Chapter 36: If You Want It...
Rekka returned to the Astral Express just before dinner, sporting a highly conspicuous, comical mark plastered across his snout. The dragoness from earlier had been so frantic with affection that she had planted a massive, sloppy kiss right on his face.
"She... chased you the whole way?" March 7th asked, her eyes wide.
Rekka nodded vigorously, his massive draconic head bobbing up and down.
"And you just let her kiss you?"
He shook his head frantically, his heavy scales scraping against the air.
"Then where did this mark come from?"
Rekka fell silent.
He raised his colossal dragon claws, clumsily swiping at the air in a desperate attempt to recreate the tragic scene. The memory was simply too horrific; even he didn't want to relive it. That dragoness was as passionate as a raging inferno, and her gaping maw had landed a direct hit on his cheek before he could dodge.
"So you just let yourself be taken advantage of like that?" March 7th planted her hands on her hips, her tone dripping with absolute disappointment. "With a body that big, you just let someone kiss you whenever they wanted?"
A pitiful whimper rumbled from Rekka's throat.
It wasn't entirely his fault—he had exactly zero experience dealing with giant, scaly female hooligans.
'Besides, she didn't mean any harm, so I couldn't bring myself to strike back,' he thought miserably.
"Sigh... really, are dragons these days so lacking in reserve?" March 7th grumbled, shaking her head.
Rekka nodded heavily, letting out a long, mournful wail.
Dan Heng stood off to the side, watching Rekka's miserable state with his arms crossed, a slight twitch tugging at the corner of his lips.
"She chased you all that way just to get one kiss, and then you ran back?" Dan Heng asked dryly.
"What else? Was I supposed to kiss her back?" Rekka retorted, his draconic voice booming.
"Of course not!" March 7th blurted out. Realizing her voice had cracked an octave, she quickly coughed and added, "I mean... well... you don't even like her, so how could you just kiss her!"
"Alright, alright, let's not talk about that for now." Himeko strolled over, a steaming coffee cup in hand. She looked through the reinforced glass of the Parlor Car at the giant dragon sulking outside the window. "Rekka, can you eat anything right now? Pom-Pom has dinner ready, but in this state..."
"I was so desperate I figured it out," Rekka muttered.
During the frantic chase, the sheer terror of being pursued had suddenly unlocked his ability to shrink. Though he couldn't get entirely small just yet, he had managed to compress himself from a cosmic behemoth that could wrap around the Astral Express dozens of times down to a size that could barely manage three loops.
"Is that mark on your face a brand?" Dan Heng asked, inspecting the lingering shape.
"I don't know how to remove it yet," Rekka replied, looking utterly despondent.
A short while later, Rekka stood up from the floor of the Express.
He had finally reverted to his normal human appearance, and to his immense relief, the embarrassing mark on his face had vanished along with his scales.
Exhaustion weighed down his bones. He dragged himself back to his room and collapsed onto his mattress with a deep sigh of satisfaction.
Ah...
A soft bed.
Comfortable.
He lay perfectly straight, arms flat at his sides, and instantly drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, March 7th pushed open her bedroom door and immediately sensed that something was fundamentally wrong with the Astral Express. If she had to pinpoint the strangeness... the train suddenly had an alarming amount of symmetrical decorations.
She blinked. For every potted bonsai on the left side of the corridor, there was now an identical one on the right, facing the exact opposite direction.
March 7th slowly turned around, her eyes narrowing.
There were three flowers in the vase on the left, and exactly three flowers in the vase on the right. Even the angles of the petals were perfectly mirrored. Next to the wall clock hung a second, identical clock; one displayed the standard cosmic time, while the other... wait, why were there two clocks?
What exactly was going on? Did a thief break in last night? But what kind of deranged thief would infiltrate the Astral Express just to rearrange the furniture?
It had to be Rekka.
Did that guy switch to some obsessive-compulsive Path today? Did everything have to be perfectly symmetrical?
"Rekka! Where are you!"
This was definitely his doing!
