"The purest branch of Irminsul."
Ryen watched the memory-image in front of him, the thought forming quietly as the scene completed itself.
Buer's hands were folded together, and from somewhere inside her , from the place where a god's nature lives before it has anywhere to go , a boundless light was flowing outward. Not the blinding kind. The patient kind. It moved with the quality of water finding its level, pouring steadily into the small branch she had broken free, until the branch could no longer contain what it held and began to respond.
A pulse of green. Then growth.
The branch extended, shaped itself, became something with a face and hands and the particular gravity of a being that was newly arrived and already held more than it yet understood.
The silhouette of a small god. Nahida, at the first moment of her existence.
Buer's form was dissolving as it happened. The light that had constituted her began to lose coherence, separating into individual motes, each one drifting upward and outward and disappearing , not extinguished, but gone. The way a candle goes out when it has consumed everything it was given.
She was already almost entirely light by the time she spoke, and she spoke toward the closed eyes of the small figure in front of her, the one that held everything she had kept aside. The words were a final errand, entrusted to the air between them.
"Much later, you will become a great god. You will come to understand the true nature of wisdom."
"When that time arrives, you will know your purpose , but please do not hesitate. Do not grieve."
"All of this is the arrangement of fate."
"And so, "
The memory began to shift. The small figure in the distance , the one standing at the base of Irminsul, which they had glimpsed from far away since entering this space , slowly turned.
Her face was identical to the face in the vision. The same line of the jaw, the same expression, the same quality of warmth made ancient by the years that had built it.
The same smile.
Buer's lips parted, and her voice, unhurried and soft, moved through the space the way warmth moves through a room when a fire is lit somewhere nearby.
"Let the world… forget me entirely…"
The sound that followed was like glass finding the floor. Not the catastrophic sound of something destroyed , the brief, clean sound of something that has fulfilled its purpose and released itself.
Every image dissolved.
The pink space returned around them all at once, simple and steady and holding no more secrets.
Buer stood not far away, composed and still.
She looked exactly like Nahida. There was no difference that could be named by pointing at a feature. The only thing that distinguished them , the only thing that could be sensed rather than seen , was something in the quality of her presence. A maturity that was not severity, a gentleness that was not softness. Something built and shaped by thousands of years of existing in the way that she had existed: as the god that chose to carry the world's weight alone, without anyone knowing she was doing it.
"This is, I suppose, our first proper meeting." She looked from one face to the next, and her expression carried the particular warmth of someone greeting people they have known for a very long time, though the meeting is new. "Hello, all of you. Nahida."
Her eyes moved to Ryen.
"And Ryen."
He pressed his lips together in the hint of a smile.
"That explains why Zhongli and the others always went vague whenever someone brought up Nahida's true nature." He thought about it for a moment. "And why Venti almost didn't recognise her the first time they met , he'd seen you before, and the resemblance caught him off guard."
Buer's smile settled, easy and fond.
"Zhongli and Venti , that is Morax and Barbatos, isn't it. They appear to be well."
A brief pause.
"Though you are correct , it was never something they could fully conceal, not from people who had known me. The resemblance is not coincidental."
She turned her gaze gently outward, as though addressing the space between rather than any particular person.
"Nahida is me, and I am Nahida. We share the same essential nature. But we are also distinct individuals."
"One, and not one."
Ryen let out a short sound that was partway between amusement and acknowledgement.
"A genuine Goddess of Wisdom. Even your explanations require decoding."
He had meant it as a light observation, a way of moving the conversation forward. But Buer took it seriously. She held the comment for a moment, then nodded with genuine attentiveness.
"Forgive me. That was unclear. Let me try differently."
"Nahida and I , we were born from the same soil, and we carry the same essential nature. She is my reincarnation in the sense that the divine essence which constituted me has continued through her. But reincarnation, in this context, refers only to the transmission of a god's fundamental nature between forms."
"In reality , and here I would borrow something you yourself once said, Ryen , in all the world's unending span of time, no two flowers are ever exactly the same."
"We are independent beings. She has her future ahead of her. I have the purpose I was given, and carried, and have now laid down."
"Does that make more sense?"
Buer was patient , genuinely, unhurriedly patient, in the way of someone for whom patience is not an effort but simply the natural pace at which they move. But Ryen's attention had already found its way elsewhere. He was looking at her with an expression of genuine puzzlement.
"Where did you hear me say that?"
A silence.
Buer blinked at him. Then, slowly, with the tolerant composure of someone who has expected unexpected things and is still occasionally surprised by them, she said:
"Is that where the conversation has gone?"
