Back in the Sanctuary of Surasthana, Nahida had been holding the connection to Irminsul's passage for the entire duration of the group's absence.
The moment she heard footsteps in the corridor, she let the passage close, and was moving before anyone had fully entered the room. She crossed the distance in a few quick steps, threw herself at Ryen, and began checking him over with the focused thoroughness of someone who has been worried and is not going to stop until the worry has been refuted by direct inspection.
"Ryen, are you alright?"
She was looking at him the way she had looked at the passage when it had briefly flickered: as if a change in appearance would tell her something that words might not.
Something had happened while they were inside. She had felt it, not precisely, not with the clarity of information, but as a quality in her chest, a sudden wrong sensation, like a step onto ground that turned out not to be there. The kind of feeling that happened when something nearby was doing something dangerous.
She had not let go of the passage. She had stayed outside, maintained the connection, and been afraid.
"What could possibly be wrong with me?" Ryen looked genuinely puzzled by the degree of alarm, and reached over to ruffle her hair. "Are you the one who is alright? You have been holding that connection by yourself this entire time."
Nahida ran one more check, eyes, expression, any visible change in the quality of his presence, and, finding nothing she could point to, let herself breathe.
"The World Tree and I are closely attuned. Holding the passage was not difficult." A pause. "But just now I was frightened. Are you certain nothing happened?"
Before Ryen could frame his answer, Yae Miko intervened from behind him with the expression of someone who has been waiting for permission to comment.
"Nothing happened to him, specifically." She rubbed one ear with the air of someone who has just emerged from an unpleasant experience and is marking the contrast. "If anything, he walked away considerably better off. The same cannot be said for the rest of us, who went in expecting a pleasant tour and came out having been briefly flattened by the fundamental architecture of the universe."
She gave Nahida a look of rehearsed pathos.
"We suffered."
Nahida, whose attention had been entirely on Ryen, looked at Yae Miko. Then looked back at Ryen. Her expression rearranged itself around the question.
Ryen raised a hand before the follow-up question could arrive.
"Her suffering was real, though brief. More importantly, I am fine. More than fine."
He settled into one of the Sanctuary's chairs and gave the room a short, serviceable summary of the Imaginary Energy situation: what it was, where it came from, why it had been beyond anyone in Teyvat's ability to handle, and why the same applied to him in reverse. He left out the deeper cosmological theorising and the extended Q&A with Irminsul. The relevant facts were simple enough to transmit without the supporting architecture.
Nahida processed this with the focused attention she brought to things she intended to understand completely. When he finished, she held it for a moment, then said:
"So, you have absorbed this Imaginary Energy. And now you can create Gnoses at will, and in principle create Archons."
She looked up at him. "You are effectively omnipotent?"
"That is too strong a claim." He shook his head, the amusement behind it genuine rather than performed. "Imaginary Energy is a remarkable force, for anyone in the Tree-and-Sea universe, it would represent an opportunity beyond any other available to them. But I am not the Imaginary Tree itself. I have a fragment of its force, not its totality. The distinction matters."
He thought for a moment about how to make this useful rather than abstract.
"What it gives me is fullness. Range. The ability to do things in categories I previously had no access to. It is not primarily about raw power, my real ceiling has always been my native strength and the Sword of Cosmic Dominion, and that has not changed. What Imaginary Energy adds is everything surrounding that core: the breadth of what is available to me, the ability to reach into domains I was previously locked out of."
He looked around at the expectant faces.
"For instance, I can fly."
A silence.
The kind of silence that forms when a room has been building toward a significant revelation and received something it did not expect.
Alhaitham, who had been listening with the particular quality of attention he gave to things he intended to fully understand, blinked.
Zhongli, who was familiar enough with Ryen's approach to things not to be entirely surprised by this, absorbed it with the muted patience of long acquaintance.
Ningguang looked at Ryen. Then at the space where a more dramatic conclusion might have been standing. Then back at Ryen.
"I can phase out of physical existence," Ryen continued, in the tone of someone listing features. "I can travel through the Sea of Quanta, enter the space between worlds and navigate through it. I can manipulate elements that Teyvat has no name for. I can create Gnoses and, in the right conditions, seed the conditions for an Archon to form."
He paused.
"But the flight is the part that matters most to me personally."
For those who had known Ryen long enough, this statement landed without surprise. It settled, correctly, into the established pattern of a man who processed enormous developments through the lens of what they meant for his daily quality of life.
For Alhaitham and the others who had not spent months in his company, the experience was more novel.
"He is not joking," someone helpfully offered from the back of the room.
"He is genuinely that practical," someone else confirmed.
"This is, in fact, exactly what he is like."
"You get used to it."
Ryen smiled.
"Battle applications are real, but limited by the amount of Imaginary Energy I currently have. What I absorbed from Irminsul is not nothing, but measured against the Imaginary Tree itself, it is vanishingly small. I can do meaningful things with it. I am not going to rewrite the architecture of reality." He spread one hand. "What I can do is operate more completely. Fill in the gaps. The energy functions like a module, it recovers over time, which means I do not need to use it conservatively, but I cannot burn through it without limit."
"You said," Zhongli said, from the position he had settled into near the window, his voice carrying the deliberate quality of a question with a known answer being verified rather than asked, "that this force could theoretically produce an Archon."
