The moon shifted, casting flower shadows across the earth; dew settled silently onto sleeves and collars.
Time flowed on, unhurried.
Before Yae Publishing House, the novel enthusiasts who had stayed to watch the music competition — those who had grown curious about Your Lie in April — had one by one found the books they were looking for. Satisfied, hearts full of quiet anticipation, they drifted away into the night.
The izakayas, too, gradually emptied.
All of Inazuma fell into stillness. The night had grown deep.
A clean, cold wind swept down from Mt. Yougou, which rose high above Narukami Island — carrying with it the cool, misty breath of the mountain — and blew all the way to Inazuma City.
In the clear, cold light of the moon.
Ei stood quietly on the terrace of Tenshukaku. The cold wind struck her full in the face, sending her violet hair streaming.
Her robes billowed and danced.
Ei gently swept aside the strands of hair the wind had scattered, tucking them behind her ear. She lifted her gaze toward the direction of Mondstadt, and her brow furrowed, almost imperceptibly.
She looked down at the copy of Your Lie in April in her hands — its pages already turned deep into the story.
The scene she had reached was the duet between Arima Kousei and Miyazono Kaori.
Fang Qiu had written this passage with a light and buoyant hand. Miyazono Kaori's arrival was like sunlight breaking through clouds — sweeping clean every shadow that had taken root in Arima Kousei's heart.
The music of the two wove together.
Arima Kousei's lips curved upward, a smile rising without his meaning it to — drawn out by the melody of Miyazono Kaori's violin.
Their performance ended.
Both were drenched in sweat. They looked at each other.
Their eyes were full of smiles.
Seeing this, Ei's own lips curved, unbidden, into a faint smile. She turned to the next page.
The next page.
Miyazono Kaori — still smiling at Arima Kousei — collapsed straight to the ground with a dull thud.
The smile on Ei's face froze.
—
At that same hour, in Liyue.
The night was hazy, the moonlight scattered and dim.
Inside the tavern.
Zhongli drained the last of his wine in a single swallow and turned his gaze toward the young man sitting across from him.
The young man had slumped forward onto the table, deeply, heavily asleep.
Out cold.
Zhongli pulled his gaze back and looked at the last remaining bottle on the table — apple cider.
"The drunkard poet's favorite wine," he murmured.
He looked out the window, his eyes distant.
When that drunkard poet had first come to Liyue, two thousand years ago, it was this wine he had brought with him.
At the time, Zhongli had assumed the man had run into some difficulty in the fulfillment of his duties and had come seeking his help.
As it turned out, that drunkard poet had traveled ten thousand li to Liyue for no other reason than to deliver him a single bottle of wine.
From that time onward, the Seven of that age would often gather in Liyue. The drunkard poet always brought something different — a new wine each time, shared among them all.
To this day, Zhongli still remembered the taste of every one of those wines.
Only — the world had kept changing, and everything he had once known so well had gradually faded away.
And that drunkard poet had never come again.
He poured himself a cup from the bottle and drank it down. A tart, faintly sweet taste filled his mouth.
Outside, the night was deep and dense. A cool wind stirred the great trees beyond the window; their leaves rustled softly.
Passersby on the street instinctively pulled their collars tighter and rubbed their hands together.
"What a cold wind. Is the weather turning already?"
"This cold — you don't think Liyue Harbor is actually going to get snow this year, do you?"
"Liyue Harbor hasn't had snow in years."
"Damn it, why did you have to go and quote a line from Sword and Fairy? Now I'm thinking about all the terrible things Old Thief Fang Qiu did to us again. That final scene — snow blanketing the sky — I was so sure Jing Tian and Tang Xuejian were going to live happily ever after. And then they didn't."
"That scene really was something. I thought Zixuan and Xu Changqing fading from each other's lives was already brutal enough — and then the blade waiting for Jing Tian and Tang Xuejian hit even harder."
"Speaking of 'blade-feeding' — that phrase really does capture it perfectly. It really does feel like a blade going straight into your heart. I wonder which genius came up with it."
"I need to sit down and go over the plot of Your Name to restore my mood."
"You know, Your Name really was something special. I'm already looking forward to Old Thief Fang Qiu's next book. I hope it ends just as well."
"Right? When Miyamizu Mitsuha and Tachibana Taki finally met at the end of Your Name — a grown man like me actually cried. It was genuinely moving."
"Old Thief Fang Qiu has finally walked the righteous path and turned over a new leaf."
"At the rate Fang Qiu puts out books, she's probably already started writing the next one, right?"
They chatted as they walked, each heading home.
—
And at that same moment.
Fang Qiu was sprawled out on the Jumpy Dumpty, with Tingyu nestled in her arms.
"Mm... it must be about time. I should go to sleep."
She stretched lazily, glancing out the window at the quiet night, and murmured to herself.
The stretch earned her a round of indignant squirming from Tingyu, who had been lying contentedly in her arms until that moment.
"I wonder when the third edition of the Teyvat Travel Guide will come out."
Fang Qiu turned her head toward the writing desk, where the Liyue Edition of the Teyvat Travel Guide lay open to its final page, and couldn't help but let out a small sigh.
This book really was something. Page after page of wild, boundless imagination, backed by the sheer force of will to act on every last idea. It was genuinely breathtaking.
Though — what did strike Fang Qiu as a little strange was that this adventurer named Alice seemed to harbor an almost obsessive fixation with explosions.
For instance: her desire to blow Starsnatch Cliff off the map.
Her plan to modify a certain reconnaissance knight named Amber's explosive toy into an absolute weapon of mass destruction capable of reducing an entire forest to rubble in a single shot.
And, apparently with nothing better to do, she had gone to a ruin called Stormterror's Lair and blown up several colonnaded corridors — destroying protected historical sites without a second thought.
Strangely enough, though, when it came to Liyue, she hadn't seemed to develop any particular urge to blow things up.
She had mostly just done alchemy in the kitchen of Wangshu Inn out in Dihua Marsh, researching explosives.
The descriptions in the book made Fang Qiu think of a certain someone she had seen in an anime in her past life — a man who lived by the motto that art is an explosion.
And Alice's final stop in Liyue, according to the book, had been Guyun Stone Forest. The god she described as being suppressed beneath the stone spears there — that had to be the great sea demon that had broken free from its seal just recently and wreaked havoc on Liyue Harbor, didn't it?
As expected of Alice — to have seen at a single glance, even back then, that a god was being held down beneath those spears.
A true expert.
Still — for reasons Fang Qiu couldn't quite put her finger on, the figure of a certain Master Zhongli kept appearing throughout the Liyue section of the book.
Did the work at Wangsheng Funeral Parlor really leave that much free time?
Or... was there something to the old rumor that Wangsheng Funeral Parlor had once been a front of sorts?
Had Master Zhongli happened to cross paths with Alice while he was on some kind of extended annual leave?
Come to think of it that way, the benefits package at Wangsheng Funeral Parlor sounded pretty decent.
By comparison, Lady Ganyu and Lady Keqing had it rough. It didn't even feel like 996 anymore — it felt more like 997.
In at nine in the morning, out at nine at night, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, no exceptions.
Talk about grinding...
Even the donkeys on a production brigade wouldn't be worked this hard.
Lying flat was the way to go.
Fang Qiu set Tingyu down on the desk, stretched again, and then glanced at the blank sheets of paper sitting off to the side.
"I'll write again in a few days."
She murmured to herself, and let the night settle quietly around her.
____
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