Along the snowy steps down the mountain, the plum blossoms were in full bloom, a sea of white and crimson.
Ruan Mei descended like a walking corpse, and for a brief moment, the scenery before her blurred.
The plum branches swayed, and time seemed to flow backward several hundred years.
Back then, there had been winters like this, too.
Rrakavasha had still been very young, yet more sensible and well-behaved than any child she had ever seen.
Carrying more than a dozen lethal viruses in his body, even though he'd barely been able to leave the medical pod, he was still extremely frail.
Yet he didn't mind at all, saying in a childish voice,
"Even if my body isn't good right now, there are still some things I can do to help you, Ms."
Rrakavasha held a bamboo basket in his hands, standing beneath the plum trees and turning back to look at her, a pure and sincere smile in his eyes.
"Ms., plum blossoms like these perfectly meet the harvesting requirements, right?"
He rose slightly onto his toes, pointing at the cold plums blooming on the branches.
She nodded, and the boy carefully cut the blossoms down with a bamboo knife.
He didn't speak much, yet he always appeared whenever she needed him, a silent shadow at her back.
Later, the boy recovered from his illness and grew a little taller.
He could hold an umbrella for her, lift branches of plum trees for her...
A plum blossom carrying a sharp, clean fragrance brushed against her cheek, pulling Ruan Mei back from her thoughts.
She returned to the bamboo house. Looking at the unfamiliar yet familiar equipment, scenes from the past surfaced once more, unbidden, relentless.
More than once, she'd lost track of time in her research. Rrakavasha would quietly wait outside the laboratory, preparing warm pastries and light tea.
When she frowned in thought, he would silently organize the scattered data sheets, his movements extremely gentle, afraid of disturbing her concentration.
In the backyard, a bamboo winnowing basket for draining water hung on the wall.
One year, she forgot the time again. When she emerged from the laboratory, she found that Rrakavsha had already finished harvesting all the plum blossoms needed to make pastries.
"...I saw that you hadn't finished your research for a long time, so I went and picked some plums on my own. Do you think the quality is acceptable?"
He said it lightly, yet Ruan Mei noticed the tiny cuts on his hands, small wounds he'd tried to hide.
A boy, not even ten years old, was too short; harvesting plum blossoms by hand was bound to cause injuries.
She nodded and said it was fine, then asked if it hurt.
The boy shook his head, gently set the bamboo basket on the table, then turned and went back into the plum grove without complaint.
Looking back now, Rrakavasha's companionship had always been meticulous, warm, and soundless, quietly seeping into the years, so subtle that one instinctively overlooked it.
In the past, she'd only felt and accepted the love of family.
The boy's love was different from everyone else's, and even after she took him in as a student, it remained an unfamiliar territory she never explored.
Yet she... never tried to understand or analyze it, believing it to be meaningless, unnecessary to comprehend.
She was too immersed in chasing her goal, taking everything for granted, missing too many moments that were warm and gentle.
He, who always followed silently behind her, had long since lost everything, regarding her as his only light in the darkness.
From childhood to adulthood, he had always been respectful and restrained toward her, never once wanting to make her angry.
However, the seeds of all consequences were quietly sown on that day of drunkenness, a single mistake cascading through time.
Following the traces in her memory, Ruan Mei's fingers brushed along the edge of the winnowing basket, overlapping with a figure from the past.
Her fingers lingered at a certain spot, as if Rrakavasha's palm covered hers, warmth passing over.
"Heh..."
Ruan Mei withdrew her hand in disappointment, mocking herself.
'You only understand what you had, once you've lost it.'
Like the plum blossoms he picked that year, which would never bloom on the same branch again.
But she still had to keep going forward.
Even if the night ahead was endlessly long, even if there was no reunion at the end.
Because this was a debt she owed him.
And so, it was also the path she had to choose, no matter where it led.
...
In the uninhabited world, night fell.
In the underground laboratory of the manor.
On the laboratory screens, layered geometric patterns formed of spiraling data shifted, stretched, and flowed amid soft humming sounds.
After peeling away those layers, what was revealed was the secret Ruan Mei had guarded and crafted with utmost care.
It was her father and mother, eyes closed, their faces cold as if asleep, data constructs, not true life.
After gazing at her parents' faces for a long time, Ruan Mei turned off the display and hid everything away again.
Finally, she shut down the Rrakavasha puppet she had created, the counterfeit that could never be him.
From this moment on, she increasingly ignored the existing laws of life.
The more she did so, the faster her progress became, research accelerating beyond all reason.
She no longer cared about formulas, went on to disregard the meaning of life itself, and instead only observed, felt with her hands, grasped the data, and sensed it directly.
Then she compiled new laws of species, rewriting what nature had put inplace.
In the laboratory, the ferns and flowers grew ever more lush.
They grew taller at a speed visible to the naked eye, nearly filling the entire space with writhing greenery.
Through the gaps where leaves and petals opened and closed, the cool, pure faces of her parents, formed from converging data, could be seen.
No one knew how many years passed. Just before the slumbering "parents" were about to open their eyes, Ruan Mei had nearly destroyed the original evolutionary laws of all species in the uninhabited world, but...
She was still moving toward the goal she sought, relentless.
Again, countless years passed in isolation.
She lifted her head from her research and looked toward the stars.
The gaze of Nous, the Erudition, descended upon her.
"...Nous..."
Ruan Mei posed her question to the Aeon, yet what she received was only His silent stillness, no answer, no acknowledgment.
Ruan Mei seemed to understand something and didn't mind it.
From then on, her temperament grew even more indifferent, and she sank even deeper into her research, consumed by it entirely.
She studied only the essence of life, stripping away everything else.
More and more diverse forms of life appeared under her simulation.
Some burning lives became flowing fire, crawling and weaving at her feet; at times, she felt she herself was fire.
Some flowing lives turned into liquid light, circling her slender wrists; at times, she felt she herself was light.
Some lives simulated from knowledge attempted to develop their own thoughts, consciousness, and emotions.
They sometimes cried noisily, laughed, or wailed in grief, all of it merging into her body, foreign sensations washing over her.
Yet she couldn't feel them, not really.
The span of their lives was ultimately short. They flickered and vanished in an instant, while only her experiments continued endlessly.
At times, her casual research would shake the biological systems circulating throughout the universe.
Her creations had surpassed the scale of experience and imagination of organic life.
She kept breaking through her understanding of life, all for a destination whose end could not be seen.
The world's riot of colors always dazzled the eyes; only by reaching that destination could one have a chance to begin again.
Whether the essence of life possessed a single ultimate truth no longer mattered to her.
She had nothing left to lose, yet something she had to seek, an impossible contradiction.
If life could be cultivated, reorganized, and re-presented...
Then memory could be dissected, balance regulated, pure beauty deconstructed, immortality re-created...
At that point, she might understand the essence of life, touch the concept itself, reach the true end she sought, and retrieve everything she'd lost.
In a trash bin not far away, letters were piled high, invitations ignored, contact attempts discarded.
Ruan Mei picked up the strangely appearing contact letter from the Genius Society on her desk.
After pondering for a moment, she didn't throw it into the trash again.
A strange, even pathological smile slowly surfaced on her indifferent face, something broken and desperate.
"Even if the universe is annihilated and restarted, I will find you..."
"My... Vash."
[End of Volume 1: First Life]