Chapter 26: Shocking News

Chapter 26: Chapter 26: Shocking News

In the end Liam did cook another plate of Grass Worms fried with egg.

Only once it was done did he call Isabella and Benjamin in. The two adults looked at the strange dishes on the table and kept asking what the ingredients were. Liam was far too hungry by then, so he could only tell them that he would go through each dish for them once they had eaten.

The two of them copied Liam, stirring the porridge with a spoon, lifting a spoonful to blow on it and then putting it in their mouths. A gentle, fragrant flavor burst across their palates, and neither of them could stop their eyes narrowing in enjoyment.

Isabella paid no attention to how hot the porridge was and shovelled three or four spoonfuls in one after another. Then came a piece of fried potato and a mouthful of greens, at a speed that left Liam and Benjamin staring open-mouthed.

This time Benjamin didn’t even manage to serve Liam anything; he simply rolled up his sleeves and joined the fight with Isabella. Fortunately neither of them touched the plate of Grass Worms fried with egg, which was the only reason Liam wasn’t left going hungry.

The two of them cleared everything on the table, let out a belch, and only then noticed that Liam was still eating porridge along with his Grass Worm omelet. Isabella went red to the ears and rubbed the back of her neck: "I’m... I’m sorry, Liam. It was so good I couldn’t hold myself back for a second..." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Benjamin was no less guilty: "Let me go and boil you some more greens."

Liam raised a hand to stop him: "No need, this is plenty for me. These Grass Worms are far more nourishing than any of that."

Then he suddenly asked Benjamin: "Brother, your health seems to have improved, hasn’t it?"

At those words Benjamin and Isabella both went blank. They thought it over for a moment and decided Liam had a point. Isabella slapped the table: "Now that you mention it! Normally by about nine in the morning Benjamin has gone pale all over from the heat. But it’s half past twelve now, and he’s been out in the sun all morning without fainting once!"

Liam nodded: "That’s right. And today his chopsticks were even faster than yours."

Benjamin: "..."

You noticed that too?

Isabella rubbed her chin: "But why? Surely this pheromone disorder can’t actually be cured?"

Liam pointed at the plate of Grass Worm omelet: "It can’t, no. It’s thanks to those grass worms the two of you used to find so repulsive. I noticed the container of frozen boiled worms was a little short. They must have come back to life and crawled away."

Benjamin: "..."

Benjamin’s face went scarlet. Under Isabella’s unwavering stare he had to put his hands up in surrender: "I just wanted them so badly that I snuck a few in the middle of the night. Only a few, honestly!"

Isabella laughed coldly and gave her brother a thorough scolding. Once she was finished she turned to Liam: "Can these Grass Worms really cure Benjamin’s illness? How do you know?"

Liam finished his last mouthful of egg, wiped his mouth, and only then started spinning his story: "Well, I didn’t know either. Do the two of you remember the dishes I sent to that top gifter in my broadcasting room the other day? He had them tested and found a new active compound inside. He said the compound can help stabilize pheromones. I worked backward from that and concluded that Benjamin’s condition has eased because he’s been eating a lot of Grass Worms."

He looked at Benjamin and said seriously: "But none of that has been properly verified. We’re all taking the afternoon off, and we’re going to the hospital on Altair for a full examination."

Liam also wanted to use the opportunity to find out what was wrong with his own body, given the way that blue cat kept being so infuriatingly cryptic about it.

Isabella drew a deep breath and sat down, saying to her brothers: "If this worm really does work the way you say, should we report it to the Research Institute?"

Liam laughed: "Sister, do you think they’d believe us if we told them now? You may not know this, but I know it very well. That crowd at the Research Institute look at everyone down their noses. Say a word to them and they’d have us thrown in prison."

Benjamin and Isabella looked at each other and asked: "Then what should we do?"

"Make it and sell it ourselves." Liam tapped the tabletop: "I’ll handle that with the young master myself, neither of you needs to worry about it. Once this goes out on the open market and ordinary people confirm what it does for themselves, that crowd at the Research Institute will have to pay attention to it in the end."

