Seven days passed before anyone had fully registered that they had started.
The Festival of the Flower Goddess receded, and with it the particular elevated brightness that had settled over Sumeru City in its aftermath. The holiday's remaining days ran their course, and then ordinary life resumed , or what passed for ordinary life in a nation that had just, in the space of a single week, changed almost beyond recognition.
Under full mobilisation, Sumeru's progress was moving at a pace that bordered on the improbable.
Ningguang and the others had delivered without hesitation. Every resource the Alliance had committed to Sumeru arrived promptly and at cost price , a cost so low, given the quantities involved, that the economic character of the exchange was closer to a donation than a purchase. Nobody complained. The arrangement served everyone, and everyone understood this.
The most immediately needed resources were soil and saplings. Sumeru did not yet have a resident workforce capable of managing the full scope of the desert transformation , even once people were in place, learning the land would take time , but the transformation itself could not wait for that. Every day of delay was a day the desert remained desert. The materials had to arrive and be put to use while the planning caught up.
This meant that the four partner nations made a great deal of Mora in those seven days. Liyue and Mondstadt took it in stride , both were already past the point where individual revenue windfalls registered as particularly significant. For Inazuma and Snezhnaya, the calculation was different. For Inazuma especially, the combined revenue from Sumeru's purchases ran into the tens of billions of Mora, and that sum, transferred directly into the national treasury, freed up projects that had been stalled for lack of funds and quietly resolved a pressure that had been building since before the war's end.
Kamisato Ayato had written three letters in seven days. All three were addressed to Makoto, and all three were optimistic in register and specific in content. Inazuma, he reported, was stabilising faster than projected. Revenue was flowing. Reconstruction was moving. The mood among ordinary citizens had shifted from cautious to genuinely hopeful.
He also mentioned, in each letter, and with the diplomatic indirectness of someone making a request they do not want to make directly, that he would very much like to enter the MC World and begin contributing to the Alliance's operations there.
Makoto read all three letters and concluded that the situation was now stable enough to allow it. She sent word back: proceed to Liyue with a small team and wait there.
Inazuma's representation in the MC World's high-end operations had always been thin. Ei and Kujou Sara handled military matters. Sangonomiya Kokomi and Makoto managed domestic coordination. Kamisato Ayaka covered administrative matters in Liyue's orbit.
Yae Miko was technically listed under Inazuma's active contributors. In practice, she had been largely occupied with other things. Makoto had decided, some time ago, not to count on her for operational planning.
More hands were needed, and Mondstadt had already sent a second round of personnel.
Snezhnaya remained the difficult case.
Since the Doctor's most dangerous operative had been removed, the reports coming back from the Rooster , one of the Harbingers who had remained in contact with the Alliance's interests , described a Snezhnayan situation that was becoming increasingly unstable and difficult to read. The Jester's faction had moved decisively into the resulting vacuum, and the pressure on the Rooster and those aligned with him was intensifying.
The Cryo Archon was angry. She was angry every day, and the anger was justified, and she could not act on it. Returning to Snezhnaya while the situation was at its most volatile was exactly what the Jester and his people wanted , her involvement would not stabilise things, it would complicate them further and hand her opponents precisely the political leverage they were looking for. A crisis in which the Archon herself intervened directly was a crisis that became about the Archon.
So she waited. And she was angry about waiting.
None of this touched Sumeru directly. In Sumeru, the days had taken on a quality that the people living them were not quite sure how to describe , something close to the feeling of a dream in which everything is going right and you have not yet woken up to find out otherwise.
Every morning, Blight patients arrived at the medicine stalls in steady streams. They drank their milk. They walked out healthy. This had been happening for days, and it had not become less remarkable with repetition. The stalls ran out of milk before they ran out of patients; the milk was restocked; the patients came back the next day; they were cured. It was that simple, and the simplicity of it, the complete absence of ceremony or complexity, was somehow the most disorienting part.
Sumeru had not been without illness for five hundred years. The Withering had been background reality, a permanent condition of the land, something you planned around the way you planned around weather. Now it was simply not there, and the absence felt like a weight that people had not known they were carrying until the moment they put it down.
The Sky-Tree at the Akademiya plaza drew worshippers every morning without coordination or announcement. People came, left garlands, stood for a moment, and went about their days. The numbers grew every day. Nahida, as the visible center around which all of this was converging, had reached a depth of popular affection in Sumeru that functioned less like political support and more like a communal reflex. The idea of criticising her had become, for most of Sumeru's citizens, so far outside normal consideration that it was functionally unthinkable.
