Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 45

Chapter 45: The Reason for Returning to the Army

“Hello, Sir!”

“Not good.”

Even though the towering figure standing before him was the esteemed General of the Xianzhou Cangcheng, Kagashi did not offer him so much as a welcoming glance. He merely stared back, his expression cool and unapologetically distant.

“Don’t be like that. No matter what titles I hold now, I was still a graduate of the Qingyun Academy back then,” Teng Xiao said, his face breaking into a wide, easy smile that carried a deliberate hint of familiarity. “When I was just a child and broke my leg, you were the one who personally carried me to the medical clinic, Sir.”

“So this is how you choose to repay that kindness?” Kagashi asked, his voice flat. “By dumping your fresh recruits on a civilian worker for training?”

“Now, don’t be angry, Sir.”

“It is better if you address me by my name,” Kagashi interrupted smoothly. “You are now the General of Cangcheng, and I am nothing more than an ordinary Academy teacher. Proper etiquette must not be discarded so casually.”

He placed a heavy, deliberate emphasis on the words ‘ordinary’and’Academy teacher’.

“One thing at a time. You call me General, and I call you Sir. There is no conflict there.” Teng Xiao’s smile remained entirely unchanged, acting as though he hadn’t heard the sharp barbs hidden in Kagashi’s words, nor did he seem to care about the obvious wall being thrown up between them.

“General, has anyone ever told you that you are exceptionally bad at feigning ignorance?”

“Precisely!” Teng Xiao rubbed his large hands together, leaning forward with an exaggerated, sincere expression of a student seeking wisdom. “When I was still in my mother’s womb, a fortune teller pointed right at her belly and declared, ‘This child’s greatest flaw in life will be his absolute inability to play dumb!’ Do you think I still have time to change my ways, Sir?”

“If you actually managed to change, it would only cause everyone else more trouble.”

In truth, Kagashi was already troubled enough.

As the old saying went, it wasn’t the thieves you feared, but the exhaustion of constantly being targeted by them. While the proverb might not perfectly describe Teng Xiao, the underlying principle was identical. Kagashi was absolutely being targeted.

This year alone, the General had sent him more than ten formal letters, averaging one a month. And now, his tactics had escalated to something even more outrageous—a brazen ‘act first, report later’ approach of sending active recruits directly to his doorstep.

“Give it up, General,” Kagashi said, his posture remaining completely unmoved as he poured a cup of tea. “I have lost the will to continue fighting. I have absolutely no intention of ever returning to the Cloud Knights.”

The quiet atmosphere inside the tea pavilion suddenly thickened, the casual banter evaporating into silence.

Staring intently at Kagashi’s calm, emotionless face, Teng Xiao finally dropped his playful facade. His broad shoulders squared, and when he spoke again, his voice was a deep, resonant rumble.

“At least give me a real reason, Kagashi. That retirement excuse you gave back then? It never convinced me.”

Lost the will to continue fighting?

What a complete joke.

The Kagashi Family’s legacy was written in blood and steel. One of their ancestors had been among the very first Generals to ascend as an Emanator of The Hunt. Although his tenure had lasted less than three hundred years, he remained a towering historical figure permanently etched into the Xianzhou Annals. He wasn’t just the first Emanator of Cangcheng; the heroic exploits of another ancestor, a legendary Cloud Knight Vanguard, were still widely recounted across the Cangcheng, inspiring countless derivative literary works and stage adaptations.

In a family that had served in the military for generations, not a single soul had ever disgraced their name.

And by the time Kagashi’s generation came of age, his courage had eclipsed the entire army.

Hundreds of years ago, during the horrific meat-grinder of the Second Abundance Plague War, Kagashi had stood alone. Armed with a single sword, he had staunchly defended the entrance to a civilian refuge Grotto Heaven on the Xianzhou Yuque. He hadn’t just saved hundreds of millions of lives, honoring his ancestors—he had completely surpassed their achievements, truly proving that the student had eclipsed the master.

When the war finally ended and the vanguard forces moved in to clear the battlefield, anyone who laid eyes on Kagashi was left utterly paralyzed by shock.

He had lost his entire right arm. He stood in absolute silence before the Grotto Heaven’s entrance, a shattered blade gripped tightly in his left hand. Surrounding him, the mangled, grotesque corpses of countless Abominations of Abundance had been piled so high they formed a literal, temporary wall of flesh blocking the gateway.

One man guarding the pass, and ten thousand monsters could not break it.

At that time, Kagashi wasn’t even fifty years old.

The suffocating aura of killing intent that clung to him, framed against a backdrop of a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, struck a chilling awe into the hearts of even his most hardened comrades. Every single soldier in the Cloud Knights believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was destined to become the youngest Sword Champion—or perhaps even General—in Cangcheng’s history.

No one doubted his future.

