Honkai Star Rail: My Death Feeds Their Madness — Chapter 69

Chapter 69: Your Disciple Misses You

But before that, she needed to become stronger.

‘Master… I will not shrink back.’He had promised to teach her how to slaughter the Abominations of Abundance. He had promised to grant her the power to carve her own path.’So, you must… you absolutely must come back.’

They had an agreement.

Jingliu quietly watched the approaching ground, burying those desperate, silent pleas deep within her chest. She had not expected Kagashi’s departure to stretch into two agonizing years. For a Long-Life Species, two years was a fleeting breath, yet to her subjective senses, it dragged on like two centuries of isolation.

Throughout those twenty-four months, Jingliu never allowed herself a single moment of slack.

The wooden training dummies in the martial arts field were shattered and replaced, batch after batch. The heavy longsword in her grip, once a clumsy burden, transformed into a lethal extension of her own arm. She executed every grueling drill in the reserve camp with flawless precision, and secured perfect marks in the mandatory “Abominations as Arch-enemies” tactical course.

Only in the dead of night, when the day’s physical exhaustion crashed over her like a heavy tide, would the stoic facade crack. As sleep pulled at her consciousness, her Master’s gentle figure would involuntarily claim her thoughts.

As a mere member of the Cloud Knights Reserve Army, she lacked the clearance to view front-line battle reports. Every scrap of news had to be relayed intermittently through Sleeping Snow. Sometimes the reports spoke of smooth advances; other times, they detailed the bitter anxiety of a grinding stalemate. Most often, they whispered of life-and-death thrills on the edge of the cosmos.

She transitioned from the initial, breathless panic of learning her Master had been wounded, to a numb acceptance of the long, agonizing waits. Now, she harbored only one humble, desperate prayer: that he would simply return alive.

Even she knew how luxurious a wish that was for a Cloud Knight.

Being away from the Yaoqing Xianzhou for more than half a year was classified as a deep-space expedition. Since the very foundation of the Cloud Knights, there had never been a single precedent of an Expeditionary Force returning with its ranks completely intact.

And three months ago, the Expeditionary Force led by Kagashi had gone entirely dark.

The Yaoqing sent out transmission signals day after day, broadcasting into the void. The void offered only static in return.

In exactly five days, it would be her Coming-of-Age Ceremony.

Within the modern Xianzhou Alliance, any youth reaching the age of maturity could take the Adult Exam. Once passed, their identification would be stamped with the official mark of adulthood, stripping away the restrictions that bound the young. For Jingliu, it meant one thing above all else: leaving the reserve army and officially enlisting as a glorious, blood-sworn soldier of the Cloud Knights.

If the heavens allowed it, Jingliu hoped that her once-in-a-lifetime Hair-binding Ceremony could be officiated by her Master’s own hands. Even if the modern iteration of the rite had been drastically simplified over thousands of years of cultural evolution, it was the only milestone that mattered to her.

The night wind howled across the high-rise, biting through her thin clothes.

Jingliu sat on the very edge of the rooftop, her legs dangling over the dizzying drop. She looked up at the eternal, lonely moon hanging in the sky. Her fingers unconsciously rubbed the warm silver moon jade pendant resting in her palm.

Qiu Zhiyan had given it to her, claiming it was a protective ward Kagashi had bestowed upon her centuries ago. Zhiyan had told her that if she managed to escape the slaughter alive, she should show it to him. Jingliu had originally planned to return the jade to her Master, but he had softly declined, insisting it belonged to her now.

“Master…”

A cold crescent moon reflected in the girl’s crimson eyes, swimming in an emotion she rarely let surface.

“Your disciple misses you…”

Five days later. The Cloud Knights training camp assembly square.

Massive banners obscured the morning sun, emblazoned with heavy calligraphy: Xianzhou Soars and Cloud Knights Victorious. Across the vast, sweeping square, 5,764 reserve army members who had survived the Adult Exam stood in rigid, perfectly aligned rows. Less than three percent of the total candidates managed to pass the brutal assessment at this age.

Atop the towering central platform, a hundred veteran Cloud Knight instructors stood in a line. Clad in gleaming silver armor, their expressions were carved from stone. In their hands, they held the ceremonial hair crowns and hairpins. The completion of this rite signified that these vibrant youths were finally stepping out of the greenhouse, legally and morally qualified to don armor and march into the meat grinder of war.

Jingliu stood at the very back of the formation, assigned to the final batch of recipients.

With every passing minute, the heavy weight in her chest sank a fraction deeper.

The ceremony for the first hundred concluded.

The ceremony for the first thousand concluded.

