The Abyss Order's headquarters.
Aether sat on his throne with his eyes closed, regulating his breathing in the way of someone who has a great deal to think about and has found that stillness helps.
To his left: Endis, the Abyss Lector who had brought back the alchemical elixirs from Sumeru, standing in her human form now, restored. To his right: Kanenstaedt, formerly an Abyss Mage, equally restored. Both of them had been among the first. The change in them was visible not just in form but in the quality of how they stood: the particular straightness of people who have been returned to themselves and have not yet stopped being grateful for it.
Below: the assembled ranks of the Abyss Order, the hall full of the movement and low sound of entities coming and going. Not all of them had recovered their human forms yet. Those who had not watched Endis and Kanenstaedt with the specific hunger of people waiting for their turn.
The elixirs worked. They had confirmed this. The problem was access.
Sumeru had turned out to be harder to infiltrate than expected. The alchemical elixirs were being distributed according to patient priority, Blight cases first, then public health distribution, and Lesser Lord Kusanali was personally managing the supply. Beyond that, the concentration of Archons and Adepti in the city during and after the festival had made any kind of covert operation into the region essentially suicidal. They had tried anyway. They had gotten very little.
The order Aether had issued following that assessment had produced results that he was still, in retrospect, finding slightly surreal.
Every active Abyss Order presence in Teyvat had been redirected to Liyue. Every operative had been instructed to conduct themselves as model citizens. No hostility. No sabotage. No agenda beyond: make a good impression, and wait for Ryen to return.
The members had complied. Enthusiastically, even. The calculus was simple: this was how they got their humanity back, and that was more important than the Plan, more important than the order's history, more important than anything the Abyss had been working toward for five hundred years.
Helping an old woman across a road in Liyue was, in the arithmetic of personal motivation, straightforwardly worth it.
The only problem had been that Ryen was not in Liyue. He had been in Sumeru, and then he had returned, and now finally,
The transmission had come from Endis, who had been at The Chasm when Dashi appeared, and the transmission was exactly what they had been waiting for.
He had come home.
An Abyss Lector burst through the portal at a pace that was slightly faster than decorum usually allowed, knelt immediately, and delivered the news with the expression of someone who has been holding something exciting for the length of an entire journey and is now releasing it.
"Your Highness! The information is confirmed. Ryen has returned to Liyue. The Adeptus also indicated, he said the audience can be arranged. Ryen is willing to meet."
Aether's eyes opened.
"Good." He stood from the throne. "Endis. Come with me."
The Lector who had brought the news brightened immediately. "Your Highness, my elixirs, "
Aether was already moving. He paused, glanced back, and waved in the general direction of the supply.
"Take them yourself. You know where they are."
Then, remembering the rest of what had been relayed: the contractual reckoning with Zhongli. He had known this was coming. He had known it with the certainty of a man who had spent enough time around Morax to understand exactly what contract violations cost. He had filed it under necessary costs and made his peace with it.
"Let's go."
He and Endis stepped through the portal.
Behind them, the Abyss Order's hall erupted.
The Lector who had delivered the news sat completely still for exactly one second before his composure dissolved into something between reverence and giddy relief. Kanenstaedt materialised at his elbow, gestured toward the storage alcoves, and said two words.
"Come along."
The rest of the hall watched them go with the unified expression of an organisation that has just been reminded that this was happening, that it was real, and that the queue was moving forward.
The murmuring started immediately and did not stop.
The line is moving. Our turn will come.
Liyue Harbor. Outside the main gate.
The Abyss portal deposited Aether and Endis on a quiet stretch of road approximately half a kilometre from the harbour entrance, close enough to walk to comfortably, far enough from the city's internal ley lines that a deep Abyss signature would not trigger any detection systems inside the walls.
Aether took stock of his surroundings. Endis, he noticed, had adjusted to human form well enough that the transition was no longer visible in how she moved. Both of them looked, for all practical purposes, like ordinary travellers.
