The morning after the Sabzeruz Festival.
Sumeru had not fully come down from the previous day. The whole nation was still running a degree warmer than usual , a residual brightness that persisted through the night and showed no signs of fading. The holiday had seven days remaining, and the city intended to use every one of them.
Early that morning, a steady stream of people had already begun arriving at the Akademiya's entrance. Most were desert folk , faces scrubbed clean, bearing held with the quiet self-consciousness of people who have dressed carefully for an occasion. They came in twos and threes, joined the line outside the gates, and waited their turn.
When they reached the front, they faced the Sky-Tree.
It had been planted only days ago, but it stood as though it had always been there , an anchor point for the city's new story, already tall enough that looking up at it required tilting your head back. One by one, people bowed in front of it. The expressions they wore were the ones saved for things that matter: composed, careful, the face a person puts on when they want a moment to be recorded properly in their own memory. They laid garlands at its base. Then they stepped aside and left in silence.
The queue stretched several hundred meters from the gate.
Sumeru's people were not religious in the sense of supplication , they had always been a nation of scholars, skeptics, people who preferred evidence to faith. But they were willing to believe, and what they believed in this morning was not supernatural. They believed in the tree as a sign. Evidence that someone had chosen to begin something here, in Sumeru, on their behalf, and that the beginning was real.
Each person offered their garland and walked away.
Today was still a holiday. Most, it seemed, had planned a two-stop morning: the Sky-Tree first, then the queue at the Akademiya's main entrance , where Azar was receiving his public reckoning, one person at a time, and the line for that was longer still.
Azar, for his part, was discovering what a thorough accounting looked like when an entire nation decided to collect.
Overnight, a fence had been erected around the Sky-Tree. Four guards stood at the perimeter: two from the Corps of Thirty, two from the Gilded Brigade. The composition was deliberate , one each from the rainforest institutions and the desert, standing together at the same post.
Ryen stopped walking when he saw it.
He stood at the gate with Nahida and the others, and he looked at the four guards, and then he looked at the fence, and then he looked at the Akademiya building beyond them, and his brow drew together in a way that had nothing vague about it.
Ningguang and Jean and the others noticed the expression and said nothing yet, waiting.
Ryen turned to Cyno, who had come to receive them.
"This arrangement at the gate , that was the Akademiya's initiative?"
Cyno blinked, then nodded. "Sage Naphis proposed it. As a demonstration of commitment to Lesser Lord Kusanali's policies , the Akademiya leading by example. It went to a vote and passed."
The group had expected Ryen to approve. He had seemed, in their experience, broadly supportive of anything that moved Sumeru's integration forward.
Instead, he said, quietly and with complete conviction:
"That is a serious mistake."
A silence.
Keqing replayed the sentence in her mind, confirmed it, and turned to look at him.
"You're saying this is a problem? But Nahida asked them to move toward integration, and the Akademiya responded the very next day , leading by example, demonstrating the policy in practice. That seems like exactly what you'd want."
She paused. "It would also encourage everyone to follow the same model. Accelerate the process."
Ryen shook his head slowly.
"This is one of those situations where the best intentions and the worst outcomes are produced by the same decision. I had some concern about this yesterday. Now I can see it already happening." He turned toward the building. "If this is not corrected carefully, it will not help integration at all. It will do the opposite , and the damage it causes will be far harder to undo than the original problem."
"The world I came from has a textbook example of exactly this."
Ningguang and Jean exchanged a glance. They had heard enough about Ryen's original world to know that when he cited it as a cautionary reference, the citation was worth paying attention to. A world of eight billion people across nearly two hundred nations , the scale of policy consequence there was unlike anything in Teyvat's experience, and the failures were as instructive as the successes.
Before the conversation could go further, Ryen held up a hand.
"Not here. Inside. Get Alhaitham and the others into a meeting room."
He looked at the guards one more time, said nothing further, and walked into the Akademiya.
The group reassembled in the great meeting hall. Alhaitham, Candace, Rahman, Tighnari, Cyno, and the Sages were already seated by the time Ryen came in. Buer had not shown herself , she remained out of sight near Nahida, watching, wanting first to understand how the Akademiya currently operated before announcing her presence.
Ryen settled into the front-facing seat with Nahida in his lap, looked around the room once, and went directly to it.
"The policy of placing desert folk and rainforest folk in equal numbers at all significant posts , this passed unanimously?"
General acknowledgement from around the table.
Sage Naphis spoke first, carefully. "Is there a problem with it, Ryen?"
Ryen looked at Alhaitham.
"You , nothing felt wrong to you?"
Alhaitham paused. He glanced toward Candace and Rahman before answering, weighing his words.
"My instinct said something was off. But with Nahida pushing for integration, and everyone else in agreement, I let it through." A slight tension in his voice. "So there is a problem. I was right to hesitate."
"There is more than a problem," Ryen said. "Left uncorrected, this creates a crisis that is genuinely difficult to reverse , not a policy disagreement, not a practical inefficiency. A structural fracture. The kind that does not break from the top down, but from the middle out, along lines you cannot predict in advance."
"You are not just looking at a split between the desert and the rainforest as regions. You are looking at something that can turn into ethnic hostility , a self-sustaining conflict between peoples, driven not by government decisions but by the people themselves. That kind of division, once embedded, cannot simply be legislated away. No authority can reach it."
