"Ryen, what are you doing? Stop, "
The announcement had landed on everyone like something dropped from a height, and the moment of collective blankness lasted just long enough for the alarm to catch up.
Ganyu was the first to find her voice, and it came out with the particular quality of someone who is trying to remain reasonable in a situation that is testing that effort.
"It is fine." Ryen raised one hand before the concern could fully organise itself. "I know what I am doing. This force has no capacity to harm me , if anything, it is one of the better opportunities I have ever had the luck to encounter."
From further back, Zhongli's voice came without rushing, but with weight.
"Would you explain why?"
"It would take a while to get through properly." Ryen tilted his head, looking for the shortest path through it. "Think of it this way: for every person here, and for every being born in this universe, this force is poison. Absolute poison. Touch it and you are done. But for me , it is the opposite. For me, this is one of the most potent things that has ever been within reach."
He looked at them.
"If I can successfully contain it, I will be able to create Gnoses at will. As many as I choose."
A pause while this processed.
"If I feel generous, I might even create a few Archons to go with them."
He was not exaggerating, and he knew it. The fragment of Imaginary Energy lodged in Irminsul was vanishingly small measured against the Imaginary Tree itself , a single drop drawn from an ocean so vast the ocean barely noticed the loss. But an ocean and a drop were different contexts. What had been negligible to the Tree had been more than sufficient to bring a World Tree to the edge of ruin for a thousand years.
For Ryen's purposes, the quantity was more than adequate.
Imaginary Energy was the fundamental force of the Tree-and-Sea universe. Paths in that universe were congregations of imaginary energy , manifestations of universal philosophical concepts. Gnoses, which in Genshin's cosmological architecture represented the authority over elemental law, were precisely that: concentrated law, concentrated concept, concentrated authority. The connection between Imaginary Energy and the ability to create a Gnosis was not a leap. It was a direct line.
Creating a Gnosis from Imaginary Energy was not conjuring something out of nothing. It was directing the force that had always underpinned those concepts back toward a specific expression of them.
Creating an Archon was the same logic taken further. An Archon was a being whose existence embodied an elemental law. Law originated from Imaginary Energy. Therefore, sufficient Imaginary Energy, shaped with sufficient intentionality, could theoretically produce the foundational conditions for an Archon to exist. Not the being itself , beings developed, they lived, they became , but the seed of the possibility. The authority from which the being could grow.
He had not said any of this aloud. It would have taken longer than he had patience for right now.
What he had said was enough for Zhongli's purposes.
"You are telling us," Zhongli said carefully, "that this is not a danger to you specifically."
"Correct."
"And that the reason for that is your origin , that you come from outside the framework this force operates within."
"Also correct."
Buer had arrived at the same conclusion. She was the Goddess of Wisdom and she had spent the last several minutes processing what Ryen had said in the previous chapter's conversation with Irminsul, and the expression on her face was one of complex, layered understanding arriving all at once.
"So the original plan," she said, working through it as she spoke, "in which I connected myself to the Imaginary Energy, and my deletion from existence carried it with me , that would not have worked. Even if the deletion succeeded, the Imaginary Energy itself would not have gone with it."
"Obviously." Ryen turned briefly to look at her. "You are a being born of this universe. If you had been able to truly bind yourself to the Imaginary Tree's fundamental force , to claim it, to merge with it fully , you would have transcended every category that exists within the Tree-and-Sea framework. You would have been more than a god. You would have been the universe's function itself."
He shrugged.
"The deletion of your existence might have carried away the Imaginary Energy's current host , you , but the force does not cease to exist because its vessel is removed. It would have dispersed back into Irminsul and the problem would have remained. Perhaps slower. Perhaps differently distributed. But present."
"Then Otto's sacrifice, and the logic that he, "
"Does not apply here either," Ryen said. "Completely different mechanism. Otto worked within the Tree-and-Sea framework to change outcomes within the Tree-and-Sea framework. That logic operates on internal rules. What I am doing does not."
He turned back to Irminsul.
"The principle of the Imaginary Tree is supreme within its own universe , nothing born of the Tree and Sea can defy it. But I am not born of it. I am not subject to it. I am, from the Imaginary Tree's perspective, a piece of context that exists entirely outside its jurisdiction."
"Imagine an absolute law," he said, "that governs every particle, every force, every being within a given space , and then imagine introducing something from outside that space, something that was never written into the law in the first place. The law has no category for it. The law cannot process it. The law simply does not apply."
