Honkai Star Rail: Summoning the Chrysos Heirs — Chapter 30

Chapter 30: Hyperthymesia

‘Can you stop asking already… My little treasury is seriously about to hit rock bottom.’

The air inside the consultation room hung heavy with the cloying, sweet scent of calming aromatherapy. Cyrene slumped limply against the plush leather of the chair. Her eyelids drooped, fluttering softly as if she were hovering on the very edge of deep slumber.

But beneath that flawless veneer of a deeply hypnotized subject, her consciousness remained razor-sharp.

On the translucent blue panel hovering at the edge of her vision, the numerical value representing her [Memory Trace] was plummeting at a speed that made her chest ache. With every probing question Su Zhiwei threw her way, that precious number ruthlessly ticked down.

Cyrene mentally bit down on a handkerchief, weeping imaginary tears as she watched the points she had painstakingly hoarded wash down the drain. From the exact second this so-called psychological consultation began, the System had been burning through her reserves at maximum intensity, weaving layer upon layer of impenetrable, counterfeit psychological defenses to ensure she didn’t show a single micro-expression of deceit.

[Host, the total consumption thus far is merely 25 points of Memory Trace.]

The System’s mechanical voice chimed in at the worst possible moment, dripping with a cold, artificial logic that knew absolutely nothing of human suffering.

[You recently acquired 50 points of Memory Trace. Your balance remains well above the safety threshold. There is no need to be so… stingy.]

‘What do you know?!’Cyrene snapped back in her mind, her internal voice practically dripping with grievance.’Phainon had to hack a low-level Abomination to pieces just to scrape together ten or thirty points for me! And this woman sitting across from us? She just flaps her lips, and in fifty-odd minutes, she’s burned through twenty-five points! This isn’t a psychological consultation; it’s daylight robbery!’She glared viciously at the floating interface. If looks could kill, that ticking counter would have shattered into pixelated dust long ago.’And looking at her posture, she has zero intention of wrapping this up. If she keeps interrogating me for another hour… ugh, am I paying out of pocket just to come to work?’

The System seemed genuinely choked by her sheer miserliness. The blue panel flickered twice in the void before it wisely chose to play dead.

With the System falling silent, Cyrene didn’t have the luxury of continuing their bickering. She shifted her weight ever so slightly, sinking deeper into the cushions to make herself appear even more like a fragile, defenseless doll. Through the narrow slits of her half-closed lashes, she quietly studied the solemn woman sitting across the desk.

‘How strange… I answered everything perfectly. With the Memory Trace providing absolute cover, my physiological signs and micro-expressions should be completely flawless. Why does she still look like she’s trying to dissect me alive?’ Cyrene thought, a genuine trace of distress rippling through her mind. Where exactly had she slipped up?

“Alright, Cyrene.”

Su Zhiwei abruptly stopped tapping her pen. She leaned forward, the ambient light catching the edge of her glasses. The gaze behind those lenses instantly morphed from clinical gentleness to a piercing, predatory sharpness.

“Now tell me, how exactly did you manage to process such a massive influx of Remembrance without causing catastrophic damage to your own cognition?”

It was a trap. A beautifully laid snare.

When an ordinary human mind faced the crushing weight of a raw information flood, the brain’s natural protective mechanism would trigger an immediate, forced shutdown. Yet Cyrene had walked out of that encounter looking entirely too relaxed.

“I… don’t know.”

Cyrene shook her head with agonizing slowness. Her voice drifted out airy and disjointed, mimicking the cadence of someone speaking through a dream. She blinked, her azure pupils reflecting Su Zhiwei’s stern face, looking utterly pure and hollow.

“It just feels like… sitting in a dark movie theater, watching someone else’s film play out on the screen. Once the credits roll and I walk out, it doesn’t affect me at all.”

“Watched a movie?” Su Zhiwei seized the keyword instantly, a deep crease forming between her brows. “If it was merely like watching a film, why do you possess such excruciatingly detailed knowledge of the events within it? You can even recite fleeting numerical values and background details with perfect accuracy.”

The fountain pen in the doctor’s hand pressed down hard against the open notebook. Dark ink bled into the crisp paper, blooming into a jagged black stain.

“A normal person watching a movie, even in a state of absolute, hyper-focused attention, could not possibly memorize every single detail of a plot spanning an entire month. Especially not when they were only exposed to it for a mere ten seconds.”

The room plunged into a suffocating silence. The only sound left was the low, steady hum of the air conditioning unit overhead.

“Hmm…” Cyrene let out a soft murmur, her brow furrowing slightly as if she were genuinely struggling to process the complex logic of the question.

After several agonizing seconds, she finally spoke. Her tone was slow, airy, and entirely matter-of-fact.

“Because… those images are just stored inside my head. Whenever I want to look at them, they stop. They zoom in. Every little corner becomes perfectly clear.”