For such a peerless, heroic figure to suddenly retire on the flimsy grounds of ‘losing the will to fight’, and subsequently transition into a quiet civilian role as an Academy teacher… who would ever believe there weren’t hidden circumstances?

The previous General of Cangcheng had speculated that Kagashi’s abrupt retirement might be tied to the grief of losing his family members in that very battle. But it was only a guess. Teng Xiao had always felt that reasoning was fundamentally flawed. No matter how he analyzed the man, Kagashi was not someone who feared death. It was simply impossible for a warrior of his caliber to suddenly cower from the battlefield just because he had witnessed the brutal reality of war claim his kin.

“Kagashi, say something. Don’t just sit there in silence,” Teng Xiao urged, his memories pulling him back to the present. “What is your real reason?”

“What reason? The reason for me to return to the army?” Kagashi took a slow sip of his tea, his voice perfectly level. “Cangcheng will not cease to function without me.”

This time, it was Teng Xiao’s turn to fall silent. He frowned deeply, the heavy lines on his face pulling taut. Then, with an extremely solemn gesture, he reached into his coat and slid a sealed, confidential document across the table.

“This is the reason.”

“…The divination results from the Xianzhou Yuque?”

Kagashi picked up the document. As his eyes scanned the text, his usually expressionless face gradually hardened into solemnity.

The report wasn’t long. It was just a single line of classical text written in the Yuque’s traditional cipher. Translated into modern vernacular, the terrifying gist was simple: Within the next three years, the Xianzhou Cangcheng will encounter a disaster no less severe than the Second Abundance Plague War.

“What is the Yuque’s official stance on this, and what were the Marshal’s orders?” Kagashi asked quietly, setting the paper down.

“The Yuque proposed that Cangcheng immediately enter the highest level of combat readiness. The Marshal approved it without hesitation.” Teng Xiao furrowed his thick, dark brows, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. “Now do you understand why I have repeatedly come here to ask for your return?”

“In less than two years, I will be six hundred years old,” Kagashi replied, his gaze drifting toward the pavilion’s open window. “I am already a full century past the regular retirement age for the Cloud Knights. No matter how formidable I might have been in my youth, that is all in the past.”

No sooner had the last syllable left his lips than the air inside the pavilion violently ruptured.

A massive giant sword tore through the space between them with a deafening sonic boom, its heavy blade slashing fiercely straight toward Kagashi’s skull. If it landed squarely, it would cleave him perfectly in two.

Yet Kagashi did not move a single millimeter. His expression remained as placid as a still pond, his eyes not even blinking, acting as if he couldn’t even see the lethal edge plunging toward his face.

Clang!

The sharp, ringing vibration ceased abruptly. The massive sword, radiating a suffocating, murderous intent, hung suspended a mere hair’s breadth above Kagashi’s forehead.

“In the entire Cloud Knight camp, the number of people who can sit unflinchingly beneath a falling blade like this can be counted on one hand,” Teng Xiao grinned, the fierce light of a warrior burning in his eyes.

“Could it simply be that I did not react in time, and my legs have already turned to jelly from fright?” Kagashi asked dryly.

“If your legs actually turned to jelly and you wet yourself from fright, I’d drink it right off the floor.”

Seeing the stubborn, unyielding fire in Teng Xiao’s eyes—a clear sign that the General would absolutely not leave this pavilion until he extracted the truth—Kagashi finally let out a soft, defeated sigh.

“Teng Xiao,” he began, finally dropping the distant, formal titles. “The probability of retired Cloud Knights succumbing to being mara-struck is vastly higher than that of ordinary citizens. This has been a grim consensus since the Era of the Three Sufferings.”

Hearing his own name spoken without the icy distance, Teng Xiao immediately withdrew his giant sword, resting it against the table. He leaned in, listening intently, nodding for Kagashi to continue.

“When the Second Abundance Plague War ended… my mother began showing the early symptoms of becoming mara-struck.”

“What?!”

Teng Xiao’s expression violently twisted in shock.

His mind raced, rapidly pulling up the classified military files regarding Kagashi’s family. During that horrific calamity, Kagashi’s father and eldest sister had died in battle, at the ages of 474 and 85 respectively. His mother had been critically wounded and left on the brink of death, but she had been rescued in time and survived. She had been 397 years old at the time.

Which meant… Qiu Zhiyan was 995 years old this year.

For ordinary long-life species, once they crossed the seven-hundred-year threshold, the probability of falling to mara increased exponentially with every passing year. A retired Cloud Knight managing to live to nearly a thousand years old without turning was a miracle—perhaps a one-in-a-hundred-thousand anomaly.

But that wasn’t the horrifying part.

The point was, if she had shown the early signs of becoming mara-struck centuries ago… how had it not fully manifested yet?

Connecting this impossible medical anomaly directly to Kagashi’s sudden, absolute refusal to ever leave his home and return to the battlefield, a terrifyingly absurd guess quietly surfaced in Teng Xiao’s mind.