Chapter Text
The Central Reading Room of the Empire's First Comprehensive University was deathly silent, save for the faint, rhythmic rustling of ancient paper pages being turned. Outside, the harsh light of the local star pierced through the towering alloy French windows, casting a cold, rigid blue halo across the black walnut tables.
At opposite ends of the long table sat two figures who stood in extreme contrast, both in physical stature and social class.
Xavier was slouched in an ordinary wooden chair identical to those used by the surrounding students, yet his mere presence forced an oppressive weight onto the space, as if he were seated upon a throne. He wore a cold black trench coat with sharp, aggressive tailoring, masking his overly exaggerated, beast-like frame during this incognito inspection. However, the dark-patterned black shirt underneath was carelessly unbuttoned at the top three buttons.
As he leaned back slightly, his collar slumped open to both sides, completely exposing the deep, sharp, and structural lines of his collarbones against his stark, pale skin. Just below, the explosive contours of his pectoral muscles rose and fell subtly with his heavy breathing. The dark golden double-headed eagle badge—the ultimate symbol of the Regent’s supreme authority—was currently heated by his warm skin, perfectly concealed beneath the inner side of his lapel, hidden from sight.
His legs were spread wide apart—a posture of absolute possession and raw masculine dominance.
Xavier’s dark eyes, hooded in the shadows, narrowed slightly. Even more arresting was his hand, which lazily spun a heavy fountain pen; his fingers were exceptionally long, with sharply defined knuckles and rugged contours, creating a striking visual contrast between his pale skin and his dark uniform under the light. As he carelessly rotated the pen, hard veins faintly bulged across the back of his hand. They weren't exaggerated, yet they brimmed with an explosive power that felt as though it could crush a human throat at any moment, before lazily vanishing back into his dark cuffs.
Directly across from him, Wei kept her head slightly bowed, clutching a thick volume of Basic Architecture.
Under this suffocating, unfamiliar pressure of raw masculinity, her slender fingertips unconsciously tightened against the pages. For the past three years, the Imperial Intelligence Department had dispatched high-tier psionic users countless times to conduct carpet-style mental sweeps across the campus. Wei had long grown accustomed to this routine. She only needed to hold her basic textbook, quietly playing the part of an ordinary, even cowardly female student, to perfectly bypass the radars of all the military hounds.
With lowered eyelashes, she simply assumed that the highly aggressive man across from her was just another high-level inspector newly deployed by the Intelligence Department.
She had no idea that the man sitting opposite her had already turned those long fingers spinning the pen into an invisible ruler, dripping with malice and erotic undertones. That highly predatory gaze pierced through the cold air, inch by inch, stripping away all her most private and fragile physical defenses.
What she could never have imagined was that this man she took for an ordinary inspector was none other than the master of the Empire whom she had hated for ten whole years, swearing day and night to drag him down to hell—the Regent, Xavier!
Wei's frame was far too fragile. The man's broad shoulders blocked almost all the light in front of her, completely swallowing her inside a massive shadow. Her youthful, obedient face carried the sheer innocence and harmlessness of a typical college girl, her long black hair falling messily over her shoulders. Anyone looking at her would think she was just an extremely hardworking, ordinary, sweet student.
This highly deceptive shell had successfully allowed her to stay hidden right under the eyes of the Imperial Intelligence Department for three full years.
For those three years, she had never initiated an attack. She did only one thing: tearing open hidden coding loopholes within the Empire's impenetrable Skynet. She didn't do it for fame or profit, but solely to escort countless exiled civilians and classified scholars from her motherland, "New Oasis," helping them escape the Empire's relentless hunt.
In Wei's mind, her parents had lived a life entirely at peace with the world. Ten years ago, it was that tyrant Xavier who, to usurp the throne, cold-bloodedly detonated a star at the border. Her parents and her entire motherland were thus forced to become innocent collateral damage on his path to absolute power. She would never forget the moment the mega-explosion descended. Her parents didn't even have time to leave a final word; they could only despairingly stuff her young self into the refraction pod. It was the old professor who raised her—treating her like his own daughter—who escorted her as he fought his way out of the carnage, brought her to the Capital under a false identity, and nurtured her talents.
