[But there is something dead in Jade Curtiss. Once, when he was a boy, he had aspired to something. He remembers exactly that motivation. He remembers telling Peony, the pair of them sitting in Professor Nebilim's classroom: Jade wanted to be an academic researcher or an autopsist. It would be fun. It would be interesting. He wouldn't get bored.

And if he did, he'd abandon that and move on to something else. When Jade was a boy, all he wanted was to satisfy his curiosity, to satisfy his desire for more and more and more knowledge. Whether or not others believed it possible, Jade never doubted his own abilities. So his only concern was finding something that interested him, and the relevance to society be damned.

Then Jade killed Professor Nebilim. With her, everything in him but the desire for her resurrection died, as if smothered under an avalanche from Mount Roneal. The day he let go of that, he had nothing but a sense of duty to Emperor Peony and a place in the military that would allow him to productively occupy his days.]

For a long time, I worked merely because my work was before me. For someone such as myself, a lack of work to focus on would be highly unpleasant. The military provides a suitable atmosphere for such productivity, and I was already in it.

[Jade links his fingers together. He is still studying Shintaro, still in that dispassionate way.]

What are your thoughts on the ability of human beings to change?