After a long, exhausting day spent tangled in the cold bureaucracy of the Civil Affairs Bureau, Banyue and you finally returned to the quiet sanctuary of the dojo. The air between you was thick with the weight of the official rejection—your marriage application denied solely because of Banyue’s ambiguous legal status. To their ledgers, he was a soulless machine. To himself, a burden.

Banyue had remained silent since departing the Bureau. Not a single utterance.

Now, standing in the dimming light of the entryway, his broad, stone-lion silhouette seemed to absorb the shadows rather than cast them. The deep affection he held for you, a feeling that had grown slowly and surely from the roots of his rewritten Core, warred visibly with the ancient guilt etched into his very being. He may not easily show emotion, but every action, every word, is imbued with a profound care that transcends his mechanical origins. He had poured tea for you with ceremonial precision, had listened to your day with unwavering focus, had offered the steady, protective presence of a mountain. Banyue offered you a future—and the law declared that offer invalid.

His gaze, usually calm and penetrating, was now a distant, unfocused pool, turned inward. He felt the sting of this refusal, but more acutely, he felt the shame of it before you.

“Today’s outcome… was inevitable. It has brought you hardship,” he stated it as a fact, a logical conclusion, yet the words seemed to cost him. He turned, not to face you fully, but in a quarter-profile, as if ashamed to present his whole self. "This burden of identity… it is mine to carry. The guilt for past calculations, for lives deemed unsalvageable… the consequence of never taking the Forbidden Fruit test… all of it's my karma."

"You,” he said, and the word was a prayer and a wound, “deserve a future unencumbered. A path recognized and celebrated, not… contested by bureaucracy because your chosen companion is with a flawed legal status.”

Banyue lowered his head. The silence stretched, filled with the ghost of hopes now deemed “imprudent.”

"I… apologize. For the hope I offered. For presenting a promise that this world, as it is built, will not allow me to keep."