An hour slipped quietly away.
"And now? How does it feel?"
Caelus lounged comfortably in the lab's custom-built chair, with Stelle behind him.
Her arms circled his neck, her breath coming in soft catches, that generous pair of sweethearts squashing flat against "her own" back.
Through the wondrous empathy link, Stelle received every nuance of the sensation — like sinking into two cool, springy water-balloons on a lazy summer afternoon, a comfort beyond describing.
"Fascinating."
Ruan Mei's lashes trembled. Her slender foot, carved as if from jade, came down with the caution of an observer beginning an experiment, settling lightly onto the thing before her.
The heat that rose through her sole made her toes flinch on instinct, the round, full little digits curling despite herself.
"That is a sensation I forgot long ago…"
Ruan Mei lowered her gaze, remembering, or perhaps calculating.
"And I cannot verify whether this emotion truly corresponds to any feeling buried in my memory."
"The techniques for manipulating emotion and nerve, the molecular switches that induce dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins — I mastered all of that ages ago, and I can reproduce a quantifiable experience of 'pleasure' without effort. It is all merely chemistry."
Ruan Mei raised her head slowly. A faint red gleam flickered in her jade-green eyes, like a petal drifting onto a clear pool and setting the water rippling.
Cold, aloof — and yet strangely tinged with a small stirred light of feeling.
"But at this moment, there is genuinely something else in me. Something more."
Where reproductive behavior was concerned, what looked like Ruan Mei's easy generosity was in truth the absolute indifference of someone who understood it too thoroughly to care.
Her madness and her coldness ran from the inside out. She wasn't twisted, only pure — a rational, glacial hunger to know the origin of all things.
She had carried "I want to know what things really are" to its furthest extreme, and walked that road farther and climbed it higher, deconstructing, comprehending, creating, all as a matter of course.
None of it struck her as a big deal.
No more than plum blossoms opening and falling. No more than a planet being born in her hands, or dying there.
The awe, the terror, the worship or the disgust of others were meaningless background noise to her, stirring neither joy nor malice.
It was precisely this trait — the total stripping-away of reverence for life in the pursuit of truth — that made her the "mad scientist" Ruan Mei in the eyes of some researchers on Herta Space Station, and of most ordinary people everywhere.
The lake of her heart lay still and cold, an abyss with no visible bottom.
On a spiritual level, perhaps she had already quit being human, the same way DIO had.
So normal it was eerie. So rational it verged on the divine.
"Darling, measured against universal values, your personality model deviates significantly from the norm."
Ruan Mei's voice was gentle, affectionate — and carried nothing human in it.
"More interesting still, under specific conditions that deviation seems to possess a certain atypical contagiousness. Rather like a memetic virus."
A top-shelf memetic virus, no less!
She had never done anything like this before, but for a Genius of Ruan Mei's caliber, no field of knowledge took long to master.
Having inherited Ruan Stelle Mei's memories, she adjusted quickly to the heat and the size of it, and the motions of her foot grew skilled and precise.
"Is that an accusation that I'm not human? Or a diagnosis of perversion?" Caelus met those jade-green eyes that seemed to see straight through the substance of a soul, an easy smile tugging at his mouth.
The Ruan Mei in front of him called to mind a famous counterpart from elsewhere in the multiverse: Doctor Chen Ang.
Ruan Mei's inhumanity was still a tier short of his, but the mere resemblance in thought pattern was enough to raise a chill in anyone using the ordinary coordinate system of morality and feeling.
Then again, for a Masked Fool who had long since flung worldly morality past the ninth heaven, Caelus would have faced the real Doctor Chen with nothing more than regret that there was no fun to be had.
Since she had no moral restraints at all and had proposed the arrangement herself, Caelus hardly minded participating in an experiment of Ruan Mei's design.
He really wasn't after her body.
He was himself a whole gallery of exquisite beauties, in numbers sufficient to throw a grand party.
Caelus simply found that skin-to-skin contact with this version of Ruan Mei held no interest whatsoever.
Her humanity had been worn away almost to nothing.
Faced with that hungry gaze that wanted to deconstruct him, cultivate him, reproduce him, Caelus couldn't even get his stalk up.
It was nowhere near as good as testing the upper limit of the Path of Propagation with his adorable Star-baby.
Herta's stock as the most human-acting player in the Genius Society just kept rising!
So he had let Stelle and Ruan Mei attempt a fusion first.
He wanted to see whether some interesting chemistry might result.
"The evidence is in. Our narcissism still comes out on top." Caelus, sublimely full of himself, planted a fierce kiss on his Star-baby.
"That's Lord Caelus for you!" Star-baby threw her chest out, head high with pride.
Toes like young cardamom buds slid downward, exploring with perfect composure, kneading gently at the root that symbolized vitality itself.
Ruan Mei watched the two of them together and recalled everything she had been as Ruan Stelle Mei.
An emotion utterly unfamiliar, unprecedented, dropped into the absolute-zero pool inside her like a pebble and raised the faintest ring of ripples — envy.
Catching that flicker before it vanished, Ruan Mei sank into a deeper, more silent contemplation.
"Darling."
The soft, lovely call turned both Stelle's and Caelus's heads at once. Ruan Mei reached out toward their faces.
Her palm, still glistening with residue, brushed tenderly across Stelle's cheek and Caelus's, coming to rest at last on the strawberry marks left on their necks.
It looked like a lover's caress. But because the one doing it was Ruan Mei, it carried an unsettling wrongness, something not quite human.
Stelle blinked in confusion, then seemed to sense something; her pupils shifted slightly. Caelus, registering what Ruan Mei was doing, raised an eyebrow. "What exactly is this…?"
"The same help Bronita gives Herta."
