The back mountain.
The puppet carried a bamboo basket in one hand and a bamboo knife in the other.
Each time it passed a plum tree, it would stop, precisely selecting the fullest, best-colored blossoms at the tips of the branches, deftly cutting them down and placing them into the basket.
This scene was all too familiar to Ruan Mei.
Powered by Rrakavasha's memories, every action the puppet took was a perfect reenactment of his year-after-year routine while he was alive.
Following behind and watching everything, she stood dazed, lost in thought.
The memory backup Rrakavasha left behind was incomplete.
After successfully curing Durand's amnesia, he no longer needed clinical trials, no longer connected himself to recording devices, and naturally, there were no further memory backups.
The memories the puppet possessed didn't include those final years; the end remained a mystery.
To know what he was thinking in his very last moment, was that wish, in the end, nothing more than a luxury she didn't deserve?
The puppet's silhouette almost completely overlapped with the figure in her memories, yet Ruan Mei felt only pain when looking at it.
She finally understood why, back then, Yu Qingtu had spoken those words about the difference between creation and soul.
No matter how similar the appearance, it lacked Rrakavasha's essence, that warmth she'd taken for granted.
And yet...
It was precisely this soulless puppet that had, for hundreds of years, unwaveringly carried out its prime directives without fail.
It had never betrayed its creator.
And what about her?
Ruan Mei's gaze grew heavy with sorrow, weighted by centuries of mistakes.
That promise she once made, to take responsibility for Vash, had long been forgotten, discarded like so much irrelevant data.
Not only forgotten completely, but she'd even pushed all the blame onto him, making him the villain in her own narrative.
The greatest sorrow is a dead heart.
Rrakavasha stripping away his most profound memories twice, how was that any different from enduring the cruelest punishment this world could offer?
From beginning to end, the root of every bitter consequence lay with her alone.
She had personally created the beginning, and then personally buried everything, placing a full stop at the end of that shared chapter of their lives.
Her eyes returned to the puppet picking plum blossoms ahead, and she felt as though all the strength had been drained from her body.
An uncontrollable thought crept into her heart...
If Rrakavasha hadn't created it before he died, would she have learned the truth much earlier?
No...
Even if she had known, what could she have changed?
From the moment the puppet was activated, everything had already become irreversible. Time moved in only one direction.
Ruan Mei climbed the stone steps upward, her steps heavy as a boulder.
In a hazy trance, she seemed to see scenes from the past appear ahead, ghosts of memory.
A boy, barely reaching her shoulder, walking beside her, step by step, toward the mountain peak with eager curiosity.
Ruan Mei blinked instinctively.
There was nothing ahead but empty air.
A quiet sense of loss spread from the depths of her heart.
Before she realized it, she'd reached the summit, where a scene she had never witnessed before unfolded.
Sunlight poured down from the horizon, filtering through red-and-white plum branches, painting pale colors across the snow that had yet to melt.
No wind. No rain. Even the snow had paused in this moment.
Just a few steps forward, and one could melt into this tranquil, harmonious painting, become part of something beautiful.
Many years ago, there had been only a handful of plum trees here, scattered and wild.
Over the hundred-plus years since Rrakavasha returned to this land, he'd transformed this winter mountain peak into a sea of blossoms.
Flowers bloom again in time.
But he would never be young again.
Ruan Mei's gaze drifted aimlessly, then suddenly froze.
Memories sealed away stirred up inside her, and she recognized that particular plum tree, older, gnarled, standing apart from the rest.
She had planted it with her own hands back then, and it was still alive, defying time.
Whether Rrakavasha himself or the puppet he left behind, both had taken exquisite care of these plum trees, treating them as something sacred.
Seeing this, she couldn't help but think of him. Fragments of moments they once shared flashed uncontrollably through her mind, and a dull ache quietly pierced her chest.
"...That is..."
Ruan Mei's somber expression tightened as her eyes locked onto the old plum tree.
A tombstone stood alone beneath it, solemn and final.
