Chapter 502

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Protagonist:

Lin En

Lena

She carefully peeled back the tattered fabric wrapped around the infant, confirming that what had fallen from the sky was a baby girl.

Mei pondered for a moment, and a name had already settled in her heart — Ayla.

This name was drawn from ancient Terra vocabulary, signifying bronze, the first metal tamed by human civilization.

On this forgotten wasteland planet Wade Tower, crisis and death were everywhere; she prayed simply that this child might be like bronze — enduring rust and hammering without breaking easily, living on with resilience.

No splendid meaning, merely the most genuine hope of a scavenger weathered by hardship.

Cradling the swaddling clothes, Mei trekked across the wilderness strewn with metal fragments and weathered stone, making her way back to the settlement where she dwelled.

This was only a crude refuge outpost; over fifty desperate scavengers huddled together for warmth.

A few shacks pieced together from scrap metal were crammed into the depression of a massive warship hull; outside, rusted steel plates were stacked as defensive ramparts, and a generator hummed low, barely maintaining the most basic lighting and heating.

When Mei entered the camp carrying the infant, word spread quickly.

For this group long accustomed to death, Mei having a daughter again counted as a rare happy event.

People gathered around to peer in; rough faces showed a trace of long-lost gentleness — someone handed over a scrap of cloth, another produced half a hard starch cake, each offering their meager blessings.

Mei lowered her head to gaze at little Ayla in her arms, harboring no extravagant wish, only hoping she would grow up safe and sound.

Reality soon presented a difficulty.

Mei was already forty years old; her body was no longer young, and she had no breast milk at all.

She inquired throughout the entire settlement, but could not find a single woman in lactation.

What surprised Mei, however, was that Ayla was extraordinarily easy to raise.

Mixing compressed starch canned food with water into a thick paste and feeding it to her, the little one ate with relish, her amethyst-like eyes narrowing in utter satisfaction.

This truly delighted Mei.

But trouble followed — Ayla's appetite was astonishingly large.

Mei had already set aside two-thirds of her own rations for the child, yet Ayla still often seemed not to have eaten her fill. The enormous dietary demand brought an incomprehensible growth rate.

In merely one month, Ayla could already walk steadily upright, toddling back and forth between the metal shacks.

Not even half a year had passed before her height reached a full 1.2 meters; her build looked almost indistinguishable from a human girl of five or six.

But her appearance was far more outstanding.

A head of black, silky long hair fell like satin; a pair of eyes clear as amethysts; skin fair and delicate, exquisite as a meticulously fired porcelain doll.

In a wasteland settlement full of grime and scars, where everyone wore tattered clothes, such an excessively pretty child was far too eye-catching.

Rumors quietly sprouted and spread among the shacks.

By the campfire some whispered that Ayla was a demon's daughter, a calamity seed cast down from the Warp, who would sooner or later bring destruction and disaster to Wade Tower.

Suspicion in the shadows spread wider and wider; panic quietly diffused through the small settlement.

But upon learning of these rumors, Mei's attitude was utterly unyielding.

Whoever she heard badmouthing behind her back, she would directly confront them, standing before their crude shack door and sternly demanding by what right they maliciously slandered a little girl who didn't yet understand the world.

"Every morsel she eats was scraped from my own share; she hasn't eaten a single bite of your family's canned food!"

Mei's voice echoed through the camp; her palm, covered in old calluses, pressed on the hilt of the rust-stained hunting knife at her waist.

"If I hear even half a sentence slandering Ayla again, I'll personally cut out your tongue!"

Mei was one of the most senior scavengers on this wilderness; she had once served as a peacekeeper in the now-destroyed Hei Tie Cheng, and enjoyed considerable prestige in the settlement.

After this forceful stance, the open gossip was finally suppressed; no one dared publicly criticize Ayla anymore.

Yet the massive food consumption brought by the child's rapid growth remained an unavoidable practical problem.

However reluctant her heart, Mei had no choice but to decide to take Ayla out scavenging with her.

Scavenging was, after all, the survival method relied upon by over ninety percent of Wade Tower's residents.

This planet had been trapped in the isolation of the Cage Star System since long before the Great Rift tore the galaxy.

Aside from the occasional Chaos pirates who stumbled in, there were virtually no more visitors from elsewhere in the galaxy; even the Empire's Tithe had long forgotten this abandoned star system.

Fortunately, this place had once been a vast industrial world; the surface was covered with the wreckage of abandoned factories,

and several brutal void wars had caused countless warships to crash onto the planet, forming endless massive junkyards across the land.

The surviving people of Wade Tower shuttled day after day through the metal ruins, picking through still-usable parts and supplies to exchange for the food and water that kept them alive.

Mei did not expect young Ayla to actually dig up much valuable material.

The little girl's skin was fair and tender, looking frail and delicate.

She brought Ayla outside mainly because she didn't want to leave her alone in the camp, fearing hidden malice might harm the child while she was away.

She only hoped Ayla would obediently follow behind her and not get lost in the vast ocean of garbage — that would be enough.

But reality soon overturned all of Mei's expectations; the talent Ayla displayed left her incomparably shocked.

Extraordinary insight and terrifying learning ability were manifested in the little girl to the fullest.

Mei merely gave a simple verbal explanation once of the classification methods and corresponding values of various parts and supplies, and Ayla committed them firmly to memory.

Walking through the boundless sea of garbage composed of mountains of scrap metal, shattered circuit boards, and rusted components.

She could always identify valuable objects at first glance, picking out supplies from countless useless scraps.

Not only that; her physical capabilities and reaction speed far exceeded those of ordinary human children.

During one scavenging trip, a giant radiation cockroach over two meters long fiercely burst out from under a rusted steel plate, its limbs waving, mouthparts dripping corrosive mucus, lunging straight at Ayla.

Mei didn't even have time to raise her gun to shoot.

But Ayla nimbly sidestepped and pivoted, cleanly dodging the cockroach's lunge, bent down to grab a metal fragment with a sharp edge from the ground, and hurled it with all her strength.

A cold light flashed, and the sharp iron shard struck precisely at the soft weakness of the radiated cockroach's body.

With a pfft, the huge insect body crashed heavily onto the ruins covering the ground, twitched a few times, and then stopped moving completely.

Mei Yaya stood in place, her breath stagnating.

The girl who had completed the kill before her eyes was not even one year old.