Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 42

Chapter 42: Even if the Universe Annihilates and Restarts, I Must Find You

On both sides of the stone steps leading down the mountain, the winter plum blossoms were in full, defiant bloom.

Ruan Mei walked down the path like a living corpse. Her footsteps were hollow, lacking their usual measured grace, and the vibrant scenery before her eyes blurred into a wash of meaningless color. As the cold wind swayed the dark plum branches, time seemed to fracture, flowing backward across hundreds of years.

Back then, there had also been freezing winter days exactly like this one.

At that time, Kagashi was still young, yet he possessed a quiet sensibility and a well-behaved nature that far exceeded any child she had ever encountered. Carrying over a dozen deadly viruses within his frail body, he was incredibly weak even when he was tentatively permitted to leave the hum of the medical cabin.

But he never seemed to care about his own suffering. He would simply look up at her, his childish voice soft but steady.

“Even though my health isn’t good right now, there are still things I can do to help Sister.”

Kagashi held a woven bamboo basket, standing beneath the sprawling canopy of a plum tree. When he looked back at her, his eyes were filled with a pure, unblemished smile that chased away the biting winter chill.

“Sister, these plum blossoms perfectly meet the harvesting requirements, right?”

He stood slightly on his tiptoes, his small fingers pointing toward the delicate winter blooms clinging to the highest branches. She had given a brief nod, and the youth carefully set to work, harvesting the petals with a small bamboo knife.

The youth never spoke much, but he always appeared exactly whenever she needed him.

Later, the youth’s illness was finally cured, and he grew a bit taller. He became the one to hold the umbrella over her head during the spring rains, the one to gently lift the heavy plum branches out of her path…

A single plum blossom petal, carrying a sharp and cold fragrance, brushed against her cheek. The fleeting touch pulled Ruan Mei’s wandering thoughts violently back to the present.

She returned to the Bamboo House. Her gaze swept over the research equipment—machinery that felt simultaneously strange and intimately familiar—as scenes from the past began to replay in the empty room.

More than once, she would lose all track of time while buried in her research. The youth would quietly wait outside the heavy doors of the laboratory, preparing warm, delicate snacks and brewing clear, fragrant tea. Whenever she frowned in deep thought, the youth would silently approach and organize her scattered data sheets. His movements were always incredibly light, terrified of disturbing the fragile threads of her inspiration.

Entering the quiet backyard, she saw a winnowing basket used for draining water still hanging against the bamboo wall.

One year, she had completely forgotten the passage of time. When she finally walked out of the laboratory, her eyes aching from the screens, she found that the youth had already finished harvesting the specific plum blossoms required for making her favorite pastries.

“…I saw that Sister hadn’t finished her research for a long time, so I took the liberty of picking some plum blossoms. Do you think the quality is up to standard?”

He had said it so simply, offering the basket with a gentle smile. But Ruan Mei’s sharp eyes had immediately caught the tiny, red scratches crisscrossing his hands. The youth, not even ten years old at the time, simply wasn’t tall enough to reach the best branches, making it inevitable that the rough bark and sharp twigs would tear at his skin while he picked the flowers by hand.

She had nodded, telling him they were fine, and casually asked if his hands hurt.

The youth merely shook his head, placed the bamboo basket gently on the wooden table, and turned around to head back into the plum grove to gather more.

Looking back on it now, Kagashi’s companionship had always been careful and gentle. It had quietly seeped into the fabric of her years, blending into the background so perfectly that she had subconsciously learned to ignore it entirely.

In the past, she had only ever felt and received the unconditional love of her parents. The youth’s love was entirely different from everyone else’s; even after she formally took him as her student, his devotion remained an unfamiliar variable.

But she… she had never once tried to understand or analyze that variable. She had dismissed it as meaningless, an unnecessary emotion that offered no value to her grand equations.

Too invested in chasing her own cosmic obsessions, she took his presence entirely for granted, missing far too many inherently warm moments. The youth who had always silently followed behind her shadow had long since possessed nothing else in the world, viewing her as his one and only light. From childhood to adulthood, he had always been respectful, restrained, and endlessly patient, never once doing anything to make her angry.

However, the seeds of all this bitter fruit had been quietly planted during that fateful day of drunkenness.

Following the fading traces in her memory, Ruan Mei’s slender finger brushed against the rough edge of the hanging winnowing basket. In her mind, the action overlapped perfectly with the phantom figure from the past. Her finger stopped at a certain spot on the woven bamboo, right where it would have been covered by Kagashi’s palm, desperately trying to feel the residual warmth he had once transmitted into the wood.

“Heh…”

Ruan Mei withdrew her hand in quiet disappointment, a dark flash of self-deprecation crossing her beautiful eyes.

Some things are only understood to be precious once they are irrevocably lost. Just like the plum blossoms he had picked for her that year, they would never bloom on the exact same branch again.

