"Thank you for telling us, Ryen. Without this, we would have caused irreparable harm."
Alhaitham wiped a thin sheen of cold sweat from his temple. The more he thought about it, the more the full shape of it settled in , and the more it settled in, the more his stomach turned. What Ryen had described was not a worst-case extrapolation. It was the logical destination of the road they had been about to walk. If he was honest, what Ryen had laid out was probably the conservative version of what waited at the end.
External threats, Sumeru could manage. The Five-Nation Alliance's foundations made external crises a manageable problem. Internal rebellion was unlikely , the loyalty Nahida had earned from her people in less than a week was already the kind that did not produce organised insurrection. Someone would try before the rest of the city stopped them.
But an ideological trap , a contamination of how people thought about fairness and representation, spreading through every conversation and assumption and institution until it was invisible , that was a different category of problem entirely. That kind of fracture didn't come from outside, and it didn't come from above. It came from the middle of society, from people who were genuinely trying to do the right thing, and it could not be identified as wrong until after it had already become too embedded to remove without causing the very violence you were trying to prevent.
How would you solve it then? Ask Nahida to connect with Irminsul and selectively erase that pattern of thinking from every citizen in Sumeru simultaneously? Setting aside whether such a thing was even technically possible, Nahida would never do it. It would be an absolute violation of everything she stood for. And Alhaitham would not ask her to.
The only viable solution was the one Ryen had pointed to: don't let it start. What doesn't happen doesn't need to be solved.
Ryen looked around at the self-recrimination gathering in the room and shook his head, not unkindly.
"There's no need to be so hard on yourselves. It hasn't happened yet. You can still correct course."
"Besides , without a precedent to learn from, who would have seen this coming? The nation I described had a population of over three hundred million people, and even they didn't anticipate where this particular current would take them."
Zhongli, who had been listening from the side with the quiet attentiveness he brought to things he intended to remember, spoke at a measured pace.
"Precisely because the population was so large, every decision made at the top produced consequences at the bottom that were magnified beyond what the decision-makers expected. The larger the population, the faster and more completely a policy's effects propagate. The feedback loop becomes difficult to read because the results come back faster than the causes can be evaluated."
He paused.
"Your former world, as a reference point for how governance functions at scale , it carries significant lessons for how Teyvat's nations might navigate their own growth."
He glanced at Ryen with the particular expression of someone who wants an answer to a question they are not sure they want answered.
"Though I find myself wondering about that nation now. How does it stand?"
Ryen's mouth curved slightly, without warmth.
"There is no going back for them. The upper levels of government don't dare introduce any policy that doesn't account for every group's interests simultaneously , the moment something doesn't balance perfectly, it becomes a political liability. Protests. Organised disruption." He turned his cup slowly in his hands. "That country has, by most measures, the strongest aggregate power of any single nation in my world. External threats rarely materialise into anything significant. But that doesn't mean they are safe."
"The internal fractures run continuously. The social division is worsening, not improving. The racial tensions, which the policy was originally meant to address , they are sharper now than before the policy existed."
"People enter schools and workplaces carrying firearms, and they use them. Mass killings. Targeted violence against specific groups." He set the cup down. "None of this is mysterious in retrospect. It is exactly what happens when the principle of absolute representational equality is pursued past the point at which any other consideration is permitted to matter."
"Everyone can see what is happening. Nobody with any influence is willing to say so out loud , because saying so out loud means being labelled a discriminator, and that ends careers and invites retaliation. So they watch. They manage the symptoms as they appear and do not touch the cause. The cause continues to develop."
He looked around the table.
"That is what the end of this road looks like. Sumeru was about to take the first step onto it."
The room held its silence for a long moment.
Alhaitham exhaled through his teeth.
"I understand now , completely. The instinct I couldn't articulate. That is exactly the shape of what I was sensing."
He straightened.
"This policy cannot be extended. All current integration-related measures are to be suspended immediately and reviewed from the foundation."
Not a single objection was raised. Even Candace and Rahman , who sat at this table as representatives of the desert, for whose benefit this policy had ostensibly been designed , said nothing against it. The cold sweat that had found its way down their backs during Ryen's explanation had not fully dried. If this path had continued to its conclusion, they would have been among those responsible for it. That was not an abstract possibility. It was very nearly what had happened.
"I am sorry." Naphis's voice was taut. His hands were clasped on the table with the tension of someone holding themselves accountable. "I brought this proposal forward. That is on me."
"We all voted yes," Tighnari said quietly, with the precision of someone who does not permit blame to be concentrated on one person when it belongs distributed across many. "The responsibility is shared."
He looked at his old teacher directly.
"What matters now is that we are still early. The correction is still possible. We wait any longer and that stops being true."
"Correct," Alhaitham said, without softening it. "We act now."
Ryen gave a single, clear nod.
"The window is still open. Don't let it close."