"Low profile," Aether said, as a reminder rather than a new instruction. "We are visitors. We are here for the Lantern Rite."
Endis nodded.
They began walking toward the gate.
Aether had not visited Liyue Harbor in person in quite some time. The last time he had been near Liyue in any official capacity, the city had looked like Liyue, prosperous and well-built and the foremost trading port in Teyvat, all of which was already impressive.
What was coming into view ahead of him was not the same city.
The gate itself had been extended and reinforced, the architecture more substantial than he remembered. The guards, Millelith, he recognised the institution if not the specific personnel, were standing in configurations that suggested the post had been redesigned with modern threat assessment in mind. Several of them carried weapons that Aether had only ever seen in worlds with advanced technology: the particular distinctive shapes of firearms, various configurations, one or two carrying equipment that he was fairly certain was military-grade rather than civilian. There was an RPG strapped to the back of one soldier standing slightly apart from the others.
He kept his face neutral.
The queue at the gate moved at a steady pace. When they reached the front, a Millelith guard looked them over with the professional attention of someone running a checklist, paused on Aether's appearance, and took a step forward.
"Where are you coming from?"
Endis straightened slightly, old instinct activating. Aether gave her the faintest possible touch of a signal, not yet, not here, and she settled.
The movement had been noticed. From somewhere in the cluster of guards near the wall, the angle of several rifle barrels had shifted. Not dramatically. Enough.
Aether understood military positioning. He understood it extremely well. He ran a rapid assessment of what would happen to Endis if the force behind those weapons was deployed in any quantity, and concluded that the assessment had one clear outcome regardless of how he varied the inputs.
"Travellers," he said, with the ease of someone who has given this answer many times. "We heard about the Lantern Rite. We wanted to see it for ourselves."
The guard studied him. Something in the combination of features, the height, the hair, the colouring, was producing a thoughtful expression.
"Gold hair, braided back. Shorter than expected, "
Shorter than expected.
Aether felt the particular cold of a very specific premonition arriving.
The guard produced a piece of paper. Aether looked at it sideways with the caution of someone who knows they are about to see something they will not enjoy.
It was a wanted poster. Or a missing-persons notice. Or something in between. The category was less important than the content.
The content featured a figure with a gold braid and an expression that could charitably be called artistically interpreted. The artist had preserved exactly two accurate features: the hair and the colour. Everything else appeared to have been rendered from memory by someone who either had very limited artistic ability or had been making a point.
Aether looked at the drawing.
He looked at it for a moment longer than necessary.
The guard was consulting with a colleague.
"Close match on the hair. But this one's presentable. The drawing is... quite different."
The colleague squinted.
"To be fair, the drawing is a bit, the artist may have had a stylistic approach."
"I think the word is abstract."
"We can't really say that."
"We're not saying it to his face."
"We are saying it next to his face."
Aether was standing approximately four feet away and had the hearing of a person who had been trained in fieldcraft since before most of Teyvat's current population was born.
He heard every word.
His expression had not changed. His expression was not going to change. The iron discipline that had carried him through five hundred years of the Abyss was fully deployed in service of maintaining a neutral countenance within earshot of a conversation that was characterising his appearance as abstract and wondering whether their more visually striking colleague had received a disproportionate share of whatever the relevant assets were.
He thought several things about Lumine that he had thought before and several new ones.
The guard folded the paper away.
"Sorry for the delay. We take our patrol responsibilities seriously. Safe travels, enjoy the Lantern Rite."
Aether inclined his head with the gracious ease of a man who had just survived something that had not technically been a threat and was choosing not to process it further in public.
"Thank you. We will."
They passed through the gate.
Endis waited until they were a reasonable distance into the city before glancing at him.
He did not invite the observation. She chose not to offer it.
Liyue Harbor opened around them, and whatever Aether had been prepared to see based on his existing intelligence, the reality was doing something different to his expectations.
