Ryen laughed.
"What do you mean, a burden? You will be living in my world , taking care of it, in your own way. As long as you are not the one feeling put-upon, everything else is easy."
Buer pressed her lips together, still turning something over quietly.
"Even so. I have never truly been there before. I am not certain whether what remains of the Forbidden Knowledge , even with the main body severed , might still carry some residual effect that could, "
"Relax."
He shook his head, the same easy confidence that had characterised every conversation about the MC World.
"Whatever the Forbidden Knowledge is, and whatever principles it operates by , none of those principles apply in my world. That place is strict and strange in equal measure, and the one thing everything that enters it has in common is that it follows the world's own rules, regardless of where it came from or what it was before it arrived."
"Nothing goes wrong there. And even if something did, it would not be your responsibility."
Buer held his certainty in her expression for a moment, then let herself accept it. She had no better argument to offer, and he knew his world better than anyone living.
"Sumeru is also not something you need to carry anymore," Ryen added. "Everything is moving. Nahida and Alhaitham have it in hand. Let it go the way Morax and Venti let things go , completely, without reservation. Retire properly. Plant things. Fish. Hunt if you feel restless. Visit people."
He thought for a moment.
"If you genuinely cannot sit still, build something. I made a version of the Sanctuary of Surasthana with Nahida once. You could build your own , the whole city, if you want to. When Sumeru's forces are established enough in the MC World, they can help. In the meantime, it is your time and your space."
He meant every word of it, and it showed. He had always operated on the principle that as long as no one was in danger, the world could absorb whatever anyone chose to do with their time. Klee spent entire days in the MC World with explosives and heavy weaponry, leaving craters where flat ground had been, and his response to this was to applaud and tell her she had worked hard today. The craters could be filled. The landscape was patient. The only genuinely irreplaceable resource was people, and people were doing fine.
The one standing exception , the one category of item he kept as a strategic reserve and handled with something approaching actual caution , was the Wither Storm skull. That particular combination of materials could affect the world's continued existence in ways that required at least nominal management. Everything else was recoverable.
"A truly remarkable world," Buer said, after a quiet moment.
"What I have seen of it through Irminsul's collected memories , it is extraordinary in ways that language reaches for and does not quite hold."
She smiled, then turned to Nahida.
"Then , let us go. Nahida, this one is yours."
Nahida inhaled, steadied herself, and reached for Irminsul.
She had been taught. The principle was simple in the way that things are simple when they are entirely natural: she did not need to find Irminsul because Irminsul was already part of her, the way breathing is part of a living body. All she needed to do was stop doing everything else and let the connection exist.
A passage opened.
It was not the clean, stable corridor that Buer could have produced. It had the quality of something made by someone doing it for the first time , functional, present, but with the particular shimmer of effort at its edges, the structural equivalent of handwriting rather than print.
Nahida looked at it, then at Buer, with the expression of someone who had been told a task was simple and is now holding the evidence that simple and easy are different things.
"I did it. But it is not as steady as you described. It keeps , shifting slightly, "
"It is perfect."
Buer touched the top of her head.
"Your first attempt at connecting with Irminsul, and you made this. We are naturally attuned to the World Tree , it is not a skill we acquire, it is a thing we are. The steadiness will come with repetition."
She turned to the passage and released a thread of her own Dendro-gold light into its structure. The shimmer resolved. The edges settled.
"Shall we all go?" She looked around at the assembled group. "I do not mind the company."
Zhongli inclined his head.
"If it presents no difficulty , I have heard of Irminsul's existence my entire life and never seen it directly. I would like to."
"Irminsul is not fragile," Buer said simply. "It is everything Teyvat has ever been , every memory, every piece of knowledge the world has collected. It is not harmed by being witnessed."
She paused, and her gaze found Lumine with something in it that was harder to read than her usual composure.
"There is a possibility , for some of you , that what you find inside will answer questions you have been holding. There is also a possibility it will produce new ones."
She looked at Lumine for a moment longer.
"In either case , please come."
She stepped into the passage first. Nahida stayed at the threshold, holding the connection, unable to enter while maintaining it from outside. The others followed: Ryen, Zhongli, Makoto, Ei, Guizhong, Venti, and the rest. Some remained outside to keep watch and stay with Nahida.
The transition was brief and disorienting in the particular way of moving between categories of space , not a physical sensation so much as the experience of the previous context simply being absent.
They arrived, and the previous context was entirely absent.
The space inside Irminsul had no architecture in any sense they were accustomed to. There was no floor or ceiling that asserted itself, only a deep blue that pervaded everything , sky and ground and air all the same continuous cobalt luminescence, shot through with currents of flowing light like something between aurora and running water. It was the colour of deep thought. It was the colour of somewhere that had been storing the world's memories since the world had memories to store.