The desert was changing visibly. Aaru Village, which had already received a third of its planned soil replacement and its first generation of MC World saplings, now looked, from altitude, like something that had no business being in the middle of a desert. The green was startling. Residents who had lived their entire lives in sand and dust walked past their own fields and gardens and found themselves stopping to look at them. The trees grew without being watered. The crops matured in two to three days. None of this was normal, and none of the village's people cared in the slightest that it wasn't normal, because the alternative was normal, and normal had meant hungry.
Aaru Village's food production was no longer sufficient only for its own residents. It was distributing surplus to nearby desert communities, and those communities had begun sending people to join the village's expanded population. Several thousand new residents in a week. The desert folk were rational in the way that people who have had to be are rational: show them a better life, and they will come.
The integration that the Akademiya had nearly tried to force through artificial policy was happening anyway, at its own pace, without being instructed to. Desert folk and rainforest folk were working the same land, building the same structures, eating food from the same fields. They were not doing this because someone had told them to be unified. They were doing it because the work required hands and the hands were there. Alhaitham observed this and filed it away as confirmation of something he had already suspected. You did not engineer social cohesion. You created conditions in which it could grow, and then you let it.
The military reforms proceeded alongside everything else. Nahida had drawn three thousand of the best fighters from both the Corps of Thirty and the Gilded Brigade, formed them into a new unified force, and equipped them through Alliance purchasing channels: enchanted weapons, alchemical elixirs, and a hundred wolves from Liyue's kennels. The result was not comparable to the Dragon-Rider Corps or the alchemical infantry that Liyue and Mondstadt had been fielding for months, but it was a real military force , the first Sumeru had possessed that answered to a god rather than to a council of scholars, and the first that included soldiers from both halves of the nation under the same chain of command.
Sumeru still had no resident presence in the MC World, no bases, no extraction operations of its own. Every resource it consumed was purchased from partners at cost. That would change eventually , the infrastructure and personnel would arrive, and eventually Sumeru would be extracting and producing on its own terms. But the trajectory was established, and the momentum was real. In seven days, the nation had moved from isolated and ill to connected and functional.
The price of all this prosperity was paid, as it often is, by someone specific.
Azar's daily schedule had settled into a pattern that reflected the comprehensive nature of Sumeru's institutional memory and the inventiveness that comes from a citizenry with a strong academic tradition. The queue to participate was long and well-organised. Early entrants had favoured straightforward approaches. As the week progressed and the early approaches became passé, the methods had evolved considerably. Alchemical elixirs, it turned out, made extended sessions practical in a way they had not previously been. You could not kill the man. You could, therefore, explore the full range of what discomfort was possible, which Sumeru's people were doing with the systematic thoroughness of scholars investigating a new field of inquiry.
The former Grand Sage's predecessors, who had the good fortune of being already dead, had been located, disinterred, and put in the stocks as symbolic participants. The Sumeru people were nothing if not thorough.
Nobody wanted to intercede on Azar's behalf. The argument for intercession , that he was, after all, one human being, however malign , ran directly into the argument against it, which was: five hundred years. Nahida. The Blight. The children who had grown up in the Withering. The desert folk who had eaten sand while the Akademiya's scholars wrote papers about why it was better that way. Five hundred years of deliberate choices made by one person, every one of them in the direction of harm. The sympathy available was limited.
Today, the group was leaving Sumeru.
They would rest briefly in Liyue, then travel to Inazuma. After Inazuma, the return to Liyue would coincide with the Lantern Rite.
In the Sanctuary of Surasthana, everyone had gathered. Buer stood close to Nahida, speaking quietly, patiently, going through the last things she needed Nahida to understand before the separation became real.
"Both of us are incarnations of the World Tree. The connection between us and Irminsul runs deeper than it does for any other god , it is not something you reach for, it is something you simply are. You only need to quiet your mind and let yourself feel it."
"Irminsul is Teyvat's foundation. It is the world's memory and consciousness made real , it is everywhere at once. Our responsibility does not begin and end with leading Sumeru. It extends to watching over Irminsul, keeping it clean and whole."
"From this point forward, that responsibility belongs to you. Do you understand, Nahida?"
Nahida nodded with the precise, concentrated attention of someone committing something to permanent memory.
"I understand. I will."
Buer smiled and touched the top of Nahida's head lightly.
