The sudden ground collapse caught everyone off guard.

Amidst screams, Liu Hong and others sprinted forward but were still a step too late.

“Brother!”

Liu Hong used all his strength to hold back Qin Luo, who was about to jump down.

“What good will it do if you jump down?!”

“What do you know?!” Qin Luo struggled fiercely.

The Prince absolutely can’t be in danger!

Chen Chen pulled out his personal terminal and sent an emergency distress call to command headquarters.

Hu Feng sent another distress signal.

The bullet comments on the live stream were also in chaos—

“Damn it! Both of them fell!”

“Why isn’t the rescue team here yet!”

“Pray for the safety of the honored couple!”

“They’re so strong, they won’t die that easily, absolutely not!”

“Damn it, who would dare to participate in the competition after this?”

“Let’s all send distress calls to the school! I don’t believe they can just stand by!”

---

On Academy Star, Qian Fan had just brought Mianmian and Cola home. He had just put the two children to bed and was about to watch some live stream when he saw the scene of Song Yu being pushed out. His fists immediately clenched.

“He only knows how to play dirty tricks!”

Qin Lin walked out of the laboratory, hearing curses coming from the living room.

His spouse was standing with one foot on the sofa, eyebrows raised, shouting at the virtual screen: “Hit him back!… Good! As expected of my student!… Beautiful!… Watch out for the Ant King’s tentacles!… Beautiful!… Why aren’t you pretending when you’re saving your wife?…”

Qin Lin: “…”

Where’s your teacher’s composure?

“Careful!”

Qin Lin saw his expression was off, his gaze shifted to the virtual screen, and his brows furrowed.

“Is there no rescue team nearby?”

“That kid Song Ke messed with it.” Qian Fan quickly swiped open his terminal with a dark face, making a call.

As soon as it connected, he spoke impatiently: “Father, something’s gone wrong in the league, those two kids might be in danger!”

Qian Li looked at the live stream through the virtual screen.

“I know.”

Hanging up the call, Qian Fan looked at Rong Shi, who had actively removed his emitter on the screen, and his heart pounded.

“They’ll be fine.”

Qian Fan was dazed and couldn’t snap out of it.

“My students… can’t be in trouble again.”

Qin Lin patted his shoulder, and at an angle he couldn’t see, took a deep look at the screen.

---

Inside the ant nest, 01 attached itself to the ceiling, acting as a wall lamp, illuminating the entire hole.

Rong Shi stood at the entrance of the hole with Song Yu on his back, his gaze sweeping over the experimental equipment inside.

This was a biochemical laboratory, and strictly speaking, it was an abandoned laboratory.

A thick layer of dust lay on the experiment table, various tools were scattered everywhere, and the instruments remained in the state they were in during the last experiment.

A row of cabinets stood against the wall, their rusted doors half-open, with a few scattered, toppled medicine bottles inside. Many drawers were open, and several yellowed white papers lay on the ground.

“Let’s go in and take a look,” Song Yu urged.

A laboratory built in such a place must be clandestine.

Rong Shi walked in, and at Song Yu’s strong request, put him down.

The space inside the hole wasn’t large, but it held many filing cabinets and medicine cabinets.

Rong Shi picked up a few papers from the ground. The handwriting on them was very messy and blurry, roughly records of some experiment, like casually written drafts.

After flipping through all of them, only a few individual numbers were clear, along with a few words.

“Pheromone equality?” Rong Shi mumbled.

“Rong Shi, come look at this,” Song Yu’s voice sounded from behind him. He casually placed the paper in a drawer and walked over.

“Look, isn’t this very similar to the one on the tree trunk?” Song Yu held the paper in his hand out to him.

The yellowed paper was filled with text, blurry like the ones Rong Shi had seen, but the circular area in the lower left corner was pure white, with clearly visible writing, and a simple drawing of a rabbit at the very bottom.

Glancing at Rong Shi’s reaction, Song Yu whispered, “Is your father involved with this laboratory?”

Rong Shi shook his head: “I don’t know, I’ve never heard him mention anything about this.”

Since it might be related to his father, Rong Shi carefully inspected the few remaining medicines and documents in the laboratory, handing all of them to 01.

01 had a light bulb on one end and an open mouth on the other to collect the medicines.

“This auxiliary tool is really useful,” Song Yu said jokingly, trying to lighten the overly oppressive atmosphere.

Rong Shi replied, “It’s just too greedy; it’s easily lured away.”

[QuQ]

After leaving the hole, Rong Shi was led by Song Yu to explore several nearby xue holes.

Behind the laboratory, there was a warehouse for experimental equipment. On each side, there was an old operating table, making it look like an operating room.

[This model of operating table was built twenty years ago.]

“So, this laboratory has likely been here for twenty years?” Song Yu leaned on his back, analyzing, “Aside from that, how did they guard against termites?”

Placing a laboratory in an ant nest was equivalent to putting a bed in an enemy’s home; it would be impossible not to be discovered.

“From the moment we fell until now, we haven’t seen a single termite,” Rong Shi noted.

“The Ant King just died, so they’ve all been called by the Ant Queen to protect the larvae?” Song Yu pondered.

Rong Shi shook his head, the scanned image of the ant nest flashing before his eyes.

“Perhaps there’s more than one ant nest here.”

Female ants in a colony, after reaching adulthood, will fly away from the group to establish their own colony.

The colony might grow larger and larger, or it might face extinction.

The massive and complex ant nest structure on the scan was likely caused by two ant nests layered on top of each other.

