The days on Mt. Aocang bled into one another in a gentle, dreamlike procession. The sharp terror of Alex's first moments had receded, replaced by a quiet sense of wonder that was both his and not his. He was still Alex, the twenty-four-year-old from a world of steel and glass, locked away inside this small, ridiculously cute body. He remembered his lonely apartment, the taste of lukewarm instant coffee, the endless scroll of social media feeds that only deepened his sense of isolation. But those memories were becoming like a story he'd once read, distant and faded. The vibrant, immediate reality of Teyvat was overwhelming them.
His new reality was the scent of dew on Qingxin flowers in the morning, the feeling of cool, polished stone beneath his bare feet, and the vast, breathtaking panorama of Liyue's jagged peaks spread out below him like a painter's masterpiece. His new reality was dominated by the presence of the magnificent, god-like crane who had taken him in.
Cloud Retainer, for her part, found her centuries of placid solitude completely and utterly disrupted. The child was an anomaly. A puzzle wrapped in an enigma, and then wrapped again in a layer of heart-wrenchingly adorable innocence. She had spent the first few days observing him with the detached curiosity of a scholar examining a new species of flora. She provided him with food—simple dishes of foraged mushrooms and mountain herbs, which he ate with a quiet appreciation that she found strangely satisfying. She fashioned him new clothes from adeptal silks, simple but comfortable garments that actually fit his small frame, her meticulous work a stark contrast to the oversized rags he had arrived in.
She would watch him as he explored the peak. He never strayed far, as if an invisible tether kept him close to the safety of her abode. He would sit for hours by the crystal-clear pool, looking at the way the light danced on the water's surface. He would lie on his back on the grass, his luminous azure eyes fixed on the stylized clouds drifting by, a small, contented smile on his face. He possessed a stillness, a capacity for quiet contemplation that was unusual for a child, yet it was coupled with sudden bursts of pure, unadulterated childish joy. A brightly colored crystalfly would send him into a fit of soft giggles as he tried to follow its erratic path. The discovery of a particularly shiny rock would be a treasure he would keep with solemn importance.
About a week into his stay, Cloud Retainer decided the nameless state of the boy was an untidy variable.
"Child," her voice echoed around the stone table where he was meticulously trying to stack flat pebbles. He looked up, his glowing eyes blinking slowly, the tower of pebbles forgotten. "You have no name. This one cannot continue to refer to you as 'little one' or 'child' indefinitely. It is inefficient."
Alex's mind churned. He couldn't be Alex. That name belonged to a ghost in another world. He needed a new identity, something that fit this new life. He thought of the grand, lyrical names of Liyue—Xingqiu, Chongyun, Keqing. Something like that would feel too elaborate, too much like he was trying to be someone he wasn't. He needed something simple.
He looked at his small hands, then at the vast world around him. He was a human, a person, in a world of gods and magical beings. A simple fact, but it felt like the most important thing about him right now.
"Ren," he said, the name coming to him in a whisper.
"Ren?" Cloud Retainer's voice held a note of inquiry. "A simple name. It has several meanings. Which do you intend?"
He looked up at her, his expression guileless. "It means 'human'," he said softly. "Because… that's what I am."
It was a profoundly simple and yet deeply complex answer. He wasn't an adeptus, or a spirit, or some stray magical creature. He was just a human, lost and alone. The statement, delivered in his soft, childish voice, resonated with the ancient being. It was a declaration of identity, humble and absolute. It was also, from her perspective, another piece of the puzzle. A child who awakens with no memory but feels the need to anchor himself to the most basic concept of his own being.
"Very well," Cloud Retainer declared after a moment of contemplation. "Ren it is. A fitting name for a strange little person."
From that day on, he was Ren. And with a name came a new phase of his existence on the mountain. Cloud Retainer, having decided he was a long-term problem to be solved, took it upon herself to educate him. Her methods were, like everything else about her, formal and precise.
"If you are to reside in Liyue, even temporarily, you cannot remain ignorant of its structure," she stated one afternoon. They were seated by the stone table, an invisible force having cleared the surface of Ren's pebble collection. "Ignorance breeds chaos. And this one… dislikes chaos."
And so, Ren's lessons began. Cloud Retainer would speak of the Geo Archon, Rex Lapis, the Prime of the Adepti. Her voice would fill with a rare, almost imperceptible reverence as she described the founding of Liyue Harbor, the Archon War, and the contracts that formed the bedrock of the nation. Ren would listen, his chin propped in his small hands, his azure eyes wide and unblinking.
He already knew all of this, of course. Alex, the gamer, had read every in-game book, listened to every scrap of NPC dialogue. He knew about the Guizhong, Osial, and the true power of the Geo Archon. But hearing it from Cloud Retainer was different. This wasn't text on a screen; it was living history, recounted by someone who had been there. The weight of millennia was in her words.
And the childlike part of him, the part that was becoming more and more dominant, was simply captivated. He wasn't analyzing the lore for quest clues; he was listening to the greatest bedtime story ever told.
"Rex Lapis is… strong?" Ren asked one day, his voice small.
"'Strong' is a word one might use to describe a Mitachurl," Cloud Retainer corrected, a hint of avian pride in her tone. "Rex Lapis is the bedrock upon which this entire nation was built. His strength is the strength of the mountains themselves, unyielding and eternal. All adepti are bound by his contract to protect Liyue. It is our solemn duty."