"Once this particular trap sets itself into a society's foundations, there is no path back out. No government that has tried to dismantle it from within has survived the attempt. It sustains itself not because it works, but because opposing it costs more than enduring it."
"Sumeru is not in that position yet. Make sure it never is."
The meeting did not end there.
Nahida, with the brisk focus that had surprised everyone who was still adjusting to the idea of a five-hundred-year-old god in a child's body running proceedings, turned the conversation forward.
"For now , let's set the integration policy aside entirely and return to it properly when we've thought it through. The Akademiya's current priorities should be the desert transformation and the Blight patients. What is the progress?"
Hidden from the room's sight, just beside Nahida's shoulder, Buer watched.
She watched Nahida straighten in her seat and ask the right questions in the right order. She watched the Akademiya's scholars respond to her , not with condescension, not with the careful management of a child who needed handling, but with the attentiveness of people who had been given a reason to pay attention. Nahida's authority in this room was real. It had been earned in less than a week, and it was real.
She was still finding her footing. The gestures were a little careful, the register occasionally a half-step behind what the situation called for. Five hundred years of isolation from governance meant there were gaps, and the gaps were visible if you knew where to look.
But Buer knew where to look, and what she saw beneath the gaps was something that could not be trained into a person. Nahida had the instinct. The character. The particular quality of patience-without-passivity that made a god worth following.
She would grow into this completely. It would not take long.
So. Buer allowed herself a quiet, private exhale. She is going to be fine.
The last thread of anxiety she had carried for five hundred years , the one she had not fully acknowledged even to herself , loosened.
If Nahida could walk this path on her own, then Buer could step back and let her. Not with grief, but with something that felt, unexpectedly, like relief.
She could leave. She could go into that other world , that extraordinary, bewildering world that had left her genuinely speechless in the ten seconds she had spent inside it , and she could rest. Watch from a distance. Rebuild Sumeru in a place where time moved differently and nothing was ending.
A retirement, of sorts. For a god who had never had one.
The thought arrived with a warmth she had not anticipated.
The door opened. Naphis returned with the expression of someone who has just finished resolving something that could have been much worse.
Conversation paused. Everyone looked at him.
"Well?" Alhaitham asked.
Naphis nodded, the tension in his face settling into something more like relief.
"We had not formally launched anything yet. Nothing had been circulated publicly. Full suspension is in effect."
He paused.
"The scholars and Gilded Brigade members already integrated into the Akademiya's existing structure , those are less straightforward to handle."
Cyno shook his head calmly.
"That part isn't a problem. I've reviewed all of them personally. The scholars are not padding , they have their own research projects and the work to back them up. The Gilded Brigade members assigned to guard duties are capable fighters, well-suited to the role."
"They were placed appropriately, not as a concession to a number. That part holds."
The room's collective tension dropped another degree.
"Thank goodness we stopped when we did." Naphis pressed his lips together, some of the shame still sitting in his expression. "If this had gone further , I would have been the one who brought Sumeru to ruin. With the best of intentions."
"It is over," Nahida said, gently and without dwelling. "We won't resolve anything by continuing to revisit it. We'll plan this properly and take it slowly."
She looked at Ryen.
The look said everything, and he read it in full. She wanted Buer brought forward. She wanted to give her people , the scholars, the Sages, everyone in this room who had spent their lives in Sumeru's service , the chance to see that the god they had revered for five hundred years was not gone.
It was a small gift Nahida wanted to give them. And it was the kind of gift only she could give.
Ryen glanced at Buer.
Buer stood in her concealment for a moment longer. Then she breathed out, slowly, and nodded.
Ryen turned back to the room with the expression of someone about to make an announcement.
"There is one more thing today , beyond the updates Nahida wanted. We have a surprise for you."
A surprise.
Alhaitham's gaze sharpened immediately, moving across the faces around him. Ryen wore the particular kind of smile that preceded something genuinely remarkable. The others carried versions of the same expression , anticipation with a specific shape, like people waiting for a door to open that they already know leads somewhere extraordinary.
Another collaboration? A new resource?
He did not finish the thought.
The green light started small , a point of warmth near Nahida's shoulder, barely visible. Then it expanded with the unhurried certainty of something that had decided the time was right, and as it opened outward, it resolved into the figure of a woman.
The recognition came before the mind caught up with it. It was not intellectual. It was the kind of knowing that belongs to people who have spent their whole lives connected to a particular presence , the texture of a divine nature that Sumeru's scholars had studied and revered and written about for five hundred years, and that sat in some layer of perception beneath conscious thought.
This is her.
The room stared.
Naphis rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, openly, like a man checking whether he was awake.
"Greater , Greater Lord Rukkhadevata?"
His voice had lost all of its earlier smoothness. He sounded like someone who had just been handed evidence that the world's categories were negotiable.
