CHAPTER 220: CHAPTER 220 - SECRET MESSAGE

The control room slowly returned to a brittle silence after Bian’s furious exit. Monitors blinked with data feeds, keys clicked softly under tense fingers, and low murmurs resumed between team leads. No one dared mention the outburst, but the heavy air lingered like smoke after a fire.

The central communication engineer, a young Farian officer named Rhaes, sat tucked into a half-shadowed booth along the wall. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, his slender fingers loosening slightly from the stiff curve they’d taken on the edge of his console.

Bian’s wrath had passed like a storm, but the danger still hung overhead.

His eyes flicked subtly to the schematics on his personal panel—the last ghost signals of the internal sweep now fading from view. He tapped a few keys and closed out of the encrypted thread he had accessed during the search. No trace. Nothing left behind. Good.

He had informed his friend—an older systems technician stationed in one of the venting sublevels—the moment the sweep order had gone out. A single encrypted ping, passed over the backup relay circuit, hidden beneath a maintenance code. They’d worked together before. They knew what had to be done.

The humans were well hidden now. Rhaes was sure of it.

But the weight of what he’d done sat heavy on his chest.

His eyes drifted to the center of the command deck where Second Prince Dican sat quietly. The prince hadn’t spoken since Bian stormed off. His golden hair hung softly around his cheeks, unstyled and slightly disheveled from the rough morning. His eyes were downcast, a faint frown etched deep into his brow.

There was something wrong.

Rhaes had served in this ship since his training years—he’d watched Dican grow from a quiet, rowdy teenager into the second heir of a war-weary empire. But this Dican... this version of him, seated so obediently at the console while chaos bloomed around him...

It wasn’t the Dican he remembered.

Every time that human boy—Bian—was near, the prince became someone else. Malleable. Soft. Lost in a haze that seemed too thick for even orders to cut through.

Rhaes had seen the way the prince looked at him earlier, dazed and slow. He had watched the way Bian grabbed his face and barked at him like he was scolding a broken pet. He had seen everything.

And now... now the prince just sat there.

Blank.

"I need to inform the First Prince," Rhaes thought grimly, eyes narrowing.

Normally, such observations would be passed up through the High General’s channel. But after their near-death skirmish with the Grayling behemoth and the emergency maneuver through the black hole, half their long-range communication satellites were fried.

The link to the Farian central court—along with their Earth-based envoy systems—had gone dark.

Rhaes tapped his fingers against the side of his console slowly, his mind racing.

He couldn’t make a move yet. Not with the eyes of the other officers around him. But as soon as internal repairs on the sub-communication arrays finished, he would send a private burst through the restricted uplink channel—one only available to high-priority personnel.

Rhaes waited until the final diagnostics report came through from the maintenance team.

"Sub-deck relay stabilization nominal," the message read in pale blue script across his private terminal.

"Secondary communication root partially restored. Expect 2–5 second delay on outgoing bursts."

That was all he needed.

He swallowed hard and glanced around the control room. Everyone else remained focused—either too afraid or too resigned to lift their eyes. Dican hadn’t moved in nearly ten minutes. The Second Prince sat stiffly in his seat, barely blinking, as if someone had pressed pause on his consciousness. The red gem on his forehead flickered faintly, a dull pulse instead of the steady, healthy glow it once held.

Rhaes reached into the pocket at the side of his panel and retrieved a narrow black crystal—the size of a stylus, smooth and unmarked. Inside was a tiny sliver of Farian quartz-core, calibrated exclusively for one thing: relay encryption.

He slid it into the hidden port beneath his monitor.

The panel flickered.

Access granted.

With cautious fingers, he navigated through the layers of interface—disguising each click, shrouding each thread in maintenance logs and reroute reports. He fed the data line through one of the external solar calibration nodes, routing it away from central logs and into a blind spot known only to senior engineering staff.

Once the path was clean, he began crafting the message.

---

TO: First Prince Xing Yu – Flagship Daoshen

SECURITY TIER: Emergency Encrypted – Red Line 7

MESSAGE CONTENT:

Priority update from Virelin’s Judgment

Humans assigned to transfer custody escaped containment. Status: UNKNOWN.

Second Prince Dican unfit for duty. Symptoms of cognitive dissonance and docility observed.

Mate, designated "Bian," demonstrating dangerous authority. Orders contradict Farian law.

Communication compromised. Requesting immediate extraction or override authority.