She let it settle, then answered anyway.
"I am an incarnation of Irminsul. Irminsul holds the whole of Teyvat's existence within itself , every being, every memory, every moment that has ever belonged to this world."
"You, Ryen, are the World Master , a category of existence that Irminsul cannot reach or record. But Lady Ganyu and the others are Teyvat's own children, and their memories belong to Teyvat."
"Whatever you have done, said, or meant within earshot of people who are part of this world , those memories belong to Irminsul. Which means they are, in their way, available to me."
"At present, there are only two beings in Teyvat whose existence Irminsul does not directly record: yourself, and Lumine."
"But that inability to record you directly does not mean you are invisible to it. You exist within Irminsul as a shape in the memories of others , as a presence defined by its effect on the people around you. A different kind of record, but a record nonetheless."
The structure of it settled into place in Ryen's mind. Cleanly.
Irminsul could not write his name on its pages. But Ganyu could. And the pages Ganyu filled with memories of him , those were Irminsul's pages. He was there, rendered in the first person of everyone who had ever stood next to him.
"So you know rather a lot," he said.
Looking at her now, he thought he understood, for the first time, what being the Goddess of Wisdom actually meant. It was not intelligence , intelligence was what the Akademiya cultivated and measured and awarded titles for. This was something else. Buer was connected to the single largest repository of accumulated knowledge and experience that had ever existed within this world. Every question she might ask, she could answer. Every piece of information she might need, she already held.
Compared to that, even Zhongli's ten thousand years of personal observation was a single library against an ocean.
The System was the only thing Ryen possessed that stood on roughly comparable ground. Without it, he would have had nothing to set against what she was.
It also explained, incidentally, why she had not been taken seriously enough by those who should have protected her. People tended to underestimate what they could not quantify. And Buer had never given them cause to quantify her.
Buer acknowledged the unspoken assessment with a slight dip of her head.
"I should apologise. I did not seek out Ryen's secrets , I had no such intention. But Irminsul had already integrated the memories of Lady Ningguang and the others, and while this fragment of my consciousness was attending to Nahida, I encountered that information incidentally."
"I know that you hold an entire world, and I understand something of how extraordinary and strange that world is."
"I also know what the Five-Nation Alliance has been undertaking."
Ryen made a small, dry sound.
"There is something uncomfortable about someone seeing through every layer you've built."
The others in the room wore variations of the same expression. There was nothing comfortable about the idea that Irminsul had been quietly watching , not with malicious intent, but with the unconcerned thoroughness of a system that did not distinguish between what was meant to be private and what was not.
If it were only Ryen, Irminsul would not have dared record a single thread of data about him. His position was simply too far outside its jurisdiction. But the others were Teyvat's own, and through them, everything had already been written down.
"Please be at ease."
Buer had read the room before anyone spoke.
"Irminsul itself has no consciousness. The only beings who have ever been able to commune with it were myself, and now Nahida. Even the Heavenly Principles do not touch Irminsul's operation , it is beyond that kind of reach."
"Ryen, as World Master, your essential nature places you above Teyvat's hierarchy. And the world you carry is still growing, still expanding its ceiling in ways that have not finished resolving. Even if every layer were known, Irminsul's sole response, if it had a will, would be to keep a careful distance."
"Though , as you have already sensed , Irminsul is, at this moment, asking you for help."
Ryen nodded with the easy acknowledgement of someone who had already filed this under matters to address eventually.
"I felt it the moment we arrived. Because of the black corruption?"
Buer nodded, and something in her expression shifted , not grief, exactly, but a particular quality of self-accounting that sits adjacent to it.
"To be precise: it is the consequence of Forbidden Knowledge. And, in part, the consequence of my own error."
She took a moment, and then continued.
"Thousands of years ago, King Deshret reached through to the secrets beneath the Abyss, and what came back through that opening was Forbidden Knowledge. It was the name I gave to what arrived , though you and Lumine may know it by other names."
"Later, I exhausted myself suppressing it, borrowing from the Void to seal what had been unleashed."
"What I did not understand, at the time, was that I had already been contaminated in the process."
A quiet pause.
"To use a phrase that Ryen might recognise , the one who sets out to slay the dragon becomes, in the end, the dragon itself?"
She exhaled, and the sound carried the specific weight of someone who has had a very long time to make peace with something and has done so, but has not forgotten.
"The Withering. The Blight. Both were curses carried into the world by Forbidden Knowledge , curses visited on human beings, and on the world itself, though neither I nor anyone else understood this at the time."
