In your daily interactions, you discovered that Mei Rokuro's hobbies were unlike most people's. She preferred seasonal pastries, classical poetry, and opera.
Perhaps influenced by her, you also developed a fondness for delicate desserts.
Among them, your favorite became plum blossom cakes made from lotus leaves, fresh plum blossoms, and glutinous rice. Sometimes, you mixed in small rice dumplings, red and green fruits, and pine nuts, seasoning them with jams, sweet beans, and nuts—creating endless variations of plum blossom cakes, exquisite in both appearance and flavor.
When Mei tried your creations, she was often surprised by your skill. Sometimes, she even asked you for lessons.
Day by day, time passed—
And so came Mei's nineteenth birthday.
You had been waiting for this day, perhaps your entire life.
Your childhood friend, the girl who once saved you on the battlefield—when had your feelings for her truly begun? In that moment, or in the very first time your eyes met? You no longer knew, and it no longer mattered.
At her birthday banquet, you confessed your heart to Mei.
Her response was… vague.
Neither a clear rejection, nor an acceptance.
Inside the starship, docked at Milian-4 Satellite, Mei leaned against the porthole, one smooth hand resting on its cold glass.
Her delicate face reflected faintly back at her.
Though her expression was calm as ever, her heart stirred faintly, an unfamiliar flutter.
She did not know whether it was his confession… or simply the dull thrum of chemicals—phenylethylamine and dopamine—beating through her veins.
In reaching for the truth of life itself, she had neglected to learn some simpler truths.
Your confession received no reply. Yet you did not despair.
Instead, you resolved to pursue life sciences even further— to one day stand as her equal, and then confess again.
During those studies, you acquired from an auction a curious manuscript once belonging to Iriya Saras, Member #56 and the second president of the Genius Society.
You doubted its authenticity—purchased for only 10,000 credits, it hardly looked legitimate.
Yet one casual evening, as you flipped through it on your desk, the "Hyper-Spatial Remote Sensing" recorded within seemed… possible.
Intrigued, you studied it alongside your research expeditions. For a year, progress eluded you—its eccentric logic was maddening.
At twenty, you were still immersed in life sciences, but you had not abandoned the manuscript.
At twenty-one, after two years of trial and error, three months of sleepless cloistered work finally bore fruit—you succeeded in creating a weakened prototype of Hyper-Spatial Remote Sensing.
Though imperfect, it was quickly put to use. On expeditions, you could now maintain communication with teammates even deep in the field. Soon, every researcher carried the device, and expeditions grew safer, faster, smoother.
Its success inspired you. You vowed to refine it further, file for patent, and spread its use across the stars.
But its formal debut came only with the second great upheaval of your life.
At twenty-two, while your expeditionary fleet entered a remote system, an alarm rang:
An unknown gravitational pull gripped the starship.
Within a week, if nothing changed, all crew would be dragged into its core.
Using Hyper-Spatial Remote Sensing, you tried to call for aid—but the gravity field jammed all signals.
A probe was dispatched toward the source.
The images it returned drew silence to the entire conference chamber.
It was no planet.
It was a sphere of flesh.
A monster adrift in void, shaped like a world—blood-red eye unblinking, wandering eternally, devouring everything caught in its wake, folding the universe into its grotesque body.
The room drowned in despair. You remembered the frozen beast in No Man's Land, long ago—but this time, there was no escape.
Almost without hesitation, you locked yourself in the laboratory. To others, this seemed cowardice, but no one judged you—after all, you were still young.
Ideas were raised. Detonate explosives, use the recoil to drift free—calculations showed less than a 1% chance of success.
Sacrifice small ships with fueled engines—yet gravity seized them instantly, dragging them to their doom.
Three hopeless days passed. The gravitational pressure grew so intense it felt as though it might tear your very body in half. Within days, you would be swallowed.
That night, you quietly stepped from your lab. In the chaos, no one noticed.
You went instead to the kitchen. There, as though it were any other day, you kneaded dough, mixing preserved plum, lotus leaf, glutinous rice, rock sugar—
One last box of plum blossom cakes.
Then, you wrote a letter, slipping it into the wooden box.
At dawn, Mei slid open her cabin door.
There, a wooden box awaited her.
Inside were plum blossom cakes… and a folded letter.
Her hands trembled as she read:
"The blossoms are here again this season, but alas, we cannot share them together.
I offer you this humble verse, young lady—
May we meet a spirit of plum, at dusk when moonlight wanes, to cherish each whisper as if eternal.
Do not worry. — Shirakawa Hibiki"
Her eyes reddened instantly. She raced to the control room, desperate, her voice breaking:
"Father, Mother—have you seen Hibiki!?"
Overwhelmed as they already were, Rokuro and Megumi exchanged uneasy glances. They had been too preoccupied with survival to notice.
Checking surveillance, they saw it: Hibiki had launched a small ship alone, silently, into the void.
Mei's suspicion became truth. She seized the Hyper-Spatial Remote Sensing, linked his frequency, and called.
By fortune, the beast's gravity barred only outgoing signals. Internal ones still carried.
The line connected.
"…Hello."
"…Hibiki?"
"Mm. Did you taste the cakes? The ingredients weren't ideal—the plum wasn't fresh. They may not suit your palate—"
"Is now really the time for this!?"
Her voice snapped with anger, trembling beneath it.
From the other side came a chuckle.
"It's rare, seeing you like this. I thought the Mei I'd known was long lost, turned wooden—warm outside, cold inside. But now, seeing you still feel—— I'm relieved."
"…I—"
"Don't speak. There isn't time."
You gazed at the immense flesh-sphere looming beyond the viewport, and your voice grew soft:
"When I was a boy, a fortune-teller said my life would be short, destined to end before its time.
Ironically—everyone around me departed long before I did.
I should have died on that battlefield… and yet you pulled me back.
Since then, I've traveled, seen sights I never dreamed I would. For that… I'm already grateful, already fulfilled."
The signal cut.
You throttled the engines to maximum, starship shuddering through void.
At last, the coordinates matched your calculations. In dying breath, you completed the modified Hyper-Spatial Remote Sensing and activated it.
"Three. Two. One—"
A pulse scattered across the stars. Coordinates, message, broadcast at the highest frequency.
Even then, such a signal should not have reached Him.
But in that last instant, before oblivion, you glimpsed cruel laughter—masks within void.
Aha, the Aeon of Elation, amused beyond measure.
A Preservation Pathstrider, on death's edge, daring to claim lineage of Abundance, taunting Hunt before the vast universe—all to challenge the Beast of Gluttony itself.
Ahaha… how utterly hilarious!
Aha took your trembling signal and carried it to every corner of existence. And within countless ears, a voice rang:
"I, Shirakawa Hibiki of the Abundance, call upon the Calamity-Felling Bow to draw its string!"