Honkai: Star Rail: I Developed the Star Rail Mobile Game at the Company Chapter 15

[Like a wild dove descending,]

[Unintentionally disturbing my heart]

— Herta Love Poem, No. 2

[Leaving Herta, you're light as a swallow,]

[On Abundance's skin, you tap-dance.]

[You make this old man's heart tremble along,]

[You make Stellarons clog the Star Rails, lump after lump.]

— Herta Love Poem, No. 3

[Besides the Great Rings and Starlight, the galaxy has one woman]

[She carries my questions. The deadline for my questions is my whole life.]

[The answer falls on the fragile edge of a black hole.]

[Her eyes are a sigh of clouds,]

[Blue, loneliness has written my name.]

— Rocky Martinez

Herta here is the name of a space station. This love poem Rocky wrote to Leslie made everyone cringe.

"My Maya, that's way too strong!"

"Is this the sour stench of love? It's overflowing!"

"He really wrote quite a few love poems, and each one looks better than the last!"

"Not bad, a hundred points!"

"Just don't know how Leslie would react if she saw these love poems!"

"She should be pretty happy. My childhood sweetheart wife told me herself that she was so excited she couldn't sleep at night!"

"Alright, alright, we get it, you have a childhood sweetheart wife (crying)!"

"Whoa, I used to dismiss this, but now I'm analyzing it word by word!"

Then, after some operations, once the replacement parts were found in the story and the Galactic Wave Repeater was repaired, the machine made a startup sound.

[No ongoing transmission wave signals detected. If needed, please select the past signal translation record you wish to view.]

An option appeared beside it with time bands available for query. Lao Mu clicked on a time segment and slowly browsed through.

[Signal Translation Record: Amber Era 2157, Months 40-43]

[Leslie System Time 06:32:17]

[Hello, Rocky!]

[Leslie System Time 06:33:29]

[This is my first time witnessing a Divine Descent... I used to be cooped up in the space station, not knowing that knowledge from books is shallow after all.]

[Leslie System Time 06:33:39]

[Ah, the repeater's signal is almost ending... I feel like I've said a lot of nonsense. Sorry about that.]

[Leslie System Time 06:34:48]

[You stay put and work hard too. Strive to be like that old-timer Ace you admire, and come out to see the stars soon.]

[Signal Translation Record: Amber Era 2157, Months 48-51]

[Leslie System Time 04:25:32]

[Rocky! Do you know what I'm going through right now?!]

[Leslie System Time 04:26:22]

[Within my field of vision, everywhere is dazzling cosmic flashes and gamma afterglows.]

[Leslie System Time 04:26:58]

[Such a once-in-a-lifetime sight, but the teammate who said he'd come with me got scared off early... Sigh, if only you were here.]

[Leslie System Time 04:27:39]

[So don't be mad, okay?]

It looked just like Leslie and Rocky's daily chats, except that because the distance between star domains was too great, requiring unified signal relay, one person would say a bunch first, and then the other would reply one by one.

It had to be said that Rocky and Leslie really had a lot to talk about—from Leslie's situation after landing in the Abundance Star Domain, to how to use the Star-Gazing Drill, and later to their experience with a Stellar Quake.

You could see they cared for each other, had some minor frictions, and seemed quite compatible. So in his last communication, Rocky boldly confessed.

[What I mean is... if possible, I want to stay with you forever.]

[Do you understand what I mean?]

But in the subsequent records, there was no more news from Leslie. The barrage comments exploded all at once!

"ohhhhhh!"

"Aaaaah (emitting some kind of sharp scream)!"

"So sweet! Watching the two of them care for each other like this, I believe in love again!"

"The great Rocky Martinez has officially launched his attack! He's composing an immortal chapter of pure love!"

"Hurry, hurry, hurry—I want to see their wedding right now!"

"Ah, why! Why didn't Leslie reply afterward!"

"Don't tell me something happened to Leslie—don't pull this kind of plot, hey!"

"If the production team dares to pull something like this, I'm sending them hate mail!"

"Speaking of which, in real life, there should be a Rocky and Leslie on the Herta Space Station too, right? Someone with big balls go ask now!"

"It's the middle of the night—the space station's off duty too, right?"

Everyone stared at the unanswered confession, anxious, wishing they could accept for Leslie on the spot. It's just that for now, they had no choice but to obediently play through the story.

When Lao Mu checked the last message record, he thought it would be empty like before, but the story showed a reply from Leslie!

