Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 23

Chapter 23: Stars

[Remaining Lifespan: 11 hours, 01 minutes, 37 seconds]

“…Happy birthday in advance…”

Sitting on the wooden steps of the bamboo house, Clarice offered a beautifully wrapped gift box to Kagashi.

She should have been smiling. A birthday was meant to be a joyous occasion, yet an invisible weight seemed to drag the corners of her mouth downward. She tried her hardest to force a cheerful expression, but her lips only trembled, settling into a weak, sorrowful curve.

“Don’t worry,” Kagashi said, his voice as gentle as a passing breeze. “I know exactly when my time will come. There is no need to celebrate early.”

‘Mr. Kagashi is a terrible liar,’Clarice thought, lowering her gaze to the wooden floorboards.’I’m afraid you are just lying to me again.’

“You silly girl. At least give an old man pushing one hundred and seventy-five a little bit of trust.”

Kagashi let out a quiet chuckle, accepting the box with both hands. He offered her a questioning look, silently asking for permission. Only after Clarice gave a slight, hesitant nod did he carefully undo the wrapping.

Inside lay a sachet radiating the crisp, faint scent of winter plum blossoms, alongside a thick scarf and a hand-knitted sweater.

His gaze lingered on the woven threads for a long moment. The lines around his eyes softened into absolute warmth.

“…Thank you for the birthday gift, Clarice. I love it.”

So this was what she had been secretly working on these past few weeks.

Life was a fickle, unpredictable thing. Most regrets were set in stone from the very beginning, and most affections were doomed to wither without a blessing. Kagashi knew he could not offer this girl a promise for the future. He had no right to.

His body was failing. He was dying of old age.

“See if the size fits…” Clarice whispered, her voice barely carrying over the night wind.

Without a second thought, Kagashi slipped off his outer coat and pulled the sweater over his head. It draped over his frail frame perfectly.

He pulled his coat back on to brave the evening chill. Just as he parted his lips to speak, Clarice suddenly leaned in close. Her slender fingers reached up, carefully wrapping the scarf around his neck before tying the plum blossom sachet to his waist.

They were close enough that the faint, sweet fragrance of her hair drifted into his senses.

“It really is cold tonight. Thank you for being so thoughtful.”

“Liar,” she murmured, her breath hitching in her throat. “Your body lost the ability to sense temperature changes a long time ago…”

“Yes. I haven’t been able to feel the cold for a very long time. But, silly girl…”

Meeting her tear-filled eyes, Kagashi reached up and gently took her hand. He guided her palm to rest flat against his chest. His tone remained endlessly patient and warm.

“This heart… it hasn’t stopped beating just yet. Right now, it feels very warm.”

Clarice stared blankly into those dark brown eyes. The quiet, unwavering tenderness that had originally made her fall for him was still there, completely untouched by the shadow of death.

Faced with that overwhelming gentleness, she could no longer hold back. She bit her lip, suppressing a broken sob.

“On this planet, during these few specific days of the year, the starry sky is always at its absolute clearest,” Kagashi said, guiding her attention upward. “Look up.”

“Is Mr. Kagashi trying to tell me that people turn into stars after they die…”

“People do not turn into stars when they pass away. That is merely a way for the living to project their grief onto the universe. Look over there.”

Clarice lifted her teary gaze, following the line of his pointing finger.

A sea of stars, scattered like crushed diamonds across velvet, filled the endless expanse of the night. They twinkled quietly in the deep, dark void. The edges of the cosmic dust clouds bled into shades of light blue and cyan, forming a static, stunning river of light. No shooting stars broke the stillness. No distant suns suddenly dimmed.

It was peaceful. Serene. Devastatingly beautiful.

Clarice found herself entirely mesmerized.

In all her Remembrance, she had never simply sat down to gaze at the night sky like this. She had never known the cosmos could hold such quiet beauty.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Mm… it is very pretty…” Clarice nodded unconsciously.

If only Mr. Kagashi was not dying. How wonderful, how perfectly romantic it would be to just sit together on these wooden steps and watch the stars for the rest of their lives.

“Mr. Kagashi, I want to lean on your shoulder.”

She closed the distance, resting her head against him. She breathed in deeply, greedily committing his scent to memory.

The two sat in silence for a long time, watching the static river of light above.

“Mr. Kagashi, tell me your story,” Clarice finally whispered into the quiet night. “From childhood to adulthood. The ordinary days, the dangerous encounters, the tragedies, the beautiful moments… as long as you are willing to speak, I want to hear all of it…”

She needed to remember everything he had done.

If she could, she wanted to carve his entire existence into her soul. She wanted to preserve all of his Remembrance.

Aside from her mother, Mr. Kagashi was the only person she had left in this vast universe. And soon, he would leave her behind forever.

He would leave no physical trace behind, but Remembrance was different. Her mother had been right. Aside from Remembrance, they truly had nothing.

“My story, huh…”

Kagashi’s voice grew distant, his mind drifting back across the long, weary centuries of his past.

They said that right before a person died, they experienced a sudden review of their life, watching their memories flash by in an instant. His time had not quite arrived, yet he could already see the old ghosts gathering in his mind.