Precisely because of this towering sea of blood vengeance, she willingly surrendered the pride of a genius, disguising herself as a mediocre, clumsy nobody. Deep within the darkest recesses of the dark web, she joined the Central Alliance—the only faction claiming a willingness to shelter the refugees of New Oasis.
She would use her brain as a weapon, transforming into "Dream Builder," the top ghost hacker wanted by the Intelligence Department for three full years. One day in the future, she would personally deal this tyrant a fatal blow!
She kept all this flawlessly hidden; not even her mentor at the university knew her true identity.
Xavier scrutinized Wei without leaving a trace.
Over the past three years, holding the data chip intercepted from Skynet's core, he had locked the signal's approximate range to Capital University and had conducted countless sweeps here.
The ghost hacker revealed in the Skynet clashes was cold, rational, and surgically precise. Yet, he had visited this reading room many times and had seen this girl timidly asking professors about basic architecture problems, then turning around, clutching her books, and greeting passing classmates with a sweet smile.
In his thirty-odd years of an arrogant, egocentric world, everyone was but fragile trash that shattered upon touch. He coldly examined the petite, delicate body before him. This shell—which seemed as if he could completely envelop it with one hand and snap it in half—had never, in the past thousand days and nights, been associated in his mind with the ghost hacker who stood against him and covered the sky with one hand on Skynet.
Click.
Xavier's long finger tapped lightly on the walnut table.
In that one-ten-thousandth of a second of physical movement, within the quantum network dimension invisible to mortals, an encirclement meant to thoroughly strip away pride and soul brazenly erupted!
The twelve elite interstellar cyber armies mobilized by Xavier within the quantum network transformed into a sky-blotting sea of pitch-black killing codes. Carrying absolutely destructive high temperatures, they violently surged into the depths of Skynet, launching a completely unheralded, frenzied assault on that crystal-clear, orderly, and almost ascetic Nine-Dimensional Crystal Labyrinth!
In reality, the reading room remained extremely quiet. But within the Quantum Skynet, the man's mental plunder was like a raging tidal wave and tsunami, tightly binding and frantically strangling her.
Wei was currently enduring a mental defensive pressure unmatched by anyone else in the entire galaxy. Deep within that Nine-Dimensional Labyrinth built of crystals, her soul's defensive line was facing a formatting tear like crashing waves. To neutralize this apocalyptic disaster within 0.01 seconds, Wei's mental consciousness, at the instinctual threshold of life and death, frantically ignited her entire mental power, sinking into the depths of the firewall as a quantum storm. The physical anchor between her flesh and consciousness instantly collapsed and severed; her shell left in reality was reduced to a white porcelain doll stripped of its soul's spark.
However, this apex predator, Xavier, was playing a game of "dual-front sniping" that only he could achieve in the entire galaxy.
At the most violent moment of the Skynet slaughter, Xavier leaned against the back of his chair. A trace of wickedness flashed in his dark eyes as he deliberately released a faint coercion of his Abyss-level mental power within the real-world reading room.
That primitive, destructive power capable of causing instant brain death in low-tier psionics, though only leaking a trace, instantly filled the entire library with the echoes of instinctual biological terror. Driven by biological instinct, the souls of surrounding ordinary students and low-tier psionics involuntarily emitted chaotic collapses and tremors.
Wei had long been familiar with this routine coercion sweep. At this moment, her physical body could only rely on muscle memory to maintain the lowest-energy external physical disguise. She skillfully lowered her head along with the people around her, her slender shoulders even trembling slightly, attempting to perform the instinctual fear of an ordinary student facing a high-tier psionic sweep.
But she made one fatal miscalculation.
The instinctual trembling and fear fluctuations of a soul under extreme terror required the spontaneous stirring of the core mental origin to be produced. At this suffocating moment, with her soul's sanctuary completely locked down and her defensive crystal lattice frantically overloading, her brain had already fallen into a deathly silent absolute defense. She simply had no spare energy to simulate an ordinary person's mental terror for this "inspector"!
In Xavier's high-dimensional, radar-like mental perception net, the entire reading room was like a noisy mental slaughterhouse, filled with the screaming mental fluctuations of fear everywhere.