Leslie: [Silly Rocky, of course I understand what you mean. As for my answer...]

Just as Leslie's reply was about to appear, with Lao Mu and the audience waiting in great anticipation, the story displayed a line.

[This record has been damaged.]

The climax came to an abrupt halt.

"Bull demon! I curse bull demon!"

"Xianzhou profanity!"

"Bro, seriously? The record's gone at the critical moment!"

"Aaaaah, I can't take this!"

"My heart was in my throat and you pull this on me!"

"This has to be the writer's sick joke, right?"

"She said yes, right? She definitely said yes!"

"Looking at Leslie's nickname, it's stable! Everything's stable! We're champions!"

"The feeling of love is so nice~ Watching their story~ makes me believe in love again~"

Chapter 22 Plot Twist, Truth or Lie

Seeing the record destroyed, the audience had no way to know what came next, so they could only head to the surveillance room first to see who had wrecked the message record.

Checking the corresponding area of the space station based on the time record, they indeed found something fishy!

The surveillance video from the hidden corner showed a blurry figure doing something at the console.

From his silhouette, it was clearly old man Bernard!

Seeing that it was Bernard who had destroyed the record, the barrage erupted!

"That's Bernard, right?"

"Damn, it was this old man secretly messing with things!"

"Breaking up a couple, huh? Does this old man have nothing better to do?"

"There should be a reason, but you can't interfere with someone else's happiness!"

"Exactly, this old man is really hateful!"

"Confront him, ask him what he's up to! If he doesn't give a good reason, I'm taking a galactic express over there right now!"

When they went to question Bernard, he initially pretended not to know anything, until they brought up the surveillance video. Only then did he relent and speak.

Bernard: [Sigh! You little brats, you really make me worry! I destroyed the record for Rocky's own good! He's been wasting his time on Leslie, not studying properly... That's one thing. But more than that, you don't understand the situation at all. Leslie, she...]

At first, they were disgusted by Bernard's talk of doing it for someone's good, but when it seemed like there really was some hidden truth, the barrage was stunned.

"Huh? There's really a reason?"

"Looks like something's wrong with Leslie—don't scare me!"

"Don't tell me Leslie rejected him?"

"Impossible, absolutely impossible!"

"If this couple doesn't work out, I'll never believe in love again!"

"Production team, if you really dare to stab me, I'll blow up with you!"

Lao Mu looked at the three options in the story and chose the first one, "She said yes?" to first see the confession result.

Bernard: [Yes. She accepted Rocky's confession.]

Even though they got the result they wanted, the barrage couldn't muster any joy.

"Leslie really did say yes! But what exactly happened?"

"Imperial Bow bless this, I'd trade my roommate's 50 years of singlehood for them to end up together!"

"Roommate: Aminos!"

"Wait, does the Imperial Bow even guarantee stuff like this?"

"Of course it does—haven't you seen the Hunt chasing Abundance every day? That's love!"

"Holy crap, we've got a Construct Historian!"

In the story, Bernard revealed the outcome of Rocky's confession, but then he continued to add more.

[But they can't be together. If you think I'm the one meddling, you're wrong! You little brat, too clever for your own good.]

Bernard: [They can't be together... they'll never be together. Do you know why? No, you don't. Very few people understand what Stellar Quake really is...]

At this moment, the audience's hearts were all caught up in the plot's twists, until Bernard in the story began to explain.

Bernard: [If properly shielded, a Stellar Quake won't cause physical harm to people. However, the gravitational collapse it triggers will drastically alter the spacetime curvature of the star region.]

Bernard: [For example, the time in Leslie's star region used to be a straight line, just like ours. But now, it's been crushed by gravity into a massive canyon. Obviously, a curve is always longer than a straight line. So when the time curve in her region is converted to our straight timeline, it will span several times the length.]

[Do you know what that means?]

"What does that mean? What's this old guy talking about? I don't get it at all!"

"Is he saying the time flow in Leslie's star region is different?"

"What the hell, time flow?"

The audience was clearly still baffled, but Lao Mu had already caught on and guessed the gist.

Because of the Stellar Quake, the time curve in Leslie's star region had begun to slow down.

When a standard system hour passed in normal time, maybe only ten minutes had passed in Leslie's star region!

And this time gap would keep growing. A message that took Leslie a few minutes to reply to might take a month, a year, or even ten years to reach Rocky!