Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 35

Chapter 35: Teacher is a Liar

“How could this be…”

As the cruel truth of the past finally unveiled itself, Ruan Mei felt as though a heavy, suffocating weight had traveled across the vast expanse of time, landing squarely upon the shoulders of the one who truly deserved it.

That person was herself.

Back then, she had not given her student a single breath of room to explain. She had simply pinned the entirety of the blame onto him, handing down a merciless punishment without a second thought. She had never once suspected that the real culprit behind that entire tragic farce was none other than herself.

She had orchestrated his downfall with her own two hands.

Her unconscious, affectionate behavior while intoxicated over those past two years had long ago planted a quiet, desperate seed in the heart of that vigorous young man. As the seasons turned, that seed had sprouted, taking root deep within his soul. Kagashi had heard those sweet, clinging words fall from her lips so many times that they had become a habit, a false promise he had foolishly learned to believe.

As for his Plum Blossom Wine, the truth was glaringly simple. The four-year and five-year vintages possessed the potency to induce that strange drunkenness, but the three-year vintage did not.

Ruan Mei could finally be certain. The Plum Blossom Wine brewed by her student was not a mere beverage; it was a consumable Curio. The effects of a Curio never adhered to the mundane laws of logic. Most possessed special properties that defied mortal cognition, and once touched, a person inevitably fell victim to their rules. If it were not entirely anomalous, how could it ever be classified as a Curio?

Within the shifting images of the Remembrance, Kagashi froze in place. It was entirely unsurprising. Hearing his teacher’s words—words that dripped with an ice-cold detachment—shattered whatever fragile hope he had been holding onto.

He was so stunned that he even forgot to let go of the slender ankle resting in his grip.

“Not letting go yet?”

At the sound of her chilling voice, Kagashi released her reflexively. He remained kneeling there, his expression utterly dazed, incapable of uttering a single syllable.

It was not until he was violently thrown into the pitch-black confinement room by his teacher that the fragmented pieces of reality finally aligned in his mind, revealing the agonizing truth.

“Five-year… four-year… three… I see…”

Listening to Kagashi’s hollow murmurs and watching his fragile figure be swallowed by the blinding, oppressive darkness, Ruan Mei felt a sharp, twisting agony pierce her heart.

A’Mu’s voice sounded exactly like a soulless puppet whose strings had been abruptly severed. No… even the mechanical puppets he had left behind in the lab sounded far more human than those few, broken words spilling from his lips.

For the next five days, Kagashi was condemned to an environment utterly devoid of light and sound.

Only those who have endured long-term absolute darkness and dead silence could possibly understand how unbearable such a punishment truly was. It was no exaggeration to call it a dual torture, one that systematically dismantled both the mind and the body.

At that time, although Kagashi’s underlying illness had been cured, he was completely unaware that the brutal treatments had left behind severe sequelae. If he failed to take his specialized medication on a strict schedule, his nervous system would shut down, stripping away his physical senses one by one.

Touch, smell, pressure, taste, temperature, pain… Ruan Mei remembered his medical chart with absolute clarity.

Yet, for five agonizing days, she had deliberately withheld Kagashi’s medication.

It was not until the dawn of the sixth day that the confinement punishment officially ended and his medical regimen was resumed. By the time the heavy doors finally hissed open, the young man was curled tightly into a ball in the furthest corner of the room, his eyes dull, glassy, and completely lifeless.

Had his physical constitution not been forcibly strengthened by his earlier, agonizing treatments, Kagashi would never have survived five days in that lightless void without a single drop of water or crumb of food. Even so, his current state was virtually indistinguishable from a corpse. He was a person who had lost his soul, leaving behind nothing but a hollow, breathing shell.

Even after the special medication was administered, it took a full forty-eight hours before his physical senses slowly, painfully began to reawaken.

Back then, standing over his trembling form, she had genuinely believed this was just a necessary disciplinary measure. She thought it was a simple punishment to force her student to follow the rules, a harsh reminder of the proper, impossible boundaries between a teacher and her subordinate. She had thought it was no big deal.

Looking back at the past now, forced to witness her own cruelty play out in high definition, Ruan Mei finally realized the truth.

She realized just how monstrous her actions had been.

Kagashi had already been trapped in a sensory void where it was terrifyingly easy to lose the very perception of one’s own ‘existence.’ And on top of that psychological hell, he had been forced to endure the physical collapse of losing every single one of his senses.

Just imagining the sheer terror of that experience was enough to make her current body tremble uncontrollably.

And what had she done after that?

“Rest and calm down for a few days. If you do it again, I will throw you directly into space.”

Leaving those heartless words behind with a perfectly expressionless face, she had simply turned her back, walking out of the young man’s room to immerse herself once more in her endless research.

She knew absolutely nothing of what happened in that room. She did not know what he did during his recovery, and she had never once bothered to ask.

Three days later, Kagashi had walked out of his quarters, his demeanor as impeccably respectful and obedient to his teacher as it had always been. It was as if that horrific transgression, and the brutal punishment that followed, had never even occurred.

