Peregrine's dormitory was the "Sky One" suite on the top floor of the academy. It took up half the floor, with an outer study and reception room, and an inner bedroom and private training ground. As an "attendant," Orion was supposed to sleep on the sofa in the outer room, but for the past three months, the original Orion hadn't even warmed the carpet—Peregrine wouldn't let him near.
Today was different.
The moment Orion reached the entrance, the automatic door slid open, and a heavy scent of blood hit him in the face.
"Come in."
The voice came from the inner room—low, raspy, like sandpaper grinding against metal. It was a world away from the cold, regal tone of the Crown Prince in the game's cinematics.
He stepped over the threshold and froze.
The reception room was a wreck. The solid wood coffee table was snapped into three pieces, the holographic projector was emitting blue smoke, and a fist-sized crater was punched into the wall. Blood was everywhere—on the floor, the sofa, even the ceiling. Splatters of dark red were shocking against the cold white lights.
And the source of that blood was leaning against the bedroom doorframe.
Peregrine Cinder.
His long silver-white hair was a mess over his shoulders. His golden eyes had narrowed into thin vertical slits, like a large predatory cat. His uniform jacket lay discarded on the floor, and his white shirt was rolled to his elbows. His forearms were covered in claw marks—some deep enough to show bone, still seeping blood.
He had done it to himself. A classic symptom of the Cinder Plague—using self-inflicted pain to suppress the madness.
"You're the one the Jordan family sent?" Peregrine tilted his head, his movements possessing an inhuman, eerie elegance. "Come here."
Orion didn't move.
In the game settings, Peregrine stood at 188cm with S+ physical stats and double-S mental power. He was the perfect heir the Empire saw once a century. But no one told the players the price of that "perfection"—the Cinder Plague. A low emotional threshold where rage granted explosive power but erased all reason, followed by memory blackouts and extreme physical frailty.
The current Peregrine was in that frail post-frenzy period. But "frail" was relative; crushing a "Defective" attendant would be no harder than crushing an ant.
"I said, come here," Peregrine repeated, his golden eyes narrowing.
This was the prelude to impatience. Orion had written it in the design docs: Peregrine narrows eyes = Danger level +30%, players are advised to save immediately.
But he had no save points.
Orion took two steps forward, maintaining a safe distance. "Master Peregrine, what do you need me to do?"
"Take off your clothes."
"...What?"
"Your pheromones," Peregrine's voice was soft, as if talking to himself. "The Jordans called you a Defective, but your pheromones..." He sniffed the air, his Adam's apple bobbing. "They're very clean."
Orion's skin crawled.
He had forgotten this part. In the Interstellar era, Pureblood Nobles used pheromones to identify status; everyone had a unique "scent." The original Orion's pheromones were judged "Defective" because they were non-aggressive—gentle and bland as a glass of plain water—a symbol of shame in noble circles.
But in the game's hidden settings, this "non-aggressive" pheromone had a secret attribute: Ember's Grace. It could soothe the madness of the Cinder Plague. It was one of the very few "stabilizers" that could exist alongside Peregrine.
The Jordan family had kept this secret, sending Orion out as a "gift," gambling that Peregrine would unconsciously become dependent on this "Defective," thereby pulling the two families closer.
The original Orion didn't know any of this. He only knew Peregrine hated him. He had spent three months locked outside, barely seeing the Prince's face.
But the current Orion knew everything.
"Master Peregrine," he kept his voice as steady as possible. "My pheromones are truly nothing special. If you need a stabilizer, the medical bay has synthetic—"
"Synthetic ones don't work," Peregrine interrupted, suddenly smiling. The smile was beautiful and terrifying; the corners of his mouth curled up, but there was no warmth in his golden eyes. "I've tried. Only yours work."
He reached out toward Orion, his pale, slender fingers still stained with blood. "Come here. Let me smell you."
The scene was grotesque. The Crown Prince of the Empire, acting like a large predator, inviting him closer just to "smell" him.
Orion remembered a detail from the game: Peregrine's sense of smell was seventeen times more sensitive than a normal person's—and after a frenzy, it reached forty times. He could tell a person's emotional state from their pheromones—fear, anger, or...
Orion took a deep breath, suppressed his instinctive trembling, and took three steps forward.
He was now one meter away from Peregrine. At this distance, if the other man lunged, he might have a chance to retreat.
"Closer," Peregrine said.
Orion took one more step.
Peregrine moved like lightning, grabbing Orion's wrist. The strength was staggering; Orion felt his wrist bones groan under the pressure. The next second, he was yanked forward—
His cheek collided with something warm.
Peregrine buried his face into the crook of Orion's neck.
"Don't move," a raspy command. Breath puffed against his skin, sending a shiver down his spine. "Let me..."
Orion froze. He could feel Peregrine's nose brushing against his carotid artery. He could feel the rise and fall of the man's chest. He could even feel... Peregrine's heartbeat, slowing from a frantic 120 beats per minute down to 90, 80, 70...
It really worked.
His pheromones—Ember's Grace—really could calm Peregrine.
"What is your name?" Peregrine's voice was muffled against his collarbone, having regained a bit of its cold, regal texture.
"...Orion Ember."
"Orion." Peregrine repeated the name, as if tasting it. "The Jordan family didn't give you that name, did they?"