She marched over and threw open the door to Rekka's room.
The room was empty. But the sight inside made March 7th gasp out loud. The bed was so flat it looked like it had been ironed with a steamroller—not a single wrinkle in sight. The pillow rested exactly in the dead center of the headboard. The pens, notebooks, and water cup on his desk were lined up in a flawless, straight row. Even the water level in the cup was perfectly parallel with the water in the flower vase next to it.
"Late-stage OCD!" she muttered in horror.
Just then, Welt pushed open his own door and stepped into the corridor. Usually, the mature senior Trailblazer used one hand to lean on his cane. Today, however, he was holding an identical Star of Eden in each hand, planting them on the floor and walking forward as if he were cross-country skiing.
"Pfft."
March 7th slapped a hand over her mouth, completely failing to hold in her laughter at the sight of Welt's new locomotion style.
Welt paused in the middle of the corridor. He looked down at the two identical Stars of Eden in his hands, then let out a long, weary sigh.
"Is this Rekka's doing too?"
"Yes," March 7th giggled.
Following the trail of perfectly mirrored objects down the corridor, they soon found the culprit sitting in the Parlor Car.
"Hey, Rekka, your days of inflicting your OCD on the Astral Express are over. Hurry up and change Mr. Yang back," March 7th demanded, pointing an accusing finger.
Rekka slowly turned his head, his expression completely deadpan.
"If you want it, then you'll have to take it. But you already knew that."
"I had a feeling you'd say that," March 7th fired back instinctively, entirely used to his dramatic nonsense. "So why did you turn Mr. Yang into a skier today!"
"What skier?" Rekka asked, blinking innocently.
"The fact that Mr. Yang is holding two canes."
"I just duplicated a cane for him. I didn't force Mr. Yang to walk with two canes."
"?"
The air in the Parlor Car suddenly went dead silent.
"So Mr. Yang just wanted to walk with two canes himself?" March 7th slowly turned her head, fixing Welt with a pair of dead-fish eyes.
"Ahem, well..."
Welt cleared his throat awkwardly. He subtly tried to hide the extra Star of Eden in his left hand behind his back, desperately attempting to maintain his mature and steady posture.
"It's not that... I just saw an extra one resting on the table and thought it shouldn't go to waste, and..." Old Yang's eyes drifted toward the ceiling. "Walking while leaning on both is indeed quite stable. It has a... well, a symmetrical beauty to it."
"It is not scarcity that is the concern, but inequality," Rekka stated, his voice taking on a deep, almost holy cadence. "Having a cane in the left hand while the right is empty is, in itself, a form of discrimination against the right hand. For the balance of the universe and the coordination of the body, two canes are an absolute necessity."
"What's the deal today?" March 7th groaned. "The Path of Equilibrium?"
"Yes. Today, I am the Arbiter of Equilibrium."
His solemn gaze slowly shifted to March 7th's hip.
"Two cameras... is this, is this right?"
With a crisp snap of his fingers, a flash of light materialized in the air. March 7th looked down at the second, perfectly identical camera Rekka had just produced and fell into deep thought.
"Only photos taken this way are balanced," Rekka explained seriously. "One for the left, one for the right; it won't make one side of the universe feel neglected."
March 7th held the two identical cameras, looking from the left one to the right one, utterly bewildered.
"So... I have two cameras now?"
"Yes, two," Rekka nodded approvingly. "One to shoot the left, one to shoot the right. Finally, by stitching the photos together, you'll get a perfectly symmetrical picture."
"Who on earth takes photos by shooting the left and right sides separately!" she exploded.
"Don't you think this is very balanced? The image seen by the left eye is recorded by the left camera, and the image seen by the right eye is recorded by the right camera. Finally, they merge in the mind into a complete visual experience."
"I feel like this is quite pointless," March 7th deadpanned.
`[The current Rekka is not the true equilibrium... he is still at the beginning of equilibrium... he hasn't truly stepped onto the Path of Equilibrium... only the second equilibrium is equilibrium.]`
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