Buer blinked.
She looked at Ryen for a moment with the careful expression of someone who had already calculated the outcome of every path available to them and was now being told that a path they had not calculated might exist.
"This… will it truly work?"
"Only one way to find out."
Ryen spread his hands.
"You're not genuinely committed to dying, are you? Not if there's any real chance of a solution that doesn't require it?"
"It is not that, it is simply, "
She paused. She was not quite sure how to say it. There were people in the world , and she was among them , who had made their peace with a necessary death. Who had chosen it clearly, with full understanding of what they were choosing, and had stopped flinching from the fact. She had been willing to let Nahida delete her from existence because the world required it and she had found no other path.
But willing to die and wishing to die were not the same thing.
She wanted to see Sumeru's future. She wanted to watch Nahida grow , not in the way she had watched, as a fragment of consciousness haunting the periphery of a Gnosis, but in the present tense, alongside her. She wanted to see the day when Nahida became something so far beyond what Buer had ever been that looking up at her was the only reasonable response.
That was a future she had believed was unavailable to her. She had grieved it quietly and sealed the grief away because grief was not useful and the work had to be done regardless.
But Nahida's grip on her hands had tightened the moment she hesitated.
She looked down. Then she looked up.
"Ryen , is it truly possible?"
"How will we know if we don't try?"
He was perfectly calm about it, in the way of someone who considered this a reasonable engineering problem rather than an existential one.
"You have no choice but to trust me at this point, do you? You said it yourself , I am the World Master. If anyone is likely to find the solution that covers every angle, it is me."
"And at absolute worst, "
He said it without theatre, as a simple statement of fact.
"Forbidden Knowledge will not dare touch me."
This was not arrogance. It was arithmetic. The Forbidden Knowledge, whatever it was and whatever it could do , if it was useful to him, that was one thing. If it was not, and it attempted anything in the vicinity of his body, he would deal with it himself. If it reached for his consciousness or his soul, the System was there, and the System was not something that tolerated uninvited contact. The Forbidden Knowledge would not find so much as a handhold.
"So. Are you going to keep hesitating? Or would you prefer to proceed with your original plan?"
Buer had not yet answered when she felt Nahida's hands tighten around hers. Not much. Just enough to say: please.
Something in her expression settled. The last of the deliberation dissolved.
"Then I will leave it in your hands, Ryen." Her voice was soft, and the composure in it was real rather than performed. "If it is possible to protect Irminsul and keep Teyvat safe , and if I do not need to die to achieve it, "
A breath.
"Please. I want to live."
The words were simple. She had apparently decided that if she was going to say them, there was no point in saying them softly.
Ryen's eyes caught the light for a moment.
He looked at her , at this god who had spent thousands of years in careful, solitary sacrifice, and who had just asked for something for herself for perhaps the first time in all of that , and felt something complicated move through him that he did not name.
He exhaled, turned to Ningguang, and met her eyes. She had already understood. The Resurrection Totem was in her hands before he finished turning.
She was about to pass it to him when she paused.
Her eyes moved to Buer. Something crossed her expression.
"Ryen," she said quietly. "We need to take her to your world first. For the resurrection to hold, her existence needs to be registered in that world's framework."
"But your portal is still back in Liyue."
Ryen waved it off.
"Easy. I'll open another one here. The Liyue portal is anchored , it won't go anywhere."
He snapped his fingers.
Light gathered in front of him. Slowly at first , small, scattered points that drifted toward each other , then with increasing coherence, the points locking together into a shape that had weight and presence and the particular quality of a door that opened onto somewhere genuinely different.
Within a few moments, a portal stood fully formed in the Sanctuary of Surasthana.
Ningguang and the others looked at each other, and the shared expression said something along the lines of: there is a reason we keep him around.
"One issue," Ningguang said, with the precisely calibrated practicality of someone who has just noticed an obvious problem. "We are currently in a consciousness-state. This is Buer's mental space, isn't it."
This gave Ryen a moment's pause.
He considered it. He could not take Buer to the MC World in person if neither of them was currently in a body. But Buer could go on her own.
"Buer , can you make the trip yourself? Just go in, then come back. That's all you need to do."
Buer nodded with the attentiveness of someone who has decided to trust a plan and intends to follow it precisely. She turned toward the portal and studied it with open, uncomplicated curiosity.
