Chapter 78: Deep Blue Arc—Final Chapter (Part 1)

Chapter 78: Deep Blue Arc—Final Chapter (Part 1)

The Real World, Crustyroll.

Although the scene on the rooftop—where Caroline gives Tendou her gift—is undeniably sweet, and the small interactions between the two are genuinely heartwarming, for some reason the interdimensional viewers watching right now can’t bring themselves to smile at all.

Some of them even feel like crying.

Because by this point in the story, even an idiot can tell that whether it’s the gift Caroline gives ahead of time, or the half-joking, half-serious final photograph Tendou keeps—these are already the last remaining traces of “warmth” in the entirety of Stellaris: Embers Season 1.

Starting tomorrow, Tendou and the others will leave Deep Blue Metropolis and return to the Embers base.

And judging from Tendou’s earlier “flashback” scenes, once they return to the base, the story will no longer be anything like the gentle, sweet atmosphere of now.

Instead, it will be filled with blood and fire, with cruelty, and with painful separations between life and death.

“A dead-husband photo, a husband-chasing necklace—no, seriously, Stellaris production team, can you be any more on-the-nose than this?!!!”

“Brothers, sharpen your bayonets! Looks like the production team has a death wish—time to show them how sharp our knife is!”

“The sugar coating’s gone. All that’s left now is the pain.”

“Follow me! Brothers, let’s fight the production team to the death!”

In order to vent their sorrow and unease over the future of Stellaris, the interdimensional viewers immediately chose to redirect their fury toward the show’s production team.

After all, the characters in the anime may be “virtual”—but the production team in the real world is very much real.

And just as the viewers’ mouths—sweet as if smeared with honey—were showering the Stellaris production team with “blessings,” the episode suddenly transitioned into a silent montage, with only background music and visuals.

. . .

The first scene shown is Tendou and the others’ final days of campus life.

On screen, after finishing their last class, Tendou and his group leave the school under the reluctant gazes of their classmates—a place they may never return to again.

The setting sun dyes the school gates a deep orange-red. Tendou adjusts his sunglasses and smiles as he waves to the classmates seeing them off behind him.

Outside the gates, Tendou, Caroline, and the others walk beneath the sunset, their shadows stretching long across the ground.

Those shadows extend all the way back into the school, reaching Isabelle’s feet—and freeze there, on Isabelle’s hesitant, unspoken expression, and on the image of Tendou and the others stepping beyond the school gates.

This scene signifies that the Trillian campus life belonging to Tendou and his friends has finally, completely, come to an end.

The second scene takes place in the boardroom of the BluEther Group.

The long-absent Tachibana finally makes her reappearance.

Wearing a rabbit mask, she stands behind Dorian alongside William Cromwell, silently watching the other major shareholders in the conference hall.

Under the terrifying pressure brought by two second-order Starbearers, most of the shareholders present ultimately choose the sensible path and agree to Dorian’s proposal.

Only a small group of shareholders, led by Burdean, hesitate and refrain from voting immediately.

But when Burdean finally casts his vote in favor as well, the entire conference hall becomes Dorian’s one-man domain.

At the end of the scene, Dorian leaves Burdean behind alone.

After an unknown exchange between the two, Burdean departs by himself, leaving Dorian standing alone before the floor-to-ceiling windows of the corporate tower, overlooking the dazzling neon lights of Deep Blue Metropolis.

Moments later, Dorian picks up the cigar resting on the table, lights it, and brings it to his lips.

As smoke fills the air, Dorian’s face grows increasingly indistinct—yet his gaze becomes ever more resolute.

At this moment, he resembles a captain standing on the bridge of his ship, staring straight ahead at a terrifying storm looming in the distance.

When the cigar burns down, Dorian extinguishes it completely.

Then, without looking back, he turns and walks out of the conference room.

And this, too, seemed to imply that he would lead this great ship called “BluEther Group” straight through the raging storm ahead—to welcome the brilliant dawn waiting beyond it.

The third sequence to appear takes place at night, inside the villa, showing separate, individual scenes of Tendou and the others.

Unlike the relatively gentle background music of the previous two segments, the music now suddenly turns sorrowful—clearly a deliberate hint from the production team.

The first scene focuses on the protagonist, Chen Kong.

Inside Chen Kong’s room, he is quietly packing his luggage.

The Trilan Junior High school emblem, his uniform, the swimsuit and volleyball from the beach.

Farewell gifts secretly slipped to him by classmates—handmade cookies, signed CDs, even girls’ hair ties.

Chen Kong packs slowly, as if he doesn’t really want to put these things into the suitcase.

When he first arrived at Trilan Junior High, his experience there hadn’t been pleasant.

But ever since Tendou showed up that afternoon, his campus life had undergone a complete, earth-shaking transformation.

Under the bright room lights, Chen Kong looks at the suitcase—finished at last despite all his deliberate stalling—and his expression turns complicated.

Although he only spent a single month at Trilan Junior High, that month of Trilan campus life was the happiest period he had known since the Great Catastrophe.

If it were possible, he wanted to stay here forever, never to go back.

An ordinary high school life.

Ordinary entrance exams.

An ordinary future.

To him, Star Origin had never been a miracle—if anything, it felt more like a curse.

If this world didn’t have Star Origin at all, maybe his life could have been better.

But the moment this dangerous thought surfaced, Chen Kong hurriedly shook his head, forcefully casting it out of his mind—as if afraid it might influence him.

Yet many things, once they appear in one’s heart, will take root like seeds in the soil of the soul.

And at a certain moment in time, they will break through the ground and sprout.

Because they are not hollow or unrealistic fantasies—but the one true “answer” buried deep within a person’s heart.

Inside Chen Xing’s room.

