159: Chapter 159 The Prince Awakens, and the Wealthy Families Kneel in Worship

Rockefeller III closed the file and clutched it in his hand, remaining silent for a long time.

He looked down at Prince Dao Dun, who lay on the bed with his chest rising and falling steadily and the monitor's waveforms flashing consistently.

Then he looked down at the research termination report in his hand—a report that, if given just a little more time, could have turned from hypothesis into reality.

In the shadows where the cold light could not reach, Rockefeller III's back shuddered ever so slightly.

It was more than just shock.

It was the moment an old aristocrat, who had spent his entire life slaughtering his way through all manner of capital and power, clearly saw himself standing on the edge of a freshly severed cliff, with the sheer drop of the abyss just millimeters from his feet.

The opposite side was a descent into absolute hell.

A few days later—no, even a few hours later—once Prince Dao Dun's body recovered enough to undergo the final step of the transformation, Solomon would have directly uploaded the consciousness of the Mothman, currently two thousand six hundred light-years away, into this shell of Grey Alien.

By then, the Fourth Prince of Zeta Star would no longer be himself; he would become a new body for the Mothman, and the Mothman's armed forces would use this perfect vessel as a medium to descend directly upon Earth.

The Five Great Families would simultaneously face two apocalyptic disasters: the fury of the Zeta Star's million-strong fleet, and the complete sealing off of all survival routes by the Mothman troops.

Samuel Astor moved his gaze away from the last page of the report in Rockefeller's hand and looked at Grey Alien still sleeping on the bed. He lowered his voice to a whisper and spoke into Rockefeller's ear: "This is not the place for a deep conversation. Prince Dao Dun requires absolute rest; we must go outside."

Rockefeller III loosened his grip on the file, handed it back to Samuel, and nodded slightly.

He turned to the group of commandos still holding their breath at the door and made a very slight, brief gesture, signaling everyone to retreat to the corridor outside the room and stand by.

Just as the group was tiptoeing toward the door, a slight coughing sound suddenly came from the hospital bed.

Immediately, the steady green waveform on the monitor, which had been jumping for who knows how long, spiked upward before slowly settling back to a baseline slightly higher than the previous heart rate.

Everyone froze at the same time.

Rockefeller III's feet were nailed to the doorway. He slowly turned his body, suppressing even his breathing, terrified that the tiny noise of turning the threshold might disturb the dying Zeta prince on the hospital bed behind him.

Prince Dao Dun slowly opened his eyes.

Those huge, oval-shaped eyeballs, pitch-black like the deep space of the night, emitted a faint, ghostly blue luster under the cold light.

There was no invasive scanning pulse like the one he had used to scan Link Warren in the underground parking garage; he was simply moving his focus slowly and with difficulty.

The infusion tubes and wires filling his body swayed slightly with the rise and fall of his chest.

He stared at the row of embedded cold lights on the ceiling for a while, then turned his head with extreme slowness and effort, looking at the group of tall figures huddled by his bed, holding their breath and not daring to move.

His lips moved.

The first few syllables were in a language that Rockefeller and Samuel could not understand at all. The voice was soft and hoarse, and the articulation and airflow rhythm were inconsistent with any human language family, sounding like a form of resonance generated from an entirely different oral structure.

He paused, seemingly realizing that the language he had just used was completely unintelligible to the creatures standing before him, and then his lips began to flutter again.

This time, the sound emitted was like a device automatically debugging its language output program, slowly down-converting from strange syllables and gradually tuning into a rough English outline.

"Who... are you?"

Rockefeller III stepped back several paces, retreating to a position about five or six steps from the hospital bed. Facing the direction of Prince Dao Dun, he straightened his suit lapels, and then dropped to his knees.

It was not the perfunctory kneeling posture of a politician bending a knee for show in a public setting.

When his knees hit the anti-static mat, they made a dull, solid thud. His back was held straight, his head bowed slightly, and his hands were clasped in front of his knees in a posture so respectful it bordered on religious devotion.

When he spoke, his voice was not loud, but every syllable was enunciated with extreme clarity, as if he were reading an ancient document carved onto a stone tablet.

"Respected Prince Dao Dun!"

"I come from the Rockefeller Family of the America of America, on Earth, the fifth terrestrial planet of the Solar System, in the Local Interstellar Cloud, the Local Bubble, the Orion Arm of the Milky Way."

"My name is Frederick Rockefeller III."

"It is an honor to meet you, my respected Prince!"

"If there is anything I can do for you, I will throw myself into the fire to satisfy you!"

Samuel Astor froze for a moment behind him, then immediately reacted.

He stepped back several paces, stood side by side with Rockefeller III, knelt on both knees, and announced his family and name in a hoarse and solemn voice.

Isabelle DuPont did not hesitate for even half a second, following suit by dropping to her knees, her skirt spreading out like a dark stain on the anti-static mat. She bowed slightly with her hands clasped in front of her knees and announced all the official titles of the DuPont Family.

Jacob Rothschild and William Vanderbilt V also knelt side by side at the same time, each announcing their family and name.

The five top tycoons who controlled the vast majority of land, military industry, finance, and railway lifelines in the Lighthouse Country were now, in this underground experimental ward filled with medical lines and monitoring instruments, all kneeling in a row before a young, grey-skinned prince who was covered in tubes and had just awakened from a deep coma, shouting in unison: "We pay our respects to Prince Dao Dun!"

In Western culture, people only kneel on both knees when worshipping deities. If one were to perform such a grand ceremony for a mortal, it would be seen by Westerners as an act bordering on blasphemy and servility—a surrender of personal dignity, reducing oneself to the posture of livestock.

But in this room at this moment, no one felt even the slightest bit of dissonance in this scene.

Aliens clearly did not belong to the category of mortals.

In a sense, the only difference between a high civilization capable of crossing thirty-nine light-years of void, writing the formula π = 3 in the sky, and trapping Solomon's Nano-Carapace in an illusion with a single monitoring core, and a deity, was that they truly existed.

And a truly existing deity was lying on this hospital bed, hooked up to an IV, quietly looking at them with those oval-shaped, pitch-black eyes. For such a noble alien prince, was there any way to show more respect than kneeling on both knees?

The armed personnel guarding inside and outside the room and on both sides of the corridor had no such reservations.

Commandos, demolition experts, sniper observers, electronic warfare technicians... Everyone who had been holding guns and standing guard, counting ammunition consumption, and reporting search progress on tactical channels just moments ago, now put down their weapons and knelt on both knees in the direction of the hospital bed.