"And no one in this room," he said, with no particular edge to his voice, only the quality of someone stating a fact that requires acknowledgement, "can claim to have fully mapped human nature. The point where people's assumptions harden into prejudice is not a line that is visible until after it has been crossed."
The room had gone quiet in the way it goes quiet when something has been said that cannot be unsaid.
Ningguang and Jean had their notebooks out.
Candace pressed her lips together. She was one of the desert representatives in this room, and she had voted in favour of this policy, and she felt the weight of that clearly.
"I don't understand it yet," she said. "The intent seems sound , the Akademiya visibly commits to equal representation, it sets a precedent, people follow the lead. Isn't that the mechanism you'd want for something like this?"
"The intent is sound," Ryen said. "The mechanism is where it breaks."
He set down his tea.
"Walk through it with me. Currently, every significant post requires representation from both groups , equal numbers, equal standing. Good so far. Now let that principle continue to develop. What happens next?"
He waited a moment, then continued.
"People internalise the principle. Not as a temporary measure, not as a transitional policy, but as the correct way things must be. Any post, any position, any institution , it must have representation. It must be balanced. If the balance is absent, the absence is evidence of discrimination."
"The Corps of Thirty recruits for combat effectiveness. The desert folk are, broadly, exceptional warriors. The rainforest folk are, broadly, exceptional scholars. These are not value judgments , they are the product of different environments, different traditions, different centuries of development. Both are strengths. Both are real."
"But now ask yourself: if the Corps of Thirty begins recruiting rainforest scholars in order to maintain representation , are those scholars being served well? Are you asking them to do something they were not built for, in an environment that is dangerous to them, because the institution needs to reach a number? Is that a just policy, or is it a policy that wears justice's clothing?"
"Or reverse it. The Akademiya recruits desert warriors to fill scholarly positions, because the institution has a quota to meet. Are those warriors well-placed? Or are you displacing people who would actually thrive in those roles, and filling seats with people who were never meant to be there, because the alternative is being accused of discrimination?"
He looked around the table slowly.
"Long-term, this principle stops being a guideline and becomes a law everyone is bound by whether they understand it or not. Any outcome that does not reflect the principle, no matter how the outcome was reached, becomes evidence of prejudice. And anyone with an interest in exploiting that principle , and there will always be someone , has a tool that is practically impossible to remove, because any attempt to remove it can itself be framed as discrimination."
The silence had taken on a different texture.
"The world I came from," Ryen said, "has a name for what happens when this principle runs to its conclusion."
He drank his tea.
"Political correctness."
He set the cup down.
"What political correctness looks like in practice: a rigorous, enforced standard of fairness that has cut itself free from every objective consideration and exists purely to satisfy the principle itself. Group representation becomes the only measurement that matters. Performance, aptitude, circumstance, context , all of it is subordinated to the requirement of representation."
"An institution that prizes intellectual rigour must hire people who cannot do intellectual work, because representation requires it. An institution that trains soldiers must accept people who are physically unsuited for combat, because representation requires it. If you decline to do either, you are not making a practical decision , you are, by the logic of this principle, engaging in discrimination, and that carries consequences."
"In the world I came from, those consequences are organised protests. Marches. Property destruction. People asserting their rights by making the city ungovernable. The term for this is making their voices heard."
"And no one in power is willing to dismantle it, because dismantling it means being labelled a discriminator, and that is a label that destroys careers. So instead it persists. It grows. And the nation that was trying to solve the problem of inequality ends up with an entirely different problem that is, in many respects, worse and more intractable than the original."
He looked directly at Sage Naphis.
"The path you are about to walk , map it against what I have just described, and tell me where the deviation is."
Alhaitham had gone very still. He was not the kind of person who made a show of having arrived at a conclusion, but the quality of his stillness was different from his ordinary listening stillness. Something had locked into place.
"That is what I was feeling," he said, more to himself than the room. "That is the specific shape of it. I could sense the problem , I could not name it."
He straightened.
"This policy cannot be extended. Any further implementation must stop immediately. Everything related to integration policy needs to go back to the beginning and be rebuilt from the foundation."
Even Candace and Rahman , who had been the desert's representatives in this discussion, who had voted in favour, who had been present precisely because they were supposed to be the voice of their people , had not objected. Cold sweat had made its way down their backs somewhere in the middle of Ryen's explanation, and what they were feeling now was not relief so much as the particular dread of having seen, very clearly, where a road leads after you have already taken the first steps.
"I am sorry." Sage Naphis's face had colour in it. His hands were clasped too tightly on the table. "This is my error. I brought this proposal forward."
"It is all of ours," Tighnari said quietly, from across the table. "We all voted yes. The responsibility does not sit with one person."
He looked at Naphis directly.
"The important thing is that we are still early. We can still turn this around. If we wait, "
"Then we cannot," Alhaitham said, finishing the sentence in the way that needed no softening. "Correct."
Ryen gave a single, clear nod of confirmation.
"Exactly. While it is new, while it has not yet sunk into practice and been internalised as normal , there is a correction path. Leave it longer and the correction path narrows. Leave it long enough and the path closes."
"Political correctness, in the world I described to you, is not a policy that can be repealed. No one who has tried has survived the attempt politically. It has become the kind of thing that sustains itself , not because it works, but because the cost of opposing it has been made higher than the cost of enduring it."
"Sumeru is on the approach to that road right now."
"You will not want to know what the view looks like from the other end."