Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, in the small town of Qiaoying village, found in the relatively peaceful valley of Chenyu Vale, a pair of twins were born underneath the chilling light of a shivering blue moon. 

Apart from the exuberant cries of the newborns, the night was quiet, mournful in a way that it shouldn't have been. It wasn't to be helped, however. Not when the world around them was marked for death. 

A mother and a father cradled the children in their arms, smiles hesitant and withdrawn on their faces. The father, Zhuang, held the eldest child, born with inky black hair and piercing purple eyes, and settled him against his shoulder, his hand cupping the back of his head to calm him. The child’s cries were shallow, his gaze narrow and cheeks chubby, little arms and legs shifting as though he were running a race. Zhuang laughed at the feeling of dull kicks hitting his chest, but the laughter was hollow and sorrowful, just as most things were at the time.

The mother, Shiqin, held the younger one as though he was the whole entire world, cradled to her chest as she stared down into his eyes. Unlike his brother, the younger one was born with a shock of soft green hair, deep pink eyes blinking curiously up at her as though she were the most interesting thing he had seen. She was at the time, after all.

The midwife had left just moments ago to announce the birth to the town and bring back some clean water to clean the children off. Shiqin was tired, her eyes drooping shut as she leaned back against the edge of the bed. Having children was meant to be a joyous occasion, but neither parent could bring themself to be full of cheer during a time like this. For one thing, they hadn’t expected a second one, the doctors and healers they’d visited never once mentioning something of the sort. The second set of contractions that started after the first birth had been a surprise. It wouldn’t have been an unwelcome one, however, if not for the poverty and sickness that surrounded them.

For tea farmers, the tea trees of Chenyu Vale were everything. Originally a gift from the adept that protected the region, the tea was their livelihoods, their connection to the world outside of their small village. It kept them afloat in the ever growing economy of the nation of Liyue. If there was no tea, there was no Qiaoying Village. The people had lived there and farmed their tea for years and years. Nothing should have changed, not when it hadn’t for the longest time.

But the world grew rough. The actions of gods and archons always somehow fell down upon the mortals to clean up and deal with in the end. The deadening of the tea of Chenyu Vale was no different, but it was just a small wave of a much bigger problem the village was suffering from.

Sometime, a long time before the birth of these twins, the valley had come to a stand still in their tea-growing efforts. It was as though the plants had been poisoned, the leaves falling from them, the tea shriveling before they could fully grow. That which was able to be harvested was processed but impotent, lacking in the unique taste and effect it had once been famous for. It sold, but for less than half of what it once had.

The miasma, or what the people called the plague, began its infection on a small scale at first. It started with the tea—the farmers watching in progressing horror as their long-pursued efforts were slowly but surely deadened—then the water and the air. None of them knew what exactly had caused this plague upon their lands, but it was not too difficult to presume. Their adepti were weakened still by the archon war, though hundreds of years had passed already, and their protections were only as powerful as the adepti themselves. It wasn’t too farfetched to assume that something had slipped inside through the cracks in the veil. 

People began to complain of headaches and bellyaches more often, sickness spreading though not quite deadly just yet. The tea making process slowed due to many of the workers out with the sickness and their water cleansing methods sometimes failed, the disease persevering through even the sharpest of heats that were lit to burn away the undesirable additions. They began to cover their mouths upon leaving their houses, worried about stumbling into the stronger patches of miasma while trying to work.

Then it began to affect the soil, many of their other crops failing or refusing to grow at all. The plague left much of the small town destitute and hungry. The tea they were able to process and other products they made sold less and less over time, no longer providing them with the comfortable living the townspeople had once been accustomed to. People left, heading towards Yilong Wharf and Liyue Harbor to search for work and opportunities to pull themselves from poverty. 

Shiqin and Zhuang had stayed, still hanging onto their dream of raising their child— children —where they both had grown up. But the effects of the miasmic plague were only getting worse and Zhuang had been urging Shiqin about the side effects since the early stages of her pregnancy. He was concerned about the complications the miasma might cause, but Shiqin brushed him off every time, claiming she and their child would be fine. And they had been, in the end, but they weren’t fully in the clear just yet. 

“He’s got your eyes,” Shiqin laughed, voice watery, as she gently caressed her son’s face. “And your smile.”

“Yeah?” Zhuang smiled, happy his wife was at least somewhat happy despite the fact that they were both slowly realizing this would never work. Their house was barely big enough for the two of them, let alone four. They had been preparing the last few months to take care of one child, not two. “This one has your hair. And by the way he’s squinting, your need for glasses as well.”