Coordinates trailing the black hole jump attached. Following passive trajectory toward Gia system.

– Comm Officer Rhaes, ID #0417, Engineering Relay Tier IV.

---

Rhaes read it twice. Then a third time.

He couldn’t mention too much. Couldn’t include speculation about the Grayling medicine—not yet. The First Prince would know how to interpret the phrasing.

He attached the pathing data from their trajectory, layered it with masking pulses, and routed it through the repaired relay. It would be slow. Cumbersome. Might even break apart mid-transit.

But it would reach them.

It had to.

He pressed "SEND."

The screen blinked once. Then again.

ENCRYPTION STABILIZED. TRANSMISSION SENT.

Rhaes closed the panel, wiped the access logs, and removed the black crystal, tucking it deep inside the lining of his uniform. His heart pounded, but his face stayed still. Calm. Just another silent officer doing his job.

No one looked at him. Not even Dican.

And somewhere, far out among the stars, a tiny sliver of light carried the warning toward the First Prince’s warship.

Outside a long distance from dicans current location, an armada of sleek, silver-grey Farian battleships soared silently across the void, a swarm of disciplined precision wrapped in armored grace. Dozens of large ships moved in formation like an elegant metallic web—interconnected, vast, imposing. But at the very front of the formation, tucked among them like a gleaming arrowhead, a much smaller, faster vessel hummed with refined purpose.

This was The Jienel Tear, the flagship of the First Prince.

Inside its gleaming cockpit, the air smelled faintly of crystalline polish and thermal alloy. The lighting was soft but purposeful, bathing the room in silvery white with streaks of gold. Seated with one leg lazily crossed over the other was Cealus—the First Prince.

He sat like a painting—an elegant, dangerous thing. His outer robe was golden and flowing, a delicate Farian silk that trailed like water off his shoulders. Beneath, the skintight black warrior’s suit clung to his lithe body, tracing every honed line of muscle, outlining his slim waist and sharply cut shoulders. Each movement he made was fluid, precise, and effortlessly poised.

His hand hovered lightly over the console, long fingers tipped in faint silver tattoos, each one etched with old Farian warrior glyphs.

The message blinked into his interface. It unfolded like a spider’s web—carefully encrypted, scattered in strings of broken code—but its content was unmistakably urgent.

He skimmed the lines slowly, his lips pursed in a faint, unreadable expression.

He tapped the screen once.

"Connect me to my brother’s ship," he said softly, his voice low and gentle, like silk slipping through fingers.

The communications officer seated near the front turned halfway in his chair, swallowing before responding. "Your Highness... we are unable to make direct contact. The relay network was damaged after their black hole maneuver. We don’t have a pinpointed location either... It’s as if the Virelin’s Judgment is drifting ghostlike, no signal bursts strong enough to track."

Cealus tilted his head faintly, the corner of his mouth twitching into something close to curiosity. "Oh?" he whispered.

His eyes—narrow, almond-shaped and faintly glowing a brilliant lilac—flicked across the holographic message again. The low flicker of tension in his brow betrayed the mild concern coiled beneath his regal calm.

"Then trace this message," he murmured, fingers slowly dancing over the incoming frequency. "The relay burst—however weak—left a directional trace. I want all proximity satellites sweeping for residual transmission trails. Amplify the distortion and triangulate their current drift route. It should reveal their trajectory."

"Yes, Your Highness!" the officer replied, already inputting the data.

Cealus stood, the golden robe sliding down his shoulders as he moved with predator’s grace toward the main console. The tight black suit underneath caught the ambient light, outlining his sculpted chest and trim frame in precise shadows.

As he stepped forward, a full-body hologram of the deep-space sector they’d recently crossed flared into being. His violet gaze scanned the map slowly, deliberately.

Dican...

A faint frown formed between his brows. His little brother was sensitive—brilliant, sweet, far too easily led. Cealus had always been there to protect him from the uglier sides of Farian court politics.

But now... this.

What the hell did you get yourself into?

And more importantly... Who the hell is this Bian?

Cealus narrowed his eyes. His voice, when it came again, was just as calm—but colder.

"Ready the intercept team. Silent entry protocols only. I want no blaring signals. No grand announcements."

He looked out through the panoramic viewglass ahead of him, where the stars gleamed like icy sparks against the black.

"We’re going to find them."

And this time... I’m not letting anyone lay a hand on Dican again.