[Metis performed Psychic Soothing on Caleb.
He encountered no resistance whatsoever. Caleb practically laid everything open before him.
Only something buried deep within was shrouded in black mist, sealed away beneath layer after layer.
Perhaps this was what had made him feel before that Caleb was hiding something.
It would be a lie to say he wasn't curious, but every Tianjia had secrets of their own. Metis didn't insist on uncovering absolutely everything.
Caleb loved him. That was enough.
Metis withdrew and saw Caleb looking at him, appearing somewhat dazed.
He looked as though his entire body had been relaxed to the point that his thoughts had scattered.
It was a little like the blank state after waking from general anesthesia, as though the entire Tianjia had been reset to factory settings.
"How do you feel?" Metis asked him with a smile.
Caleb nodded blankly, his gaze following Metis with an utterly infatuated expression.
Having recovered his memories, Metis was in an excellent mood. He had completely let go of all his worries and thoroughly enjoyed the intimacy of having his mind pressed close against Caleb's. He wanted to satisfy any request Caleb might have.
And so he continued, "What else do you want?"
This factory-reset Caleb with his blank expression thought seriously for a moment, then asked with complete sincerity:
"Can I call you Male Lord here?"
Metis: "???"
He had only given Caleb some Psychic Soothing. He hadn't accidentally broken his brain, had he?
Factory-reset Caleb had his own internal logic. He explained earnestly:
"We've already left Tianjia territory, so we no longer have to follow the rules of the Tianjia Empire. Theoretically, we can use whatever form of address we want."
"So... you want to call me 'Male Lord'?"
Metis looked confused and strange, as though he had encountered one of the universe's greatest unsolved mysteries.
Caleb nodded and asked with a hint of pleading, "May I?"
Metis hesitantly nodded, still far more puzzled than anything else.
He couldn't help wondering, could this be some kind of special bedroom title?
But even if it was, shouldn't it be something other than "Male Lord"? What Tianjia female would enjoy a form of address that sounded like acknowledging someone as their master?
Could Caleb's hidden trait actually be a submission kink?!
Metis was profoundly shocked.
Caleb, meanwhile, was delighted. Holding Metis in his arms, he worked himself up for quite a while before softly calling out with barely concealed anticipation, "Male Lord."
A tingling numbness spread all the way up Metis's spine, bringing with it the strange sensation of electricity running through his entire body.
Metis thought it had to be because Caleb's breath against his ear was simply too ticklish.
Caleb... really knew what he was doing.
He looked taciturn, always standing quietly in the shadows like some silent guardian. Sometimes Metis even wondered whether he was a mechanical Tianjia.
Yet when it came to flirting with a male, his skill level was astonishingly high, hitting the secret spots in Metis's heart with terrifying precision.
Metis hadn't even truly called him "Female Lord" yet, only for Caleb to beat him to it.
Metis entwined his neck with Caleb's and lightly bit his ear, feeling as though this female had swindled away his entire heart.
This wasn't anything like the marriage Metis had envisioned before, an exchange of interests where each side took what they needed. He had been drawn into unknown territory, and if he continued forward, he might get hurt.
Metis felt a little aggrieved. Caleb had lured him beyond the boundaries of safety, making him surrender everything until there was no longer any possibility of retreat, not even the option of cutting off an arm to save himself at a certain cost.This chapter was taken from novelping . com without permission.
He had staked everything on this. If a bottomless abyss lay ahead, he had already lost the chance to change his mind.
"Don't hurt me." Metis pressed himself tightly against Caleb and made his request.
Caleb answered him, "I am loyal to you. Male Lord."
...]
It was the readers following the novel who were truly dumbfounded.
[What is Caleb doing? (stunned)]
[Calling a male "Male Lord"? Do Tianjia act like this after being "factory-reset" by Psychic Soothing?]
[Impossible, right? How many tens of thousands of years did he get reset back to? Ever since the Tianjia overthrew the control of the Brain Bugs (males), females have always held power. Even if the earliest males experienced some pain when facing other males, with an instinctive fear and desire to submit, after all these years, generation after generation of inherited memories centered on female supremacy, along with the corresponding genes being passed down, have long since reshaped females both mentally and physically.]
[Could Lieutenant General Caleb have... reverted to an ancestral trait?]
[I'm impressed you managed to dig up such an obscure theory. It's probably just a bedroom kink. Sometimes it's pretty fun to see a male looking shocked.]
[You guys even play like that? (Tianjia on a starship staring at the light screen)]
[I don't think it's just a kink. I've thought for a while that some of Lieutenant General Caleb's behavior was strange. When he mistakenly believed His Majesty the Emperor was involved with the Prince, he was even willing to take a step back and create opportunities for them to spend time together. You could still explain that as yielding to imperial authority. But there were strange details elsewhere too. I used to think it was simply because Lieutenant General Caleb came from a civilian background and therefore had exceptional respect for an Imperial Prince, but combined with some of the wording in the novel, there might be another possibility.]
[What wording?]
["Inherited memories from the other half of his bloodline," "the part belonging to the Tianjia deep in his bones was awakened." Those phrases seemed a little strange when I first read them, but now everything fits.]
[So I wasn't the only one paying attention to that. I've been wondering about it for ages.
"Inherited memories from the other half"... why would inherited memories be divided into two halves? Even if the author wanted to refer to some specific content separately, he could have said "a certain part of his inherited memories" instead of "the other half," which so obviously implies a fifty-fifty split.
And then there's "the part belonging to the Tianjia deep in his bones." What other part is there besides Tianjia?
The answer is already obvious.]
[Holy crap! Lieutenant General Caleb is mixed-blood?!]
This time, it wasn't only the Tianjia who were shocked. Even the Zergs were stunned.
They had constantly joked that Lieutenant General Caleb and the Tianjia Emperor were Zerg undercover agents, but they had never imagined Caleb might genuinely have a connection to the Zergs!
Some old analysis posts were dug up as well.