"She , she has been resurrected? How is this, "
Tighnari had moved to a closer angle and was studying Buer with the careful, discreet attention of someone who needed to be certain before they allowed themselves to feel what they were about to feel. He checked once. Checked again. Verified that what he was seeing was present in the physical world, not a projection, not an illusion.
He lowered his head. Something in the line of his expression had shifted into a territory that was harder to read than simple shock.
Around him, Alhaitham and the others were quieter than they had been all morning. The practical complications arrived with the awe rather than after it , the same thoughts, moving through the same minds at approximately the same time.
Nahida had just begun. She had demonstrated real capability, real leadership, real wisdom. The people of Sumeru had started to trust her in a way that was genuine and growing.
And now the god who had preceded her , the one who had held Sumeru through everything, whose name was spoken with a reverence that five centuries of absence had not diminished , was standing in the same room.
What did Sumeru do with two Archons?
Whose voice did it follow?
And the alliance with Ryen , all of those transformative projects, the desert reclamation, the Blight cures , those were tied to Nahida personally. If Rukkhadevata resumed her position,
Alhaitham pressed two fingers briefly against his temple, thinking fast.
Naphis, operating on pure feeling rather than strategy, had already opened his mouth.
"This is wonderful , you are truly back, Greater Lord Rukkhadevata! Now you can, "
Tighnari's elbow found Naphis's ribs before the sentence completed itself.
The interruption was gentle enough to be deniable and firm enough to work.
Naphis stopped.
Tighnari kept his own expression mild. His reasoning had arrived quickly and completely: Nahida was present, and Ryen , who had demonstrated on multiple prior occasions that his patience for people who made Nahida unhappy was approximately nonexistent , was also present. Whatever Naphis was about to say, the timing was wrong, and the direction was worse. The thought of how Ryen might respond to anything that reduced Nahida in this room, even unintentionally, produced a very clear mental image of Naphis being introduced to the Zombie problem in the MC World.
With an expression that communicated its message without words, Tighnari turned to Alhaitham.
Alhaitham, who had already finished his own calculation, cleared his throat.
"My apologies, Greater Lord Rukkhadevata." He spoke with care, finding the register that was appropriate for a god rather than for a crisis. "This is , there are no words adequate for this moment. We are simply not quite certain how to, "
He allowed a pause.
Then he started again, from a cleaner angle.
"Whatever has brought this about , Sumeru has not lost a god. It has gained one."
He chose his next words carefully.
"If the day has come when two great gods watch over Sumeru, then this is Sumeru's extraordinary fortune."
Naphis, who had been recalibrating in the space Tighnari had given him, let out a breath that was more embarrassed than it sounded. He had almost said exactly the wrong thing. What Alhaitham had just said was precisely right , acknowledging Rukkhadevata's return while refusing to position it as a competition. Not because Alhaitham was being diplomatically careful, but because it was the accurate description of what this moment actually was.
I need to learn how to talk, Naphis thought, with the particular resignation of someone arriving at a conclusion they have arrived at before and not acted on.
Buer had been watching the room through all of this with the composure of someone who has been through enough versions of things to know how they tend to resolve. Five hundred years was a great deal of practice in patience. She let the shock run its course, watched the adjustments happen, and did not rush any of it.
When the room had settled enough, she spoke.
"After five hundred years , you are all strangers to me. But not to Sumeru."
Her voice moved through the meeting hall with the unhurried quality that characterised everything she did.
"I want to say clearly: Sumeru's governance belongs to Nahida. I am here today to see her, and to see this place. It is not my intention to return to an active role."
She turned her gaze gently around the room, letting it land briefly on each face.
"As far as Sumeru is concerned , you may continue to regard me as having passed on. I will not be returning on any regular basis. What I ask of each of you is the same thing I asked when I was still here: take care of Sumeru, and support Nahida in leading it well."
Naphis, who had just finished composing his instincts into something more considered, looked as though there were several things he wanted to say at once. He managed to hold most of them back.
Alhaitham, reading the room with the efficiency that made him difficult to surprise, leaned forward slightly.
"Then , may I ask , will you be residing in Ryen's world permanently? Under ordinary circumstances, you would not be leaving it?"
Buer turned her gaze to him, and a small smile found its way to her expression.
"You are perceptive. Nahida is fortunate to have you beside her."
"Thank you for the assessment, Greater Lord Rukkhadevata."
She gave a slight nod at the implicit question.
"Yes. That is broadly accurate. There are objective reasons why I cannot remain in Teyvat for any extended period , reasons that relate to Irminsul's health, and to Teyvat's stability."
She paused.
"It is not a sacrifice I am making under protest. It is the right outcome for Sumeru, and for everyone here. I ask you to accept it as such."
Alhaitham held her gaze for a moment, considering.
"Can we know the reason?"
"There are many practical constraints involved," Buer said simply, her tone warm but without elaboration. "What I can tell you is that it is not a choice made for my sake. It is made for Sumeru's. And for all of Teyvat."
She left it there.