Tingxia told the leader yet? Was he planning a surprise?

Lin Tao stubbornly read through the entire report word by word, her fingertips trembling faintly on the virtual screen. After confirming the pregnancy timeline and all data were accurate, she incredulously rubbed her stiff cheeks.

She didn’t pay much attention to the threatened miscarriage issue. With modern medical technology so advanced, as long as treatment stabilized it, the child could definitely be born. The only thing puzzling Lin Tao now was Wei Tingxia’s behavior; it seemed like he didn’t even know about the child’s existence.

Could the child not be Yan Xinfeng’s?

Lin Tao felt like she had gone mad from staying up late. Whose child could it be if not Yan Xinfeng’s? The two had paired.

The metal edge of the desk dug painfully into her palm. Lin Tao suddenly realized this was a golden opportunity. If she leaked the news to Yan Xinfeng, she might exchange it for the coveted squad leader position.

She grabbed her jacket and was about to stand when she suddenly felt something ice-cold and hard pressed against the back of her head.

If a person had been held at gunpoint once in their life, they would never forget that feeling for the rest of their days.

Lin Tao instantly felt cold sweat soak her back.

Then, she heard Wei Tingxia’s voice.

“You saw it?”

The omega’s casual words, paired with the gun barrel pressed to the back of her head, painted an intensely terrifying picture.

“Sorry,” Lin Tao tried to apologize. “I was just looking around casually. I didn’t expect……”

She swallowed: “You, you have a risk of threatened miscarriage. You should get treatment promptly, or the child……”

She didn’t finish her words because Wei Tingxia suddenly reached over her and deleted the report.

“You don’t need to worry about this child. It definitely won’t be born,” Wei Tingxia said. “You should worry about yourself.”

Lin Tao didn’t understand either sentence.

And fifteen days later, as Lin Tao huddled in the escape pod of a smuggling ship, she finally understood the true meaning of those words.

Outside the porthole, Wei Tingxia leaned against the medical pod, rarely lighting a cigarette for himself.

Blood trickled down the inside of his thigh onto the alloy floor, mingling with the bloodstains from the earlier battle. Wei Tingxia’s expression didn’t change as he rolled up his sleeve and injected himself with a disguise agent.

“I wasn’t planning to take you with me originally. Who told you to see the report…… Wish me luck, Dr. Lin,” he said. “And wish you luck too.”

The pirate leader’s paired omega had leaped to become the Empire’s Second Prince, and Lin Tao had paid the price for her curiosity.

……

After recounting everything that happened that night in full detail, Lin Tao felt like she had no strength left in her entire body. Sweat soaked her sleepwear, and in the extreme panic and daze, she actually felt a trace of relief.

This secret had been bottled up in her heart for too long. Telling it to the other party involved felt very good.

In Lin Tao’s view, even if Yan Xinfeng didn’t fly into a rage, he should at least show the anger of an alpha deceived and toyed with by his lover. But she watched for a long time and waited for a long time, yet got nothing.

The only thing Yan Xinfeng revealed was endless sorrow and grief, evoking the image of a needle piercing the deep sea.

What was he grieving?

Grieving that he had no right to know the truth, or grieving that child?

Lin Tao felt she was far from the truth.

“……Thank you.”

After a long while, Yan Xinfeng finally spoke. His voice was very soft, almost like a sigh. “Do your job as a military doctor well. I wish you luck too.”

Lin Tao was stunned and hadn’t responded yet when the man turned and left.

In the interplay of light and shadow, his back was as straight as ever, his steps steady, showing no abnormality at all. But for some reason, Lin Tao felt like something important had been hollowed out of him, leaving him empty and forlorn, with only a stiff, cold shell remaining.

The door closed soundlessly behind him. The corridor lights stretched his shadow long until it vanished around the corner.

Lin Tao opened her mouth but ultimately said nothing.

She suddenly realized that Yan Xinfeng wasn’t grieving over either of those things. His sadness was only for Wei Tingxia.

……

……

Wei Tingxia slept halfway through when he was suddenly woken by someone.

These past two days, he had been handling the arrangements for those omegas’ destinations. It took some effort to get all their identity proofs in order, escorting them in batches to the recovery area or back to their hometowns. After collapsing for a while, Wei Tingyun quickly pulled herself together and helped him a lot.

At the same time, based on the scant memories of those omegas, Wei Tingxia locked onto several likely drug production sites. System 0188 was checking them one by one.

Lin Wensi had already received the news over there. They were just waiting for the right moment to act. Once they controlled Capital Star, the other star systems would be only a matter of time.

Wei Tingxia made a chart listing all the alphas and betas who had gone missing without reason in the past three months. The numbers were shocking.

Executing Wei Shu would be the last punishment to consider. Letting a person like that die was too easy on him; he should be made to serve hard labor for life with the Old Emperor, paying back every drop of blood and every ounce of flesh he had taken.

Wei Heng had a bad head on him, always reckless and fight-happy. Dead was dead; nothing to regret. Wei Tingxia still resented how Wei Heng had spotted him during his escape and, without regard for anything, sent mecha to chase and intercept him, nearly getting him killed. Someone like that should be exiled to a border planet to dig potatoes……

He was dreaming about these things, so when he felt someone squatting by the bed and holding his hand, Wei Tingxia’s voice still carried sleepiness.

He called softly: “……Yan Xinfeng?”

The person behind him didn’t answer, just buried his face into his palm, breathing heavily.

Wei Tingxia blinked, naturally rolled over, lay on his side on the bed, and gazed at Yan Xinfeng’s dark crown.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did the mecha really blow up?”

In his view, Yan Xinfeng, crouched by the bed, shook his head and said nothing. After two breaths, a drop of scalding liquid splashed onto Wei Tingxia’s palm.

He was crying.

This man, who hadn’t shed a tear even after betrayal and being stabbed in the back, now knelt by Wei Tingxia’s bed, his shoulders and back heaving with suppressed sobs, weeping silently.

“……”

Wei Tingxia instantly understood what had happened.

As a black household who had fled the Empire, Yan Xinfeng’s step-by-step rise to leader of the rebellion covering the entire territory showed he was a man of extremely strong sense of justice, with invisible moral standards he held himself to rigorously.

Letting him know Wei Tingxia had undergone modification and miscarried because of him would be worse than killing him.

This really wasn’t a good time. But as Wei Tingxia stared up at the pale ceiling, he felt like cold cotton was viciously stuffed into his chest, sucking dry all his blood and air, leaving only a damp, heavy mass that pressed down so hard he could barely breathe.

“……If you’re grieving over that child, I can only say sorry to you,” he said slowly. “I know who you went to see. I never thought I could hide it forever, but it still came too soon.”

Too soon— so soon that Wei Tingxia didn’t even know how to explain it all, so soon that he had never considered whether Yan Xinfeng could accept the future he had planned.

Wei Tingxia hadn’t thought about that child in a long time. To him, the appearance of that mass of tissue had been the accident; losing it was inevitable. His body wasn’t suited for nurturing life. If it appeared, it only added harm.