Ryen's words settled into the air of the Sanctuary, and Nahida's expression answered before she could find words for it. Her small face moved between confusion and sothing quieter , a tentative, half-ford hope. She looked around the room, then looked again, scanning slowly, and found nothing she could point to.
She had begun to wonder if Ryen was mistaken when a voice reached her.
Gentle and unhurried. Warm in a way that was hard to describe precisely , the sound of it was like her own voice, and yet it carried a quality hers did not. Sothing that made the room feel smaller and safer all at once.
"You sensed , then. It seems I am still not very good at concealing myself."
Ryen raised a shoulder.
"I have no elental sense to speak of, but instinct is sothing else entirely."
He rose from the sofa, trusting that instinct, and crossed toward one of the far corners of the room. Then he paused, reconsidered, and stepped back. His body's sense of threat and direction was honed to an edge that few things in the world could match , but that was a warrior's instinct, calibrated for danger. Finding soone who held no danger for him was another matter.
If Rukkhadevata decided to act against him, he might have been able to locate her that way. She did not, and so the signal was not there to follow.
"Are you looking for , Ryen?"
The voice moved through the Sanctuary with the ease of sothing that had always lived here. A brief pause, and then a note of apology threaded into it.
"Please don't trouble yourself. I am only a sliver of remaining consciousness , not even a true soul fragnt. The only reason I can speak at all is that the Gnosis has returned to the Sanctuary of Surasthana. It carries enough of my connection that I can borrow from its energy for a little while."
"If you would be willing to place the Gnosis in Nahida's hands, I can address you all directly. Whatever questions you have brought , you will find their answers here."
Ryen and Ningguang exchanged a glance. He passed the Gnosis across.
The mont Nahida's fingers closed around it, the soft green light already present in the stone intensified. It did not simply brighten , it breathed outward, slow and continuous, as though sothing vast and patient were exhaling through the small object for the first ti in a very long ti.
Nahida felt it the instant it touched her palms. Sothing new had entered the Gnosis , or perhaps sothing old had returned to it. A power she did not recognise, but that her hands seed to know without being taught.
Before she could hold the thought, a gentle pull extended from the stone. It moved like a current of water finding the shape of a riverbed, flowing past each person in the room, light enough to dismiss with a breath of resistance, barely present enough to feel at all.
The group looked at one another. One by one, they lowered whatever internal walls they maintained and allowed the current to take them.
Ryen had never experienced anything like it. He noticed, distantly, that he had no particular reason to be concerned. Anything that ca for his body would find sothing stronger waiting. Anything that ca for his consciousness or his soul would find the System. The gap between attempting sothing like that and surviving it was not a gap most things in any world had successfully navigated. He did not think Rukkhadevata was trying, and he would not allow the System to react as though she were. He simply followed where the current led.
The world went soft.
For a mont he was suspended in nothing, weightless in the way that only made sense in dreams , the kind where the ground beneath your feet is sohow also the sky, where breathing is optional, where a single exhaled breath could carry you into flight. Cloud-sea on all sides. No direction that ant more than any other.
Then, gradually, sothing appeared.
A tree.
He saw it before he could make sense of what he was seeing. The scale of it defied any frawork his mind reached for. It was not large in the way that mountains are large. It was large in the way that history is large , the way that all accumulated ti, compressed into a single object, presses against the inside of the mind until thought becos difficult.
The mont it resolved into focus, Ryen heard it.
Not sound, exactly. Sothing beneath sound. The tree was making a noise that had nothing to do with wind or bark or movent , it was older than any of those things, a frequency that belonged to the first monts of an existence straining under weight it had never been built to carry. Ancient, and desperate, and aid directly at him.
The word that surfaced without invitation was plea.
The thought had barely ford when the System spoke.
A clean, single chi. Ding.
And Irminsul vanished.
Ryen ca back to himself standing on solid ground. Beneath his feet, the knotted surface of enormous tree roots, each one broader than a road, crossing and recrossing each other in patterns too old to have been designed by anything that thought in terms of design.
He looked up. The sky above this space shifted as he watched , one mont the soft pink of a clear dawn seen through flower petals, the next a red so dark and saturated it looked like sothing had bled across the ceiling of the world.
He looked at Ningguang and the others beside him. They were speaking quietly among themselves, expressions curious and alert. Whatever he had just experienced , the sound beneath sound, the direct weight of Irminsul's signal finding him , they had apparently not felt it.
His brow drew together.