Her student had realized he was wrong and corrected his mistake… that was the convenient lie she had told herself back then.

Looking at the memory now, Ruan Mei felt a sickening premonition twisting in her gut. Something major—something devastating that she had been entirely blind to—had definitely happened during those three missing days.

Staring intently at the projected images of the past, she watched as two full days bled away. The young man lying on the sterile bed had not moved a single inch. He did not even blink, his chest barely rising and falling, looking for all the world like a discarded corpse.

Watching this silent suffering, Ruan Mei’s nose tingled with a sharp, acidic sorrow. She quietly clenched her hands, her perfectly manicured nails digging deep into her palms.

A’Mu’s appearance was truly… heartbreaking?

She was not entirely sure if that was the correct human emotion to describe the crushing weight in her chest, but it likely was.

It was not until the third day that Kagashi’s dry, cracked lips finally twitched. A nearly inaudible, raspy sound slipped from his throat.

“So everything… was just because of drunkenness…”

The young man forced himself out of bed. His legs gave out before he could even take two wobbly steps, and he collapsed heavily against the cold metal floor.

However, his damaged nervous system seemingly unable to register the impact, he simply pushed himself back up. He continued to stumble forward in a specific direction, his knees buckling and sending him crashing to the floor several more times along the way.

Yet he still appeared to possess no physical sensation whatsoever. Dragging his battered body like a walking corpse, he finally reached the private research terminal hidden deep inside his room.

He stopped in front of the heavy console. His fingers, so terrifyingly thin that the pale joints were starkly visible beneath the skin, slowly began to tap across the keys, carefully compiling a complex string of code.

Ruan Mei followed his hollow gaze to the glowing monitor and immediately felt the blood drain from her face. She recognized the architecture of the code instantly. The program was designed for Remembrance deletion.

Back then, Kagashi’s understanding of the Remembrance was strictly superficial. Yet, driven by an unimaginable despair, he was writing a sequential, brute-force program to permanently seal specific memories in a single, violent stroke.

That kind of programming was incredibly immature. The side effects were catastrophic.

The process of sealing memories through such crude means was like reeling raw silk from a live cocoon. It required extracting and isolating the relevant neural pathways bit by bloody bit. Finally, those isolated memories would be violently cast out of the subconscious, chained to a psychological ‘boulder,’ and sunk to the absolute bottom of the deep sea of Remembrance.

Unless the very surface of that mental sea was shattered, those moments would never be remembered again.

During the program’s execution, the human brain would register a phantom agony akin to being gnawed alive by ten thousand starving ants. Cultivators and researchers with insufficient willpower were frequently driven entirely mad by the sheer torment before the memory sealing could even reach completion.

But what about Kagashi?

He mechanically attached the heavy, cold neural instruments to his temples and slowly, deliberately pressed the execution key.

A terrifying, invisible agony instantly struck his nervous system, yet the young man did not so much as furrow his brow. It was as if his mind had already detached from his body, rendering him completely numb to the sensation of countless insects burrowing into his brain.

With his spine pressed flat against the console, Kagashi slowly slid down the metal casing until he slumped against the floor. Staring into the empty air, he began to murmur in a low, broken voice.

“The Plum Blossom Wine given to Teacher must never be more than three years old…”

“Teacher… must be respected absolutely…”

“The rules… must be followed…”

Time crawled by in agonizing slow motion. The glowing progress bar on the terminal screen started at a mere one percent, and after what felt like an eternity of silent torture, it gradually climbed to ninety percent.

Throughout the entire grueling process, Kagashi offered no further reaction. He sat there, utterly motionless, enveloped in a death-like, suffocating loneliness.

Ninety-five percent… ninety-six percent… ninety-seven percent…

Just as the progress bar ticked to ninety-nine percent, hovering on the precipice of absolute erasure, Kagashi slowly lifted his lowered head.

Every last trace of warmth and luster had vanished from his dull brown pupils. Two silent lines of tears finally broke free, overflowing from his eyes and tracking down his pale cheeks.

“Teacher is a liar…”

The young man finally let his eyes flutter shut. His limp body fell sideways against the cold floor as his consciousness sank into complete, unbroken silence.

When he finally woke up hours later, he struggled to push himself off the floor. The artificial luster of a perfectly obedient student had returned to his eyes as he looked around the empty lab, his expression entirely blank.

“Why am I lying here…?”

He wrapped his arms around his shivering shoulders. “Sss… so hungry… so cold…”

Kagashi’s voice was weak and polite as he pushed open the heavy door and walked out into the corridor.

With the quiet click of that door shutting behind him, the desperate, vigorous young man who had so deeply loved his teacher was forever sealed away in the dark. The person who walked out into the light had successfully reverted into the rule-abiding, teacher-respecting, perfect student.

Standing in the echoes of the Remembrance, a crushing, violent sense of suffocation quickly enveloped Ruan Mei, dragging her down into the very abyss she had dug for him.