The ant colony corresponding to the ant nest they were currently in had likely already gone extinct, and this place was abandoned.

“So—they were using an abandoned ant nest from the very beginning?” Song Yu asked, though his tone was certain.

This method was incredibly secretive. By simply wrapping the hole with a special material, they could avoid detection by all electronic devices, easily achieving invisibility right under one’s nose.

Rong Shi’s mind was filled with the drawing his father left behind.

Was this laboratory related to the test subjects? For whom did his father leave these marks, and what was he trying to convey?

After having 01 mark the laboratory area, Rong Shi carried Song Yu and started walking upwards.

The original tunnel to the surface had collapsed, so he had to choose another route.

Both were lost in thought. When they turned into another tunnel, their differing heights caused both their foreheads to simultaneously hit the soil above.

Song Yu clutched his forehead and playfully patted Rong Shi’s shoulder: “Don’t you watch where you’re going?”

“…Are you okay?” Rong Shi asked.

“Good thing there’s no surveillance here.” Song Yu wiped the dirt from his forehead. Seeing Rong Shi was also covered in dust, he used his sleeve to wipe him, chuckling, “If those omegas at school saw the Chairman bump his head while walking, I wonder if they’d be disillusioned?”

Rong Shi tilted his head to let him wipe, secretly pleased: “Do you care about their thoughts?”

“I only care about his thoughts,” Song Yu replied.

Rong Shi bent slightly to duck into the tunnel, his voice soft: “He doesn’t dislike people who are occasionally clumsy.”

---

t

Ten minutes later—

[Turn right at the intersection ahead, pay attention to the tunnel height, don’t hit the benefactor’s head, okay?]

Rong Shi: “…Mm.”

01, now a light bulb, led the way, with Rong Shi following behind, and Song Yu draped over his shoulder, laughing uncontrollably.

It wasn’t until they were almost at the surface that Rong Shi had 01 disable the restrictions on both their terminals.

The terminals had high security, but they had an unavoidable location tracking function.

The rescue system could query the location of any ID.

To be safe, Rong Shi activated 01’s protection and disabled the terminal’s location function once they had fallen to an area where ground surveillance couldn’t detect them.

As soon as they reconnected to the network, both their terminals started ringing incessantly.

As they neared the surface, Rong Shi had 01 transform into a flat, thin sheet and hide in his jacket.

His vision was dark, so Song Yu reached into his backpack for a flashlight and shone it for him.

“Rong Shi.”

“Hm?”

Song Yu looked at the illuminated ground ahead, his voice very low: “Why did you save me? If I died, he’d be yours anyway—everyone wants me dead.”

The flashlight’s beam didn’t reach Rong Shi’s face; Song Yu could only vaguely make out a silhouette.

After a few steps, he heard Rong Shi say, “Don’t worry about what those people think. I want you alive.”

Song Yu’s hand, resting on Rong Shi’s shoulder, involuntarily tightened. The simple rabbit drawing flashed before his eyes.

In the lab, when he saw Rong Shi and the sketch, he suddenly remembered why it looked familiar.

In their second year of knowing each other, Bunny had drawn this sketch for him, only that rabbit didn’t have two whiskers and wore a jumpsuit.

Bunny said his virtual avatar was based on this. Although the two rabbits had subtle differences, the irregular face shape and the carelessly asymmetrical ears were identical.

At the time, he had even inwardly complained, wondering which clumsy artist had drawn it, it was so ugly.

If the rabbit with whiskers was drawn by Rong Guang, then was the one representing Bunny also drawn by Rong Guang?

Rong Shi said this was a sketch representing their family of four, but Bunny wasn’t a family member.

Though incredible, a wild idea sprouted in Song Yu’s mind.

But how could it be? Bunny was clearly so cute—

Absolutely impossible!

Song Yu was caught between doubt and self-doubt, subtly probing: “Why? What’s special about me to you?”

After asking, he immediately regretted it, feeling incredibly stupid for even having such a guess.

“Of course, you’re special,” Rong Shi said.

Those four simple words made Song Yu’s heart skip a beat, a faint current spreading, making his fingertips tingle.

He didn’t know if he was expecting something or avoiding something.

Rong Shi looked at the path ahead and said calmly, “You owe me several blank checks. If you died before cashing them, wouldn’t I be at a loss?”

Song Yu: “…”

Song Yu didn’t know if his expectations had been dashed or if he was simply relieved. His heart felt empty.

“That’s it?”

Rong Shi calmly added, “We’re currently in a pre-marriage state. If you suddenly die before divorce, it would be treated as a widowhood, and my net worth would take a further hit. Too much of a loss.”

Song Yu: “…Damn it!”

After all that, that’s all you thought of?!

Song Yu scoffed, too angry to speak.

A moment later, he couldn’t help but sneer, “Don’t worry, even without a discount, someone like you wouldn’t find a wife. You don’t have that problem.”

Rong Shi: “…”

A faint light appeared in the distance, getting closer to the surface.

Once they left here, they would be under surveillance again.

Song Yu felt anxious. He thought it was impossible, yet he couldn’t help but probe.

“Are those kinds of rabbit sketches unique to your family of four?”

---

Author’s Note:

Song Cat: Why did you save me? [Meekly disheartened]

Rong Bunny: Because 01 still needs you to feed it.

Song Cat: So you only like my money? Ha! [Angrily flips table]

Rong Bunny: …

#Why is my wife acting strange?#