Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 38

Chapter 38: Deep Love Unknown

Watching this unfold, Ruan Mei’s neatly trimmed nails dug fiercely into the soft flesh of her palms, drawing crescent moons of white.

How she wished Kagashi would scream, break things, or unleash a torrent of resentment and hatred toward his teacher.

But he did nothing of the sort.

His face remained entirely devoid of expression, as if the very gears of his mind had ground to a halt. His body radiated absolutely no emotional aura. He simply stood rooted in place, a hollow shell abandoned by its soul.

He remained in that statuesque stillness until the dead of night. Moving with the stiff, jerky steps of a puppet with severed strings, Kagashi made his way to the wine cellar. He gathered every last jar of the Plum Blossom Wine that had been aged for over three years and carried them back to the window of the Bamboo House.

Slumping onto the floor, he mechanically tore the seal off the first jar. He hoisted it into the air and poured the liquid down his throat with his head tilted back.

Before the first jar was even empty, the flush of heavy intoxication painted his cheeks.

Yet his hands never stopped. After draining two entire jars in rapid succession, a hollow, broken smile finally cracked across his expressionless face. He slowly pushed himself up from the floor.

Ruan Mei watched him rise, her mind racing with a dozen different frantic guesses about what he might do next.

But she never anticipated his actual destination.

Kagashi stumbled back into the medical room and planted himself in front of the main control console.

Without a single second of hesitation, his fingers danced across the holographic keys, rapidly writing out the very same memory-erasure program he had used once before.

“No… don’t do this…”

Ruan Mei let out a low, sobbing plea, her voice trembling as she reached out to a phantom.

But no matter how desperately she begged, she was ultimately trapped as a spectator to a past Remembrance. The memory would not pause or alter its course for her tears.

For Kagashi, this act was not merely reclaiming the collapse and despair he had suffered over a hundred and fifty years ago. It was the boundless, suffocating agony of personally tearing away his own identity, piece by piece.

Even now, watching him destroy himself, Ruan Mei still could not detect a single shred of resentment or hatred directed at her.

‘Please… just say something… anything…’

As if her desperate prayer had somehow pierced through time, space, and the vast sea of stars, the young man who had just initiated the memory-stripping protocol lowered his eyes. He began to murmur to the empty room.

“If only I hadn’t brewed that Plum Blossom Wine…”

“If only Teacher hadn’t saved my life back then…”

“If only Teacher… hadn’t picked me up and brought me back to this place…”

“It is all my fault… everything is my fault… I am the one who made Teacher unhappy…”

Beneath the sterile glare of the medical room lights, Kagashi’s shadow began to writhe unnaturally against the floorboards, eventually shrinking inward until it was completely absorbed into his physical body.

An aura of absolute, suffocating isolation quietly enveloped his figure.

Witnessing this horrific transformation, Ruan Mei’s pupils constricted to pinpricks.

She had encountered a Pathstrider of a certain faction before, and she knew exactly what this phenomenon signified. In this very moment, under the crushing weight of his despair, Kagashi had stepped into the shadow of Nihility. He had become a Self-Annihilator.

Self-Annihilators shared a tragic, universal destiny: their various existential attributes—flesh, cognition, memory, and emotion—would all gradually erode and vanish along their journey of self-annihilation.

For some, their skin would turn to rotting wood, riddled with weeping scars and hollow holes.

For others, their internal systems would collapse; they would lose the ability to distinguish between joy and agony, descending into total numbness.

Some lost their memories, others their physical senses. It was as if the very meaning of their existence was being actively devoured by some higher entity, leaving them to wander as ghosts in their own dreams and hallucinations until they finally faded into a black hole at the edge of the horizon.

She had studied such tragic figures in the clinical case files of the Doctors of Chaos.

Those who had just stepped into the shadow of Nihility typically displayed no outward symptoms, appearing indistinguishable from ordinary humans.

Reaching the severe, grotesque stages required an irreversible, progressive decay.

A thick, bitter sense of sorrow tugged at the corners of Ruan Mei’s mouth.

How utterly ironic.

Kagashi was dying, but because he was only in the nascent stages of the self-annihilation process, his death would not look unsightly.

But was dying like this—erasing his own mind in a cold, empty room—truly not unsightly?

“It is clearly not your fault…”

‘It is all my fault… it is all because of me…’ The agony of watching him strip away his memories mirrored the devastation of that year perfectly.

Yet for a man whose heart was already dead, none of the physical pain mattered anymore.

While waiting for the system to process the erasure, Kagashi looked up at the monitor to confirm the progress bar. He then pulled out a blank piece of white paper and began to write.

He left one note plastered directly onto the control console, a stark warning to his future self not to go searching for the forgotten memories again.

As for the final note he held in his hand, Ruan Mei could not see the words he penned.

