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ArabicHonkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 37
Chapter 37: He Did Not Fail Her
In the early years, it had been nothing more than the standard dynamic between a doctor and a patient’s family. Yet as the seasons bled into one another, the distance between the two softened, shifting into something resembling genuine friendship.
Even through the hazy veil of the Remembrance, Ruan Mei could read the subtle shifts in the young girl’s expressions whenever she looked at Kagashi. It was a terribly familiar gaze. One Ruan Mei had not seen directed at herself in so long that the memory of it had nearly gathered dust.
Back in her youth, when she still walked the halls of the Academy, many of her peers had looked at her with those exact eyes.
If she recalled correctly, the emotion was called… affection.
Ruan Mei analyzed the thought with clinical precision. Yes, that was the appropriate categorization. She had always been adept at dissecting the various stares directed her way. Some were driven by pure, idle curiosity, which she ignored. Others were heavy with hidden motives and calculated greed, which only brought her a faint sense of disgust.
But a very small fraction of those gazes, no matter how deeply she scrutinized them under a metaphorical microscope, could only be distilled into a single, unadulterated concept: sincerity.
The way Clarice looked at Kagashi was steeped in absolute sincerity.
So why did a sharp, phantom ache twist in Ruan Mei’s chest? Why did watching this young girl look at her A’Mu provoke such a bitter, suffocating wave of discomfort?
Perhaps she needed to initiate a new research project on the volatile spectrum of human jealousy.
For now, Ruan Mei forcibly swallowed the strange, acidic tightness in her throat and pressed deeper into the currents of Kagashi’s Remembrance, desperate for answers.
In the twilight years of his life, his daily routine remained largely unchanged from the decades prior. The only difference was his quiet refusal to employ any methods to extend his natural lifespan. His organs began their slow, inevitable decay. The devastating sensory loss he had once cured returned to haunt his failing body.
Ruan Mei’s brow furrowed. Kagashi did not possess the formula to recreate that specific cure, but even if he did, without actively extending his lifespan, the medicine’s efficacy would be practically nonexistent against the sheer weight of old age.
By the time he reached one hundred and seventy-two, the world began to slip away from him.
Sometimes, Kagashi would eat a meal and taste nothing but ash. Sometimes, the biting winter wind would howl against his skin, and he would feel no chill. His vision would occasionally blur into dark, formless shapes, and his fingertips would go entirely numb.
Most dangerous of all, he began to lose his sense of pain. Unless he physically saw the blood blooming on his clothes or the open wound on his flesh, he would not even realize he had been injured.
Yet he accepted this quiet deterioration with absolute grace.
He only brewed specific concoctions to lock his physical appearance in a state of eternal youth, leaving the rotting foundation beneath to take its natural course. He adopted a stray cat to fill the silence of his home. Life drifted on like a slow-moving river, right up until his final three months.
A quiet conversation between Kagashi and his close friend, Yu Qingtu, suddenly seized Ruan Mei’s undivided attention.
“Before I go, I want to ask you one final question.”
“Please speak, Senior.”
“Do you admire… no, I should say, do you look at Ah Ruan with the affections of a man looking at a woman?”
In the space between breaths, Ruan Mei leaned forward, her eyes locking onto Kagashi’s youthful face in the memory, desperate to catch a micro-expression, a twitch of the lip, a flicker of the truth.
“Senior, please do not tease me. I hold only the utmost respect for my teacher. How could I possibly harbor such disrespectful and absurd feelings toward her?”
His face was a mask of perfect, placid calm. There was no hesitation. No trace of a lie.
In Ruan Mei’s mind, a devastating image violently resurfaced—the lonely silhouette of a young man manually carving out his own memories, tearing away his love and his trauma, choosing to swallow the bitter glass of his own heartbreak in absolute silence.
She bit down hard on her lower lip. A metallic taste flooded her mouth as an indescribable, crushing wave of distress radiated through her bones.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
“Take care, Senior,” Kagashi’s voice echoed, soft and polite. “When the Plum Blossom Wine is delivered, please remember to leave a message for Teacher. Remind her to maintain a regular schedule and to eat on time.”
Hearing those words recounted by Yu Qingtu in the present was one thing. Hearing Kagashi actually say them, watching his gentle expression as he worried for her health even as his own body failed him, was something else entirely.
It wasn’t until Yu Qingtu’s figure vanished from the memory that Ruan Mei realized her lungs were burning. She had forgotten to breathe.
A second later, the memory fractured with the sound of violent, tearing coughs.
Kagashi doubled over, hacking dark, heavy blood into his hands.
Locking his exterior in a state of youth did nothing to halt the necrosis of his internal organs; if anything, the conflicting biological states triggered severe side effects. The coughing fits were the final warning signs. But he didn’t know that. He simply wiped the blood away, treating it as just another mundane symptom of his approaching end.