Ren's gaze drifted towards the distant silhouette of Liyue Harbor, a smudge on the horizon. He knew that the "unyielding and eternal" god was, at this very moment, likely wandering the streets as a mortal consultant named Zhongli, fretting about forgetting his wallet. The dissonance between the legend Cloud Retainer spoke of and the reality he knew from the game was dizzying. It also gave him a strange sense of protective knowledge. He knew the secrets of this world's gods.
As he listened, his childlike wonder would invariably manifest. He would gasp softly at the tales of great battles, his eyes sparkling. He would trace the intricate Liyue script characters Cloud Retainer projected in the air with a finger, his brow furrowed in concentration. He never fidgeted or grew bored. He simply absorbed it all with an intensity that the ancient adeptus found both baffling and deeply endearing. It was during one of these lessons, as he sat there bathed in the golden afternoon light, his glowing eyes fixed on her with absolute focus, that she felt her resolve crumble just a little bit more.
"When you address this one," she said, the words coming out sounding more abrupt than she intended, "you will use the title 'Master'."
Ren blinked, the flow of the history lesson interrupted. "Master?" he repeated, tilting his head. The movement was so purely innocent, so utterly charming, that Cloud Retainer felt a strange flutter in her chest, an emotion she sternly identified as… irritation. She was not meant to be charmed.
"Indeed. This one has taken you into one's care. One is providing you with shelter, sustenance, and knowledge. The term is appropriate to our current arrangement. It denotes respect and acknowledges the dynamic of teacher and student. It is… logical."
She was justifying it to herself. Ren, however, understood the deeper meaning immediately. In the lore Alex knew, Cloud Retainer had other disciples—Ganyu and Shenhe. They were her found family, the children she had raised. By asking him to call her Master, she wasn't just establishing a formal dynamic. She was adopting him. She was making a place for him, however small and provisional, in her solitary world.
A slow, brilliant smile spread across Ren's face. It was a smile of pure, unadulterated happiness that seemed to make his entire being light up. It was like watching the sun rise.
"Yes, Master," he chirped, his voice filled with a genuine warmth that struck the adeptus with the force of a physical blow.
Cloud Retainer immediately turned her head, pretending to examine a cloud formation. "Hmph. See that you remember it," she muttered, her imperious tone failing to quite conceal the strange new warmth spreading through her ancient heart.
The days settled into a comfortable routine. Mornings were for lessons. Afternoons were for Ren's quiet explorations, always under the Master's watchful, though distant, eye. In the evenings, as the sun set and painted the sky in hues of orange and violet, they would often sit in comfortable silence. Sometimes, Ren would ask about the stars.
"Are there other worlds up there, Master?" he asked one night, pointing a small finger at the glittering tapestry of the Teyvat sky.
This was the opening Cloud Retainer had been waiting for, a chance to probe the mystery of his origins. "Perhaps," she responded, her voice neutral. "You tell me, Ren. The patterns of these stars are unknown to you. What are the stars like, from where you come from?"
Ren fell silent, his adult mind working to translate the concepts of his world into a language a child could speak and an adeptus could understand.
"My world… it was very loud," he began softly, his gaze distant. "And the stars were hard to see. There were too many lights on the ground. We lived in tall, gray mountains that weren't made of stone, but of something shiny and hard. And we had… carriages that moved without horses, roaring like beasts on black rivers that crossed the land."
He paused, trying to describe technology in terms of nature. "And we had metal birds, Master! Huge ones! They didn't have feathers, and their wings didn't flap, but they would soar through the highest clouds, carrying people inside them."
Cloud Retainer listened, her sharp mind analyzing every word. She of course knew of the lost nation of Khaenri'ah, of technology that defied the natural laws of the elements. Was this child a descendant, somehow displaced in time? No, his descriptions felt different, less arrogant, more wondrous. He spoke of these things not as achievements of mankind, but as simple facts of his world, like the sun rising in the east.
"We also had glowing rectangles," Ren continued, his voice barely a whisper now. "You could hold them in your hand. And inside, you could see stories. You could see other people, other places, even if they were far away. It was like… like a window that could look anywhere. But it made everyone very lonely."
That last sentence hung in the cool night air. It was a moment where the child's simple observation and the adult's painful experience merged perfectly. It was a truth so profound and sad that it silenced the ancient adeptus. She looked at the small boy beside her, his beautiful face illuminated by the moonlight, and saw not just a cute, lost child, but a soul who understood a type of loneliness that was utterly alien to her. Her loneliness was one of solitude and immense lifespan. His, it seemed, was the loneliness of being surrounded by people while being completely alone.
She didn't press him further that night. She simply sat with him, watching the silent, bright stars of her own world, feeling the strange, protective ache in her chest intensify. This child, this 'Ren', was more than a puzzle. He was a treasure, washed up on her shores by an unknown tide. And for all her power, for all her ancient wisdom, she had no idea what to do with him. All she knew was that the thought of him being cold, or scared, or lonely, was a state of affairs that she found, more and more, to be entirely… disagreeable. And Cloud Retainer, was not used to simply disagreeing with the state of the world. She was used to shaping it.