“From the earliest moments I can remember, my homeworld was swallowed by war. We lived as wanderers, displaced and drifting through the ruins…”

“No one knew what kind of fate waited for them in the next hour, let alone the next day.”

“My parents might have died early on, or perhaps they managed to survive a little longer. I never found out.”

“I was captured to be used as backup food. The famine was absolute. When starving people could no longer find anything to eat, their own kind naturally became the next meal.”

“The apocalypse is a cruel teacher. When survival is the only goal, the concepts of right and wrong dissolve entirely. All that remains is the raw, ugly truth of human nature.”

“Along with a group of other children and the elderly—those with no ability to fight back—I was locked inside a rusty iron cage for about ten days.”

“During that confinement, many of the ‘livestock’ contracted various deadly, flesh-eating biochemical viruses. Ironically, it was a blessing in disguise. The infected were thrown out into the mud, no longer having to worry about being butchered and eaten by their captors.”

“As for how long those discarded infected managed to survive out in the wasteland… no one had the luxury to hope for a future. We lived one agonizing day at a time…”

Clarice listened in silence, her already heavy heart twisting painfully in her chest. The sheer bleakness of his words choked the air from her lungs.

She finally understood. She deeply understood why Mr. Kagashi held his teacher in such absolute, reverent regard.

To pull a dying child out of that bottomless, suffocating darkness… sometimes, a lifetime of devotion was born from a reason that simple.

Far away, in a desolate and deserted sector, a grand manor stood in isolation.

Ruan Mei set down the observation lens on her pristine workbench and looked up at the ceiling, her expression completely detached.

Even down here, buried deep within the reinforced walls of her underground laboratory, the faint, muffled rumble of thunder echoed through the metal, revealing the sheer violence of the storm raging on the surface.

She shifted her gaze toward the failed biological experiment resting on the table. Out of pure habit, she opened her mouth to order A’Mu to clean up the mess.

But as her eyes landed on the familiar, lifeless face of the synthetic creation in the corner, Yu Qingtu’s parting words suddenly echoed unbidden in her mind.

For absolutely no logical reason, a rare, unfamiliar spark of irritation flared in her chest.

Ruan Mei naturally refused to believe her emotional state was being influenced by another person’s idle chatter. After a brief second of cold calculation, she attributed the sudden annoyance to the recent stagnation in her research progress.

“…I should go out for a walk.”

She stepped into the elevator, leaving the sterile white lights of the underground lab behind. The moment the heavy steel doors opened at the surface, a deafening crack of thunder tore the dark sky in half.

Torrential rain poured down in sheets, crashing against the earth like a collapsing waterfall.

Ruan Mei stopped in the doorway.

She felt as though she had never seen rain this heavy before.

No… she had.

Countless fragments of Remembrance flashed through her mind, shifting rapidly before finally locking onto a single scene from over a century ago.

The very first time she met A’Mu, the sky had been weeping just like this.

She had stood at the edge of a massive, muddy pit, holding an oil-paper umbrella over her head. She had looked down at the little boy curled up amidst a mountain of rotting corpses, her gaze perfectly indifferent.

She remembered the boy’s eyes.

They were numb. Completely empty.

But after those unfocused, dying eyes finally registered her presence, a faint glimmer—something so fragile it almost looked like an illusion—sparked to life within them.

That tiny light trembled in the freezing rain before fading away, congealing into an emotion she had never encountered in a dying subject before. It was a very light, very subtle mixture of… relief and worry.

Yes. Worry.

He was not terrified of his own impending death. He was worried that this pristine stranger standing above him might contract the deadly virus eating away at his flesh.

He had already accepted his grim fate, but he refused to watch someone else suffer the same agonizing end.

The thunder had been deafening that day, too. The raindrops had fallen with desperate malice, looking as though they wanted to swallow the entire world.

“Do you want to live?”

Her voice had been incredibly soft, barely cutting through the roar of the storm.

Yet, down in the mud, the little boy’s dark, bruised lips had slowly parted, forcing out a silent, desperate syllable.

“…Yes…”

And so, she had allowed A’Mu to live.

Time was a fleeting, unpredictable variable. Nearly one hundred and sixty-nine years had slipped by in the blink of an eye.

Standing in the doorway of her manor, a sudden, irrational thought surfaced in her mind. She wanted to see him. She wanted to sit down and reminisce about the old days.

But within seconds, the cold logic of the Genius Society extinguished the impulse.

A’Mu had left her tutelage over a century ago. Where was he now, exactly?

He had never told her his destination.

It did not matter. Her current phase of research was far too critical to be paused for a social call. There was no practical need to contact him.

With the intellect he possessed—while perhaps not on the level of the universe’s most renowned scholars—he could easily drive the biological technology of any ordinary planetary civilization forward by centuries.

The knowledge she had imparted to him was more than enough to cure every incurable disease known to mortals. It also included various genetic methodologies to extend a human lifespan by at least eight hundred years.

He had told her he wanted to live.

Only a little over a century had passed. It was far too early for her to start worrying about his mortality.

“I will take a bath, and then resume the experiment.”

Dismissing the storm and the ghosts of the past, Ruan Mei turned on her heel and walked steadily toward the hot springs.