"When my strength was spent and the immediate crisis seemed resolved, I believe I allowed myself to think it was finished. I forgot , or did not allow myself to fully consider , that I was Irminsul's incarnation. That what touched me, touched Irminsul. That what I had absorbed in fighting the Forbidden Knowledge, Irminsul was also quietly absorbing."
"Until five hundred years ago."
Her gaze moved somewhere past the walls of this space, soft and far-reaching, finding a day that existed only in memory now.
"The Sustainer of Heavenly Principles intervened. The Seven Gods were ordered to converge and suppress Khaenri'ah. My situation was particular enough that I was instead sent to guard Irminsul."
"When I arrived…"
She raised one hand. The sky above them shifted at her gesture , the pink dissolving, the deep arterial red flooding back in, the colour of a world hemorrhaging from something it did not know how to name.
"That is what I found. The Irminsul I had known , the one I had been connected to since the beginning , was entirely consumed. The Forbidden Knowledge I had believed was contained had continued its work, patient and absolute, through every year I had been elsewhere."
The sky held its colour for a moment. Then Buer's hand moved again, and the red retreated, and the pink settled back, and the space was still.
"At that moment, I understood the full shape of what I had failed to see. I was connected to Irminsul. What had happened to me had happened to it. What I remembered, it remembered. What I carried , it was carrying."
"To fully cleanse Irminsul," she said, "there is only one way."
Before she had finished the sentence, Nahida was already asking.
"What way?"
Buer did not answer immediately. She looked at Nahida, and the expression on her face was the kind that has no adequate name , the way a parent looks at a child who does not yet know that they are already everything that was ever hoped for them.
She raised her hand, and the sky changed again. Back to pink. Soft and steady and kind.
"I knew I would not survive. So before the end, I gave Irminsul one last gift , from myself, with everything I still had to give."
"A gift that would help Irminsul endure until the turning point arrived. Until fate bent in the direction it needed to bend."
"As it turned out , I was right to bet on it." A brief smile, self-deprecating, threaded with something that might have been a laugh at her own expense. "The Goddess of Wisdom, staking the world's survival on a gamble. There is a particular irony in that, isn't there. But I had no better option."
Ganyu and the others found themselves watching her with an ache that settled quietly in the chest. This was what the world had been asked to forget. This was the god who had carried Teyvat's continuance alone, without ceremony, without witness, for however many years it had taken , and then had made herself disappear so that the carrying could continue after her.
"I broke free the purest branch of Irminsul and poured every last piece of my essential nature into it. And that is how Nahida was born."
She turned to look at Nahida directly, and her voice went warm in a way that the previous warmth had only been approaching.
"So, Nahida."
"You have been wondering who you are, and who I am."
"Do you understand now? I am you, and you are me , and we are not the same. I am your past. You are my future."
Nahida stared at her. The expression on her small face was one that only formed when a question had been answered in a way that raised four more questions that were all equally unanswerable.
Was this a mother?
No , that was not quite right, not exactly,
A sister?
That did not fit either,
Herself?
But that could not be it , she was herself, standing here, holding a Gnosis, having just watched the moment of her own birth from the outside,
Ryen was quiet beside her, and he was not struggling. The shape of what Buer was had arranged itself into clarity in his mind some time ago.
His brow was slightly drawn. He looked at Buer for a long moment.
"So," he said, carefully, "the reason you have appeared now , the reason you reached out to Nahida, to all of us , is Irminsul."
Buer's expression held its smile, and she inclined her head.
"Yes."
"Though I will admit to a small private selfishness as well. I wanted to see whether Nahida had found her way to understanding what it means to be a god. Whether she had the capacity to walk toward something great."
"I was right again, as it turns out. Nahida has already surpassed me."
Nahida immediately and emphatically shook her head, the previous philosophical paralysis forgotten entirely.
"That is absolutely not true! Compared to Greater Lord Rukkhadevata, I am nowhere near , if it had been you in my position, you would have done everything I did and better!"
Buer pressed her lips together in a smile that did not contest the point.
"Protecting Irminsul is our shared mission. Restoring Irminsul is what Teyvat requires to continue. In the past, I carried that responsibility as far as I could carry it."
"Now, Nahida , it is yours to hold."
She walked forward, unhurried, until she stood before Nahida. Her hands extended and found Nahida's, and the grip was light and certain.
"I was contaminated by Forbidden Knowledge. Through that connection, so was Irminsul. The contamination runs in both directions, and it cannot be addressed from outside."
"So the only path to Irminsul's full restoration , there is only one."
A breath.
"Nahida."
Her voice softened until it was barely more than presence.
"Let the world forget me entirely."