She had seen the MC World through Irminsul , through the memories of the people who had walked it and carried those memories back. She knew what it was, in the way that reading about a place tells you what it is. What she did not know was what it felt like from the inside.
She looked back at the group once, briefly.
Then she stepped through.
They waited.
The wait was not long. Less than a minute by any measurement. The portal pulsed once , a soft ripple of light moving outward from the surface , and Buer stepped back into the Sanctuary.
She stood still for a moment.
Her small face had an expression on it that was familiar to anyone who had experienced the MC World for the first time: the expression of someone who has just encountered a category of reality they did not previously have a framework for, and whose brain is now politely informing them that it needs a moment.
She had known what it was. She had been completely unprepared for what it was.
Buer, who possessed the accumulated knowledge of every mind that had ever lived and thought and remembered in Teyvat, stood in the Sanctuary of Surasthana and found that she did not quite have adequate language for what she had just experienced. The gap between knowing about a thing and standing inside that thing was apparently not something that Irminsul's libraries could fully bridge.
She opened her mouth. Then closed it. Then decided, with characteristic composure, to defer the processing for later.
Ryen had already closed the portal. He crossed to Ningguang, took the Resurrection Totem from her hands, and turned to face Buer.
"Ready?"
Buer pulled her attention back from wherever it had briefly gone, schooled her expression into something collected, and nodded once.
He used the totem.
A gold light ignited in the air around Buer , not slowly, not tentatively, but with the completeness of something that had always been about to happen. The light pressed outward in all directions at once, and in the space of a single breath, it had reached every corner of the Sanctuary.
And then the consciousness-space ended.
All of them were back.
The Sanctuary of Surasthana. Real stone beneath their feet. The smell of the night air coming through the high windows, cool and sweet. The familiar dimensions of a room that had been rebuilt for warmth and occupation.
Ryen rolled his shoulders, settling back into his body with the mild interest of someone returning from a long walk.
The group looked, without coordination, toward the place where the gold light was still active , a sphere of it, floating perhaps a meter above the floor, and growing. Not dramatically, not in surges, but with steady, patient expansion, like a lamp turned gradually brighter until the room could no longer contain the comparison.
Buer was returning to Teyvat.
Nahida had crossed the room before anyone else moved. She stood in front of the light on her small legs, watching it with enormous eyes, and did not look away.
Ryen reached sideways without looking and gave Yae Miko a light tap on the shoulder.
Yae Miko's expression passed briefly through indignation before she looked at him.
"How long has it been?"
She pressed her lips together, not quite annoyed. "Less than a minute. No time at all, really."
She tilted her head.
"Consciousness-space doesn't follow normal time. The concept barely applies there. I could explain it properly if you wanted, "
"I'll pass."
Yae Miko made a small, long-suffering sound.
Her eyes drifted back to the light. After a moment, she said:
"Buer's back. But what about Nahida? What about Sumeru? How does this work now?"
Ryen had already considered this. The concern was not complicated to identify , two claimants to the title of Dendro Archon, one who had held it for a thousand years and one who had held it for five hundred. Both legitimate. Both present. Both connected to the same essential divine nature. A nation that had just started listening to its current god, and a predecessor who would mean, to anyone who knew what she represented, something that Nahida could not be yet.
"The Forbidden Knowledge hasn't been resolved," he said. "Until it is, Buer can't leave the MC World."
Yae Miko blinked. Pressed her own forehead lightly with two fingers.
"I nearly forgot about that. Then , for now, at least , it takes care of itself."
"It was never the problem you were imagining," Ryen said, with the ease of someone who had solved the same kind of problem enough times to recognise them early. "Buer is not the sort of god who would take anything from Nahida. She created Nahida. She is the reason Nahida exists."
"The power-struggle novel you had running in your head , that story does not have Buer in it."
"She would help Nahida manage Sumeru before she would ever complicate it. And once we've dealt with the Forbidden Knowledge and she can move freely , Nahida will not be spending the majority of her time in Sumeru anyway. True has been in Liyue this whole time. Ei as well."
Yae Miko absorbed this, then released the concern with a small shrug.
"What about the Forbidden Knowledge itself? Do you actually have a plan, or were you giving her hope to work with?"
"I have a direction."
Ryen's tone was unhurried.