He turned inward.
"System. What was that?"
The System took its ti. When it answered, its voice was flat and informational, stripped of anything that might resemble concern.
Ding. A corrupted Irminsul , foundational structure of the world of Teyvat , has detected the host's identity. It has transmitted an appeal to the World Master.
Corrupted.
Ryen looked up again at the faint threads of deep red that clung to the edges of the sky like smoke from a fire that hadn't finished going out.
"That's a lot to ask of ," he said, to no one visible. The complaint was for the System alone, delivered in the tone of soone who had long since accepted that the universe had opinions about his schedule.
"Sure, I'm technically the World Master. I'm also a block-figure player. How exactly am I supposed to fix a world tree? Water it? Fertilise it? Bone al? Milk irrigation?"
The System offered no guidance. The System, in Ryen's long experience, was exceptional at announcing problems and indifferent to suggesting solutions. One productive sound per existential crisis was about its limit.
He let it go. The car would reach the mountain when it reached the mountain, as his grandmother used to say, and there had never been a problem the MC World could not solve. If it beca necessary, there were mods.
He pulled his attention back to the space around him and looked at it properly.
The roots beneath his feet were ancient beyond calculation , not dead, not dying, but carrying the weight of sothing that had been under strain for a very long ti. Below, where the roots descended into the fog, there was no visible floor. White haze, and then nothing. An implied depth that the eye did not want to follow.
The sky steadied as he watched it. The red retreated, and the pink held. The space seed to have found its footing now, having passed through whatever instability had characterised its first monts. A soft rose light settled over everything and stayed.
Nahida had taken hold of his hand. She was turning her head slowly, taking in everything, and her face held the expression of soone walking through a room they cannot quite place but cannot quite escape the feeling of having known.
"Ryen," she said, very quietly. "This place. I know it. I... I think I know it."
One small hand pressed against her chest, and the pace of her breathing changed. Her eyes were wide and directionless at once, like soone listening to music they had heard before but cannot na.
"It is so familiar. I... I cannot explain it. I feel, "
She stopped.
"Happy. But also , sad. Both at the sa ti."
Her voice dropped further.
"Sothing is calling . I can hear it, but I don't know where it's coming from."
Ryen did not fully understand what she was describing, but he understood enough. He lifted her, settled her against his chest, and felt her go still.
"Don't be afraid. I'm here. Whatever this is , I'm not going anywhere."
She looked up at him for a long mont, uncertain and very young, and then she nodded once and pressed her face against his shoulder without another word.
"Please follow the roots," Buer's voice ca. "Co to , all of you. The answers you are looking for are here."
They moved. And as the first step was taken, the world shifted.
Not dramatically , not with the violence of a scene change , but gradually, like the surface of still water responding to sothing dropped into it from a great height. The space around them began to fill with sothing that had no na but could only be called mory.
It arrived as image.
A white-haired woman, her face composed into an expression that allowed nothing in or out. Her back was straight. Her eyes looked downward from a height that was not simply physical. Below her, a girl in green, looking up.
The white-haired woman's voice ca as though from the air itself, from every direction and no particular direction.
"Khaenri'ah has transgressed. They reached into the Abyss and called upon what lies outside the world. The Seven Gods will march with to suppress them. Greater Lord Rukkhadevata , Buer. You will remain. Guard the World Tree."
The girl's chin dropped in the smallest acknowledging bow.
"As you command, my Lord."
The image held for a mont, and then it held.
The girl had not shown her face. But sothing in the line of her back, in the particular way she stood with her hands at her sides , everyone present felt the familiarity of it sowhere wordless in the chest.
"Five hundred years ago," Ningguang said, her composure intact but her voice carrying the particular careful quality of soone placing their words very precisely. "This is that night."
Buer did not answer. The group moved forward again without needing to be asked.
Lumine stopped for half a second and looked at the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles , that impassive white-haired figure descending from altitude, looking at Teyvat and its gods with the expression of soone managing a resource , and made a sound low in her throat that was not quite a word.
"I will put you on the ground," she said quietly, with complete sincerity. "Eventually."
She kept walking.
The sky turned to blood.
None of them had to ask why. The sound that ca with it was not loud. It was everywhere. It was the sound Teyvat made when it understood what was happening to it , not a cry, not a scream, sothing older than either, the frequency of a world registering that it was being unmade from inside.
Another image erged.
