Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Taste actually had a surprising number of friends.

As Yor followed the young bug toward the dining hall, bugs kept calling out greetings to him along the way, and Taste would stop to respond each time.

"Highest-grade alloy, a bit heavy, high energy consumption, but this amount of energy drain? Chump change." The broke bug cheerfully introduced his metal limbs, with the smug look of a sucker who thought he'd gotten his money's worth.

"This is my dependent, Yor. He'll be living with me... and my brother."

"Yeah, my brother's stationed downstairs—hasn't come back all night."

......

By the time Taste found a seat with his oversized tray, a crowd of bugs had already gathered around him and Yor.

Taste chattered animatedly while grabbing a bit of everything from his tray and piling it in front of Yor.

Yor, who'd always been the one serving customers, was now being waited on for the first time: "..."

A bit strange, but... inexplicably nice.

Until he looked down at what Taste had grabbed—colorful, oddly shaped, some of it still squirming...

The war bug's tray across the table looked way safer!

Definitely still a kid...

Yor shoved the dangerous-looking stuff back into Taste's tray, then quietly blended into the weird gathering.

The brown-haired bug across the table had already dropped his voice: "You guys heard?"

The whole table, Yor included, perked up.

"At dawn, they picked the first batch of bugs to serve the Broodmother."

"What? Already? Did our captain get picked?"

"More than chosen—they were sent in ages ago. They might already be done by now."

"Ah, serving the Broodmother... I wanna go too... If only my rank were higher!"

The brown-haired bug was clearly in the know. He patted the shoulder of the bug who was griping about his low rank: "The ones going in this time aren't actually high-grade bugs."

He glanced around, dropping his voice even lower: "They're all the lowest-tier worker bugs—the physically strongest ones get priority."

At that, the table went quiet. Even the usually hyper Taste slowed down his eating.

Only Yor, picking up on the shift in mood, suddenly realized—this so-called "serving" wasn't about breeding, but about feeding the Broodmother.

Those low-tier bugs were in for a bad time.

The table was quiet for a moment, until the bug who'd been griping about his rank suddenly spoke: "Isn't this just what war bugs are supposed to do anyway..."

Back in ancient times, the war bug clan didn't even have the right to reproduce. Their job was to guard the nest, hunt for food, and—when food ran short—become food for the Broodmother and the other clans that handled reproduction.

The genetic memory every war bug carried made their faces darken.

"What era is this, saying stuff like that." The Broodmother was gone, the Guard Department was asleep, and the War Department had become the richest and toughest branch of the whole bug race. Why bring up... ancient history.

This topic was taboo for all war bugs. Someone laughed it off and switched to talking about frontline defense, and the mood warmed back up.

Yor couldn't follow most of the conversation. He sat in the corner and picked up his newly activated terminal, searching keywords like ancient bug race, war bug duty, serving the Broodmother.

Nothing particularly relevant came up, but a small post titled "Post-Transformation Pheromone Balance Control Sharing" caught Yor's eye.

The post had very few views. Before Yor could click it, it got buried under newer posts and disappeared.

Luckily, Yor remembered the tag at the end of the post. He tried typing "Second Life" into the forum.

Sure enough, a sub-forum popped up. Clicking in, the titles hid a lot of keywords, but he could still see tags like "experiment subject," "Broodmother transformation," and "survivor survival" all over the screen.

It was a support forum for escaped experiment subjects.

Yor eagerly registered for the forum. Verifying his status as an experiment subject was easy—his War Department dependent bug ID clearly listed his experiment history, even his original species.

The forum verification went through quickly. By the time Yor said goodbye to Taste and hurried back to the monitoring pod, he could already see the forum's full pages.

At the very top, a hot post was titled: "Eight years after escaping the lab, finally metabolized all the drugs—today I officially became a male bug!"

The post wasn't long, and a lot of it was hard to understand due to translation issues, but the whole thing made Yor's heart race.

The bug who posted was clearly emotional too, but he still explained his experience clearly:

After years of natural metabolism, plus medical treatment, he went from no longer producing honey to sprouting wing buds on his back, gradually metabolizing all his Broodmother traits. Recently, he'd even stretched his wings for the first time, formally transforming into an ordinary male bug.

Although he was physically weaker than other male bugs, he could work, live, and build normal relationships.

The poster also attached a photo: a guy who looked no different from an ordinary bug, except his antennae were short and his bug markings were faint.

All the replies below were encouragement and congratulations. Though some experiment subjects who still made a living selling honey said they envied him but had no choice—they had to keep enduring the pain of pheromone imbalance just to get by. They still had to live...

Experiment subjects varied in original species, physical condition, degree of transformation, and what happened after they escaped. Yor couldn't help browsing the posts for a long time, hoping to find his own path forward from the experiences of these fellow escapees.

But after searching for a while, what interested him most was still that hot post—becoming a male bug, living an ordinary life. Wasn't that exactly what Yor wanted?

He re-read the post carefully, studying the poster's life and treatment.

When he reached the final line—"It took me eight years to finally stop being a strange 'thing' and become a 'bug'."—Yor's tears suddenly spilled over.

Feeling the cold wetness on his face, Yor blinked in surprise.

An orphan with no parents, he'd carried everything on his own since childhood. No matter how good society's welfare was, the reality of having no family to lean on, no safety net, was always there.

When things got hard, crying was never Yor's first choice.

It must be those damn side effects from the experiments. Yor wiped away his tears and searched with cold fingertips: "Blue Star," "Earth," "humans," "interstellar news."

Nothing... of course.

The bug race's network had extremely limited connection to the outside world. Aside from invasion wars, bugs lived almost completely isolated lives. Their internal network had almost no alien info.

Expected, but still a letdown.

Maybe becoming an ordinary male bug was his best option going forward.

He even had family now. Rubbing the ID card in his hand, the names Taste and Dexter in the family section were clear and neat.

Just as he was thinking, the doorbell rang.

When he opened the door, it wasn't Taste as he'd expected.

Dexter, whose crisp military uniform was somehow all wrinkled, looked panicked: "Bug... Yor, Taste he..."