Chapter 44: March 7th: It's All Your Fault! Quickly Film a Beautiful Short Video to Help Me Save My Image
"Let's discuss a trade..."
Luocha's voice was a low, smooth murmur. His gloved hands reached out, pressing against the heavy lid of the pristine coffin he never allowed out of his sight. With a heavy, grinding slide, the seal broke, and the lid shifted aside.
Upon seeing the contents resting within the velvet-lined interior, Ruan Mei's breath hitched. It was an imperceptible shift, but for a genius so detached from mundane reality, the flicker of genuine astonishment flashing across her usually placid eyes spoke volumes.
She fell silent. Her slender fingertips drifted downward, gently brushing against the cold, metallic edge of her laboratory bench as her mind raced through countless biological equations.
"This is..." Ruan Mei murmured, her gaze locked on the coffin. "A condition I cannot refuse."
"Then the trade is established," Luocha replied, his polite smile never wavering.
"But it must be made clear," Ruan Mei added, her tone returning to the calm, unreadable depths of a still pool. "I cannot guarantee she will definitely wake up. Deep within her consciousness, a sufficiently fierce will to survive must be ignited. Otherwise..." She finally raised her eyes to meet his. "Even I can only maintain her vital signs within this empty shell."
A heavy, suffocating silence permeated the sterile air of the laboratory.
Luocha slowly closed his eyes, bowing his head slightly. "That... is enough."
...
"Hey... do you guys feel like the researchers at Herta Space Station have been looking at us with these weird, goofy smiles on their faces lately?"
March 7th tilted her head, her pink hair bouncing as she peered suspiciously down the bustling metallic corridor.
Whenever she walked through the Master Control Zone over the past few days, she could feel the prickle of eyes on her back. The moment she spun around to catch the culprits, the researchers would immediately flash bright, overly enthusiastic smiles and nod at her in greeting.
This was a level of VIP treatment she had certainly never received before, and it was giving her goosebumps.
"Have they?"
Stelle blinked slowly, her golden eyes staring blankly ahead as she struggled to recall her social interactions over the past seventy-two hours. There was indeed a hint of intense curiosity in the researchers' gazes lately, but she hadn't paid it any mind. After all, she was Stelle. Digging through trash cans and sprinting through hallways naturally drew a few extra looks, right?
"Maybe a little," Caelus chimed in, nodding in agreement as he swiped through his holographic interface. "But the researchers at the space station have been way more generous with their mission rewards lately. I'm not complaining."
Although their pockets were already lined with millions of credits, Stelle and Caelus still tirelessly scoured the space station, accepting every odd job and commission they could get their hands on. Perhaps this was just their unique way of practicing the path of Trailblaze.
Recently, they had actually accomplished something genuinely worth being proud of: helping a young researcher named Rocky resolve his agonizing heartbreak during the "To, The Faint Star" commission.
Rocky had harbored deep feelings for a senior researcher named Lesley. Just before she departed for the perilous depths of the galaxy to carry out a long-term cosmic observation mission, he had finally mustered the courage to confess. Unfortunately, before he could receive her response, Lesley's star skiff had already launched.
At first, their long-distance communication remained normal. But as Lesley's mission took her deeper into the cosmos, her ship entered a starquake zone with extreme time dilation. For Lesley, only a few months might pass, but for Rocky, decades would vanish in the blink of an eye.
Because of this brutal relativistic physics trap, Lesley's replies became slower and slower, the intervals stretching from days to agonizing months.
Knowing the absolute cruelty of this temporal misalignment, Rocky's mentor had secretly intercepted and cut off their communication. The older man simply wanted to prevent his brilliant student from wasting his entire youth waiting for a ghost who might never return.
Naturally, under the relentless, trash-can-rummaging investigation of Stelle and Caelus, the truth was dragged into the light.
The mentor had presented the Trailblazers with two choices: hand Rocky the true reply—in which Lesley joyfully accepted his feelings while explaining the harsh reality of their space-time distortion—or hand him a forged rejection letter to cleanly break his heart and allow him to move on.
Stelle and Caelus, without a second thought, chose to hand Rocky the truth.
Upon learning the reality of the situation, Rocky didn't despair. Instead, he made a resolute, borderline insane decision: he would abandon his safe position at the space station, begin a journey across the stars, and chase after time itself just to find her.
"Speaking of which, big brother..." Stelle turned her head, looking at Leon with intense curiosity. "How did you know the girl Rocky liked was named Lesley before we even investigated? And you even went out of your way to build that special location pointer for him."
That custom-made pointer Leon had tossed to the young researcher would forever track Lesley's exact coordinates, completely ignoring the interference of the starquake.
"I just knew," Leon replied, a lazy, knowing smile playing on his lips. "Besides, a two-way journey of genuine affection shouldn't be blocked by something as trivial as space and time."