“What should we name them?” asked Shiqin, smile slipping slightly. They had prepared one name beforehand, Baizhu, but not a second one. And which one would be named Baizhu?

Zhuang was silent for a long moment, looking between the babies thoughtfully. Then, he said, “The one you’re holding, he’ll be Baizhu. This one, I think we should call him Baishi.”

Humming, Shiqin’s eyes flickered back down to the baby in her arms. “My little Baizhu.”

Leaning over, Zhuang traded with her, setting Baishi down in her other arm and picking up Baizhu, supporting his back on his elbow and holding him against his chest. He sat down in the chair and let the baby settle. Shiqin hummed as she brushed through Baishi’s hair. Baishi settled into her hold, his cries dying off as he relaxed.

“My sweet Baishi,” she whispered, closing her eyes as she cradled him. “They’re perfect.”

“Perfect,” Zhuang echoed, tone just as mournful as his wife’s. The twins both fell into a peaceful sleep as their parents put aside their worries. They both knew this would be the last moments of calmness for a long while, so for now, they basked in it.

—

A few months passed, just as difficult as Zhuang and Shiqin had expected. 

If taking care of one child would have been a chore, taking care of two was a heraclean task, especially a few weeks in, when Zhuang had to go back to work in the fields, trying to find tea leaves that hadn’t gone bad for only a portion of what he had been making before. Feeding the kids was simple enough in the beginning, but approaching a few months in, there were even fewer supplies and even less mora to be made. 

Some of the townspeople offered to help, but not many had the ability to do so. Yilong Wharf had been sending over provisions when they could, but they weren’t much better off either, much of their trade having depended heavily on the tea and the products that could be made from it.

Most of their textiles and clothing were handmade or bought at Yilong Wharf, but with the crop failures, little new clothing could be created and not many of their neighbors had much to spare. Zhuang and Shiqin remade some of their spare clothes into diapers and clothing for the twins, but both knew it wouldn’t last very long. Something had to be done.

It all came to a head, six months in. Both of the twins cried often, either hungry or upset over something neither parent could understand, but today was different. Shiqin sat at their dinner table, her pounding head settled in one of her hands as she sat Baizhu on her lap. Zhuang bounced Baishi in his arms, trying to settle him.

The older boy had recently come down with a cough. They had procured some medicine from the town healer, but it hadn’t worked. Baishi cried all night long, feeling an invisible pain neither Shiqin nor Zhuang knew how to solve. The town doctor had been too busy to examine him, but the look he’d given him only told them the obvious. The miasmic plague wasn’t one to discriminate between the old and the young.

Baizhu, seeming to have sensed his brother’s decline in health, cried alongside his brother much of his time, though he could be calmed in his mother’s arms, where she now held him. 

“It can't go on like this,” Zhuang murmured to himself, closing his eyes in despair, his ears ringing from the harrowing cries of his son. “Not for much longer.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Shiqin asked, tone sharp. “He’s sick, Zhuang. It’d be stupid of us to ignore that.”

“Yes, he needs medicine, but the village doctor can’t provide any that works. The only medicine that would work here…”

“No,” she said, interrupting him. Her eyes watered as she squeezed Baizhu’s chubby yet waning cheeks. He had just started crawling, not more than a week ago. Baishi had started just yesterday. The happiness she felt then wouldn’t have been the same if it hadn’t been in this house. She had grown up here. She loved these lands. They were her own and she had never wanted any other. She wanted both of her sons to feel the same. “We’re not leaving, Zhuang.”

“Even if it saves our son’s life?”

Shiqin hesitated. “The plague hasn’t shown to be deadly yet.”

“Yet , Shiqin. ‘Yet’ is the point there. Who knows when that will change? I don’t want our sons to be its first victims, too young and weak to fight it off properly.”

“How do we know it will change?”

Zhuang let out a heavy sigh, falling down into the seat next to her. Baishi had calmed a little bit, but his wracking breaths and tiny coughs made Zhuang and Shiqin’s hearts burn in sorrow. Neither of them wanted a day like this to come, nor did they want to have this conversation, but it was unavoidable. The miasmic plague didn’t care who it hurt, forces of nature unaffected by how humanity felt about them. 

“We don’t,” he acquiesced, “but do you really want to take that chance?”

