The spatial passage deposited everyone into Liyue in the same instant it had departed Sumeru. No lag, no disorientation, no residual nausea from the crossing.
Lumine looked around with open appreciation.
"The Imaginary Energy really is something. Something that operates at the absolute peak of the Tree-and-Sea universe, "
"Don't say absolute peak," Ryen said, pleasantly. "Say: is there anything in the Tree-and-Sea universe that Imaginary Energy cannot do?"
Lumine scratched her head, face innocent.
"Well, is there?"
He spread his hands.
"Time, for one. I cannot manipulate time. Not with the quantity I currently hold." He paused. "Although that is a limitation of supply rather than category. For the Imaginary Tree itself, time is less a force and more a book, something to open to any page at will, past, present, or future, as the occasion demands."
He did not add that even his current amount was not entirely without time-adjacent effects. Over in what he privately thought of as that rattletrap Honkai universe, Welt Joyce had wielded far less Imaginary Energy than Ryen now held, and the man had still managed to produce black holes with it, gravitational lensing sufficient to locally distort the flow of time. A black hole was not time manipulation in the Imaginary Tree's sense, but it was not nothing either. Still, he held to his standard: if you could not navigate the timeline freely, you had not mastered time. Everything else was physics with extra steps.
Lumine had sidled up to him while he was thinking and reattached herself to his arm with the expression of someone who has rehearsed a transition.
"Ryen," she said, in the voice that announced she was about to ask for something, "you know I am always on your side. I am extremely supportive and cooperative and I listen to everything you say."
"Noted."
"And since you can now create Gnoses at will, and the Void Gnosis would technically cost you very little, "
"How you perform," he said, "is how you are rewarded."
Lumine's face stiffened slightly.
"That is so miserly! You have unlimited Gnosis production now, it is not as though you lose anything meaningful by giving me one! And I am not just anyone, I am, "
"If you were serious about wanting it," he said, perfectly amiably, "you would already have made a case I could not dismiss. You are trying to get something for nothing, and I am pointing out that the Void Gnosis is not nothing."
He held it up for her to consider.
"This thing, used correctly, is sufficient to put someone in a position to challenge the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles directly. The exchange rate matters. I am not being stingy, I am being reasonable."
"I also have a Master-tier Staff," he added, in the same tone, "which I mention only because I would not give you that either."
Lumine's expression said she had calculated and lost.
"Fine!" she said, with the energy of someone abandoning one argument to win a different one. "What if I, what about the Master-tier Staff? Could I have that?"
"Under no circumstances. It is extremely impressive-looking and I enjoy having it."
She gave up on that angle and glared at him.
"You are completely insufferable."
"You were told the terms."
"The terms are, !" She made a sound that was not quite a word. Then, after a moment: "Fine. Then I want it on record that you are the most difficult person in any world."
"Record noted."
He pushed her face gently away from his with two fingers.
"Though," he added, in a tone that had dropped just low enough to serve another purpose, "since you asked about washing yourself clean and showing up at my door, the offer stands. I did say you were appealing."
Lumine went immediately red, which she covered by turning away at speed.
"You are a menace!"
From the side, Yae Miko had been watching this exchange with the serene amusement of a connoisseur. The moment Lumine vacated the position, she took Ryen's arm in a smooth motion and looked up at him with the expression of someone who has decided to approach the same problem more intelligently.
"I did mention," she said, conversationally, "that I have been very diligent lately."
"You did."
"And I believe I also mentioned, " she tilted her head, voice dropping, "that according to certain texts I have been studying, I am a treasure. One you would certainly appreciate."
Ryen processed this, correctly identified the look in her eyes as approximately eighty percent genuine and twenty percent calculated mischief designed to see exactly how he would respond, and arrived at the most direct answer.
"Even if you were not a treasure, which you are, you would be someone I liked regardless. You are a small fox and that is sufficient on its own merits."
Yae Miko blinked.
