Three days slipped by in the blink of an eye.
Ryen still hadn't summoned Aether. Aether, for his part, was in no hurry.
Those three days, Ryen's life was thoroughly leisurely.
Ningguang and the others had wrapped up their affairs and returned, spending each day contentedly close to Ryen, not a step out of the main gate, not a glance beyond the inner door.
From time to time, Ryen attended to other things.
Chatting with Jean about the Knights' development, and about the small hopes she kept quietly to herself.
Cooking with Yae Miko, getting better acquainted with the particular nature of foxes.
Watching Nilou dance. Looking after his well-behaved daughters.
All in all, Ryen's days were full.
He had never been one for going out. With a house full of wives to spend time with, what was there to leave for?
Besides, as the days passed, the Lantern Rite drew ever closer.
This meant Liyue Harbor was filling with people at an accelerating pace. With the Five-Nation Alliance now a living reality, citizens of Mondstadt and the other nations were naturally eager to take part in the Lantern Rite. The festival had, almost by itself, become a grand occasion for all five nations.
At nearly every hour of the day, travelers arrived from distant lands to join in.
As for the others,
What everyone else was getting up to, Ryen didn't have a particularly clear picture. But it wasn't hard to guess. The usual things.
Some were sharpening their strength. Scaramouche had been running experiments across Liyue, testing his staff, working out techniques for wielding it.
Some were venturing into the MC World for exploration. Beidou had launched several pushes toward the new continent over these three days, but regrettably, none had penetrated very deep.
On the whole, it amounted to the same: people either wandering around Liyue, or wandering around the world.
The only ones with any real sense of urgency were the newly arrived Sumeru contingent, Alhaitham and the others.
Bukhary was managing reasonably well. She had, after all, absorbed a great many memories from the Millelith's early development of the MC World. She had some baseline understanding of how that world worked. The difference between witnessing something through borrowed memory and standing in it yourself was impossible to fully convey, that firsthand shock of the senses couldn't be transmitted through any other medium, but it wasn't starting from zero.
Alhaitham and the others, however, were starting from absolute zero.
He was, without question, exceptionally intelligent. But this world did not operate by reason. It violated every ingrained assumption about how reality worked. High intelligence alone couldn't accelerate that kind of understanding.
In fact, Alhaitham's progress was actually lagging behind Dehya's.
Ryen had a reasonably good idea why.
Alhaitham was a brilliant scholar, and therein lay the problem. The more intelligent a person, the more they think. The more they think, the more rigid their model of how the world must work becomes.
Early on, Ryen had taught Ningguang and the others to maintain a separate mental framework for the MC World. In the initial exposure phase, you didn't need to understand the reasons. You didn't need to know why. You only needed to know how.
To illustrate: given the same tree, Ryen had once asked Dehya to try cutting it down.
Dehya had picked up an axe without a second thought and felled the whole thing without asking a single question.
Alhaitham, by contrast, had swung the axe, severed one block, and then sunk into contemplation.
The reflexive scholarly instinct kicked in immediately, driving him to figure out what was behind all of this.
And that was the scholar's particular weakness.
Alhaitham knew Teyvat too thoroughly. Rapidly shifting his mental framework in a short time was genuinely difficult.
That said, word was he had already resolved to settle in the MC World for an extended period, to let his subconscious simply acclimatize.
Well.
That sounded slightly dangerous, honestly, going about it that way made it rather easy to forget Teyvat's rules entirely.
But if he was confident, Ryen wasn't going to interfere.
Beyond Alhaitham's situation, the other ripple was the scholars from Sumeru who had just joined Albedo's research institute, Naphis and the others.
It wasn't that they were causing trouble. Quite the opposite. A great many of these scholars had already become core contributors. The most complex and sensitive research was still off-limits to them for now, but the simpler work, alchemical elixirs and the like, they had already gotten their hands into and were actively refining.
Even by Albedo's exacting standards, they were qualified collaborators. A few of the more exceptional talents might, in time, help him push into more cutting-edge territory.
It sounded like good news. The source of Albedo's headache, however, was precisely these scholars.
As the MC World's first designated Chief Alchemist, appointed by Ryen from the very beginning, Albedo had been immersed in the MC World for far longer than anyone else. His understanding ran deeper.
Combined with five hundred years of accumulated alchemical knowledge from Teyvat, it had taken Albedo exactly one day to earn the complete reverence of every scholar in the institute.
Even Naphis was considering formally taking him as her teacher.
Albedo happened to also be the institute's administrator, which, translated into the Sumeru scholarly mental framework, made him essentially the Grand Sage of this MC Akademiya.
And what scholars do when they encounter a figure they revere…
Was not difficult to predict.
In three days, Naphis and her colleagues had thrown themselves into research with the ferocity of people who had been starved of it for years, squeezing their rest time down to the absolute minimum. They ate their meals crouching next to their workbenches. There were instances of a scholar eating one moment, then shouting "I have a new idea!" the next, and immediately vanishing back into their research.
Burning out one's body in the name of scholarship was not, actually, Albedo's biggest headache.
He could understand the hunger. Encountering a new world overflowing with boundless treasure and knowledge, when he had first arrived, he had been just as consumed. Even now, the sight of mana crystals still did something to him.
Albedo's real headache was this:
They'd imported the entire Sumeru Akademiya culture.
Every conversation became an academic discussion, whether the other party wanted one or not. Alchemists from other nations found themselves relentlessly engaged on scholarly topics they could barely keep up with. If you couldn't hold your own, the Sumeru scholars would patiently and tirelessly press the discussion further. If you could hold your own, they would immediately look at you with reverent adoration and propose forming an academic household, or a research partnership, or some kind of study collective.
