Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 46

Chapter 46: Shackles

“Lord Kagashi, you haven’t… done anything to draw the gaze of the Ten-Lords Commission’s judges, have you?”

Teng Xiao caught himself mid-sentence, hastily softening his phrasing. He had originally intended to ask if Kagashi had committed any heinous crimes.

“If I were to confess to such a thing, would you hand me over to the Commission?” Kagashi asked. His dark eyes rested on the younger man, carrying a deep, unreadable weight.

“…Don’t joke about things like that. Let’s talk about the real reason.”

A cold knot tightened in Teng Xiao’s gut. He couldn’t detect a single trace of deceit on Kagashi’s placid face. Which meant it was entirely possible that the man was telling the truth. But Teng Xiao refused to entertain that grim thought; he had to offer Kagashi a way out of this dangerous conversational territory.

Seeing the General’s unease, Kagashi gracefully stepped back from the edge.

“The true reason for my discharge is much simpler,” Kagashi said, his voice softening into a quiet murmur. “I just want to ensure I never break my promise to my mother. I want to be able to tell her ‘see you tomorrow,’ and actually mean it. That is all.”

He paused, looking down at the rippling surface of his tea. “She has lost everything. She only has me left. And I… only have my mother.”

Silence fell over the pavilion. Teng Xiao stared at his cup, digesting those words.

On the Xianzhou, the curse of the Long-Life Species was that the longer one lived, the harder it became to draw genuine emotional warmth from familial bonds. Decades bled into centuries, and over time, the sharp edges of love and loss dulled into a numb indifference. Many simply stopped taking family ties to heart.

Yet, he could understand Kagashi’s current devotion. For one, Kagashi was relatively young by their standards, and for another… Teng Xiao’s own mother had passed away when he was merely a child. From a purely personal standpoint, he deeply respected Kagashi’s choice. The only thing that truly surprised him was that the bond between the Kagashi mother and son had remained so fiercely intact for nearly six hundred years.

“Teng Xiao,” Kagashi broke the quiet, his tone turning reflective. “Outsiders look at the Kagashi Family and see a golden ticket to the heavens. They believe being born into our bloodline is a stroke of absolute luck, a guaranteed meteoric rise. What they don’t know is that most of my ancestors were born wearing shackles forged by the past.”

“Why do you say that?” Teng Xiao frowned, genuinely perplexed.

“Because we have served in the military for generations. Without exception. Whether it is the wives who married into the estate, or the daughters who married out into other families—all are bound to the battlefield.”

“Is there something inherently wrong with that?”

“Have you ever considered,” Kagashi asked softly, “that a life of warfare might not be the path every single one of them wanted to walk?”

Teng Xiao was stunned.

It was true. Everyone simply assumed that, given the Kagashi Family’s illustrious, blood-soaked history, their descendants would naturally grow up to be fierce Cloud Knights. It was accepted as a law of nature. No one had ever paused to ask why the Kagashi Family had held their swords for so many unbroken generations. If pressed, Teng Xiao would have guessed it was out of sheer inspiration, a desire to honor the legendary deeds of their forebears.

“Could it be…”

“There is no need for ‘could it be.’ It is exactly as you are guessing.”

A complex, melancholic emotion threaded through Kagashi’s calm voice.

“As the direct descendants of the first Emanator of The Hunt, the Kagashi Family has only one ancestral teaching: never disgrace the glory of our ancestors.”

Kagashi let out a faint, humorless breath. “But the bitter irony is that this teaching wasn’t passed down by our founding ancestor, Kagashi Chengyou, nor by his wife. It was a chain forged by their descendants, locked around the necks of every generation that followed.”

He looked up, meeting Teng Xiao’s eyes. “From the era of our founders until today, on the grand thousand-year timescale of the Long-Life Species, the Kagashi Family has burned through twenty-three generations in a mere two thousand years. In practice, we are no different from a Short-Life Species.”

Teng Xiao’s breath hitched.

“My mother and I are the longest-living generation since our founders,” Kagashi continued, his voice steady but heavy with historical grief. “Before us, the oldest member of the family barely scraped past four hundred years of age.”

“My grandfather only lived to be sixty-two. My grandmother raised my father entirely on her own after giving birth to him. The moment he turned twenty-three and passed his adulthood examinations, he returned to the military. He died in a foreign land less than two years later.”

Kagashi’s eyes lowered. “During that dark period, the Kagashi bloodline was on the absolute brink of extinction.”

He smoothly shifted the subject. “You are familiar with the child’s choosing custom, the divination ritual passed down since our alliance with the Foxians, correct?”

“Naturally,” Teng Xiao replied, eager for the lighter topic. “I grabbed a toy array-sword when I was a toddler. But my parents didn’t force a destiny on me because of it. Later on, applying for the Cloud Knights was entirely my own choice.”

