Chapter 378: Discovering Traces of the Former Monarch

Chapter 378: Chapter 378: Discovering Traces of the Former Monarch

However, just when they had finally moved past the topic, He Hanshi spoke up again. "Lanlan, I’m going to get a vasectomy."

As soon as he finished, the other four chimed in, "I’ll get a vasectomy too."

As they put it, "Carrying a child is already so hard on Lanlan. With her Fertility Value this high, she’ll get pregnant easily in the future, which means she’ll just have to keep suffering."

They couldn’t bear it, and their hearts ached for her.

In their eyes, children were far less important than their wife. They only liked the idea of having children because they would be Shi Lan’s children. It wasn’t as if they liked just any child, was it?

Shi Lan was genuinely scared now. She knew that if she didn’t stop them, the moment they got an idea like this in their heads, they would act on it immediately.

She said immediately, "Don’t! Please, don’t get sterilized yet, okay? I want to have a cub with each of you. Can we at least wait until we’ve had one child for each of you?"

"Besides, our family is large and influential. It’s not like we don’t have the money; we can afford to raise them."

God knows, Shi Lan never used to like children, or rather, she’d never really given it much thought.

But now, she truly wanted to give each of her Beast Husbands a child. On one hand, she didn’t want to dash their hopes and leave them with regrets. On the other, she herself really wanted to play with some fluffy little cubs.

Ahem. Shi Lan had to admit her motives weren’t entirely pure. But just imagine: a little white lion, a little black panther, a Little Joyful Bird, a little nine-tailed fox, and a little Pallas’s cat all surrounding her, calling "Mama, Mama," each one acting cute and spoiled while making little kneading motions on her.

Just the thought of it made Shi Lan feel like her life would be complete. She would be overjoyed.

’This is the ultimate sense of achievement for a lover of all things fluffy—creating your own new fluffballs!’

With this in mind, Shi Lan redoubled her efforts to persuade them, terrified that if she let her guard down for a second, they’d all go get snipped. She really, truly wanted little cubs.

Even if they weren’t fluffy, having a female child would be wonderful too. A soft, sweet little girl. She could be like Jiang Yan and have her own little human doll to dress up, putting her in beautiful clothes every day and taking her out. She’d probably be the envy of everyone they met. The thought alone was delightful.

Through a combination of gentle persuasion and stern reprimands, she finally convinced He Hanshi and the other four to temporarily abandon the idea.

Only then did Shi Lan relax.

After she became pregnant again, Xiao Du, on the other hand, was completely carefree. It even said happily, ’Master, you just have to tough it out for a little while and focus on nurturing the cubs. Once they’re five months along, hand them over to my seed. Hehe, I’ll definitely raise them into big, plump babies for you.’

Shi Lan rubbed her belly and smiled.

’With a spirit body like this, pregnancy really won’t be that hard.’

Of course, her Beast Husbands were also incredibly supportive. They slipped right back into expectant-father mode, anticipating her morning sickness by scouring the entire interstellar network for delicious foods and fun, beautiful things, all in an effort to keep her in high spirits throughout the pregnancy.

Meanwhile, Ye Ming, He Hanshi, and the Director continued their search for any trace of the Monarch. It was impossible to relax with such a dangerous figure lurking in the shadows.

However, a lead finally surfaced during the second month of Shi Lan’s pregnancy with the twins. An interstellar citizen came to the palace to report that while he was out fishing, he thought he saw the former Monarch heading into the sea.

Ye Ming immediately took a team to investigate the area the man described.

Capital Star had three main ocean regions. The one furthest from any residential zones was the largest and also the deepest.

Capital Star was a planet driven by technology and was the most economically developed in the system. Very few people were involved in industries like fishing. Moreover, perhaps because robots weren’t very good at processing fish, most of Capital Star’s residents didn’t eat much seafood.

Very few people lived near the ocean, and there were only one or two surveillance systems in the area. ’No wonder,’ Ye Ming thought. He had suspected the former Monarch never left Capital Star, but they could never find a trace of him. ’He must have been hiding in this ocean all along.’

He boarded a submarine with a squad of soldiers and descended into the sea.

The informant wasn’t actually certain if the person he’d seen was the former Monarch; after all, he had only seen his face online and on wanted posters.

But then again, he figured, ’What kind of normal person hides in the ocean?’

So he had been firm in his decision to report it.

Ye Ming operated on the principle of "better safe than sorry." In any case, they had to investigate. He worried that if they delayed any longer, Dr. Ai and the former Monarch would cook up some other bizarre creation and pose an even greater threat.

As it turned out, the man hadn’t been mistaken.

In fact, the person who had surfaced from the sea was indeed the former Monarch.

Normally, the former Monarch, Ye Tianlin, would have planned to stay hidden. As the saying goes, a cunning rabbit has three burrows; his research facilities were not limited to that single underground base.

But he was in a foul mood today. Months had passed since Dr. Ai had obtained Shi Lan’s blood, yet he had made no progress on the issue of spiritual power collapse. It seemed they would have to capture Shi Lan herself.

The reason for Ye Tianlin’s anxiety was related to his own physical condition.

Back then, he had devoured his older brother’s 3S Spiritual Power, upgrading his own to the same level. To test his new strength, he picked a fight with the Insect Clan. It was then he discovered that after devouring spiritual power, his own collapse value began to rise at an alarming rate. This was why he sought out Dr. Ai. The two of them were like-minded, so one provided the resources while the other dedicated himself to research, vowing to solve the problem of spiritual power collapse in males.

To solve this problem, they couldn’t just rely on pure research to determine if their findings were effective. Thus, both Ye Tianlin and Dr. Ai landed on the idea of live human trials. In other words, they needed other people to suffer from spiritual power collapse.

However, for a male raising his spiritual power through normal means, it would take decades of frequent combat against the Insect Clan to reach a high-risk spiritual power value. Ye Tianlin, who had gained his power by devouring it, had an extremely unstable collapse value and simply couldn’t afford to wait that long. That was why they first developed Chao Si.

Therefore, Ye Tianlin and Dr. Ai had targeted He Hanshi’s group from the very beginning. Their initial targets were just He Hanshi and Ye Ming; the other three were simply caught in the crossfire. At the time, they never imagined Chao Si would be quite so effective.

Over the years, He Hanshi and the other four encountered several different Prison Directors in their confinement. They believed all of them were out to harm them, but in reality, many of the drugs they were given were actually intended to treat spiritual power collapse.

Unfortunately, these drugs were all rejects from Dr. Ai’s earlier research. They were destined to be useless and, in fact, only stimulated their collapse values, causing them to rise even further.

This only solidified the conviction of Ye Ming and the others that the Prison Directors were there to destroy them.

Later, with Ye Ming also on Black Star, Dr. Ai’s research into a cure for spiritual power collapse became more overt. But the results he painstakingly developed were still completely useless.

However, just as Ye Tianlin was beginning to believe that spiritual power collapse was an incurable affliction, Shi Lan—a glimmer of hope—suddenly appeared.