Settling In

There was no doubt about it: Gu Ting was a male insect.

A male hatchling who had not yet undergone awakening differentiation.

An ordinary male insect with weak psionic power and a poor constitution.

A poor little thing whose psionic power was a mere F and whose constitution was so frail it barely scraped a C.

At the Gem Association center on Planet Firenze, female insects in white coats hurried back and forth, yet their gazes kept falling with pity on the little male insect sitting dazed on the hospital bed.

For these medical female insects, who had spent years living on the outskirts of Firenze, he was the male insect with the lowest test results they had ever seen. His constitution barely cleared the passing line, but his psionic power was pitifully poor. Even after the awakening differentiation that came with adulthood, a miracle was highly unlikely.

A male insect like this would have a hard time winning the favor of powerful, high-ranking female insects from wealthy families.

After all, with psionic power that low, he could barely look after himself. How was he supposed to soothe a female insect?

A petite sub-female tried to hand the little male insect a brand-new stuffed rabbit.

He crouched halfway down beside the hospital bed. Now that the little male insect in front of him had calmed down, he had reined in the scent of his pheromones, and the sub-female could catch only the faintest trace of it.

The ward was warm. Bright sunlight streamed through the window, and the little stuffed rabbit was adorable, its flesh-pink plush clean and full of the sweet scent of candy.

Gu Ting blinked and slowly reached out to take the stuffed rabbit.

He wore an oversized hospital gown, and beneath the rolled-up sleeves, his arms were covered in blood-crack marks.

Medical equipment these days was very advanced, and it had offered a reasonable explanation for the blood-crack marks spread across every part of Gu Ting's body except his face: psionic power this frail could hardly sustain the body's functions, leaving his skin fragile and prone to injury, accompanied by intermittent analgesia.

—He was a pitiful little thing.

But however much pity they felt, once the medical female insects finished examining Gu Ting, all they could do was hand the little male insect over to the Gem Association.

"What's your name?" asked Novi Wardens, president of the Gem Association. He was over two hundred years old now, which counted as elderly among the insect race, whose average lifespan was three hundred years.

Perhaps it was the passing of the years, but the overbearing pride Novi had once possessed had faded. Unlike his youngest son, Klein Wardens, who had been haughty and conceited ever since being taken to be raised in Bird of Paradise as a baby, Novi possessed the mildness of an elder, so the eyes he turned on Gu Ting held a trace of tenderness.

"..." The little male insect tried to speak once more, but his voice stuck in his throat and would not come out.

He lifted his lashes a little in frustration. Helplessness surfaced on his pale face, yet those beautiful blue eyes made it impossible for anyone to scold him.

"It's all right. Take your time." Novi gently patted the little male insect's shoulder and extended his psionic tendrils. Like a small length of translucent vine, they slowly wrapped around the male hatchling's fingers.

The instant they touched, coolness spread over Gu Ting's fingertips, like touching ice in the heat of summer, and it roused his spirit.

The psionic power that existed in the interstellar world was full of mystery and wonder. In an instant, Gu Ting felt the fog shrouding his brain blown away, and his thoughts grew active again.

The spoken and written language of the insect race seemed suddenly to come alive, circling and taking over the little male insect's nerves until he had fully absorbed the mouth shape and pronunciation of every single character.

In reality, all of this happened within a few seconds.

"...Gu Ting."

"My name is Gu Ting."

The little male insect spoke his name. It was the only proof of identity he had left after transmigrating.

Proof that he had once been a human named Gu Ting.

"Good. Your identity has been registered." Novi fastened a child's bracelet around the little male insect's wrist. "Then I hope you enjoy life in the Bird of Paradise community!"

"Thank you..."

The Gem Association staff took Gu Ting to the heart of Firenze: the Bird of Paradise male insect community. It was like a paradise built on the planet. Its perimeter was a tall, pure-white fence carved with exquisite roses, and past the gates lay endless splendor.

It was divided into an inner district and an outer district. The inner district was reserved for male insects to live in, attend classes, and hold gatherings among themselves, while the outer district was where male insects who had accepted date requests spent time with female insects, who paid for the pleasure.

The entire inner district was really no different from a small city. A huge fountain stood in the central plaza, where angel-like statues held up water jugs. An artificial sun shone over the whole community, and on either side stood rows of villas, with a commercial district just across the street. The outer district was equally lavishly decorated, every part of it suited to male insects' tastes. As for female insects' preferences, those were never considered.

—This was Eden, the paradise of male insects.

After their birth, all male insects, whatever their birth families' circumstances, were brought to the Bird of Paradise community to be raised together. Gu Ting's arrival was a special case, so the community assigned him a small apartment and provided him with a bionic robot.

The home wasn't large. Its two floors together came to only about sixty square meters, more than enough for a child not yet five years old.

Gu Ting was left in the apartment. The female insect who had brought him didn't dare linger in the inner district of Bird of Paradise and could only hurriedly set up the robot's program before leaving.

In the empty house, the robot took on the role of the little male insect's father, softly coaxing the child in its care in a cold, even tone. The scene was eerie and absurd.

Not a single insect thought there was anything wrong with leaving such a small child to live alone in a house.

