All was silent.
Aboard the Vengeance, He Shenyan was seated in the armchair that belonged to him alone, breathing steadily.
His eyes were closed, and a quiet ease seemed to be slowly flowing across his pale face. The Captain's Quarters was very quiet. Erebus, who had been embedded in the wall, had been silently removed by the Central Hub. At this moment, in this room where so much had happened, only one person remained.
Breathing.
He listened to his own breathing, trying to find some rhythm in it—there was no meaning in it, but He Shenyan simply wanted to do it. He had already done too many meaningful things. Now, he needed to do something utterly meaningless to fill the corners of his memory.
Counting the rhythm of his breaths was a decent method.
People always needed to do a few trivial things.
Those things had no meaning, and they would never even mention them to others—after all, would anyone tell someone else in the middle of a conversation: hey, I did nothing yesterday afternoon, just lay in bed counting my own breaths?
No one chatted like that.
And yet details like these filled life with meaning. They were the precise perception of "being alive." Life itself had no real meaning, so why not do something even more meaningless and make a positive out of two negatives?
At that thought, the Mage smiled faintly and opened his eyes—a footstep came from the corridor at just the right moment, and it was hard to say whether he had foreseen this scene in advance or if it truly was only coincidence.
The doors slid open, the silver metal splitting in two, and a giant wrapped in furs stood there, peering inside with some unease.
"Come in, Russ."
As though he had breathed