Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Life is a Circuitous Maze

The rain came and went with the fleeting temperament of a summer storm. Sunlight pierced through the parting clouds, casting a brilliant, shimmering glow over the puddles that dotted the uneven ground outside.

Kagashi closed his oil-paper umbrella with a soft click. He lightly shook off the excess water, stepped out of his mud-stained shoes, and slid his feet into a pair of clean, dry sandals waiting by the door.

“Go dry your clothes quickly,” he murmured, his voice calm and gentle.

Having brought her mother here for treatment on many such rainy days, Clarice was well-acquainted with the routine. She swapped her shoes and handled the familiar layout of the Bamboo House with ease, making her way to the fixed area where the special ‘dryer’ sat.

It was a peculiar contraption that Kagashi had tinkered with during his spare time. Too indifferent to bestow it with a proper name, he simply called it a dryer.

As Clarice activated it, warm air seeped into the fabric of her dress. The gentle heat circulated along her chilled skin, drawing out the dampness left by the rain and forming a faint, ethereal mist that was barely visible to the naked eye.

On the other side of the house, Kagashi retreated to his private room. He changed out of his damp clothes, habitually slipped into his crisp white lab coat, and walked into the sterile quiet of the treatment room.

The current session was nearing its end.

Clarice’s agile figure came to a halt beside Kagashi. She stared through the glass of the treatment pod at her mother, her slender fingers unconsciously interlacing in a silent, desperate prayer.

“Rest assured, everything is normal,” Kagashi said, offering a quiet word of comfort.

As the treatment countdown on the monitor reached zero, the heavy door of the medical pod hissed open automatically. Inside, Ms. Durand slowly fluttered her eyes open.

Taking in the sight of the two faces before her—one deeply familiar, the other suddenly foreign—the heavy confusion clouding her eyes diminished, but only slightly.

“…Clarice…” she whispered, her voice fragile. “…and this gentleman…”

“Mother!”

Clarice carefully reached in to help Ms. Durand sit up, embracing her mother with a surge of relief. But the joy was painfully short-lived. She pulled back, her small face suddenly stricken with deep astonishment.

“Mother, you… don’t remember Mr. Kagashi?”

“Mr. Kagashi, Mr. Kagashi…” Ms. Durand repeated the name, her brow furrowing as she searched the fractured depths of her mind. “…Is he the doctor helping me?”

A fleeting shadow of solemnity crossed Kagashi’s dark eyes. Meeting the young girl’s panicked, trembling gaze, he offered her a discreet, reassuring look, signaling her to remain calm.

“Ms. Durand, please allow me to examine the current state of your brain,” he requested softly.

“Alright,” she agreed, her tone polite but distant.

With practiced precision, Kagashi attached the delicate instrument electrodes to Ms. Durand’s temples and initiated the examination program. Countless streams of complex data—information that Clarice couldn’t even begin to comprehend—cascaded across the holographic display. Kagashi’s eyes tracked the scrolling text, not missing a single punctuation mark, absorbing every minute detail.

A few minutes later, he powered down the instrument and gently removed the electrodes.

“Ms. Durand’s current condition presents some minor surprises, but it remains well within a controllable range,” Kagashi explained smoothly. “Please rest assured. In two months, your amnesia will definitely be completely cured.”

“Oh, that is wonderful news. Thank you for your trouble,” Ms. Durand smiled. Even though she could no longer place his name or face, she could instinctively feel the deep kindness radiating from the young man.

“You may head home now. It is expected that you will return for a follow-up treatment in twenty-four days.”

Ms. Durand showed no particular reaction to the number twenty-four.

Clarice, however, was entirely different. Seeing her mother’s placid acceptance, a sharp pang of worry twisted across the girl’s face.

This was the very first time after a treatment session that her mother had forgotten the interval between her visits. And the time required until the next treatment had shortened by yet another few days. At this rate… sooner or later, it would reach a critical threshold where daily treatments would be entirely useless.

When that time came—

Even she might be forgotten by her own mother.

When a person completely loses their memories, even if their heart still beats and they draw breath, they are no different from the deceased.

‘Life is a circuitous maze; besides memories, we have nothing.’

Recalling those melancholic words her mother had once spoken to her, Clarice finally seemed to grasp the true, terrifying weight of that sentence.

After the mother and daughter departed into the clearing weather, Kagashi imported the raw data from the session into his central recording terminal and began a deeper, more rigorous analysis.

Generally speaking, even in worlds boasting highly advanced medical technology, ailments of the mind and memory had always been an impossible wall.

Take the long-lived species of the Xianzhou, for instance.