Time skipped forward. The young girl named Clarice brought her mother to his clinic to treat her amnesia.
Ruan Mei barely registered the mother and daughter. Her entire focus was anchored to Kagashi. Every time he subtly turned his face away to hide a grimace of pain, every time he wiped a stray drop of blood from his chin when he thought no one was looking, a fresh, jagged tear ripped through Ruan Mei’s heart.
His final days were never meant to be this agonizing.
Clarice laid out her tarot cards on his table, performing a divination for him: the Three of Swords, the Ten of Swords, and The Star, reversed.
Ruan Mei saw through the girl’s desperate lie instantly. The true meaning of that spread was the exact opposite of the bright future Clarice spun for him.
Eternal love?
No. It was ruin. It was absolute pain, the collapse of the mind, and a freefall into the deepest, darkest abyss of despair.
It was a mirror reflecting everything Ruan Mei had personally inflicted upon her A’Mu.
“Is that residence not far from here also your home?” Clarice asked.
“…It is not my home.”
“Then… why do you clean it so frequently?”
“That is my teacher’s home,” Kagashi replied, his voice carrying a quiet, reverent warmth. “Long ago, she used special means to move her residence here, but when she left, she forgot to take it with her.”
“And trimming the overgrown weeds along the path… why do that?”
“Because I am afraid that if she ever returns, Teacher might forget the way home.”
Ruan Mei clutched the fabric over her chest. Her composure shattered. Hot, unbidden tears spilled over her lashes, tracking down her porcelain cheeks before she even realized she was crying.
She stumbled backward, her shoulders colliding hard with the cold metal of the laboratory equipment behind her. She blindly tore the memory-immersion electrodes from her temples, the sensory feedback cutting out as she collapsed against the console.
“On her journey to her destination, Teacher lost and forgot many things… perhaps her home was one of them.” Kagashi’s voice continued to echo relentlessly in her mind. “I firmly believe that if she ever achieves her wish and reaches the end of her path, she will surely remember the things she left behind. She will definitely come home.”
“I cannot help her reach that destination. The only thing I can do is look after her home until she returns.”
Yes. A’Mu couldn’t help her ascend to Aeonhood.
But he shouldn’t have been left behind to wither in the dirt. This was just another tragedy she had personally engineered. Back then, he had pleaded with her, his voice breaking as he begged her to stay, or to let him follow.
And she had stood there, cold and unmoved, her eyes clouded entirely by her obsession with the divine.
“Where is Mr. Kagashi’s hometown?”
“It turned into cosmic dust long ago. Where my heart rests, that is my home.”
He had treated this reborn world as his final resting place. His heart was anchored here. This was his home… because this was where her home was.
He possessed the intellect and the means to leave, to travel the cosmos, to find a new life. So why did he chain himself to an empty house?
As Ruan Mei wept in the silence of her laboratory, a memory from centuries ago—a tender, childish voice—exploded from the deepest recesses of her soul.
‘Home is very important. Xiao Mu already has no home; Teacher cannot be like me.”When Xiao Mu graduates in the future, I will come back and help Teacher look after the house.’
The promise the young boy had made, the vow he had quietly upheld for his entire, agonizing life, plunged into her chest like a serrated blade and twisted violently.
Ruan Mei buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking as she completely lost her legendary rationality.
“…A’Mu… my A’Mu…”
Throughout her long, solitary life, she had witnessed nothing but the breaking of bonds. Her parents had abandoned her grandmother. She, in turn, had abandoned her parents. No one in her lineage had ever been capable of keeping a promise.
Except him.
Even though he had been dead for hundreds of years, A’Mu had spent his final days fulfilling a vow that could barely even be considered a formal contract.
Ruan Mei had not forgotten her careless reply to him back then: ‘As you wish.’
It had just been the naive, one-sided wish of a child. An incredibly earnest, devastatingly loyal wish.
He did not fail her.
But she had failed him. She had lost her Xiao Mu, her A’Mu, her only student. And now, wandering the vast, empty cosmos, she could never find him again.
She could not rewind the clock to the past, and there was no version of him waiting for her in the future.
If this gentle, broken A’Mu suddenly remembered everything at the very end of his life… would he finally hate her?
Ruan Mei’s breath hitched as she weakly closed her red, swollen eyes.
Her progression along the Path of Remembrance slowed, but it did not halt. The memory shifted, pulling her toward a suffocatingly dark night—a night that arrived ahead of schedule, granting Ruan Mei the agonizing truth she had sought.
To cure Durand’s amnesia, Kagashi had bypassed animal testing. He had personally acted as the clinical subject, injecting the experimental serum into his own veins.
And in doing so, he retrieved everything. Every memory, every heartbreak, every ounce of despair he had manually stripped away all those years ago came rushing back.
In the final frame of the memory, Kagashi sat in the dim light. His facial expression was entirely rigid, and his beautiful, gentle eyes had lost every last shred of their light.