What troubled Albedo most deeply, though, was that these scholars, already working themselves to collapse every single day, were somehow also finding time to write papers.
In three days, Naphis alone had submitted over a dozen papers to Albedo.
Speculations on the Range of Temporal Flow Variation in the Space-Time Tree. Reverse-Logic Derivation Methodology in Alchemical Elixir Compound Research. And so on, and so forth.
Albedo was genuinely mystified. She spent every waking hour in the laboratory conducting research. How were these papers being written?
He had tried to redirect them.
From Albedo's perspective, written records like papers were secondary. The research mattered, the alchemy mattered, and everything had to be oriented around practical utility. Same result, two orientations: Albedo cared about the product's efficacy, whether it could be manufactured at scale, what positive impact it would have on the Alliance. Naphis and the others cared about what principles of the world the product had exploited, and what methodology had produced it.
They were fundamentally theorists at heart.
Albedo had raised it with Ryen more than once, asking him to have a word with the scholars about adjusting their approach.
But this was the culture of the Akademiya, accumulated across countless years. It was the ingrained research disposition of scholars who had spent the better half of their lives this way.
It wasn't something that changed because someone asked it to.
And moreover, for all the chaos they were stirring up, their work ethic was genuinely admirable, and they were producing genuinely good results.
So Ryen's recommendation had been:
"Bear with it, Albedo."
Aether, for his part, had not seen Ryen in these three days either. He wasn't troubled by it.
Every morning he opened his eyes, called for his subordinate, and headed out to shop.
He had made no small contribution to Liyue's economy.
Zhongli had mentioned that Aether had purchased a house in Liyue Harbor, then spent the better part of a day in the furniture emporium, leaving with nearly every item in the place in multiple sets.
Beyond that: alchemical elixirs and milk in quantities that would have covered ten ordinary Liyue citizens' annual allocations, all purchased by Aether alone. A classic mark of someone throwing money around, though for the Abyss Order, the amount of Mora involved didn't register as significant.
He placed an order at the forge for over a hundred alchemically enhanced weapons.
At the resource exchange, he bought upward of a hundred tons of various materials.
At the special goods market, he swept through the monster-derived resources from the MC World and various other specialty items wholesale, as though restocking a warehouse.
Three days. Nothing but buying.
Single-handedly, he had poured over ten billion Mora into Liyue Harbor.
Ningguang had begun looking at Aether with considerably more warmth.
Benefactors of this kind were exceedingly rare in the world.
By the end, even Endis couldn't stop himself from dropping hints, repeatedly, that perhaps Aether ought to be showing a little urgency, maybe nudging Ryen to call for him sooner.
Aether was unmoved.
The way he saw it: he was already here. What was the rush?
His primary objective was the resources from that strange world. At this point, Liyue Harbor already stocked a great many of them, it was perfectly possible to buy them in bulk directly, right now.
The moment Ryen summoned him, on the other hand, there would be endless complications. And who was to say that being summoned meant Ryen would agree to let him and the Abyss Order into that world?
Taking it back ten thousand steps: as a traveler who had crossed between worlds his entire existence, no one understood better than Aether how much work it took to properly explore a new world.
Yes, that world's resources would certainly be richer and more powerful at the source.
But the difficulty of obtaining them there wouldn't be low, either.
Why tie himself in knots over things he couldn't get his hands on in the short term, when there were perfectly good things to be picked up right here?
The milk he'd purchased in these past few days alone was already enough to break the curse on over a thousand Abyss Order members. The alchemical elixirs and enchanted weapons could arm an entirely new unit.
Good harvest. No reason to fixate on what wasn't within reach yet.
It spoke well of Aether, that, the capacity to let go, take stock of what was actually achievable, and act on it cleanly.
These three days in Liyue Harbor were the most genuinely contented three days Aether had known in years.
Before this, every waking moment had been consumed by planning, by the question of how to execute the operation against the Heavenly Principles.
Now, none of that needed thinking about. He just went out and walked the streets when he felt like it.
And occasionally traded barbs with his wretched sister.
That kind of life, he hadn't had it in over five hundred years.
The fourth day arrived.
Morning.
Aether climbed out of bed at his leisure, splashed some water on his face, and stepped out the door, rousing Endis along the way with the straightforward intention of continuing the day's shopping.
Endis followed with a pained expression, not daring to refuse, hastily pulling himself together.
Before the two of them had even made it out the door, however, the front gate flew off its hinges with a single kick.
The half-awake Endis had half a mind to vent his irritation. They couldn't use Abyss power within Liyue Harbor, true, but that didn't mean they had to just stand there and be treated like this, did it?
Then he got a clear look at who it was, and immediately swallowed every word.
He should have known.
Other than Lumine, who else would kick a door off its hinges without a second thought?
Lumine strode in over the fallen door panel, hands on her hips, radiating the particular energy of someone who has decided they own the world.
She threw a glance at Aether and said with casual disdain:
"Come on. Ryen wants to see you."
Aether's expression went as dark as charcoal.
Hearing that Ryen wanted to see him was, objectively, good news. But if that good news was being delivered by this insufferable sister of his,
Suddenly, it didn't feel like something worth being happy about.
Especially watching Lumine stand there with her nose in the air like she was granting him an audience. Aether wanted nothing more than to shove her face into the nearest patch of mud.
As expected.
Little sisters were, without question, the single most aggravating species of creature on the face of the earth.