Ruan Mei's voice was flat and unrippled, as though reciting an experimental conclusion. "Fusing with dear Stelle let my thinking leap into another dimension."
"The perspective and the modes of cognition held by that existence, Ruan Stelle Mei, gave me a great deal of inspiration."
This, perhaps, was the correct way for Geniuses to use those earrings.
Had Ruan Stelle Mei wished it, she could have drawn Nous's gaze at any moment.
But it would have meant nothing. She existed for one hour and no longer.
Merging as equals with another existence, giving birth to a brand-new personality — that could wrench a Genius's thought patterns entirely into a new dimension, detonating the ideas that blind spots had kept locked away, striking sparks of inspiration.
"So, darling…" Ruan Mei's voice carried a strange tenderness. "I would like to give myself to you."
"…"
"Huh?"
Stelle and Caelus looked at each other, and each found the same blank bewilderment in the other's eyes.
"This slice. This body. This portion of what exists as Ruan Mei…"
The fingertips Ruan Mei pressed to their necks gave off a pale blue radiance.
The light circulated through both of them like the Photon Blood in a Faiz transformation, flowing on and back into Ruan Mei's own body.
"— I give it to you. To become you."
In that instant, the Photon Blood finished its construction.
Ruan Mei had used her own power to establish a physical empathy link with Stelle and Caelus.
Its principle, of course, differed fundamentally from the link between Stelle and Caelus, or between Caelus and his female bodies.
It was the difference between the telecom tech of 2016 and quantum entanglement communication.
Certain special conditions, or too great a distance, would sever the connection.
"Huh?"
The words left Stelle completely stunned.
"You're serious?" Caelus sucked in a sharp breath as an intense sensation climbed from his tailbone all the way up his spine.
Feeling the tremor, Ruan Mei quickly bore down with the tender arch of her foot. The measuring cup was nowhere within reach, so she hooked the high heel she had stepped out of earlier with her other jade foot and slid the front half of it on.
Only then did she lift the pressing foot away and guide it into the gap between the shoe and her sole.
"Well? Do you accept?"
Hands and feet gathering experimental material without the slightest hurry, Ruan Mei watched Caelus with an uncanny look in her eyes.
Ruan Stelle Mei had dissected several of Ruan Mei's past failed experiments with thoroughly rational, professional analysis, and offered her own conclusions.
Her earlier puzzlement over the Cat Cakes, for instance.
They missed their creator. They developed toward her something as natural as an infant's need for its mother, a living thing's need for food, a person's need for another person — that strange thing called "emotion."
Ruan Mei knew she had no feelings, and could not understand them.
The old her had considered that no great matter.
Ruan Stelle Mei disagreed.
If one wished to probe the essence of life, emotion was an indispensable link in the chain!
Which left Ruan Mei in difficulty.
She did not understand what love was, and she was unaccustomed to bonds running between one life and another.
That had a great deal to do with her childhood.
Deep down she feared emotion. To invest emotion was to open oneself to being failed.
As her parents had failed her grandmother's promise and died on that snowbound planet. As she had failed her own vow to protect them.
She could be failed. She could be hurt.
Only science would never fail her.
And so Ruan Mei had no life outside of research.
If it were possible, Ruan Mei thought, remaining Ruan Stelle Mei permanently would not have been a bad thing at all.
A pity that it wasn't.
So, then — how does one avoid being failed? Avoid being hurt?
And also guarantee, with a hundred percent certainty, that the other party is worth the emotion invested?
Ruan Mei did not know.
She did not trust feelings.
And to avoid being failed, she would never attempt anything.
To make Ruan Mei understand emotion, she first had to trust; to trust, she first had to feel. A closed logical loop with no exit.
If anyone in this universe could answer that question, it was probably only Ruan Stelle Mei.
Ruan Stelle Mei had left Ruan Mei a solution.
Ruan Mei approved of it.
Inheriting Ruan Stelle Mei's memories, Ruan Mei had experienced firsthand a narcissism no less durable than a super-grade memetic virus — one that not even Ruan Mei's own thinking could bend.
Which made one thing certain to her: whatever happened, Caelus would never fail "himself."
So the solution was this — let him become her, or let her become a part of him.
If it was yourself, you could not be failed.
On that point, even a Ruan Mei who did not understand love agreed.
"You really are something else."
"Even after a certain amount of change, you're still this insane."
Caelus looked down at Ruan Mei, who lifted her exquisite face to meet his gaze. Faint ripples had risen in those emerald eyes.
Handing over her body and everything else, completely — was that something a normal person could do? No, wait, could even think up?
This was no Herta puppet.
Ruan Mei's slices belonged to an entirely different tier than puppets, because every slice, at every moment, was Ruan Mei herself, not an AI written into a program.
"Is this an experiment?" Caelus asked with a small smile.
"Something like one. A rather long experiment. My first attempt at one concerning emotion." Ruan Mei inclined her head slightly.
"Come on, then. We accept."
Hearing Caelus's answer, the corners of Ruan Mei's lips lifted.
"Darling, before this experiment formally begins, allow me to show you the truest version of myself. To show you… all of me."
Ruan Mei set the high heel, overflowing with experimental material, down on the workbench, and walked toward the two of them while slowly undoing her form-fitting qipao.
The pale green qipao and the garments beneath it scattered piece by piece to the floor, and by the time Ruan Mei stood before Caelus, she had revealed all of herself exactly as she had promised.
"Now, then."
She bent down, and lips soft enough to bruise pressed against his.
"The experiment begins."
The moment the words fell, the familiar sensation arrived, and Caelus gained one more point of view.
It was the angle of her own bare body, kissing him.
He had become Ruan Mei.
The brush comes down and dots a branch; the lake water dips it green. She wipes away a fingertip of fine silk and shattered jade. Ice and snow chime, and every old chapter burns to ash.
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