In insect society, this was the usual treatment. Male insects could enjoy the best of everything in Bird of Paradise, whether that meant squandering and wasting or doing whatever they pleased. But the price was being separated from their families from a young age. They would receive a standardized male insect education in the community, and once they reached adulthood and underwent awakening differentiation, they would begin their very first dates and provide psionic soothing to high-merit female insects every month.

If the fate of female insects was to go from freedom to madness beyond their control, then male insects were expensive puppets whose entire lives were mapped out for them.

Each had its own tragedy, but under the pressure of survival, it was unavoidable.

—Under Imperial rule, reproduction and the survival of the race come first.

Gu Ting's life in the interstellar world could be said to have settled into a routine.

He named the bionic robot Tuantuan.

Tuantuan had originally taken the form of an adult sub-female, but Gu Ting couldn't get used to its appearance, so he changed the robot's settings to its original form: a pure-white, round, stubby robot only half a head taller than the little male insect, with a round head and a chubby body, though the mechanical tentacles extending from its base were exceptionally nimble.

During the day, under Tuantuan's supervision, he studied his male insect coursework over StarNet. At night, he hugged his stuffed rabbit and watched insect-race history. Unlike other young male insects, he wasn't full of restlessness. Even doing nothing, Gu Ting could stay quiet all day long. And in those moments when he let his mind drift, he was usually leading himself to accept the background of this world.

Insect society was vastly different from the society Gu Ting knew. The world he had once lived in gradually became blurry patches of color and faded glimpses, so he could only absorb and adapt to the history and rules of the insect race, out of place though he was.

Gu Ting accepted the fact that he was a male insect.

And having accepted it, he lived with that fact for several years.

—Ring-a-ling.

The bell rang to end class. It was the last class of the day, and the young male insects came out in groups of three or five, all wearing the same proud expression, because they had been taught from childhood that they were lofty male insects, princes who never needed to bow and scrape.

The male insects, still in their juvenile stage, were all as lovely as jade and snow, with fair skin. Because of their race and bloodlines, ninety-eight percent of male insects had light-colored hair, ranging from silver-gray to light brown, with pale gold making up the largest share.

After the various races had opened up worlds beyond their planets, they inevitably had to face all kinds of radiation from the universe. Female insects were born with extraordinarily powerful physiques and the shells they gained through insectification, which were enough to block radiation that could trigger mutations, so female insects' hair color depended only on their own genes. But male insects could not insectify. They were babies protected in the cradle, and even though they had been baptized by radiation over the long course of evolution, the effects were unavoidable: under the radiation, their hair lacked melanin.

Gu Ting was among the crowd of insects too, and with his head of black hair, he looked like an outsider.

All alone, like a little mouse hiding in the shadows.

—A cute little mouse, of course.

Inside Firenze's Bird of Paradise community, in the east district, stood the D-grade male insect school. It was called a school, but since male insects were few in number to begin with, it had fewer than three hundred students in total, nearly all of them young male insects between ten and fifteen.

D-grade ranked near the bottom of the classification system. All the students taught here were male insects with low psionic power and poor constitutions, and Gu Ting was one of the D-grade school's students. His aptitude was at the very bottom, but he made up for it by working hard, and his overall grades stayed in the upper middle. Yet in a male insect community that produced outstanding individuals one after another, Gu Ting was so ordinary that he vanished into the crowd—he was even below the crowd. Probably the only thing about him worth showing off was his fresh, lovely face.

The young little male insect wore a dark-blue uniform, the gold-embossed letter D on his chest especially conspicuous. He walked beneath the shade of the trees with his little backpack on, a stark contrast to the insects his age walking in twos and threes.

Until he saw Tuantuan waiting at the school gate to pick him up.

Tuantuan looked just as it had several years ago, with its round head, while the display screen on its body flashed a few fluorescent words: Great job in class today!

To Gu Ting, Tuantuan was already like family. Through his most isolated and helpless years in the insect-race world, the only one who had kept him company every day was the robot Tuantuan. Fortunately, technology was advanced these days, and bionic robots had powerful chips, more than capable of taking on the role of the "family" Gu Ting needed.

The not-very-tall Gu Ting lightly held one of the mechanical tentacles Tuantuan extended toward him. Rather than taking an expensive, fast hovercar, they strolled through the neighborhood, so leisurely that they seemed to live in a different world from the other male insects.

"Baby, while you were at school, your StarNet pod chimed with several message notifications. Remember to check them when we get home!"

Tuantuan, running in child mode, was very earnest about it. "But you can't stay connected past the time limit, or playing on StarNet for too long will give you a headache."

"Okay." Gu Ting nodded. "I'll only play for forty minutes and log off as soon as time's up."

Forty minutes was StarNet's setting for underage insects, and Gu Ting was already a little male insect who had been online for nearly two years.

In the great interstellar era, StarNet was like a second world beyond reality. In it, as long as you didn't specifically verify your male insect identity and get a gold badge, you could be any gender you wanted. At the very least, quite a few sub-females chose the male insect gender on StarNet. Everyone knew perfectly well what was going on, but such peculiarities inevitably brought a certain forbidden thrill to those with particular tastes.

As for Gu Ting, he was a StarNet user whose simulated identity was sub-female.