Across the room, Ryen had Guizhong against his side, his voice low enough that only she could hear it, which was producing intermittent colour in her face and a periodic impact from her fist against his arm that she clearly considered more forceful than it was. Their relationship had, at some point in the past week, transitioned from a well-kept secret to something that everyone had quietly acknowledged without feeling the need to make a formal occasion of it. This had happened partly because Venti had encountered Ryen and Guizhong in circumstances that left limited room for alternate explanation, and had responded with the breezy unshockability of someone who had been watching people be people for two thousand years.
After that, Ryen had concluded that concealment was more effort than it was worth.
Buer turned from Nahida and looked across the room.
"I am ready, Ryen. Shall we go?"
He raised an eyebrow.
"Not going to take one more look at Sumeru? Once we handle this , you cannot come back. Not until the Forbidden Knowledge is resolved."
Buer looked down at Nahida, one hand still resting lightly where it had been.
"I have already committed every part of Sumeru to memory. There is nothing I would see now that I do not already carry."
She lifted her hand.
"I trust that Nahida will take care of Sumeru. I trust her completely." She paused. "As Morax once said , I have walked this path long enough. It is time to rest."
She turned to Ryen.
"I do not intend to be a burden in your world. I will find a way to be useful."
Ryen laughed , not at her, but with the easy warmth of someone who considers an unnecessary apology slightly endearing.
"Come to my world. Build your Sumeru. Learn the system. Figure out what you want to do with unlimited time and a world that resets." He nodded toward the gathering group. "The trouble with living in my world is that you will never be short of things to do."
He turned to the room.
"Let's go."
They did not leave immediately.
There was one thing left to do in Teyvat before Buer crossed into the MC World for the last time.
They arrived at Irminsul not through the Sanctuary's consciousness-space, but in the world itself , at the place where the World Tree's presence could be felt in the land, where the roots ran deep enough that standing on the earth above them was standing on something ancient in a way that most of the world's geography was not.
The sky above held the red tinge that Irminsul's contamination produced at the edges , not overwhelming, not the full blood-colour of the memory sequence, but present. A permanent bruise at the world's ceiling.
Buer stood at the center of it and gathered herself.
The process she had described was slow and deliberate: drawing the Forbidden Knowledge from its dispersal throughout her memory, pulling it inward from every place it had settled over a thousand years, concentrating it from diffuse contamination into something that had a location, a shape, a center of gravity.
The others stood back. This was not something that could be assisted.
Gradually, the dispersal condensed. The thing that had been a pervasive taint distributed throughout Buer's existence began to move , not quickly, not violently, but with the steady inexorability of water finding its lowest point. It gathered. It took up residence in a single place.
And then it had a form.
Not a dramatic form. It did not announce itself or perform. It was simply a mass , dense and wrong and present in the way that certain things are present, a wrongness that the body registered before the mind had finished processing it. Black, but a black that was not absence of light so much as absence of the particular quality that made things feel like they belonged to the world.
Ryen looked at it.
He drew the Sword of Cosmic Dominion.
It arrived in his hand as it always did , without ceremony, without weight beyond its actual weight, the sword that had no opinion about what it was asked to cut.
"Everything that exists in form can be severed," he said , not to the others, not to Buer, simply placing the statement in the air as a matter of precision. "A concept given form is still a form."
He looked at the mass of Forbidden Knowledge that Buer had consolidated.
"You are not an exception."
He moved.
The stroke was not long. It was not dramatic. It was the particular economy of motion of someone who does not need to wind up because the instrument in their hand has already done the necessary work. The Sword of Cosmic Dominion passed through the consolidated Forbidden Knowledge , through its form, through its substance, through the principle of its continued existence , and the cut was clean in the way that things are clean when the cutting instrument is adequate to the task.
The mass did not shatter. It did not explode or dissipate in a shower of light. It simply stopped having coherence. One moment it was there; in the next moment, what remained was something that had lost the particular quality that had made it a problem, and was now merely the residue of something that no longer held.
The red tinge at the edges of the sky did not vanish dramatically. It faded, the way a bruise fades , not in an instant, but with the unmistakable character of something that is concluding rather than merely pausing.
Buer stood where she had been standing. She was very still.
She raised one hand and looked at it , not with the expression of someone checking for injury, but with the expression of someone taking inventory of something they have carried for so long that they have forgotten what it felt like to put it down.
She was quiet for a long moment.
Then she lowered her hand and turned to face them.