And by then those people wouldn’t be needed at all, because the public would already have proved it.

Mrs. Hall worked at the Research Institute, so Liam had been around these people since he was small. He had seen exactly how they treated everyone and exactly how arrogant they were, and he detested them for it.

A whole crowd of them would spend decades producing some useless object, and still look down on every other class of person. Even people from the military and the royal family rarely got a pleasant face out of them.

Liam was confident that once dishes made from Grass Worms began making waves on the market, the false expressions on those faces would be smashed to pieces. And he couldn’t wait to see that day come.

At two in the afternoon, the three Martinez siblings boarded their ship and set off for Altair to see a doctor.

Altair Central Hospital was the largest hospital within a radius of three star systems, over three hundred floors high, each floor handling its own specialty. From the moment he stepped into the lobby Benjamin grew restless. He had been here many times, and every single time the answer had been the same: hold it where it is, don’t let it get worse.

Liam patted his brother’s shoulder and pushed him into the full-body scanning pod first.

The doctor handling Benjamin was a middle-aged Beta in glasses, the same man who had been following his file for the past year. He had been scrolling listlessly through the data panel, but halfway down he sat bolt upright.

"Mr. Martinez, wait a moment."

He pulled up the old file and put the two sets of readings side by side on the screen, six months ago on the left and the fresh scan on the right. He looked back and forth several times, then took off his glasses to clean them, put them back on and looked again.

"Your gland... is repairing itself."

Benjamin was blank: "What do you mean, doctor?"

"I mean it’s healing." The doctor tapped the screen, his tone no longer holding on to any professional composure: "Pheromone disorder at your level is something modern medicine can only hold in place and stop from worsening. There has never been a case of recovery. Never, do you understand? And in half a year your stability index has risen by nearly twenty percent."

He lifted his head, his eyes blazing as he looked at Benjamin: "What medication have you been taking? Where did you get it? Which manufacturer?"

Benjamin opened his mouth to answer, but caught sight of his younger brother standing behind the doctor shaking his head, and shut it again, stammering: "I... I’ve just been eating more regularly, that’s all."

The doctor plainly didn’t believe him and pressed hard for more. Benjamin would only insist that he had been eating a little more fresh food lately, and had taken nothing beyond the medication the doctor had prescribed.

Unable to get anything out of him, the doctor could only tell Benjamin over and over to come back for a follow-up in two weeks, and added a long note to the file besides.

Isabella’s turn went much faster. She was a Beta and there was nothing worth examining, so she only had a scan run for the sake of completeness.

But when the results came up, she was the one left standing frozen in front of the screen.

"Mental power... grade D+?"

She turned to her two brothers, her voice shaking: "My mental power tested as grade D when I was eight years old, and it’s been grade D for fourteen years since. How has it jumped to D+?"

Liam looked at the reading on the screen and nodded to himself. As long as she kept eating grass worms every day, her mental power grade would certainly climb further.

But Isabella’s and Benjamin’s results only surprised everyone a little. What shocked them to the core were the results of Liam’s examination.

"Liam Martinez, male Omega. Mental power grade: E+. Health status: elevated pheromone concentration in the blood. Preliminary diagnosis: pregnancy." The young doctor read the information through carefully, then broke into a wide smile: "Congratulations to the family first of all."

He read closely through a series of test values and went on: "All the Omega’s readings are excellent at present, and there’s no gestational pheromone disorder either. His partner must have been using pheromones regularly to settle his emotions. I’ll transfer his information to obstetrics now, so take him along for a check on the baby."

The news left the three Martinez siblings so stunned that none of them could afterward have said how they took the results from the doctor or how they got themselves to the hospital’s obstetrics department.

It was not until an orderly helped Liam into the hyperfrequency scanning pod that the two elder Martinezes came back to themselves. Benjamin reached over and pinched his sister, Isabella silently pinched him back, and then both of them said dazedly: "It really isn’t a dream..."

Their younger brother was pregnant! And it had taken on the very first go!