He glanced at the mass of Imaginary Energy that had been circling his presence since he first touched the bark.
"And that," he said, "is why this force has not been able to touch me. It is not that I am immune to it. It is that I am not part of the system it belongs to, and a force that governs a system does not naturally act on something outside that system."
A silence settled over the group as this sank in.
It was a silence with a specific quality: the quality of people who have been given an answer that is correct and that also produces, as a secondary effect, the faint unsettling awareness that the person who gave it casually treats the architecture of cosmological law as a practical inconvenience to be reasoned around.
Lisa looked at the gathering darkness of the Imaginary Energy near Ryen's hand, then at Ryen, and said nothing for a moment.
"So," she said finally. "You are going to absorb it."
"I have been thinking about how," he said. "And I have arrived at a conclusion."
He extended his hand toward the bark of Irminsul once more.
In his mind, he addressed the System in the tone of someone who has decided the question and now needs the implementation.
"System. Give me a way to contain this."
The System was quiet for a moment. Then:
Ding. Place your hand on the World Tree.
"I already did that. The Imaginary Energy is repelling me."
Ding. Place your hand on the World Tree. Everything else is the System's responsibility.
Ryen looked at the bark. Then he looked at the dark mass circling at a careful distance.
Something in his expression shifted , the particular expression of someone who has just been told not to worry about a thing they were worrying about, by an entity that has never once been wrong about such assurances.
"I like this about you," he said, to the System, in the tone of someone meaning it. "This exact quality. Supremely confident, no unnecessary explanation. Genuinely decent."
He pressed his palm against the bark of Irminsul.
The response was not gradual.
The force that arrived had the character of a sudden reversal , like a current that had been flowing in one direction abruptly finding a drain. The Imaginary Energy that had been holding its perimeter around Ryen's proximity did not flee. It rushed. It moved toward him the way fluid moves toward a vacuum, which is to say: completely, immediately, without hesitation, because physics , or whatever equivalent governed cosmological forces , left no room for the movement to be anything other than what it was.
The bark of Irminsul trembled.
What had been caked dense against the wood , a thousand years of accumulated presence, the slow patient contamination that had resisted every attempt at removal , began to flow. Not in pieces. In continuity. It moved upward from the roots, outward from the bark, through the air toward the point of contact at Ryen's palm, and it did not stop.
Within moments, the exterior of Irminsul's trunk was clean.
It was not over.
From within the tree , from the deep places where the contamination had been longest, where it had wound around the internal structure of the World Tree in the way that old damage winds into the grain of old wood , the second wave came. This one was different. It did not have the same quality as the surface contamination. It had the quality of something that had existed for longer, settled deeper, become more itself.
The aura that accompanied it arrived without fanfare, and everyone in the vicinity felt it in the same instant.
There was no dramatic announcement. There was only the sudden complete conviction, arriving in the body before the mind could form a coherent response to it, that something absolute was present , something that stood at the root of everything, that preceded law itself, that had no relationship with being defied or endured or adjusted to, because it did not operate at a level where those concepts had traction.
Zhongli's legs did not hold him. He caught himself on one hand against the ground, and the expression on his face was not one that anyone who knew Zhongli well had ever seen before: something between reverence and the specific species of vertigo that comes from suddenly perceiving the full scale of something you had believed you understood.
Venti made it slightly further before the same thing happened to him.
The Adepti nearby reached instinctively for their companions.
Even Lumine, who was a Descender and therefore constitutionally unusual, felt the weight of it like standing under water rather than air.
"Do not resist it." Ryen's voice came from the direction of the tree, even and precise, apparently unaffected. "Do not try to push back against it. That will make it worse , you were born within this universe, and this is the force that underpins the existence of everything in it, including you. Resistance only amplifies the weight."
He did not look back. His palm was still against the bark, the current of Imaginary Energy still flowing through him.
"Accept it. Tell yourself what is true: you are children of the Tree. The Tree is above all things. The Tree is the origin and the ending. It is what you were made from. You are not its equal and there is nothing to fear in that."
He paused.
"Give yourself the same security you give to gravity. You do not fear falling because you accept that the ground is there. Accept this the same way."
The instruction was not mystical. It was practical in the way that breathing techniques are practical , not because they change the situation, but because they change the body's response to the situation, which changes what the situation can do to the body.
One by one, the people behind him closed their eyes.
