Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 29

Chapter 29: Six Hundred

Spring faded into autumn, the cycle repeating endlessly. It had been fifty-seven years since Kagashi passed away.

Durand passed away peacefully in her sleep, succumbing to the gentle embrace of old age. Black Swan, having lived under the identity of a dutiful daughter named Clarice, stood by the graveside to bid her mother a final farewell. With her earthly ties severed, she left her quiet hometown behind, stepping into the vast expanse of the galaxy to fulfill her calling as a Memokeeper, collecting the universe’s most precious memories.

Occasionally, her travels would bring her back to Kagashi’s bamboo house. She would linger there for a short while, resting in the quiet solitude of the home he had left behind. But there was one day she never missed. Year after year, precisely on the anniversary of his death, she would return. She never forgot.

It had been two hundred and three years since Kagashi passed away.

The complex components of the mechanical puppet he had left behind were showing their age, the gears grinding and occasionally malfunctioning. Yet, for all these years, the creation had faithfully repeated its master’s final instructions.

Whenever the specific season arrived, the puppet would trudge out to cultivate the plum grove. It would carefully pluck the blooming plum blossoms, brew them into fine wine, and send the sealed jars to wherever Ruan Mei resided. It would periodically clean Ruan Mei’s empty home, using specialized materials to reinforce the structural integrity of the bamboo house.

Despite its tireless efforts, the vegetation flanking the path to Ruan Mei’s door remained sparse, refusing to grow thick and lush.

Yu Qingtu watched all of this unfold in silence. She never stepped in to stop the machine. In fact, whenever she saw it sparking or stalling, she felt a fleeting urge to repair it herself. But the puppet was self-sufficient; it would perform its own maintenance, producing the necessary replacement parts from its internal reserves. Watching the solitary machine carry out a dead man’s will left her heart heavy with complicated emotions.

She felt it was entirely unworthy of Kagashi’s devotion. Yet, she also knew she could not interfere. If anything, she had to let it continue. The reason was simple, easily understood by anyone observing the tragedy: everything Kagashi had done was quietly laying down the groundwork for a devastating emotional collapse.

He was unknowingly weaving a snare of quiet, enduring devotion—one deep enough to eventually pierce through a cold, calculating heart and shatter it completely.

It had been two hundred and seventy-six years since Kagashi passed away.

The universe was swept up in the tides of massive upheaval. In recent years, multiple swarms of the Abominations of Abundance, who sustained themselves through endless galactic plunder, had clashed violently with the Xianzhou Alliance. The flames of war were intensifying across the stars.

Many major factions speculated that it was only a matter of time before a bloody, universe-shaking war broke out between the two forces. More pessimistic voices whispered a darker fear: perhaps another Xianzhou ship was destined to crash and burn.

Most onlookers were not optimistic about the Xianzhou’s chances. This emerging power was simply too young. Although the level of the blessing of Abundance they had received was exceptionally high, they were originally ordinary human primates. Their baseline combat effectiveness was a glaring weakness. If they lacked the sheer strength to guard the miracle of the Abundance, they would be nothing more than easy prey in the eyes of the ancient, predatory Abominations.

In their early encounters, the various branches of the Abominations of Abundance—primarily the Wingweavers and the Borisin—had easily overpowered the Xianzhou forces.

The turning point only arrived with the ascension of the Aeon of The Hunt.

After Lan, the Reignbow Arbiter, manifested multiple times across the Xianzhou ships, the Abominations of Abundance finally learned a harsh lesson. Rashly attacking the main Xianzhou fleet would exact a price paid in rivers of their own blood.

Shortly thereafter, the Foxians, who had long suffered under the plundering of the Abominations, and the Vidyadhara, whose ancient homelands were increasingly difficult to defend, successively joined the Xianzhou fleet. The three races officially forged an unbreakable alliance.

The Aeon of The Hunt became the undisputed, orthodox faith of the Xianzhou Alliance, surpassing the influence of Preservation in one fell swoop. Lan bestowed the power of their Path upon the entire Alliance, leading to the birth of seven immensely powerful, hereditary Emanators known as the Seven Arbiter-Generals.

From that moment on, the Alliance possessed the raw strength to confront the Abundance faction head-on. The era of their overwhelming defeats came to an end.

However, even with this newfound power, the Xianzhou Alliance could not simply crush the Abominations of Abundance. Their foundation was still too shallow; they needed time to grow. The main bulk of their combat force, the Cloud Knights, were ultimately just mortals who had received the blessing of longevity, alongside the Foxians. Compared to the monstrous Abominations who possessed innate, terrifying biological abilities, the gap in raw combat power remained significant.