He had read the reports. He had processed the assessments. He had built a picture in his mind of what the Five-Nation Alliance's flagship city would look like after several months of access to the MC World's resources and the Alliance's combined capabilities.
The picture had been accurate in its components. It had not been accurate in the aggregate.
The streets were busy with the particular quality of busyness that belonged to prosperous places, not frantic, not desperate, the unhurried movement of people who were going somewhere they wanted to go rather than somewhere they had to go. Children playing in alleys, acting out scenes that appeared to involve Millelith soldiers defeating monsters, with the specific dramatic commitment that children brought to reenactment. Storytellers at corners delivering accounts of battles that had apparently involved zero casualties against opponents that included gods and sea creatures. The sound of money in the good sense, exchange, not transaction.
The Millelith patrols moved through it all with the quality of people who were part of the city rather than imposed on it.
And then there were the other things.
A vendor selling something from a machine that Aether had last seen in a world considerably more advanced than Teyvat. Automatic. Self-dispensing. Standing between two traditional wooden market stalls as though it had always been there.
Firearms visible on patrol belts, worn with the same casual comfort as a polearm.
Somewhere further in: the sound of something being built, the specific rhythm of construction that had an efficiency in it that traditional construction did not.
Aether walked and observed and did not let any of it show on his face.
If Khaenri'ah had survived.
The thought arrived without invitation, as it always did when he encountered evidence of what a civilisation could become when it was not destroyed. He let it pass through, which he had learned was faster than trying to stop it.
It may not have looked like this. It would have been different.
But it might have been something.
He shook his head fractionally.
Endis had been walking slightly behind him, and now fell into step alongside. Slightly ahead of them on the left: a modest stall, wooden frame, the smell of something sweet and milky and warm coming from it. A hand-lettered sign.
Liyue Milk Tea Shop.
Endis made a sound that was barely audible and almost immediately suppressed.
Aether followed the direction of her gaze.
On the counter: cups. Various sizes. Inside them: the particular cloudy colour of something made with milk. And at the bottom of the large cups, dark spherical shapes suspended in the liquid.
The stall-keeper was a young woman who smiled at everyone with the professional warmth of someone who had found their calling.
"Milk tea? Pearl milk tea? We have original, jasmine, brown sugar, "
The thing that Aether's organisation had spent months trying to obtain through espionage and goodwill missions and covert supply chain analysis was being sold for standard Mora at a street stall in the middle of Liyue Harbor.
For a long moment, neither he nor Endis said anything.
Then Aether reached for his coin.
Five minutes later, they were walking further into the city with an impractical number of drinks between them, Aether with an original pearl milk tea in one hand and the abstract expression of a man making peace with something cosmologically significant about the nature of effort and reward.
The stall was already serving the next group of customers.
They had been walking for some time, Aether drinking, observing, cataloguing, when the street widened into a quieter section near one of the ornamental bridges. Fewer people here. The ambient noise of the harbour still present but softer.
The quality of the air changed.
Not dramatically. Not in any way that most people would notice.
Aether noticed.
He had approximately one second between noticing and the voice arriving.
"It has been some time since we last had occasion to speak." The voice came from slightly to the left and slightly behind, placed with the particular precision of someone who had chosen the exact angle at which the sound would reach its target most effectively. "A visiting guest should, by custom, present themselves to their host first. It makes one wonder, has the guest perhaps done something that gives them reason to avoid that courtesy?"
A figure in dark ink-black robes had arrived at Aether's peripheral vision without having been there a moment before. He was looking at the bridge. His hands were relaxed at his sides. He could have been any traveller pausing to appreciate the scenery.
He was not any traveller.
Aether stopped walking.
After a moment, he produced what, in the circumstances, was a remarkably composed response.
"Zhongli."
Zhongli turned to look at him with the unhurried quality of someone who has all the time available that the situation requires and intends to use it.
"Call me Morax," he said.
Aether's internal assessment concluded, efficiently and without drama, that the Geo Punishment was going to be thorough.