The resistance dissolved, and what replaced it , in the space where the vertigo and the awe and the raw weight of encountering the absolute foundation of existence had been , was warmth. The specific warmth of something enormous and fundamental and completely without malice recognising that you were part of it, and the part recognising that it belonged.
Like finding the place where you were made, and the place being unchanged, and the place not requiring anything from you except to exist within it.
The fear did not return.
Ryen pulled his hand from the bark.
The last thread of Imaginary Energy followed his palm and was absorbed without remainder.
He stood for a moment and took stock.
"System. Report."
Ding. Imaginary Energy module has been integrated.
The voice was exactly what it always was: flat, informational, perfectly unconcerned. As though integrating a fundamental cosmological force as a new module was a routine system update.
He exhaled, and found the following:
The new force inside him was unlike anything else he carried. Everything else he possessed in the way of power was his own , generated from himself, an extension of what he was. This was different. This was not an extension. This was a separate architecture entirely, operating by different rules, making available categories of action that had not previously been within his reach.
The first thing he noticed was that he could feel order. Not as an abstract concept , as a tangible reality, the way a person with normal senses can feel heat. The underlying structure of things, the way law manifested in form and in the movement of force, was perceptible in a way it had not been before. He was not certain yet what to do with this perception, but it was there.
He raised his hand.
A purple-black energy gathered in his palm , not the bright energy of his native power, something deeper, older, stranger. It moved with a quality of certainty rather than intensity, the way deep water moves compared to surface water.
The form that emerged from it was small and precise.
A Gnosis.
Dense black, the colour of a night sky stripped of every star, the absence not empty but full , a space that contained something rather than containing nothing. It sat in his palm with the particular gravity of something that was genuinely significant in its category.
"A Gnosis." Zhongli had straightened himself from the ground and was looking at the object in Ryen's hand with an expression that suggested that even his ten-thousand-year familiarity with the category of thing he was looking at had not prepared him for this particular encounter with it. "You created one."
"Told you." Ryen felt the consumption of Imaginary Energy that had gone into the production , not trivial, but not concerning. The System had registered this as a module, not a consumable resource. Modules recovered. He did not need to worry about the supply. "The logic is straightforward once you understand what the force actually is."
He turned the Gnosis in his hand once. It caught no light , it absorbed it, and the absorption had a quality of pulling rather than blocking.
"I also said I could create Archons." He turned to Zhongli with a look that was somewhere between demonstration and enjoying the moment. "I was also not exaggerating about that. For the right materials and the right alignment of elements, this force can produce the seed-conditions for an Archon to form. I cannot build the being , beings develop, they live, they become who they are , but I can create the authority from which a being might grow."
"The principles behind that, "
"Later," Ryen said. "Practical demonstration first."
He looked at the Gnosis in his palm.
"Void attribute," he said aloud, turning over the name. "The space between laws. The negative space from which order is defined."
He looked out at the assembled group.
"Does anyone," he said, with the particular quality of someone extending a genuinely interesting offer, "want to be the first Void Archon?"
The silence that followed was not the silence of people who were uninterested.
Lumine, who had been watching the entire sequence of events with the undivided attention of someone determined not to miss anything, crossed the space between them in a few steps and attached herself to his arm with both hands, her expression radiating a quality of sweetness that she turned on at high intensity when she wanted something.
"Ryen," she said, in the voice she used when she was being maximally charming, "you are genuinely the best person in any world. I have always thought this. You know I have always thought this."
"The change of register is noted," Ryen said.
"I simply," Lumine said, with great sincerity, "want to be a Void Archon."
He tapped her forehead with one finger.
"Back to Liyue first. There are things in the other world that need attention." He glanced at Irminsul once more, and the tree that had, a few minutes ago, been encrusted in black contamination, now stood clear and still in the blue light of this space , not entirely healed, the damage of a thousand years not simply reversed by the removal of its cause, but free of it. Alive in a way it had not been.
"Walk," he said to the group. Then, turning back to the tree: "And you , stop reaching for things outside your category. I said it once and I mean it. The ambition to grow is right. The ambition to eat what belongs to something infinitely larger than you , that is how you end up needing to be rescued by someone who just happened to pass through."
He shook his head.
"Remember the lesson."
Irminsul's bark was quiet beneath his retreating hand.
The ancient voice , small and deep and very old , came one last time.
…Thank you, Lord of the Outer Realms.
He did not answer. He walked back to the group.
"Come on," he said. "Liyue."