Scattered throughout the space: crystals. Suspended at varying heights and distances, translucent, each one carrying within it something that moved , something that was not quite light and not quite image but was recognisably a record of something that had happened.
The World Tree itself stood at some remove. Even from here, even without approaching, it was unmistakable , and wrong. Its bark was encrusted with the same dense black material they had glimpsed in the memory sequences: not covering the tree so much as consuming it, seeping upward along the trunk in slow, patient waves, as though something with no particular schedule was working its way toward the branches.
The sight of it produced an unease that arrived before the mind had finished processing the image. This was the world's spine. This was Teyvat's memory and its continuity and its claim to coherence. And it was sick in a way that had been building for over a thousand years.
"These crystals are fragments of scattered memory," Buer said, moving ahead of them with the unhurried ease of someone who had spent a great deal of time in this space. "It is possible that some of them hold memories relevant to people present. You may look if you wish."
She glanced back.
"But do not go too deep. The currents here can be absorbing in ways that are difficult to step back from."
Everyone understood this as a practical warning rather than a prohibition. They spread out slightly, drifting toward the crystals with the careful curiosity of people in a place that deserves care.
Guizhong, who had been walking close to Ryen's side, reached out toward one that produced in her something she could not name except as recognition. Her hand made contact.
The memory that flooded back was not unexpected , she had known it might be here , but the knowing and the experiencing were, as always, different. The Guili Plains. The attack on Guizhong's home that had ended with the land that bore her name going quiet. The memory arrived with everything intact: the sounds, the quality of the light, the specific sensation of what it felt like to be present for the end of something.
She stood with it for a moment.
Then stepped back and found Ryen's arm, and held it, and said nothing.
Venti had gone quiet near a different crystal , his expression carrying the particular quality of old loss revisited, something about flags raised in a cold wind on top of a tower that had stood alone for a long time.
Zhongli found a crystal and held its memory with the stillness he brought to everything: four Archons, and a battle that had defined what his tenure as Rex Lapis meant. Something he had carried the weight of since long before most of the people present had existed.
Makoto went still.
The memory in front of her did not need to be touched to be known. The configuration of images contained within the crystal was recognisable from where she stood, and what it contained was Khaenri'ah , the night of the Cataclysm, the divine punishment gathering overhead, the shape of things that she had been part of in the capacity of someone who had no choice in the matter. The only capacity, sometimes, in which the worst things happen.
Ei looked at her sister and did not look away from her.
Makoto stood in front of the memory for a moment longer. Then she moved past it, and the quality of tension in her expression did not shift much, but something in the set of her shoulders told you that she had decided, again, in this moment, to keep going.
Then Makoto stopped.
Her gaze had fallen on a crystal she had not been looking for, and the expression that arrived on her face was something between shock and intent.
"Barnabas!" she called out, the name carrying clearly through the ambient light of Irminsul's interior. "Come look at this."
The name cut through the ambient quiet of everyone's separate encounters and brought attention back to a single point. People drifted closer.
Makoto was looking at the crystal with the careful attention of someone reading something she had not expected to find here.
"This is, " She indicated the images moving within it. "The Doctor's manipulation. The arrangement that drew Scaramouche into the Fatui. And, " her voice tightened slightly ", Dottore's dealings with the Jester."
Buer had turned at the name Barnabas, and now she moved toward the crystal with a different kind of focus , not Irminsul-custodian focus, but the particular attention of a god who has just been handed a piece of information she did not know she was missing.
She invoked the authority that was hers by nature and drew the memory outward from the crystal, expanding it into something that all of them could witness simultaneously.
The memory was not long. What it contained was extensive.
Scaramouche's path into the Fatui, yes , a manipulation that had been evident from its shape even without this confirmation, the specific vectors of it and the hand behind it now made visible. But that was not the part that held the room.
What held the room was elsewhere in the same memory: a conversation between Dottore and the Jester, in which names had been used that had no business being spoken in that context.
Phanes.
The Lunar Princess.
The power of the Light Realm.
The power of the Void Realm.
Most of the people present had some degree of relationship to these terms , enough to understand that they occupied the outermost layer of Teyvat's cosmological architecture, the level at which the world's fundamental nature became the subject rather than the background. Zhongli's brow had drawn together. Venti had gone very still. The Cryo Archon had turned away from everything she had been looking at and was now looking at nothing in particular, with the expression of someone calculating rapidly.
Makoto looked at the Cryo Archon.
"You spoke to them about these things?"