The Vidyadhara possessed incredible physical strength and outstanding combat prowess, but they relied on hatching from pearl-eggs to be reborn. They could not reproduce naturally, making them a strictly non-renewable resource. Unless the Alliance faced total annihilation, they would never deploy the Vidyadhara to the front lines on a massive scale.

In Star Calendar Year 4274, the Xianzhou forces wiped out a massive army of the Abominations of Abundance, claiming a hard-fought victory in a brutally bloody campaign.

The contemporary General of the Xianzhou Cangcheng suffered permanent psychological trauma during the slaughter. Deemed unfit to ever take the battlefield again, the General abdicated the position to a more capable successor.

Two years later, the retired General married a Valiant Guard of the Xianzhou Luofu Cloud Knights, who had originally come to reinforce Cangcheng during the siege.

The Valiant Guard was named Kagashi Chengyou. After the war ended, he chose to settle down in Cangcheng. During the height of the invasion, he had led an elite squad of fewer than a hundred soldiers to hold the entrance of a civilian refuge sanctuary. Standing firm amidst the roaring flames of war, he had saved hundreds of millions of ordinary lives from the disaster.

His story spread throughout the entire Xianzhou Alliance. The union between the retired General and the heroic Valiant Guard became a beautiful, legendary tale passed down through the generations.

It had been four hundred and eighty-eight years since Kagashi passed away.

In a remote, desolate corner of the universe lay a barren no-man’s land. On this lifeless planet, a world-ending earthquake suddenly erupted, tearing the crust apart.

When the apocalyptic disaster finally subsided, the planetary ecosystem—which had been rapidly and artificially evolved due to external influences—was completely erased. Across the ruined world, it seemed only one structure remained entirely unaffected: the secluded manor and its underground laboratory, where Ruan Mei resided.

The heavy laboratory doors, sealed tight for decades, slowly hissed open.

A woman with hair flowing like a dark waterfall and an aura of absolute, detached gentleness walked out into the ruins. The total destruction of the planet’s ecosystem did not cause the slightest emotional ripple in Ruan Mei’s eyes.

Her research, which she had pursued relentlessly for years, had hit another bottleneck. This time, the stagnation had lasted longer than ever before. To step into the next stage of understanding, something crucial was missing. To cross that final threshold, she had locked herself in the laboratory for more than thirty years, yet she had still failed to grasp her desired answer.

Returning to the ground floor of the manor, Ruan Mei paused. Neatly piled at the designated drop-off spot were ten sealed jars of plum blossom wine. The mechanical puppet had delivered them, but she had not yet taken the time to transfer them down into the underground laboratory.

That was this year’s portion. Each jar contained enough wine to last her for over a month.

This silent delivery was the only contact she shared with Kagashi every year. It was a quiet reminder that their teacher-student relationship had not been completely severed.

Ruan Mei looked at the jars and subconsciously calculated the time. The years since Kagashi’s graduation day…

“Exactly six hundred years.”

She hadn’t expected that, unknowingly, such a long stretch of time had slipped by. Since her current research was yielding no progress, she reasoned she might as well take a trip to see him.

Having made up her mind, Ruan Mei prepared to send Kagashi a message, only to realize that the apocalyptic earthquake had completely annihilated the interstellar signal base station on the surface. This isolated planet relied entirely on that single base station for one-way communication with the outside universe. Now, even sending a simple text was impossible.

So be it.

A massive fissure opened in the ruined earth outside the manor, and a sleek, advanced spaceship rose smoothly from the underground hangar.

As Ruan Mei steered the vessel up through the atmosphere and into the starry sky, a sudden thought crossed her mind. Hundreds of years had passed. She actually did not know where Kagashi was currently living.

She turned the ship around, briefly returning to the manor to check the shipping logs on the plum blossom wine crates, extracting the exact planetary destination.

When she read the coordinates, the name of the planet struck her as oddly familiar. It felt as though she had been there at some distant point in her past.

It wasn’t until her ship breached the planet’s orbit and she caught a glimpse of its blue and green surface that her memory finally stirred. Having been entirely detached from the passage of time due to her endless immersion in research, she slowly recalled the truth.

Long ago, after her parents had died in that tragic accident, she had used special means to relocate her shattered childhood home. She had placed it right here, on this very planet. She had only lived there for a short while before setting off into the galaxy to hunt for suitable research samples.

Kagashi’s home world had been her very first sample.

After that incident, she had picked Kagashi up and brought him back to this exact planet, where they lived together for a few years. Once he had recovered from his illness, they had left together, traveling to the next sample planet—the desolate no-man’s land she had just departed. Hundreds of years had passed in a flash since then.

Over the centuries, she had genuinely forgotten about this place.

Looking down at the familiar continents, a rare trace of confusion flickered in Ruan Mei’s eyes.

Why would her Kagashi return here?