Snow covered its base, but the inscription on its surface was perfectly clear.
[Grave of Rrakavasha]
Ruan Mei's breath caught in her throat.
Step by step, she moved closer, the snow crunching softly beneath her feet, the only sound in this frozen cathedral.
There were only those three words on the stone.
No dates of birth or death.
No epitaph or words of remembrance.
No record of a life lived or love given.
Its starkness was painfully sorrowful, a life reduced to three carved words.
The puppet walked over and brushed away the thin layer of snow accumulated along the edge of the stone with mechanical precision.
Ruan Mei looked at it, then at the grave, and a question escaped her lips.
"...Did he ask you to erect it?"
"No. The tombstone was erected by Miss Black Swan."
"Black Swan... Clarice?"
"Yes. Before his passing, Rrakavasha entrusted everything to Miss Black Swan, earnestly requesting that he be buried beneath this plum tree."
Ruan Mei froze in place, the words striking like a hammer.
She couldn't help but guess.
Couldn't help but hope against hope.
Choosing to rest beneath the plum tree she had planted, did that mean Vash still held love for her in his heart?
That even in death, he couldn't forget her?
That Vash never hated her, even until the end... was that true?
The mountain lay in silence, offering no answers.
Ruan Mei slowly bent down and reached out to touch the icy surface of the stone.
The cold seeped in through her fingertips, yet it couldn't compare to the hollow emptiness spreading through her heart
Six hundred years.
She had thought she'd merely lost a student, temporarily misplaced in the flow of time.
She had thought that once she reached the end of her long pursuit, she could simply go and find him again, that he'd be waiting.
Only now, standing before this grave, did she finally understand...
What she had lost was someone irreplaceable, someone who took everything about her, even her casual, offhand words, and solemnly wove them into the entire trajectory of his life.
Vash left behind only a small plate of plum-pickled soybean cakes, a puppet that faithfully executed its commands,
and... this single tombstone.
At some point, a mountain breeze quietly rose, passing through the plum grove and knocking a few petals from the branches.
The puppet lifted its bamboo basket once more and turned toward the next plum tree, continuing its eternal harvesting.
Ruan Mei stood before the grave for a long time, murmuring softly:
"Vash..."
The wind rustled through the plum branches, answering only with the whisper of leaves.
Only that puppet, neither too near nor too far away, continued as always to carry out the mission it had been given.
Picking plums.
Guarding the forest.
Year after year, unchanging.
Ruan Mei took out the plate of plum-pickled soybean cakes, picked one up, and placed it into her mouth, not caring whether it had spoiled after all these years. She chewed slowly, savoring.
The familiar taste that spanned hundreds of years spread across her tongue, awakening the warmest memories buried deep within her senses.
Exactly the same as the one Vash made when he was eighteen, perfect, unchanged.
But why...
Why did eating it now feel completely different from back then?
Emotions suppressed for hundreds of years without her realizing it, combined with the truth of losing Rrakavasha forever, shattered the final defenses around her heart.
That emotion, never once experienced before, was called heart-scorching regret, drowning every excuse she had ever used to deceive herself.
"..."
When her parents passed away, when her grandmother disappeared, Ruan Mei had never shed a single tear.
She always told herself that tears couldn't change anything, that they were illogical and useless.
But at this very moment, clear tears slid down her shadowed cheeks without permission.
One drop after another fell onto the snow before the grave, melting small, deep impressions into it, tiny wounds in the white.
She could no longer avoid it.
So it turned out, she was not without tears.
Those tears had merely waited through a long enough stretch of time, reserved for a single person.
Ruan Mei looked at his cold grave, as if she could see through it to that young man who had always quietly stayed by her side.
Did she regret it?
More than regret. Regret was too small a word.
Should she hate herself for her dullness? For her arrogance? For failing to understand his silent companionship sooner?
She had missed the latter half of Vash's life entirely.
Vash departed carrying a love he could never voice, yet carved an eternal mark into the rest of her life, one she'd carry until her own end came, however distant.