The Man Picked up by the Gods - Volume 3 - Chapter 40

The journey of a generation’s male empress started because of four words.

“Send a dowry escort.”

During the 19th year of Yuanqing, Qi Yunruo boarded a carriage and entered through a corner door of the second prince’s estate. Then, across the watery corridor, he gazed at the prince from afar.

Notes:

For aristocratic women in imperial China to marry into a family part of the upper nobility, they must be of the legitimate line and must also have an escort/dowry maid that married into that family. That escort would be a “ying” (媵) and could be considered a concubine.

- Description from Novelupdates

I’m in a secret, bad romance with a love dependent student—「Having a secret meeting with a student one is in charge of at school… Isn’t it exciting?」The special relationship with Kirihara that no one can know about began when I took up my post at Mori Kawara High School as a teacher.At school, she’s the serious student council president who has earned a lot of trust from other teachers, but when it’s just the two of us, she becomes mischievous, clingy, and jealous.On weekends, I cook meals at her place, play games together, and pamper her as if we were lovers.Unable to reject her because she knows my weakness, and despite knowing it’s wrong, we continue to pile up secrets little by little every day…「Sensei, my feelings of liking you have grown very strong.」As Kirihara openly confronts me with her feelings, the emotions I’ve been holding back grow even stronger.Even though it would all be over if it were exposed, that sense of immorality ironically only accelerates things further—

When we met for the first time in our first year of high school, he saw my contempt, but silently continued to clean;

Rex was an ordinary salaryman, resigned to a dull life of monotony in a towering megacity. But his world shatters when he’s conscripted by Nexum Dynamics, a ruthless megacorporation, and thrust into a brutal war for a barren, alien world. The planet holds unimaginable riches, but it’s also swarming with the Krhyssari, an insectoid race that dominates the surface with their hive-mind precision and relentless aggression. Amid the carnage, Rex had an extraordinary encounter with Cleo, an ancient AI, a survivor of a long-extinct civilization. Cleo isn’t just an artificial intelligence; she’s a consciousness imbued with memories of her people’s interstellar empire and equipped with advanced bio-nanotechnology. Offering Rex a new purpose and unmatched power, she transforms his fragile human body into a hybrid of living metal and flesh, making him the ultimate weapon. But Cleo is more than a tool of war. As she journeys alongside Rex, her cold, logical algorithms evolve, shaped by his humanity. Together, they form a bond that transcends the boundaries of man and machine, discovering love in the midst of chaos. As Rex and Cleo fight for survival, they uncover a shared ambition, to rise as intergalactic overlords, uniting or conquering the galaxy.