Shiqin looked away, biting her lip to keep herself from crying. “What do you want to do?”

“I’ll take Baishi to Liyue Harbor,” Zhuang began. “I’ll get him some medicine there and hope the cough clears up with time. While I’m there, I’ll pick up some jobs, make some money and send some back home. I’ll stay until things are better, or until I’ve got enough for us to live comfortably. It won’t be forever, and later on down the line we’ll decide again whether you want to make your way out to the harbor too, or whether we’ll come back home. We don’t have to decide right now. Right now, all that matters is making sure Baishi gets better.”

“What about Baizhu?” Shiqin asked meekly, her grip on the boy tightening the slightest bit. “What if he gets it as well?”

Zhuang shook his head. “I’ll send medicine back too. For you and him. And clothes, and food, and whatever else I can get.”

Finally, the tears broke free and streamed down Shiqin’s face. She had never wanted this, never wanted the plague to tear their lives apart as it was beginning to do. She didn’t want to let go of Baishi, but the circumstances called for it. He would not get better if he continued to live in the environment he’d gotten sick in, and his health was much more important than her own desires. At least she wouldn’t be separated from Baizhu. She didn’t know if she’d be able to take it if she had been left there all alone.

Lifting up his hand away from Baishi, Zhuang leaned in close and pressed it against Shiqin’s tearstained cheek. He kissed her forehead, then her lips, before he rested his forehead against hers.

“It won’t be forever,” he said again, hoping in his heart that it was true. “Just a little while. Then things will get better, I promise.”

Promises were a fragile, fragile thing. It was only nature that they were often broken.

Chapter Text

The day Zhuang and Baishi set off on their journey was a bright and sunny one. 

Shiqin and Baizhu saw them off at the stone path leading out of Qiaoying Village. Their neighbors stood outside their houses  and waved goodbye as they passed, all too used to people leaving in the past few years. Zhuang was not the first to look towards Liyue Harbor for a better life and he surely wouldn’t be the last either. 

They stopped by the nearest Statue of the Seven, the foreboding presence of the Geo Archon watching over them as they said their goodbyes. The archon’s stone stare was distant, but Zhuang and Shiqin both felt shivers run down their spines at the sight of it. The people of Qiaoying Village and Chenyu Vale as a whole had never had the best relationship with their archon, not after what he had done to their goddess during the original war, but his statues stayed standing regardless. It would have been crucifying to remove them or destroy them and no one wanted to bring the wrath of the rock down on themselves, not for the sake of removing one or two annoying statues. 

Not that the people could remove them even if they wanted to. Zhuang could feel the power that radiated from it even from twenty feet away. It was there for good, no doubt about it. 

He shifted Baishi around in his arms, the child giggling happily as his tear-stricken mother leaned over him, squishing his cheeks and planting kisses all over his face, combing through his hair with her fingers. Both of the twins’ hair had grown over the few months, nearly abnormally long in length as far as their parents could tell. Baizhu’s vibrant green hair fell halfway down his back, long enough that Shiqin could braid it, while Baishi’s was a bit shorter, stuck around his shoulders. Shiqin liked to tie his hair back when she could, both her and Zhuang smiling at the sight of the tiny ponytail Baishi’s hair was often worn in. 

Zhuang watched his wife say her goodbyes with a fleeting smile, his own tears bubbling up. Obviously, he had no desire to leave Qiaoying Village either, but it was for the best. It would be a new start for him and Baishi in Liyue Harbor, and he could do his little family a lot of good by sacrificing his own desires for the sake of their livelihoods. 

Unable to stop himself, he passed a hand through Shiqin’s hair and drew her face up from their son’s, pressing a kiss to her lips, laughing when she let out a giggle. She pressed her hand to his cheek as well, letting out a short sigh and closing her eyes, leaning her head against his shoulder. Baizhu cooed in her arms, the twins settled warmly in their arms as they said their goodbyes.

“You’ll be back eventually?” Shiqin asked, seeking reassurance. She fought back a sob, not wanting to leave her husband’s grasp. Her body felt weak, legs shaky. She had yet to completely heal from the childbirth, which their doctor had said was normal for the most part, but she was worried it was something more. Something had felt a bit different lately, but she never mentioned it to Zhuang. She didn’t want him to worry and refuse to leave.

As much as she despised this, she understood it was for the best. Surviving off the few fish they could catch throughout the week and the few crops that avoided the tainted soil wasn’t a viable continuous solution. Soon their boys would be toddlers and they’d need more food and better clothing, things they couldn’t afford as things were.