Rukkhadevata walking toward Irminsul. The World Tree should have been a thing of impossible purity , and perhaps once it had been. Now it wore sothing else. Black. Layered over every surface in masses and ridges of a substance that moved like rot and had the texture of sothing with intent, seeping into the bark, finding the seams, patient and absolute. It was not decay. Decay was natural. This was a violation.
"Forbidden Knowledge." Buer's voice ca softly, without dramatics. It did not need them. "As I had feared. It clings to Irminsul like a parasite embedded in the bone , consuming the World Tree from within."
"If it continues unchecked , all of Teyvat will collapse. Everything."
A pause.
"I must, I must, "
Her voice thinned, took on the quality of soone asking sothing they know cannot be refused.
"Please. Lend all of your wisdom. This is the last selfish thing I will ever ask."
Green light began to move. Slowly at first, then with greater commitnt, wrapping around Irminsul like careful hands, interposing itself between the black spread and the living wood beneath, slowing what could not be stopped entirely, buying ti that could not be purchased any other way.
The contamination paused.
Ryen stood and watched and began to understand the shape of what he was looking at.
"These are her mories," he said, quietly. "What Buer lived through. What she carried."
He glanced down at Nahida in his arms.
"And perhaps , the story of how Nahida ca to exist."
The group moved without speaking. No one had anything to add to that.
The next image found them almost before they were ready for it.
Silence first. A silence that had the quality of aftermath , the silence of a landscape that is no longer capable of producing sound because the things that might have made it are gone.
The world in the image was a furnace.
Sky-high flas, still and sohow more terrible for it, surrounding the ruin of a city that had once been the pride of people who believed human beings needed nothing divine to be exceptional. The Sustainer of Heavenly Principles stood above it all with the expression of soone who had concluded that the variables had resolved satisfactorily.
Below, among the debris: Zhongli and Venti, both of them half-kneeling, both of them soaked in the blood of a battle that had already been decided. Their faces held contradictions. Confusion. Grief. The look of people who had done sothing they would not be able to set down for a very long ti.
Makoto lay in the wreckage with her eyes closed. Still. Arranged by circumstance rather than intention into the posture of soone who had finished rather than soone who had stopped.
High above, divine punishnt gathering like stormcloud over the ruined capital of Khaenri'ah.
And at the edge of the image, barely visible: Aether, stumbling through rubble, his face stripped of everything except the particular desperation of soone running toward sothing they are already too late to reach.
Makoto did not speak.
She had pressed one hand over her face, and the steadiness in her bearing , the sa steadiness she wore in every room, in every situation , had developed a hairline fracture that she was not quite managing to conceal.
She was not afraid of what she had seen. She had lived it. What she had not fully expected was to stand inside it again, and find it still capable of reaching her.
The burning capital. The faces of people who had not survived. The knowledge that she had been there. That her hands, even moved by coercion, had been part of what happened to them. That the guilt of that was not sothing that could be reasoned away by pointing to the constraints she had been operating under, because guilt was not interested in context.
Ryen said nothing. He placed his hand on her shoulder, pressure without speech, and kept it there.
When she looked at him, his expression said only: it's done. It won't be repeated. You are not in that place anymore.
She held his gaze for a long mont.
"Thank you," she said finally.
He nodded, and they walked.
The space ahead had changed. At the base of Irminsul , at the confluence of the great roots, in the oldest part of this place , a small figure stood. They had not seen her clearly at first. Now they were close enough that her presence was unmistakable even before her face beca visible.
Before anyone could look at her properly, the final mory opened.
The sa great tree, still bearing its wounds. The sky still bleeding red at the edges.
The Rukkhadevata in this image was smaller than she had been at the start. Not diminished , reduced by intention. By choice, and effort, and the long work of pouring oneself into sothing else until the original shape no longer held.
She could not be seen clearly. But what she carried transmitted itself across ti without difficulty: the weight of exhaustion, yes, and pain, but also the specific quality of sothing nearly finished , the tiredness of a task that is nearly done and cannot be left undone and has always known this about itself.
One arm lifted, careful and deliberate.
She reached into the tree. Found the branch that was cleanest, that had been held at the furthest remove from the contamination, that had been kept that way on purpose for a purpose.
She drew it free.
Her voice, when it ca, was barely above a breath. But it was steady all the way through.
"The cycle that fate ordained , it falls to to break it, with my own hands."
She held the branch for a mont that lasted long enough to contain everything she had decided.
"From this day forward , you are the new God of the Dendro. You are Nahida."
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