This was not the response she had prepared for.
It was also, she noted with mild irritation, impossible to argue with.
"Hmph." She settled her head against his shoulder with the satisfaction of someone who has technically lost an exchange and is choosing not to acknowledge this. "That is barely acceptable."
"I will endeavour to do better."
Ganyu and the others watched this from their respective positions with the collective expression of people who have long since accommodated themselves to a specific type of ongoing situation. The man attracted people the way certain flowering trees attract insects, not through any deliberate effort, simply through the aggregate effect of being consistently what he was. Yae Miko's timeline was, if anything, the most compressed version of a pattern everyone had already seen play out. The only question had ever been when, and that question had apparently resolved itself.
Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to.
The commotion of the return brought Dashi and the other Adepti over from their various nearby locations in short order. Greetings were exchanged with the casual warmth of people who had been absent for a week and were not being dramatic about it.
"Anything happen while we were gone?" Ryen asked.
Dashi considered the question properly before answering.
"The MC World has been running normally. I checked yesterday, everything looked fine." A pause, with the expression of someone producing a secondary item from the same report. "One other thing, though. In the past seven days, roughly three hundred people have died."
A beat.
Alhaitham, who had not been expecting this and had immediately begun recalculating his assessment of the MC World's danger level, felt the weight of three hundred deaths land with considerable effect.
Three hundred deaths in a week. In a world they were about to send fifteen hundred soldiers into. He was already running through what additional preparation would be required,
"Bed Wars practice, right?" Ryen said. "And the other competitive modes. I figured. The Five-Nation tournament is coming up and everyone wants to be ready."
Dashi scratched the back of his head, an expression of mild confirmation.
"That is exactly what it was. All PvP minigames, no deaths from exploration or extraction. They burned through a fair number of Totems of Undying, but I did not think it warranted a report."
"It doesn't." Ryen waved it off. "Totem production is running above a thousand units per day. Three hundred deaths across seven days of practice is well within acceptable parameters."
Alhaitham revised his threat assessment downward and filed the information about competitive modes under a separate category from operational risk.
"We are heading into the MC World now," Ryen continued. "Coming?"
Dashi shook his head, something minor occupying his expression.
"Liyue still has a small matter to deal with. We will join tomorrow."
"What matter?"
"The Abyss Order." Dashi let the words out with the particular quality of something that has been slightly inconvenient rather than actually alarming. "Specifically, some Abyss Lectors. They have been appearing near Liyue periodically, never doing anything, not causing trouble. They seem to want to communicate something, but the moment any of us approach, they make a polite exit."
Lumine's expression arranged itself into something somewhere between puzzled and exasperated.
"Aether promised me the Order would stay out of Liyue. If he is breaking that, "
"It does not read like hostility," Dashi said. "They have actually intervened against monsters on behalf of Liyue citizens a few times. And when our people approach, they genuinely apologise before leaving. We have mostly been keeping an eye on them rather than confronting them."
Zhongli's eyes had taken on the specific cool quality of someone who has a position on contractual violations regardless of the spirit behind them.
"The contract was clear."
Ryen rolled his eyes with the ease of someone who has navigated Zhongli's relationship with contracts for long enough to have developed a choreography for it.
"Understood, and noted. Next time they appear, send word that I am back. If Aether wants to meet, bring him through." He glanced at Zhongli. "You will get your Geo Punishment. I will make sure the first thing that happens when he walks in is your Geo Punishment. Are we satisfied?"
Zhongli settled, with the specific quality of a retired god who remains exacting about principle and is willing to accept logistical compromise on implementation.
He had, after all, retired. He was, as he occasionally reminded people, no longer in the active management business. He reserved the right to have opinions about contracts while delegating the enforcement to people who were still on the clock.
Ryen was well aware that the contracts Zhongli most aggressively monitored were the ones the two of them had made with each other, petty bets about fishing techniques and house-building competitions, in which the rules were clear, the stakes were minimal, and Ryen violated the terms at least forty percent of the time, specifically because watching Zhongli's face when he could do nothing about it was, by Ryen's private accounting, genuinely worth it.