A part of Shiqin wondered if things would be better if she and Baizhu did go with them. Well, maybe not better, but perhaps it’d be easier. Then they wouldn’t have to say goodbye, wouldn’t have to separate. 

But the journey would be harder with four rather than two, Shiqin didn’t truly want to leave, and it would be better all together if none of them had to leave. However, the decision was already made. Zhuang was packed, a giant backpack full of dried fish, some of the little money they had left, all of his clothing, and some extra blankets and fabrics donated by their neighbors for camping. It would be inconvenient for her to randomly decide that she wanted to come along. 

“Of course,” Zhuang replied, brushing her hair back over her shoulder and cupping the back of her head to bring her in for one last kiss. “I’ll send money and supplies back as soon as I can and we’ll make our way back when things are better.”

“You promise?” 

A small smile slipped onto his lips and his thumb traced the line under her left eye, clearing away the tears. “When have I ever lied to you? I promise.”

Reluctantly, the lovers parted, each holding one of their sons, and Zhuang backed away for as long as he could without turning his back to his wife, waving to her and blowing kisses. She waved back, holding up Baizhu’s short arm to make him wave as well. Zhuang chuckled and did the same with Baishi, the boy cooing curiously at the movement. 

Eventually, he was forced to turn away from her, hugging Baishi to his chest as a small comfort. He didn’t look to see if Shiqin was still waiting there, waving, because he knew if he did, he wouldn’t have the courage to leave. Things were turbulent in Qiaoying Village. They lived day to day not knowing if the plague would suddenly turn deadly, nor if they would have enough food to eat for the next few days. But travel was even more concerning, especially as he traveled from home for the first time, off to a city he had never been to before. 

As though sensing his turning mood, Baishi began to cry again, his sobs muffled against Zhuang’s chest, interrupted every so often by tiny coughs, reminding Zhuang just why he was doing this in the first place. His own feelings and desires about the matter didn’t matter right now. For his sons to survive, that was all that mattered. 

So he set off on the journey with as much of a pep in his step as he could manage. Zhuang traveled down the worn dirt path, swatting away the little gnats and mosquitos that flew around them and, once Baishi calmed, pointed out the red and green lizards that scuttled across their footpath. 

He skirted around a band of treasure hoarders near the outside of the port, tiptoeing along the tree line with his hand gently pressed against Baishi’s mouth, trying to avoid alerting the hoarders of their presence. To his luck, Baishi didn’t cry at the action, but rather silently giggled, staring up at his father with bright eyes as though they were playing again.

After making it around them, he settled back onto the dirt path, approaching the port with little trouble. This far, he had been before. The small port to the right of their small village, just around the mountain, was nearly abandoned, though a few boats, fishermen, and laborers lurked around the boxes stacked against the rotting wooden poles sticking up from the water.

One of the fishermen, an old man busy rewiring his pole, looked up upon Zhuang’s arrival, as his footsteps creaked the wood and scared away some of the nearby fish. Some of the other stragglers glared, but softened their gazes and glanced away upon seeing little Baishi, the boy’s bright purple eyes blinking out over the curtain of his father’s arms. 

“What do ya need, son?” the old fisherman asked, voice cracked and somewhat guarded. His vest covered in hooks had seen better days, his pants were sunbleached and cropped near the ankles, and his shoes were sandals nearly falling apart at the seams. It was clear, as Zhuang looked around, that he wasn’t the only one there down on his luck. It shouldn’t have come as the surprise that it did. 

“Just searching for transport,” Zhuang replied, looking between the people there, hoping one of them could help him. Despite living so close by, he barely recognized anyone there, most of the folks likely coming from Qingce Village or having traveled from Liyue Harbor or Yilong Wharf just to fish. “Would I be able to find any here?”

The old man stared at him appraisingly as he continued to wind up the wire around his rod. “I suppose it’ll depend. Where’re ya going?”

“Just down the river, towards Bishui Plain. Any drop off spot would be fine. I’m making my way to Liyue Harbor.”

“Liyue Harbor, eh? It’s pretty busy this time of year. Everyone’s gone there for jobs during the famine. You wouldn’t be the first, nor the last.”

“I know.”

Shrugging, the old man recast his line into the depths, finally having finished his efforts to rewire it. The hook sat there in the water for a long while. Nothing bit. With a heavy sigh, the fisherman shook his head, reeling it back up. 