“I look at it once, and I just don’t forget it.”

Su Zhiwei’s fingers tightened around the barrel of her pen so hard her knuckles turned white.

Look once, and never forget?

Even for a specialized mental-type Ability User, attempting to accurately extract specific data from a chaotic, alien torrent of Remembrance required extensive training and repeated, agonizing mental screening—like panning for microscopic flakes of gold in a raging river. Completing that entire sequence of high-level operations—screening, memorizing, and purging the psychological impurities—within a ten-second window completely defied the fundamental laws of Supernatural Abilities.

Unless…

Su Zhiwei stared at the delicate girl slouched in the chair. Under the absolute, dominating control of [Deep Suggestion], a hypnotized subject was biologically incapable of forming a lie.

Which meant she was telling the absolute truth. She really did just look at it once and remember everything.

Suddenly, an utterly absurd yet terrifyingly logical theory detonated in Su Zhiwei’s mind.

Wait… could it be?

Hyperthymesia.

The clinical term sliced through the fog of her confusion like a blade. If flawless retention wasn’t an active skill but a passive biological instinct, then every single logical loophole instantly closed. Her brain possessed no screening mechanism whatsoever; every scrap of data was indiscriminately burned into her hippocampus. She didn’t need to process the anomalous information. She only needed to retrieve it.

Realizing the sheer magnitude of this, Su Zhiwei felt her breath hitch, her chest rising and falling at a faster rhythm. If this hypothesis held true, the raw potential locked inside this girl’s skull was…

She took a slow, deep breath, forcefully crushing the spike of shock threatening to break her professional composure. She locked eyes with Cyrene, enunciating every single syllable with heavy precision.

“Cyrene. Have you… never forgotten anything in your entire life?”

The dying light of dusk bled across the imposing gates of the Special Anomaly Bureau, stretching the shadows of the courtyard into long, distorted shapes.

“Officer Lei, Sister An Ning, goodbye~!”

Cyrene stood at the bottom of the concrete steps, her slender silhouette framed by the setting sun. The dull, vacant expression she had worn in the consultation room was completely gone. A sugary, radiant smile graced her lips as she waved enthusiastically at the two figures standing just inside the glass doors, showing absolutely zero signs of fatigue or displeasure after being subjected to a grueling hour-long psychological interrogation.

“I’ll be heading home now, okay?”

“See you tomorrow, little Cyrene,” Lei Ye replied. He maintained his usual unapproachable, stone-cold poker face, offering only a stiff, microscopic nod in acknowledgment.

An Ning, however, was practically overflowing with warmth. She hurried over to the threshold, her face lit up with a gentle, affectionate smile as she waved vigorously back at the girl.

They stood there until that splash of pink disappeared entirely around the distant street corner, swallowed up by the bustling evening crowd.

Only then did the warm smile on An Ning’s lips slowly dissolve. She turned around, a knot of worry tightening her brow as she looked up at the towering, silent man beside her.

“Captain Lei, why hasn’t little Cyrene’s evaluation period ended yet?” An Ning asked, genuine confusion lacing her voice. “Normally, after going through the standard physical assessments and Dr. Su’s psychological profiling, one round of testing is more than enough to classify a recruit’s threat level, right? Why are we dragging her back in for another round tomorrow?”

Subjecting a recruit to such high-frequency, back-to-back testing was a protocol strictly reserved for extremely dangerous or highly unstable Ability Users.

Hearing his subordinate’s concern, Lei Ye didn’t answer right away. He fished a crumpled cigarette from his tactical vest and brought it to his lips. He was just about to strike a lighter when he seemed to remember something, clicking his tongue in irritation and stuffing the tobacco back into his pocket.

“She… is a rather special case.”

Lei Ye stared down the empty street where Cyrene had vanished, his dark eyes heavy with unspoken weight. The preliminary flash-report Su Zhiwei had just transmitted to his terminal contained a hypothesis regarding “Hyperthymesia” that was frankly terrifying.

If the doctor’s theory was confirmed, the Bureau’s entire training doctrine for Cyrene would have to be scrapped, burned, and rebuilt from the ground up.

“We need to run another highly targeted memory diagnostic. After all, this is the very first time we’ve ever encountered a mental-type talent quite as unique as hers.”

Catching the lingering anxiety in An Ning’s eyes, Lei Ye paused. The hard edge in his voice softened just a fraction.

“But you don’t need to stress over it. The preliminary assessment from the brass has already classified her as benign. Tomorrow’s test is purely to map out the absolute upper limit of her capabilities. There won’t be any danger involved.”

With that, he turned on his heel and strode back into the facility, his heavy military boots striking the polished floor with a dull, rhythmic thud.

“As long as nothing goes wrong tomorrow, she’ll officially be our newest teammate.”