The ceremony for five thousand concluded.

The excited clamor of the square gradually died down to a hushed, respectful silence, leaving only the final row of youths.

The instructor assigned to this last batch was a Foxian woman with short, practical hair and a severe face. She glanced down at the digital manifest in her hand, her gaze lingering on the red-eyed girl with waist-length blue-white hair. A flash of complex pity crossed the instructor’s eyes.

The total loss of contact with Kagashi’s Expeditionary Force was an open secret among the military brass.

“Are you ready, Jingliu?”

The last, stubborn ember of hope in Jingliu’s eyes finally extinguished at the sound of her name.

She stood up, smoothing the creases from her ceremonial robes. Her expression hardened, returning to its usual flawless, icy indifference.

‘Master… I hope you are still well.’

She walked slowly toward the high platform. Each step was measured and firm, violently crushing her own regret beneath her heel. She reached the woven prayer mat, knelt gracefully, and lowered her head to receive the rite.

A sudden, violent disturbance tore through the sky, instantly snapping the attention of all five thousand people upward.

A heavily damaged star skiff ruptured the cloud layer, screaming down from the upper atmosphere in a steep dive. It arrested its momentum with a brutal screech of thrusters, hovering unsteadily above the assembly square.

The scorched hatch blew open. A solitary figure stepped onto a floating longsword and descended.

A suffocating, metallic stench of blood instantly overwhelmed the crisp morning air. This was not the copper tang of an ordinary flesh wound. It was a dense, suffocating aura of slaughter—a scent that had been steeped in mountains of corpses and oceans of gore, pickled so deeply into the marrow that it choked the lungs of anyone who breathed it.

The flying sword halted inches from Jingliu. Heavy boots crunched against the paving stones. The figure stood tall and unyielding, like a blood-soaked spear driven into the earth.

Terrified whispers erupted across the square.

The Foxian instructor, recognizing the man beneath the gore, instantly stepped back and dropped into a deep, trembling bow of absolute reverence.

Jingliu froze on the prayer mat. She stared at the man.

His silver-bright battle armor was more than half shattered, exposing the dark undersuit. Thick, dark red blood stains and dried residue coated every inch of him, with the sickening remnants of Abomination flesh still clinging to the jagged edges of his pauldrons. The chilling, absolute killing intent radiating from his body had not yet been fully suppressed; it bled into the air like freezing mist.

Under the crushing weight of that aura, the surrounding youths waiting for their ceremony found their legs giving out, trembling uncontrollably against the stone.

Only Jingliu remained entirely unaffected.

‘It’s Master… he’s back…’

Kagashi ignored the thousands of terrified and reverent gazes fixed upon him. He looked straight down at Jingliu. A trace of deep, quiet relief flickered through his eyes—eyes still heavy with the dark exhaustion of slaughter—before his usual gentle sternness masked it away.

“I will take over her Coming-of-Age Ceremony.”

Kagashi turned to the trembling Cloud Knight instructor and held out his hand, taking the ceremonial items from her grip.

Looking at her Master’s ruined, blood-stained hands, a sharp ache seized Jingliu’s throat. Judging by the sheer density of the aura and the blackened color of the blood, she knew it belonged to the Abominations of Abundance. It had been caked there for over a month.

A sudden realization struck her.

The crushing worry and desperate longing she had suppressed with cold reason finally shattered her calm, flooding her chest with an uncontrollable, dizzying joy. He had not stopped. He had not rested.

Jingliu bit the inside of her cheek, forcing her breathing to steady, refusing to lose her composure in front of the entire military academy. She was the direct disciple of Cloud Knight Vanguard Kagashi. She would not embarrass him.

Taking a deep, grounding breath of the blood-soaked air, Jingliu straightened her spine.

Kagashi stepped slowly behind her. He looked down at the cascade of blue-white hair spilling over her waist. When he had left two years ago, it had not been nearly this long.

He raised his hand.

Below the stage, thousands of eyes widened in collective shock.

What kind of terrifying hands were those? The skin was entirely obscured by layers of dried gore and deep, jagged lacerations. Those with sharp enough cultivation could see blackened blood permanently wedged deep into the crevices of his fingernails and knuckles. Had this Vanguard Lord truly slaughtered his way across the stars and flown straight to the academy without a single second of rest?

Kagashi paid the staring crowd no mind. Reaching into the inner folds of his ruined robes, he withdrew a small, exquisite wooden comb, carefully wrapped in pristine white silk.

It was the only clean thing left on his entire body. It was also the very first thing he had purchased the moment his boots touched the soil of the Yaoqing.