The Cryo Archon's denial arrived without hesitation.
"Never. I have limited knowledge of the Lunar Princess and the Light and Void Realms myself. Even if I had known more, I would not have shared it with people like them."
"Then how," Venti said, quietly and with unusual directness, "did they come to know it? And why does Irminsul have only fragments , why is the record here incomplete?"
The question settled into the space they had been standing in and remained.
Because the answer was in what Buer had said, outside, before they entered , the categories of existence that Irminsul could not fully record. And one of those categories had a name.
"The only kind of being for which Irminsul's record becomes unreliable," Buer said carefully, "is a Descender."
There was a pause.
Lumine's head came up sharply.
"You are not suggesting that I, "
"No one said that," Venti said, quickly. "No one thinks that."
He and Zhongli and Makoto exchanged a glance that was very fast and entirely clear and contained the agreement not to say out loud what each of them was now thinking about what the Jester's faction might have access to that explained the gaps in the record.
Lumine looked between them with the expression of someone who knows that something is being deliberately not said and is not certain whether to be relieved or concerned about that.
"This memory, " Makoto turned to Buer. "Can it be preserved? Taken out of this space?"
Buer considered for a moment, then worked at the crystal with a quiet care , not storing it as it was, but abstracting its content into a form that could exist outside Irminsul without being lost. The process took a minute. What emerged was something that held the memory's essential information in a form that could be held in the physical world.
She handed it to Makoto.
"There is a young man who was deceived badly and at significant cost," Makoto said. "He should know."
Paimon had been circling the edges of this entire exchange with the building frustration of someone watching a conversation happen in a language they technically speak but cannot quite follow fast enough.
"Will someone please, " She planted both hands on her hips. "You are all doing the riddle-person thing. The riddle-person thing is the thing I hate most. What is Phanes? What is the Lunar Princess? What is going on?"
Zhongli shook his head.
"This is not information that benefits you to hold. There are things in Teyvat's deepest history that create more problems the more widely they are known."
Ningguang had been about to say something further. Zhongli had already turned and was walking , with the particular quality of movement of someone who has made a decision about what they are willing to discuss and is relocating the conversation away from that decision.
After a beat, Venti and the others followed.
Ryen had been watching most of this from a comfortable distance.
He had drifted past several crystals, glanced at them without particular investment, and moved on. Teyvat's deep secrets were interesting the way a foreign country's political history was interesting , you could appreciate the texture of it without needing to take it personally. Whatever Phanes and the Lunar Princess and the Light and Void Realms were, none of it had immediate relevance to the MC World, which was the frame through which Ryen filtered most things.
What did have his attention was the tree.
He had felt it from the moment they entered , the same signal he had first detected when Buer guided them through the consciousness-space, the same quality of distress that was not quite sound and not quite frequency, something that existed at the boundary of what could be formally perceived. It was more distinct now, closer, with the directness of something that was addressing him specifically rather than broadcasting generally.
He couldn't parse the actual content of what Irminsul was transmitting. The language was not language. But the quality of it was unmistakable.
Please. Please.
He picked up his pace.
The others, watching him move with sudden purpose toward the tree, followed without asking why. If Ryen was going somewhere, that was reason enough to go there.
They arrived at the base of Irminsul. The contamination was worse up close , the black material dense and active in a way that produced a physical response in everyone present, a cold crawling sensation that came from the part of the body that handles warnings rather than analysis. Buer raised a hand, stopping the group before the contamination's outer radius.
"This is close enough. The Forbidden Knowledge will not discriminate at this distance , anyone here could be affected."
The group held its position without argument. What they were feeling was answer enough for why.
Makoto looked at the tree, then at Buer. Her voice was quiet.
"You spent all those years facing this."
Buer said nothing for a moment. Then, simply:
"It was my purpose."
"It was too much for one person to carry alone."
"It was what was needed."
Zhongli exhaled , a sound that was not quite a sigh, carrying the particular weight of one ancient being looking at what another ancient being had endured and finding nothing adequate to say about it.
Ryen had not stopped walking.
He crossed the distance that Buer had marked as the boundary. The others' awareness of this arrived in the same instant , a collective inhalation, Buer's voice rising with the urgency of someone who knows exactly what she is warning against:
"Ryen , do not approach further, that is–"
He looked back with an expression that was entirely untroubled.
"It is not going to hurt me. I can feel it clearly." He turned back toward the tree. "And besides, "
He closed the remaining distance.
His hand reached out. Made contact with the bark of Irminsul.
He was quiet for a moment, holding the connection, while the group watched him from the position they had been told not to advance past.
Then, softly:
"It is asking me for help."