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ArabicHonkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 10
Chapter 10: Pessimism
Clarice tilted her head, catching a rare flicker of bewilderment crossing the young man’s usually placid features. Surprise rippled through her, but she held her tongue, waiting in the quiet stillness of the clinic.
The silence stretched, heavy with unspoken weight, until Kagashi finally broke it.
“Perhaps there is no standard way to understand this sentence,” he began, his voice a soft murmur against the quiet room. “If I had to give an answer, I think: the meaning of life isn’t about finding the way out of the maze, but about collecting those moments worth remembering during the detours. In the inevitability that everything will eventually pass away, Remembrance is the only thing we can take with us. It is the gentlest resistance people have against nothingness.”
Clarice fell into deep thought, her brow furrowing. Mr. Kagashi’s answer felt strangely hollow to her, entirely unsuited to the warmth he usually exuded. It leaned entirely too far into pessimism. If life itself faded away into ash, wouldn’t the Remembrance taken with it eventually dissolve as well? Didn’t everyone just end up with nothing in the end?
“Don’t dwell on it too much,” Kagashi said, noticing her conflicted expression. “Some questions naturally possess multiple solutions. Life inevitably marches toward death. The path taken along that journey is a choice everyone must make for themselves.”
He paused, his gaze drifting toward the window. “Let me tell you a short story I happened to read in an old text.” His voice took on a distant, storytelling cadence. “A young couple was facing their final parting. The husband suffered from a terminal illness, his time bleeding away like sand. Right before he passed, he handed his wife a bracelet he had woven with his own hands. He told her, ‘After I die, let this accompany you for the rest of your days. Whenever you look at it and think of me, I will have lived once more through you.'”
“What a beautiful, romantic story,” Clarice sighed, her eyes softening at the imagery.
“Romance is certainly one direction of interpretation,” Kagashi replied. “But my interpretation… is cruelty.”
Clarice blinked, startled. “Cruelty?”
“After a person dies, nothing of themselves remains except for Remembrance. You only continue to exist because you survive in the memories of others.” His tone was feather-light, carrying an almost ethereal detachment.
“Is there something wrong with that?” she asked, genuinely puzzled.
Kagashi lowered his gaze. “The deceased return to the dust, and the living must eventually say goodbye to the past to look forward. There is no inherent problem with the husband giving his wife the woven bracelet. However… that single sentence unintentionally imprisoned his wife in the past. The bracelet ceased to be a gift and became a shackle.”
He let out a quiet breath. “Dead is dead. Why force the person you love most to cling to your ghost? The choice to let go belongs entirely to the living. It is not something to be manipulated by the dying. For that husband to sever all ties, to ensure his wife wouldn’t drown in past memories—that might actually be the deepest, most deep affection he could have left her before departing.”
‘So this is Mr. Kagashi’s interpretation…’ Clarice parted her lips, but no words came out. As his voice faded into the quiet room, a heavy wisp of sorrow seemed to bleed into the very air around them.
He really was pessimistic. Was it simply the burden of studying medicine? Every time he treated a critically ill patient, he had to steel his mind for the absolute worst outcome, all while fighting tooth and nail to drag a life back from the River Styx. Over time, that constant proximity to death must have warped his perspective. It had to be that. Otherwise, she couldn’t fathom how Mr. Kagashi—a man as warm and gentle as the winter sun—could harbor such bleak views.
“But… isn’t it also cruel to force the wife to let go?” she argued softly. “After all, they loved each other deeply.”
“Maintaining silence with a gentle smile, or simply saying a clean goodbye, wouldn’t be cruel,” Kagashi countered.
“When facing a true life-and-death parting, it’s probably very difficult for a soul still attached to this world to be so open-minded,” Clarice pointed out, her voice tinged with melancholy.
“Haha… that is the choice everyone has to face in the end.” Kagashi chuckled softly. A sudden weight hit his chest as Xiao Ju, the clinic’s resident orange cat, launched itself into his arms. He caught the feline easily, his long fingers lightly scratching beneath its chin. “And that is exactly where the meaning lies—to see what kind of meaning a fading life chooses to bestow upon those left behind.”