“I’ll take ya,” he said finally, settling the rod against the boxes. As he walked, Zhuang noticed that he had a limp, his left leg dragging the slightest bit behind his right. “Might as well. Nothin’ much good comes to this bay anymore. Come on, my boat’s right over there.”

Zhuang followed the man around the port, passing a number of other fishermen just as down on their luck as the first. Pace slow to keep up with the fisherman, Zhuang took the time to check back in on Baishi, who had followed asleep against his chest. His arms were beginning to grow tired and he knew he’d have to accommodate for his son eventually—it was why he’d brought multiple blankets, after all—but for now, he just wanted to feel the comfort of having his child safe in his arms. 

The fisherman’s boat was small and wooden, obviously meant for fishing out in the middle of a lake and not for traveling long distances, but he didn’t seem too bothered by how far Zhuang had asked him to go. Zhuang offered to row them there, but the man brushed him away, muttering something about young people and their nerves. 

So Zhuang found himself sitting at the opposite end of the wooden boat, the seat he sat upon uncomfortably, but he wasn’t about to complain. Instead, he rocked Baishi, looking out over the water as it hit against the hull. The bay was murky, but not enough to block from sight the small schools of fish beneath the surface of the water. No sign of any bigger fish. Though the boat could just have been scaring them away, Zhuang doubted it.

“What are ya making your way to Liyue Harbor for?” the old man asked eventually as he rowed them out into the open waters. “Most made their ways out ages ago, so you’re a bit behind schedule.”

“My wife didn’t want to leave,” he explained. “We’ve lived in Qiaoying Village our whole lives. It’s a bit difficult to let go of that kind of history, but our sons are young. My little Baishi here has already gotten a cough and we don’t want it to get any worse. Who knows when the plague will take a turn for the worse? I can’t just…sit there and wait for that to happen any longer.”

“Leaving home’s a hard thing,” the fisherman creaked, his eyes lidded as he squinted out across the bay. “I did it when I was twelve. Ma and Pa never had enough for all us kids, so I snuck out in the night. Thought I’d be making it easier on ‘em. Hopped on a ship to cross the sea and never saw ‘em again.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Did you ever go looking for them?”

“Eh, what would be the point? Either they forgive me or they don’t, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t make the same decision if I did it again. Life might not have turned out too well, but I’d rather be here than be a burden on them any longer.”

Zhuang had little to say to that. In a way, wasn’t that what he was doing too? Running away to solve a problem? 

Of course, he wasn’t truly running away, but the point still stood.

“I’m sure they missed you,” was the only thing he could say.

“Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t even notice. At this point in life, I’ve made my peace with it. Not like I can change it now. My parents are long dead, my siblings likely as such too.”

Humming sadly, Zhuang nodded, squeezing Baishi a little tighter. “I can understand that. My parents died a few years back and my wife’s died in her childhood. Neither of us ever had any siblings either, so it was mostly just the two of us, neighbors and best friends since we were children, until our two little bundles of joy came to be.”

He smiled, poking Baishi’s little nose and planting a kiss on his forehead as the baby giggled. 

Their boat began to slow, nearing a small inlet surrounded by bamboo trees, but open enough that he could easily climb up onto shore. Baishi peeked out from Zhuang’s arms and his purple eyes widened at the tall stalks of bamboo.

The sun had sunk down over the horizon as they crossed the murky waters. Light glittered from the lanterns that hung from poles overhead, but shadows still hung over their faces, casting them in darkness. 

“Well, make sure to keep a hold on ‘em while you still can,” the man grunted, wiping sweat from his forehead as they came to a halt against the sand. “Who knows what will happen in the future? Gotta spend as much time with them as possible, or else you’ll miss out on all the good things that come with ‘em.”

“I agree,” Zhuang said, bowing his head. “Ever since they were born, all my thoughts have been consumed by what’s best for my children. All I can hope is that each step forward I take is the right one, but I’ll never know that for sure until that future comes and my sons are still in this world.”

“None of us can know the future,” said the fisherman, leaning on the side of the boat and waving his hand in disgust. “Don’t even try to think of it. Stay in the present and make it work. That’ll be what your sons will appreciate the most. Sometimes all that’s best for them is to be there when times get hard. Archons above, maybe I wouldn’t have left so young had I known what my parents were thinking when they were too busy for us.”