On actual matters of consequence, every promise Ryen had made regarding Liyue's development, the revival of the Adepti, the restoration of people who had been gone, he had delivered on all of them. In that register, the accounting was clean. He thought of himself, not without some accuracy, as a man who kept his word when the word was worth keeping.
He clapped Dashi on the shoulder, said his goodbyes, and brought the group into the MC World.
The MC World received them with its characteristic visual clarity: a world built from the ground up out of perfect cubes, in which every terrain feature and living thing and physical object was a configuration of those cubes in some arrangement, from the obvious (square trees, flat water surfaces, cubic animals) to the strange (mountains that somehow conveyed grandeur despite being made entirely from stacked rectangles, sunsets that were more beautiful for being rendered in bands of flat colour rather than gradients).
For Ningguang and the others who had been here many times, it had long since passed from strange to familiar. For Buer, Alhaitham, Naphis, and the Sumeru contingent, the effect was the same one it always was on first proper visit: the specific experience of being inside something that should not be beautiful and indisputably is.
Alhaitham stood still for a moment, looking at the immediate landscape. He had been here briefly and under urgent circumstances. This was different, this was looking at the thing rather than through it. The world's structure was not random. The cubes were not an accident. The logic of it was the logic of first principles: take the minimum constituent unit of matter, arrange it, and see what emerges. The results were simultaneously childlike in their simplicity and remarkable in their variety.
He filed this under things he would think about later at significant length.
Naphis was already talking to three other scholars who had apparently been holding research discussions somewhere in the vicinity of the portal entrance, none of which seemed likely to stop for some time.
Ryen looked at the familiar shapes of his world, the villa in the middle distance, the cultivated fields, the structures that had been built and added to over the months, the ongoing evidence that the place was being used and lived in, and felt the specific kind of ease that is associated with arriving somewhere you belong.
"Home," he said, to no one in particular. "Teyvat is beautiful. This is where I am comfortable."
No one took issue with this. Everyone who knew him had accepted it.
"Back to the villa," he said, and led the way.
Makoto had sent a message to Scaramouche while they were still en route. The reply came back almost immediately, a single line saying he was on his way, followed by a longer message from Makoto informing the group that the Twilight Forest team had cleared the Alpha Yeti and was currently looting the surrounding area, with the Snow Queen queued for the following day.
"Full completion estimate?" Ryen asked.
"A week at the outside," Makoto said. "Probably six days."
He nodded. The Twilight Forest run had been running efficiently, a thousand soldiers plus Scaramouche, systematic extraction rather than speed-running, and the progression unlocking in the correct order. The Alpha Yeti's defeat unlocked the Glacier biome and, with it, access to the Snow Queen in the Aurora Palace. After the Snow Queen, the final phase of the Twilight Forest progression would open. The loot from a full clear, across a force that size, would be substantial.
"The Ender Chest?" he asked.
"Scaramouche has it. Priority items, staves, special drops, are coming back separately."
He absorbed this and let it go. The Twilight Forest haul was useful at the margins of what he cared about day-to-day. What he was interested in was the system, not the individual items.
Scaramouche arrived looking as though he had been moving at speed since the message came through, which he had.
He was also holding an Ender Chest, which he opened without ceremony and began listing the contents.
"Collected materials, special drops, Peacock Feather Fan and associated items from the Snowy biome sequence, several staff variants, "
Ryen raised a hand, cutting him off with a grin.
"That can wait. Come here, big shot."
Scaramouche paused, Ender Chest still open in his hands, and looked at Ryen with the expression of someone trying to determine if the informality constitutes an insult.
He had long since decided, privately, that it did not. Not from this particular source. The decision was one he had never announced to anyone.
Ryen reached into the space beside him and produced something.
He held it out.
"Have a look."