“The Kagashi Family’s situation is the exact opposite of yours,” Kagashi said.

“Ah…?”

“Over the last dozen generations, with the sole exception of myself, not a single infant grabbed a weapon during their choosing ceremony. Yet, as they grew, every single one of them chose to join the military. Without exception.”

“…Most of them were actually forced by circumstance?” Teng Xiao inhaled sharply, the grim reality dawning on him.

Kagashi shook his head slightly, offering an ambiguous, quiet response. “No one ever spoke the words aloud, but most of them had entirely different talents. Take my father, for example.”

A fond, sorrowful light flickered in Kagashi’s eyes. “Compared to fighting on the blood-soaked front lines, he was actually a brilliant craftsman. He studied on the Zhuming and had a deep gift for forging weapons.”

“But in the end, my father abandoned the forge for the sword. There were quite a few ancestors in similar, tragic situations.”

“Kagashi descendants must never disgrace the glory of their ancestors. This is our sacred teaching. It is also the suffocating stereotype the outside world has locked us inside for two millennia.”

The underlying tragedy of those words wasn’t hard to grasp, and Teng Xiao felt a heavy unease settling over him.

War was a cruel, grinding machine. Even as an Emanator of The Hunt, there were countless tragedies one was entirely powerless to prevent, and no one could outrun the creeping shadow of the mara affliction. Among the generations of Xianzhou Generals, those who managed to serve for more than five hundred years were exceedingly rare.

If the casualty rate was that staggering for the Generals, one could only imagine the meat grinder faced by ordinary Cloud Knights fighting the Abominations of Abundance.

To be born into a clan like the Kagashi Family was essentially a death sentence, a destiny to bleed out on a distant battlefield. Yet the rest of the Xianzhou looked at them and saw only the glittering luck of nobility. Wasn’t that the cruelest bias of all?

Realizing this, Teng Xiao was deeply moved. He finally understood why Kagashi was so absolute in his decision to leave the military camp.

For two thousand years, not a single Kagashi descendant had dared to shatter the historical shackles placed upon them.

Now, Kagashi had taken the quiet, monumental initiative to be the first.

It made perfect sense. In a family that historically married and reproduced as early as possible to outpace their own mortality, Kagashi was a complete anomaly—nearly six hundred years old, unmarried, and without a single heir.

“Teng Xiao, I have no actual resistance to returning to the military,” Kagashi said, his voice pulling the General from his thoughts. “But at least give me some time… wait until I see my mother off. Her current condition… she might only have a few years left.”

Kagashi’s calm facade softened into something deeply vulnerable. “From the time I was a child until I reached adulthood, my mother has always cherished me. To give me the chance to escape the suffocating shackles of our ancestral teachings, to give me the freedom to choose my own fate, she didn’t hesitate to violently clash with my father—a man she loved with all her heart.”

“Succumbing to the mara is the inescapable fate of the Xianzhou’s Long-Life Species. The laws of nature leave me no room to change her ending.”

“So, as a final exchange for submitting to fate—I only hope that when my mother is finally taken into extinction, she can say goodbye with a smile. Without a single regret.”

“I understand.”

Teng Xiao nodded silently, the weight of the moment pressing down on him. He glanced around the quiet, empty tea pavilion, then leaned in, lowering his voice until it was barely a whisper near Kagashi’s ear.

“I didn’t hear a single word of what was said tonight. Just… control your own limits. I really don’t want to have to fish someone out of the Ten-Lords Commission’s deepest cells.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, General.”

Kagashi’s melancholic expression vanished in an instant. He squinted his eyes, a bright, beaming smile spreading across his face.

“This humble one is merely staying by his mother’s side, using the warmth of family bonds to slow the progression of her mara affliction. As for ‘controlling limits,’ I truly have no idea what you mean.”

“It’s good that you don’t understand.”

Teng Xiao breathed a heavy sigh of relief. He threw a casual arm around Kagashi’s neck, mirroring the older man’s sudden, easygoing smile.

“I understand the matter of you not returning to the military for now. But… regarding having Mianxue and Qinghan train under you…”

Kagashi slowly opened his eyes, the beaming smile fading back into his signature, understated calm. “I am just afraid those two won’t be able to handle the Kagashi Family’s brutal training standards.”

“If those two lack the perseverance and the talent, then I’ll just admit I misjudged them. Don’t worry, I won’t let you take the blame if they wash out.”

Teng Xiao let go of Kagashi’s neck and drained the last of his teacup in one smooth gulp.

“It’s getting a bit cold out here. Another day, I’ll steal my old man’s treasured tea leaves to treat you. For now, I’ll take my leave.”

With those parting words, the burly man turned and vanished into the shadows of the night.

‘Oh… what a picture of filial piety…’ Kagashi chuckled dryly to himself. He picked up his porcelain teacup, quietly observing his own calm face reflected in the dark, still water.