A flash of complex emotion gripped Clarice’s chest. “…Mr. Kagashi, if I were the one about to die, would you be willing to remember me as much as possible?”
“Naturally, I would.”
“And the reason?”
“No reason is needed.”
“But I want to know… please?” Clarice deployed her ultimate weapon, letting her voice turn sweet, soft, and unapologetically spoiled.
If any of her academy classmates were present, their jaws would have hit the floor. The eccentric, isolated girl who actively avoided making friends actually possessed such a delicate, girlish side?
Kagashi offered a helpless, fond smile. “Because Clarice is grounded, determined, filial, and knows how to be truly grateful. Hmm… and also very cute, beautiful, and graceful.”
He tacked the last part on as a deliberate afterthought. Compared to heavy character traits, a young girl would likely prefer being praised for her charm and natural beauty. Seeing a faint dusting of pink spread across her cheeks, Kagashi knew his assessment had hit the mark.
“…And if it were you, Mr. Kagashi…” She stopped herself, shaking her head. “Never mind, it’s nothing.”
Clarice realized how deeply inappropriate the question was. She swallowed her curiosity, burying the thought. One absolutely shouldn’t use another person’s life and death to frame a casual hypothetical.
“You wanted to ask if I were about to die, would I want to be remembered by others? By certain people, or perhaps by a specific person?”
Clarice winced slightly. “…You saw right through me again. Yes. Please forgive my rudeness.”
“It isn’t rude at all,” Kagashi said, his hand still stroking the sleeping cat. “The interpretation of that short story I just told you… that is my answer.”
“…Oh.”
Clarice completely missed the faint, crushing melancholy woven into his tone. She subconsciously rubbed her eyes, blinking hard against the sudden blur in her vision. When she opened them again, her expression shattered into pure shock.
Mr. Kagashi was sitting right next to her, solid and real. So why were there several translucent phantoms of him scattered across the medical room?
They flickered like fragmented memories—ghostly echoes of the young doctor standing by the medical equipment, injecting himself, recording data, clutching his head in silent agony. To her horror, she understood exactly what these phantoms were doing.
“Mr. Kagashi… you… you…” she stammered, her voice trembling.
“What’s wrong?” Kagashi asked, his brow furrowing in genuine confusion.
Clarice opened her mouth, but the words died in her throat. After agonizing seconds of hesitation, she chose not to mention the impossible spectral visions. Instead, she asked in a fragile, strained whisper.
“In order to cure my mother’s amnesia… have you… have you always been the human test subject yourself?”
“…Clarice, you—” Kagashi stiffened, clearly startled.
His first instinct was to deny it, to brush it off with a calm smile. But as he met her trembling gaze—eyes as bright and tear-filled as a fractured starry sky—the lie caught in his throat. He offered only a quiet, damning silence.
“How did you guess?” he finally asked.
“Because you are a complete shut-in who never socializes,” Clarice replied, forcing a brittle, watery smile. She instinctively turned her head away, desperate to hide her glistening eyes from him. “I’ve never seen you leave these deep mountains. Where else would you possibly find clinical volunteers…?”
‘It wasn’t a guess,’she screamed internally.’It was because I just saw it with my own eyes, Mr. Kagashi…’
Even without a formal medical education, she knew the brutal reality of research. Overcoming any complex disease required immense sacrifice, demanding a heavy toll in blood and sanity from both the doctor and the clinical volunteers. Yet Mr. Kagashi had taken all of that suffering upon himself. Alone.
Worse still, Clarice knew that clinical trials for memory-related conditions carried catastrophic risks. If a single variable went wrong, the doctor’s own memories would be irreparably damaged. He was risking his very mind, his very identity, just to save her mother.
The sheer weight of the kindness she had received from this quiet, melancholic man was already an ocean. It was a debt she could never, ever hope to repay in this lifetime.