Yet, only in the seat where Wei sat, the mental wavelength presented an absolutely smooth, deathly silent straight line. Amidst a room full of trembling, terrified souls, her soul was extremely quiet—abnormally quiet.
How could an ordinary, sweet university student fail to leak even a sliver of soul-deep fear under a coercion sufficient to cause brain death? That wasn't calmness; that was an extreme asceticism and suffocation—having the very right to breathe stripped away, her throat tightly gripped under the absolute authority of the tyrant.
This master of the Empire, using his high-dimensional mental perception net, saw right through this obedient, harmless skin to the frantically operating Nine-Dimensional Labyrinth inside, which was currently being madly invaded by him.
In the microsecond time difference as Xavier brought down the final strike of his mental tentacles on Skynet, Wei's physical body in reality experienced a brief lag due to the exhaustion of her mental origin.
Splash.
Her slender fingers trembled, accidentally knocking over a glass of clear water on the long table. The clear liquid spread across the black walnut wood. At the exact same moment, the final wave of overbearing masculine mental crushing in the quantum network actually crossed dimensions into reality, violently pulling open a hidden, aching spasm of pleasure that rippled through the root of her thighs. Wei's eyelashes fluttered violently, a trace of panic flashing in her eyes.
Her flustered, delicate, and youthful girl appearance perfectly overlapped across dimensions in this instant with the sacred, icy Nine-Dimensional Crystal Labyrinth frantically operating and desperately resisting the bombardment of his twelve cyber armies in Xavier's high-tier mental net!
"Caught you... little fox."
In the microsecond her identity was confirmed, the tyranny and desire for conquest sealed within Xavier for thirty-odd years fully awakened. The cold killing intent that originally belonged to a commander frantically morphed into the ultimate desire for destruction and sadistic excitement the moment he clearly saw the shadow of that perfect labyrinth.
Xavier did not immediately expose her; he merely watched with leisurely amusement as the girl frantically wiped the water stain from the table.
A trace of cold and morbidly wicked amusement flashed in the man's obsidian eyes. He let out a dark, wicked chuckle in his heart, his tall, imposing frame leaning forward slightly, locking his heavy, scalding masculine pheromones tightly onto that trembling, petite body opposite him.
The useless trash at the Intelligence Department spent three whole years searching for this top ghost hacker, and she was actually hidden right inside such a youthful shell—one he could crush with a single hand, or pin down by the waist and ravage until she sobbed out loud?
He was in no hurry to obliterate her; in fact, he was so excited that his Adam's apple rolled violently. He didn't want to destroy her just yet. All he wanted was, on some future day, to use the most primal, depraved method to personally transform his mental power into pitch-black tentacles, forcing them open inch by inch to invade this sacred, icy crystal labyrinth. He wanted to watch this calm, self-restrained soul utterly collapse and lose control under his absolute strength, letting out cries of submission as she wept and begged for his touch.
At this moment, Wei was frantically wiping away the water stains that had soaked into her documents.
However, the instant her skin registered the presence of Xavier's slowly withdrawing Abyss-level coercion across the air, a spine-chilling yet untraceable sense of familiarity flared deep within her cerebral cortex.
It was terrifyingly familiar, yet she couldn't put it into words. At the moment of contact, it not only triggered a wave of shameless, aching numbness inside her body, but even her most private, sacred flower hidden beneath her skirt—defying her rational control under this cross-dimensional mental inundation—absurdly tightened and betrayed her, welling up with a wave of secret, scalding moisture.
Wei bit her lower lip fiercely, forcefully suppressing this horrifying wave of self-loathing and arousal. She lowered her eyelashes, attempting to reconstruct her compromised neural defenses at maximum speed.
Xavier tossed down the fountain pen in his hand, admiring the exquisite, small face of the little fox whose neurons were completely overloaded. The man raised a long finger covered in rough, thick calluses, tapping it lightly against the tabletop. Carrying an absolute malice and overwhelming pressure, he asked slowly in a husky, deep baritone:
"Classmate, do you need some help?"
As he asked the question, the tip of his calloused finger deliberately and extremely methodically hovered over her wet document. He drew his fingertip downward through the empty air—an action so slow, so wicked, that it felt as if he were publicly stripping off her clothes.