Unlike the melancholy next door, Chen Xing is sitting cross-legged on the floor, expressionless, diligently cultivating her star energy.

Yet something is clearly wrong.

Not only is she lacking her usual focus and seriousness, but between her tightly furrowed brows lingers a visible trace of worry, leaving her distracted and restless.

After a while, unable to enter a proper cultivation state, she finally stops and gets up, walking over to her desk.

On the desk sits a half-open, exquisitely made gift box.

Inside it lies a pair of sunglasses she carefully picked out herself.

Chen Xing gazes at the sunglasses for a moment. Then, as if a sudden thought strikes her, she picks them up and walks to the trash can nearby, intending to throw them away outright.

But just as the sunglasses are raised, with the trash can right in front of her, her hand suddenly freezes in midair.

She turns her head, staring at the reflection in the lenses—at her own wavering eyes.

In the end, Chen Xing lets out a silent sigh, places the sunglasses back into the gift box, and roughly stuffs it into her suitcase.

Her movements look rough, almost as if she’s handling contraband.

Yet in reality, she places the box right at the very center of her clothes—clearly, on a subconscious level, worried that it might get crushed.

After finishing all this, Chen Xing sits alone by the desk, absentmindedly gazing out the window at the unique underwater nightscape of Deep Blue Metropolis.

After an unknown amount of time, a change comes over her gaze.

The confusion that had filled her eyes at the beginning is gone, replaced by a firmness she has never known before.

If she were the kind of person who gave up at the first sign of hardship, then she, Chen Xing, would have died years ago in that Great Catastrophe—there would have been no way she could have survived until now.

And so, no matter how difficult the road ahead may be, no matter how many thorns lie along the way, she will continue forward without hesitation.

Even if, on that path, she cannot see even a single ray of light called “hope.”

After all, victory was never something that could be picked as easily as dandelions on a hillside.

Besides, compared to a future where hope cannot be seen, what Chen Xing cannot accept even more is lacking the courage to step onto that road in the first place.

Admitting defeat?

In Chen Xing’s dictionary, there are all kinds of words—except the words “give up.”

And yet, despite all that, today’s Chen Xing still does something very unlike herself: she interrupts a daily cultivation routine she has maintained for years.

And in the quiet of the night, before her desk, she sits there—lost in thought.

Inside Caroline’s room.

In the silent depths of night, Caroline lies flat on her bed, endlessly flipping through the photo album on her phone.

A group photo at the harbor when they first arrived in Deep Blue Metropolis.

The little dolphin in the Sunken Ship Restaurant that Tendou startled.

Fireworks at the jellyfish amusement park that once frightened her…

As she looks at each photo in turn, Caroline’s rational, machine-intelligence brain is quickly overwhelmed by these emotional memories, until she forgets everything else, sinking into them completely, unable to pull herself out.

This makes her, compared to other Machina Type Starbearers, a little less coldly rational—but it also gives her something they lack: a kind of happiness called “being human.”

And all of this was brought to her by Tendou.

For a long time in the past, as a Machina Type Starbearer, Caroline didn’t actually know what happiness was, nor did she understand sadness.

Back then, life at the base consisted of only two things for her, day after day.

First: studying.

Second: running data simulations in her dreams—and continuing to study.

That life was monotonous and dull, yet she never felt there was anything wrong with it.

Because at the base in those days, there were no other people her age besides herself.

So she neither knew, nor had any way of knowing, what life was like for others of her age.

Based purely on simple, rational sample analysis, she assumed that other peers probably lived just like she did—spending their days immersed in endless, tedious study.

And that situation… continued right up until that person appeared.

Even though he was two years younger than her.

Even though, before that, he had never had any exposure to knowledge related to star energy.

Yet this guy seemed born to shatter every established rule.

Not only did he spend just a single week mastering the knowledge that had taken her several years to learn, but in less than half a month after that, he completely caught up to her achievements in star energy.

When faced with this situation, as a Machina Type Starbearer known for rationality, her first reaction was not to compete with him.

Instead, she sought to understand him, learn from him—and ultimately, surpass him.

So she took the initiative to approach him, and began to seriously follow the things he told her to do.

It’s the first time she gave up nighttime study and left the base to take a walk by the sea.

It’s the first time she jumped into the ocean and personally interacted with the little dolphins that swam near the island.

It’s the first time she asked Instructor Tachibana to help her buy a cute dolphin plush from outside.

After half a month of doing these things, her overall performance within the Stellaris Program declined.

Yet she suddenly experienced many things she had never felt before—things called “happiness” and “freedom.”

And once these things were released—like opening Pandora’s box—they could never be closed again, taking firm root in her mind, impossible to erase.

Slowly, her brain’s database, which had once stored nothing but star energy knowledge, gained many things completely unrelated to star energy in just half a month.

And these things would always surface late at night, when she tried to run data simulations, preventing her from concentrating on “learning” the way she once did.

Before long, her abnormality was noticed by the Doctor.

As a fellow Machina Type Starbearer, the Doctor immediately made what, in her eyes, was a perfectly rational decision.

He intended to purge all those useless human emotions in her mind—emotions that would only interfere with her functioning.

But at that very moment, that person appeared once again.

He not only told her that those human emotions were never useless to begin with, but also managed to successfully persuade the Doctor—someone she believed to be the least persuadable person in the entire world.

From that point on, there was suddenly one more thing she had to learn.

That was learning how to properly be a “human.”

And everything she learned was taught to her by the guy called Masamune Tendou.

The Doctor once told her that Tendou would one day change the world, and that she must become Tendou’s tool, devoting herself completely to assisting him.

She had no complaints about this whatsoever, and she threw herself into that role with everything she had.

What the Doctor didn’t know, however, was that her reason for doing so was never because she wanted to help Tendou change the world.

It was because Tendou is her world.

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