The specific reason they inevitably fell into the dreaded mara-struck state was deeply intertwined with the burden of memory. Those who succumbed to mara had their senses violently overturned, their very humanity eroded by the weight of centuries.

His teacher, Ruan Mei, had once researched how to cure the mara affliction. Kagashi didn’t know if that particular monumental subject had ever been truly conquered. He only remembered the Xianzhou native who had volunteered to be a living experimental subject—a person who was eventually taken away by a star skiff one quiet afternoon.

Whether the experiment was a resounding success or a tragic failure, whether that volunteer lived or died, Kagashi—who had only been twenty-two at the time—never found out.

However, following that event, the myriad of research subjects Ruan Mei assigned to him included an extensive, supplementary study dedicated entirely to memory.

Thanks to his long, grueling immersion in those memory-related subjects, he now possessed the actual capability to treat Ms. Durand’s deteriorating amnesia.

Currently, none of her shifting symptoms had exceeded his calculated expectations, which was a small mercy. Kagashi held absolute confidence in his work; he would definitely fulfill the heavy promise he had given to Clarice.

Since some unknown point in his life, Kagashi had begun to take promises incredibly seriously.

Sometimes, even he didn’t quite understand why he poured so much of his soul and effort into fulfilling words that the other party had clearly spoken in passing.

Many years ago, Yu Qingtu had casually tossed a sentence his way.

‘If you can make a pastry that truly satisfies me, I will unconditionally do one thing for you, and solve one difficult problem for your teacher. But since I admire Ruan Mei, even if you can’t make it, I will still help her.’

Kagashi had naturally made a solemn vow right then and there, utterly determined not to disappoint her.

He still remembered the look Yu Qingtu gave him that day—a gaze filled with deep, unmasked astonishment. The underlying meaning was obvious: a grand genius of her stature was merely making a casual joke. She had never expected the ‘Little Fellow’ in her eyes to actually agree to the impossible terms; otherwise, she wouldn’t have offered the second sentence as a graceful way out.

After snapping out of her daze, Yu Qingtu had simply curled her lips into a smile, her eyes shimmering with a hint of genuine interest and faint expectation.

It took a full seven years for Kagashi to successfully develop a magical flavoring.

When added to a pastry, the compound would automatically adapt to the taster’s palate, flawlessly mimicking their most preferred, beloved flavor. In a sense, it was a bit of a scientific trick, but it still rightfully earned Yu Qingtu’s approval.

Since that day, every time Yu Qingtu came to visit Ruan Mei, Kagashi would quietly prepare an extra portion of pastries just for her. At first, he would use that specific magical flavoring. But as time went on, and he learned her true tastes, he never needed to use it again.

“Ms. Durand’s amnesia is not caused by physical brain damage or a specific degenerative disease…” Kagashi murmured to himself, his eyes reflecting the blue light of the terminal.

“It is not the same type as Alzheimer’s disease, which was conquered by medical science long ago… this point can be one hundred percent confirmed.”

“Therefore, stem cell transplantation cannot be used as a viable method.”

“Using CRISPR-dCas9 technology to remove DNA methylation markers, reactivating the memory-related genes, supplemented by CCKBR receptor modulators…”

Kagashi turned away from the screen, opened the secure storage cabinet, and carefully extracted a single dose of specialized medicine from a shelf surrounded by biting cold air.

This was the CCKBR receptor modulator.

Strictly speaking, this chemical compound had no direct curative effect on Ms. Durand’s amnesia. The reason it was being used as an auxiliary preparation was purely for prevention. If the aggressive treatment process caused any unforeseen neurological damage to the patient’s fragile brain, the CCKBR receptor modulator would take effect immediately, shielding the neural pathways from collapse.

To actually cure Ms. Durand’s amnesia, he mainly had to rely on the culmination of his years of grueling research.

—Memory Decoding and Backfilling.

It involved simulating hippocampal function through implanted devices to perfectly replicate memory-related neural signals. He would capture and amplify the residual electrical signals hiding deep within the hippocampus, and finally digitize the patient’s fragmented memory so it could be safely re-input through a Brain-Computer Interface.

“…Whew. If I were a Memokeeper from the Garden of Recollection, there might be far simpler, more elegant means to achieve this…” Kagashi sighed softly into the quiet room.

Unfortunately, he had never stepped onto the Path of Remembrance. He could only rely on the cold, hard science of his own two hands.

Currently, this exhaustive research had reached its absolute end, with only the final, most crucial step remaining: clinical trials.

Kagashi unsealed the chilled vial and drank the receptor modulator, calmly preparing to personally verify the efficacy and safety of the preventative drug.