Orion blinked. The original name had indeed been given by his mother. The name "Ember" was meant to symbolize hope, but the Jordan family had never legally recognized it, only referring to him as "the Jordan bastard."
"It was my mother," he said.
Peregrine was silent for a few seconds before suddenly letting go and stepping back. His golden pupils had returned to their normal circles. Though they were still bloodshot, that inhuman slit-like quality had vanished.
"From today on," he turned and walked toward the bedroom, his silver-white hair trailing in a graceful arc behind him, "you sleep on the sofa in the outer room. You are not allowed in the inner room without my permission. You are not allowed to leave this dorm without my summons. Do you understand?"
Orion rubbed his numbed wrist. "I understand..."
"And," Peregrine stopped at the bedroom door without turning back. "Your pheromones... they are only for me to smell. If I find out you let anyone else touch you..."
He didn't finish the sentence, but Orion understood.
This was possessiveness. Pathological, budding possessiveness based on physiological dependence.
In the game, Peregrine never had this plotline. In the original story, the "Jordan bastard" never got within three meters of Peregrine before he died, so the "Stabilizer" hidden quest was never triggered.
But now, the threads of fate had moved.
"Understood, Master Peregrine." Orion lowered his head in a submissive gesture. "I am yours."
Peregrine turned his head slightly, his peripheral vision sweeping over Orion. The gaze was complex—scrutinizing, suspicious, and something else Orion couldn't quite read.
"Clean this up," he said, then vanished behind the door.
Orion spent twenty minutes doing a basic cleanup of the reception room. He dragged the broken table to a corner, wiped away the blood with a cleaning agent, and ignored the broken projector for now.
Once finished, he collapsed onto the sofa and stared at the ceiling.
The sofa was soft, made of some leather he didn't recognize, emitting a faint scent of cedar. It was the same scent that clung to Peregrine.
He lifted his wrist and looked at the red marks. Bruises were already appearing; the fingerprints were as clear as a stamp.
"This is f*cking ridiculous," he muttered quietly.
Before transmigrating, he was the lead designer, the creator of this world. He knew all of Peregrine's data: 188cm, 76kg, born March 15, New Era 262. He knew his favorite food was black coffee and synthetic protein blocks, that he hated sweets, that his frenzy threshold was an emotional value of 90/100, and that his post-frenzy frailty lasted 6-8 hours on average...
He knew Peregrine was going to die. In eighty-seven days, amid the fires of the Seventh Sector, this man who had just pressed his face into Orion's neck would become a piece of wreckage that wouldn't even leave a whole corpse behind.
And now, he had become Peregrine's "property."
Let's just survive first, he thought, his lips twitching into a fleeting smile before he tightened them again.
Outside the window was the night sky of the Seventh Sector. Three artificial suns orbited the planet, pouring eternal daylight onto this interstellar fortress. Orion looked at that fake brightness and remembered a detail from the game:
When The Falling Star Battle breaks out, the Seventh Sector's stellar defense system will be obscured by Zerg spore clouds. The entire sector will fall into seventy-two hours of total darkness. In those seventy-two hours, Peregrine's flagship, the Celestial, will be the only lighthouse—and the only target.
He closed his eyes, pulling up the battle map in his mind. The Zerg attack routes, the fleet's defensive vulnerabilities, the bottlenecks in the civilian evacuation corridors... every piece of data was as clear as yesterday.
Change it.
He could change it.
Not for Peregrine, but for himself. He didn't want to die. He didn't want to be an anonymous corpse eighty-seven days from now. He didn't want this world he designed with his own hands to follow the tragic script he had written.
"Orion."
The bedroom door suddenly opened, and Peregrine's voice drifted out. He had changed into clean clothes, his silver hair tied back, looking like the perfect heir once again. Only the bloodshot veins in his eyes betrayed his earlier state.
"Master Peregrine?"
"Can you cook?" Peregrine asked.
Orion was taken aback. "...A little?"
"Then go cook." Peregrine tossed something over, and Orion caught it instinctively. It was a clearance chip. "The kitchen is downstairs. Use my account. I want something hot. No synthetic food."
Orion looked at the chip in his palm, then at Peregrine.
In the game settings, Peregrine's kitchen clearance was S-rank, usable only by him and three trusted confidants. And now he had just tossed it to a "study attendant" he'd known for ten minutes?
"Is there a problem?" Peregrine raised an eyebrow.
"No." Orion clenched the chip in his hand and lowered his head. "I'll go right now."
He turned to head for the door, and from behind him came Peregrine's voice, so soft it was like a whisper to himself:
"Your pheromones... they smell like snow."
Orion's steps faltered for a fraction of a second. He didn't look back as he pulled the door open and walked out.
In the corridor, he leaned against the wall and took a deep breath.
Like snow. In the game lore, Peregrine's mother died in a blizzard in the Seventh Sector—his only memory from when he was five. After that, he was taken to the palace and raised by AI, never seeing real snow again.
Orion's pheromones were judged "Defective" because they were "scentless." But Peregrine smelled snow.
This was good. It meant that in the Crown Prince's heart, Orion was already linked to a hidden, primal memory of his mother.
"Eighty-seven days," he said to the empty air, his voice light but determined. "It's enough."