The reason the story of the faint star was so moving was that it perfectly demonstrated the fragile smallness—yet stubborn resilience—of human emotion when crushed under the macro-laws of the universe. Rocky and Lesley refused to give up on each other despite the cosmic obstruction. One risked everything to travel into a deadly starquake zone, while the other worked desperately to escape its gravitational pull.
This kind of mutual, desperate sprint toward one another was the most touching part of the narrative.
Back when Leon was grinding through quests in his previous life, this bitter-sweet little side story had genuinely moved him. Now that he was actually living in this universe, encountering it in the flesh, he naturally decided to tilt the scales.
He didn't just give Rocky a cheat-item tracker; he had also secretly pulled a few strings to provide structural support for Lesley's ship. As long as their hearts remained unchanged, they would absolutely reunite one day. At the very least, their journey would be infinitely easier than the tragic original timeline.
'Do you understand the sheer weight of my intervention?'Leon thought to himself, thoroughly amused.'My gaze is even more terrifying than the Aeon of Nihility! I'm welding the doors shut on this ship, you jerks!'
Listening to Leon's casual explanation, March 7th clutched her hands to her chest, thoroughly moved by the romance of it all.
"Wow, that's so beautiful..." she sighed, her eyes sparkling. "It's a pity I couldn't help out much with that one."
"Anyway, coming back to your original question," Leon said, smoothly changing the subject as he pulled his smartphone from his pocket and shook it. "The reason the space station researchers are looking at you like you're a zoo exhibit is probably because my video went viral."
The first two episodes of his "I am an Undercover" video series had already smashed past the ten billion view mark.
The population across the countless inhabited worlds in this galactic society was simply staggering; hitting ten billion views was just a matter of hitting the right algorithm. In Leon's previous life, the entire population of Earth hadn't even reached that number. Even he was slightly taken aback by how violently the video had exploded in popularity over such a short period.
However, upon seeing the endless stream of promotional push notifications Asta had secretly funded for him, Leon completely understood.
Sure enough, the Lead Researcher's wallet made the galaxy go round. Combined with the genuinely excellent production quality of his edits, it was mathematically impossible for the video not to go viral.
"Huh?! Ten billion views?!" March 7th's jaw dropped, her eyes widening in absolute horror as the math clicked in her head. "That means... that means literally every single researcher on the Herta Space Station has probably seen it!"
A crushing wave of social death washed over her.
"No wonder they were looking at me so strangely! They saw me acting like a total goofball!" March 7th lunged forward, grabbing Leon's arm and shaking it vigorously. "It's all your fault! Quickly film a beautiful, aesthetic short video to help me save my image, you jerk!"
"Well, I do have an idea. Do you want to try it?" Leon chuckled, easily absorbing her frantic shaking. "It's absolutely adorable. Once it's filmed and uploaded, anyone who sees it will definitely cheer and scream your name!"
To emphasize his point, Leon struck a highly specific, exaggerated pose, pointing one finger to the sky with a bright, artificial smile—the universal "I have a brilliant idea" stance.
March 7th froze, staring at him in deadpan disbelief.
"Why is that exactly the same as the meme you sent me yesterday?!" she demanded, utterly speechless.
The pose was a flawless, one-to-one recreation of a custom meme Leon had spammed in their group chat. The worst part? The meme was an edited picture of her. In the image, she was wearing a traditional Xianzhou Luofu-style outfit, with a glowing, cartoonish light bulb hovering right next to her head.
"Don't worry about the minor details," Leon waved his hand dismissively. "Just tell me if you're going to film it or not..."
"If March 7th isn't filming it, I will!" Stelle immediately shot her hand into the air, her face dead serious.
Even though she had absolutely no idea what the script or content of the video was, she knew one universal truth: as long as it was directed by big brother Leon, it would definitely be incredibly fun. During their downtime, Leon had already dragged them into filming quite a few hilarious short videos. Since he was usually the main star, he had already amassed a terrifyingly large and loyal fanbase across the network.
"Exactly! How could big brother film a new video without me?!" Caelus hurriedly squeezed his way to the front, practically shoving Stelle aside as he raised his own hand high.
There was no way he was going to be left out of a high-tier meme production.
"Hey, hey, hey! You guys don't even know what the content is yet, and you agreed that readily?!" March 7th slapped a hand over her face, groaning at the sheer lack of principles displayed by the two Trailblazers. "You guys trust Leon way too much, right?!"
"We are companions aboard the Astral Express. Isn't mutual trust a matter of course?" Stelle crossed her arms, puffing out her chest righteously.
"Exactly." Caelus nodded firmly from the side, his expression completely solemn. "And from a certain perspective, considering how much he carries us and funds our shenanigans, he can basically be considered our sugar daddy!"
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