But she had to move forward. She had no other choice.

Even if the night stretching out ahead of her was long and boundless, and even if there was absolutely no guarantee of a reunion at the end of it all. Because—this was the heavy debt she owed A’Mu.

Therefore, it was also the only path she could choose to walk.

In the desolate expanse of the No-man’s Land, night finally fell.

Deep within the underground laboratory of a hidden manor, the glow of monitors illuminated the dark. On the massive laboratory screens, complex layers of geometric patterns formed from spiraling data shifted, expanded, and flowed in perfect rhythm with the melancholic sound of an opera playing in the background.

After methodically stripping away the protective layers of encryption patterns, what remained on the central screen was the ultimate secret Ruan Mei had protected and carefully crafted for so long.

They were her parents. Their eyes were closed, their cold, data-rendered faces looking exactly as if they were merely trapped in a deep, peaceful sleep.

After staring at her parents’ faces in absolute silence for a long time, Ruan Mei reached out and turned off the opera. The music died instantly. With a few keystrokes, she hid everything back behind the encrypted walls.

Finally, she walked over to the corner of the room and permanently shut down the Kagashi puppet she had created.

From this exact moment onward, she became increasingly indifferent to the existing laws of life. The more she detached herself from morality and natural order, the faster her research progressed.

She completely disregarded established formulas. She ignored the philosophical meaning of life entirely, choosing only to observe, to ponder with her bare hands, and to hold the raw genetic data to physically feel its structure.

Then, she began to compile entirely new laws for species.

Inside the sprawling laboratory, strange ferns and alien flora grew more and more lush. They sprouted and shot upward at a terrifying speed visible to the naked eye, their thick vines and massive leaves almost occupying every inch of available space. Through the shifting gaps in the opening and closing petals, the cold, simple faces of her parents—slowly being formed by gathered biological data—could occasionally be seen taking physical shape.

An unknown number of years passed in this obsessive isolation. Just a single moment before her sleeping ‘parents’ were finally about to open their eyes and draw breath—

Ruan Mei stopped. She had almost completely destroyed the original laws of species evolution across the entire No-man’s Land to achieve this, but… she was still moving toward the true, ultimate goal she pursued.

Again, an unknown number of years slipped away into the void.

She slowly looked up from her research terminal, her cold gaze piercing through the ceiling, looking far out into the direction of the infinite starry sky.

The heavy, calculating gaze of the Aeon of Erudition descended upon her.

“…Nous…”

Ruan Mei questioned Him, speaking into the cosmic silence, but all she received in return was His absolute, unmoving stillness.

Ruan Mei seemed to understand something in that silence, and she simply didn’t care.

After this brief encounter with the divine, her temperament became even more chillingly indifferent. She submerged herself entirely into the darkest depths of her research, studying only the absolute essence of life itself.

More bizarre and diverse forms of life began to appear under her simulated environments. Some burning lives turned into streams of flowing fire, crawling and weaving across the floor beneath her feet; sometimes, as she watched them, she felt as if she were the fire itself. Some flowing lives transformed into pure liquid light, swirling affectionately around her slender wrists; sometimes, she felt as if she were the light itself.

Some lives, simulated entirely from pure knowledge, desperately tried to develop their own independent thoughts, consciousness, and emotions. They would sometimes noisily cry out, laugh hysterically, or wail in existential agony, and all of these sensory inputs merged directly into her body through the simulation links.

But she could not feel a single thing for them.

The existence of life was ultimately brief and fragile; they flickered into being and vanished into ash in an instant, while only her cold, calculated experiments continued eternally.

Sometimes, her casual, localized research would violently shake the biological systems circulating throughout the wider universe. Her creations had already far surpassed the experience, logic, and imagination of the standard scale of organic life. She was constantly breaking through her own vast understanding of biology, all to reach an endless, impossible destination.

The world’s brilliance is always dazzling, but only by reaching that final destination could one ever have the chance to truly start over.

Whether there was a single, unifying truth to the essence of life was entirely irrelevant to her now. She had absolutely nothing left to lose, but she had something she absolutely must seek.

If life could be artificially nurtured, perfectly reorganized, and flawlessly reproduced… then memory could be dissected, Equilibrium could be regulated, Idrila could be deconstructed, and Permanence could be reproduced.

At that time, she might finally understand the absolute essence of life, touch the very concepts of the universe, reach the destination she truly sought, and find everything she had lost once again.

The metal trash can near her desk was overflowing with unread letters.

Ruan Mei reached out and picked up the strangely appearing, elegant invitation from the Genius Society that rested on her table. After a brief moment of quiet contemplation, she did not toss it into the trash can with the others.

A strange, chilling, and deeply morbid smile slowly emerged on her flawlessly indifferent face.

“Even if the universe annihilates and restarts, I must find you…”

“My… A’Mu…”