The memory-stripping progress ticked up, finally reaching one hundred percent. The sealing protocol was complete. Kagashi had not even finished writing his last sentence.

He suddenly froze in place. The pen in his hand trembled violently before slipping from his loosened grip and clattering against the floor.

“This is…?”

“Why does my heart feel so incredibly uncomfortable…”

Clutching that crumpled piece of paper, he stumbled blindly back to the window. His foot bumped against the remaining jars of Plum Blossom Wine scattered across the floor. A sudden, overwhelming impulse seized his hollowed mind.

—Drink it.

—Drink it all!

Within moments, not a single drop remained in the jars.

He reached out and pulled the Ruan hanging on the nearby wall into his arms, his fingers plucking a chaotic, disjointed melody across its strings.

A faint hint of sweet, metallic blood gradually pooled in Ruan Mei’s mouth as she bit down on her lip.

Drinking Plum Blossom Wine was supposed to elevate one’s mood, bringing warmth and comfort even if the drinker consumed enough to black out completely.

She understood the chemical properties of the brew perfectly.

But Kagashi’s mood did not elevate. The notes he plucked from the instrument were drenched in a suffocating loneliness, a mourning dirge of solitary sorrow. It was the encroaching power of Nihility.

He was already a Self-Annihilator; how could the gentle, mood-lifting properties of a mere wine possibly affect him now?

He continued to pluck the strings with a tireless, mechanical desperation, playing until his consciousness finally surrendered to the dark and all movement ceased.

With nowhere to mend the leaking sky, the lowly earth makes this life feel utterly adrift.

Outside, a violent curtain of rain merged with the pitch-black night, completely swallowing the Bamboo House in a roaring storm.

When Kagashi finally awoke, the old agonies had been successfully purged from his mind. He was left with nothing but a blank confusion as he stared at the shattered jars and the mess scattered across the floor.

Ruan Mei had assumed the erasure was absolute, until she saw the words he had written the previous night and heard the melody he instinctively played next.

That melody… it sounded so incredibly familiar.

Ruan Mei’s head snapped up. It was the exact same tune he had played the very first time she gifted him the Ruan.

He had only ever played it once.

Now, after more than a hundred years of silence, the lyrics were finally completed.

The words and the music blended together in seamless, devastating harmony.

Unconsciously, Kagashi’s expression darkened, and his voice dropped into a deep, haunting register as he sang.

“Autumn arrives, the sound of leaves in the empty courtyard fades; a lonely lamp stays awake, waiting for someone to look back.”

“Three years of dreaming memories, yet never speaking out; in the end, unable to escape despair and sorrow, bidding farewell to the vigil…”

“A cup of Ardent Heart Wine down the throat; where to find a soulmate? My heart is breaking.”

“Drunkenly entrusting my obsession to the moon, I ask from afar: do you know?”

“Just one look and the obsession remains; the old years flow like water, and you walk away alone.”

“Sighing for a deep love unknown, love is like spilled water, impossible to retrieve…”

“Deep autumn comes again, at the end of the long night; drinking a whole pot, hoping for an old friend to look back.”

“Love has lasted so long, yet I never spoke; still unable to escape infatuation and old sorrows, bidding farewell to the vigil…”

“A cup of Ardent Heart Wine down the throat; what does the departed one seek? My heart is breaking.”

“Drunkenly entrusting my sincerity to the moon, I ask from afar: do you know?”

“Just one thought of mutual understanding is like a curse; still strangers, I do not see you look back.”

“Sighing for a deep love unknown, love has turned into nothingness…”

“A thousand cups of Ardent Heart Wine down the throat; the departed one is hard to find, whose heart is breaking?”

“Drunk, I take the whole world as my vigil; I dare to ask: do you know?”

“In this life, suddenly looking back after waiting through life and death; are you willing to stay together?”

“Sighing for a deep love now known, love finally ends in holding hands…”

The song slowly faded into the quiet room.

Ruan Mei fell into a deep, suffocating daze.

Not a single word in the song explicitly mentioned her, yet every single sentence was entirely about her.

For the very first time in her long existence, she felt that as a human being, she was fundamentally incomplete.

Her clinical, detached understanding of love might have been entirely wrong. Or perhaps… it wasn’t.

She understood the biological love of family. She understood the academic love of a teacher. But she had never understood the desperate, quiet love from a student.

Even more terrifying, she did not know when she had actually developed her own love for Kagashi.

In a dazed trance, the blurred, gentle words of her grandmother echoed from the deepest recesses of her memory.

‘A-Ruan, companionship is the longest confession of love…’

…Today is both Christmas and Thursday. There aren’t many good days like this where I can treat Hajihuan to KFC and give out Christmas gifts. I hope everyone cherishes the opportunity and sends some free Power of Love, otherwise—

Hajihuan uses a picture to beg you…

Old Ruan

In case you didn’t know how beautiful Old E is after the seal is released.