"In the right conditions."
"And the conditions would be, "
"A specific elemental alignment, the appropriate vessel, and enough energy directed toward the right intent." He tilted his head. "The force provides the authority from which an Archon can grow, the seat of the law. The being develops from there. I cannot manufacture the being itself. I can create the position."
"Like constructing a throne," Zhongli said. "Rather than manufacturing the ruler."
"Exactly."
Buer, who had been listening with the specific quality of a deity to whom the cosmological architecture of this conversation was both personally relevant and philosophically interesting, spoke quietly.
"So the Imaginary Energy that had been mapped onto me, the contamination that I have carried since the incident with King Deshret, now that it has been absorbed by you, it is no longer present in my body. Is that correct?"
"That is what the theory suggests." He looked at her directly. "Whether any residual traces require attention, I cannot be certain without more information. But the main contamination is gone."
Alhaitham had been running the implications quietly, and they had arrived at their destination.
"Then Greater Lord Rukkhadevata could remain in Teyvat," he said. Not a challenge, a clean, precise observation from someone who valued precision. "If the Imaginary Energy is no longer within her, the connection through which it was contaminating Irminsul would no longer exist. She could stay."
Naphis and several of the other scholars turned toward Buer with the expression of people who have been trying not to want something and have just been given permission to want it.
Nahida had been five hundred years old for a very short time and had already become clearly and unmistakably the God of Sumeru, every resource Ryen had brought, every transformation underway in the desert, every Blight patient walking out of a medicine stall healthy, all of it bore her name in the minds of the people it had reached. She was doing the work, and she was doing it well, and the people of Sumeru had responded accordingly.
But two Archons were better than one, in the straightforward arithmetic of a nation that had been without any for five hundred years. And the older of those two was still here, still present, still capable.
The appeal was honest, and nobody in the room was pretending it wasn't.
Buer looked at the expressions around her with the composed warmth of someone who understood what was being hoped for and was not going to let the hope go unanswered without being clear about it.
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she shook her head, gently.
"Morax said something when he stepped down, and I have thought about it often since then." She looked around the room. "He said: once you have left, leave completely. The work is not yours anymore. Give it over fully."
"Sumeru is Nahida's. She is managing it well. I can see that clearly."
She turned toward the waiting faces of the Akademiya's scholars, Naphis, who looked as though he had something to say and was holding it with effort; Alhaitham, who had expressed his observation and was now waiting; the others who had not spoken but whose hopes were visible.
"The honest reason is not only principle," she said, and her voice carried the straightforwardness of a god who has decided that the people in front of her deserve it. "The MC World is the most extraordinary place I have ever encountered, even counting the second I spent inside it. I have the whole of Irminsul's memory and it is still not the same as standing there."
The faint trace of something that was not quite wistfulness but was adjacent to it moved through her expression and was replaced by something more settled.
"I am a Goddess of Wisdom. The MC World, for a Goddess of Wisdom, is the single most interesting place in any world I have ever had access to. It has no end. It has no ceiling. It produces new things and then it resets and produces new things again."
She folded her hands.
"I have spent three thousand years managing responsibilities. I am going to spend the next stretch of time learning."
The room accepted this. Naphis let his expression arrive at something that was equal parts disappointment and genuine warmth, and nodded.
The scholars and the soldiers both understood that Buer was not abandoning Sumeru. She was choosing to put down the weight she had been carrying since before most of the people alive in Sumeru today had been born, and go somewhere that wanted her attention for entirely different reasons.
"There is one practical note," Ryen said, to the broader group, with the easy tone of someone redirecting a conversation toward logistics. "The Imaginary Energy residual that may still be present in Buer is manageable. If any trace remains and causes a problem, I take one additional trip through whatever address the issue requires and that is the end of it."
He stood, stretching.
"In the meantime, we are done in Sumeru. Irminsul is clean. The Blight and the Withering will resolve on their own timeline now that the source is gone. Buer is coming with us."
He looked around the room.
"Sumeru's forces, fifteen hundred personnel, led by Cyno and Rahman, five days to Liyue. Naphis and Alhaitham joining us directly."
"Yes," Naphis confirmed, with the decisiveness of someone who had already prepared for this answer. "A hundred senior scholars, ready to depart. Sumeru has sufficient stability, Tighnari and the others can hold the domestic work."
Alhaitham nodded once. The expression he wore said that he had seen enough of what the MC World had produced through its secondary effects on Sumeru that he had no remaining uncertainty about whether direct participation would be worth his time.
Ryen nodded, looked around the room once more, then turned to the door.
On the way out, he passed the place where Irminsul's passage had been open, and paused for a moment, not dramatically, not at length, and addressed the air with the tone of a final advisory.
"And to the World Tree, whatever portion of its attention remained accessible through the ambient connection Nahida maintained, he said:
"Stop reaching above your category. I will not always be passing through."
He did not wait for an answer.
He had the spatial passage already forming at his fingertip, the Imaginary Energy running through him with the particular quality of something that belonged there.
He pulled the space open like a zipper drawn through the air, and the passage to Liyue stood ready.
"Come on," he said. "We have been outside long enough. There is a world to develop."