"If Buer can consolidate the Forbidden Knowledge into a form , gas, liquid, solid, any form , then it exists. And if it exists, the Sword of Cosmic Dominion can reach it."
"Laws. Concepts. If they can be given a form, they can be severed. The Forbidden Knowledge becomes something with edges. Something with edges can be cut."
"That is not a guarantee, but it is a very reasonable bet."
He looked out at Nahida still standing vigil by the golden light.
"Besides , today is her birthday."
His voice, saying it, was quieter than everything he had said before it.
"I was not going to let her birthday end with her crying like a heartbroken kitten over something I had a sword for."
Yae Miko was quiet for a moment. Then she said, in a tone that had none of its earlier teasing in it:
"Speaking of birthdays. If mine came around , what would you give me?"
Ryen considered this with apparent seriousness.
"Myself," he said. "Delivered directly. What do you think?"
Yae Miko gave him a look that contained several things at once.
"Who exactly is receiving the gift in that scenario?"
He smiled.
"When we are done in Sumeru , Inazuma next. We can take our time there before we need to come back for the Lantern Rite."
"And," he said, with the particular quietness of someone who remembers everything they have been promised, "don't bother pretending you've forgotten. I haven't."
Yae Miko looked at him sideways. She picked up a strand of her hair and examined it with studied disinterest.
"My memory is simply not what it used to be. A lady gets older, these things happen, "
"Your promise is documented in my memory with complete accuracy. When the time comes, it will not be optional."
She clicked her tongue.
"Fine," she said, the word landing in a way that was much warmer than it sounded. "Fine. You'll have it."
They looked at each other, and the moment folded itself away.
Ryen brought the group over to stand near Nahida. The light around Buer had grown dense and close, the shape within it almost fully resolved now , and wrong, in a way that several people noticed simultaneously.
The figure condensing in the gold was not the same figure they had met in the consciousness-space.
In the space, Buer had been small. The same proportions as Nahida , the same child-like build, the same scale. It had made sense, in context: a god diminished by the compound expenditures of millennia, twice pouring herself into a task that had cost her everything.
The figure in the light was not that.
The silhouette resolving itself in the gold was unmistakably that of a woman in the full sense , the build of someone at the height of their power, carrying all of it naturally, without effort. Standing next to Ningguang's silhouette for comparison, you would find something close.
This was the Resurrection Totem's logic: it restored. Not to the state in which someone had most recently existed, but to the state in which they had existed at their greatest. Buer's child-like form had been the result of spending herself entirely , twice. The totem did not restore that. The totem restored what had always been there before the debt came due.
Several things came together in the minds of those present.
Buer and Nahida shared the same essential nature. The same source. What was true of one was, in the bones of things, true of the other. They were different, yes , Buer had said so, and she had been right , but the origin was the same.
Which meant,
"We're going to see grown-up Nahida!"
Paimon, who had been watching from the side with wide eyes, threw both arms in the air with an enthusiasm that was completely divorced from any attempt at composure.
The gold light contracted suddenly , pulled itself inward to a point so bright it was easier to look away than at , and then it released.
It did not explode. It simply opened. The light scattered outward from that single point in every direction at once, not in a rush but in a cascade, each individual mote drifting down through the air of the Sanctuary with the slow, weightless grace of the last embers of a firework after the sound has gone.
They fell like gold stars across the floor, the furniture, the assembled faces of everyone present, and what they left behind , standing in the exact place where the light had been , was a woman.
She stood still for a moment.
Her eyes moved through the room. Green irises, the colour of Sumeru in the rainy season when the leaves are at their darkest, and in them a warmth so complete and unhurried that looking at it felt like being told nothing was required of you and everything would be fine.
The face was Nahida's face. Not approximately, not as a resemblance , the same face, grown into itself, carrying the weight of all the years that Nahida had not yet lived. The same small smile. The same quality of attention.
And thousands of years behind it, patient and certain.
She let the silence hold for a moment. Then she smiled, and in the Sanctuary of Surasthana the feeling that accompanied it was something like stepping outside after a long, dim winter.
"Hello, everyone." Her voice had not changed. Gentle, unhurried, warm , exactly as it had been in the consciousness-space, in the memories, in the moment of Nahida's naming. "It is good to meet you all properly."
She looked around the room.
"I am Greater Lord Rukkhadevata."
A pause, and the smile deepened.
"Buer."