Standing, Zhuang took a step from the boat, foot settling on the firm ground once more, and then another, trying not to wake Baishi with the movements. The fisherman stood with him, his knees shaking, and Zhuang shot out a hand to steady them.

“Whoa, watch out there, don’t want you to fall.”

“I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine. Come here, grab my hand.” 

Zhuang did as the man said and took his hand, shaking it firmly. Trying to search his pockets with one hand for some of the little mora he had to spare to pay the man, Zhuang managed to fish only one out before the fisherman swatted at him.

“Put that back away. You have more need for all the mora you can get than this old man does. Keep it, put it towards that son of yours. With any luck, he won’t turn out anything like me.”

Thanking him profusely a few times before turning away, Zhuang walked up the bank of the bay, finding the dirt path that passed through with ease. He turned, waving the old fisherman goodbye as he turned the boat around and made his way back towards the port off the side of Chenyu Vale. He heard the man yell something back at him in return, but the sound was eaten by the blowing wind and splashing waves, leaving nothing but a whisper that glanced past Zhuang’s ears, disappearing into the night. 

Once the old man was out of sight again, Zhuang let out a long held sigh. The events of the day had exhausted him, and exhausted Baishi as well by the looks of it, the child’s soft breaths seeming easier than before as they left the lands of Chenyu Vale behind them. 

Glancing around the area, the bamboo trees towering up above his head, Zhuang began to look for an area that would shelter them for the night. Kneeling down, he pulled his pack from his back with his free arm, trying not to jostle Baishi with the motion, and pulled one of the longer blankets from one of the pockets. From there, he laid the blanket on the ground, placed Baishi in the middle of it, and swaddled him. Taking the flattened ends of it, he tied them into a knot, fixing the makeshift baby-sling around his shoulder so he could free up his hands while still keeping Baishi safely around his shoulders. 

A wild boar dug at the ground a few yards away, so Zhuang kept his distance. Pulling his backpack back up onto his shoulders, he glanced through the bamboo, trying to find a place where they could rest safely without danger coming upon them.

Then, in the distance, he spotted an abandoned looking house up on a small hill past all the bamboo. Taking a chance, he trekked towards it down the dirt path, crossing over the small river between it and carefully scaling the short cliff it sat upon. Approaching the door, he knocked loudly, hoping that if someone was there, they’d be kind enough to provide them with shelter for the night.

However, upon his fist touching the wood, the door creaked open on its own, the inside of the house dark and barren. Zhuang guessed it was better than nothing and squeezed inside, shutting the door firmly behind them. 

Settling down for the night from there was simple. After cleaning up the floor, airing out the dust by cracking the windows open, and ridding the place of rodents, he fed the both of them, chewing on some dried fish and feeding Baishi a few bites as well, then giving him some of the milk he’d prepared for the journey ahead. He only had enough for the next few days, but he’d get some more once they were in Liyue Harbor.

After they ate and Zhuang cleaned the both of them up, he placed Baishi down on the ground in his swaddle, piling some extra clothes all around him in case Baishi turned over in the night. Then, Zhuang laid out his own blanket right beside his son, the floor cold and hard beneath him regardless of the layering. He held his arm out and huddled it around Baishi, trying to keep him warm.

The night was rough on him, sleep refusing to take him for hours. Once it finally did, his dreams were empty, devoid of the good just as much as they were the bad. Waking, his back ached, but he got up and moved regardless. Who knew if someone was going to come checking in on the house. Even if it looked abandoned, it didn’t necessarily mean it was.

He packed the two of them up within minutes, feeding Baishi and himself before they left at the break of dawn. Zhuang tried to leave the house just as he’d found it, making sure they had everything before venturing back out into the bamboo forest. 

The path was bumpy at some points, long planks of wood tracing the pathway as they walked up the short hill. The same wild boar for the night before still lingered around the area, so they skirted around it, Baishi awake to point at it and babble this time around. The mountain stood strong along the side of the pathway and Zhuang ran a hand along the rocks until there was a break for a waterfall. They paused along the short bridge, Zhuang letting Baishi look on in wonder before they started to walk again. 

The route through the Bamboo lined portion of Bishui Plain was a patchwork of the stone bridges fading into dirt and wooden paths until the land began drawing up rather than crumbling under. Pausing for a moment at a fork in the path, Zhuang eventually decided to take the upper path after catching sight of a few groups of hilichurls lingering along the outskirts.

The upper path took the two through the old ruins that decorated the plain. Zhuang was unfamiliar with the area, though he had studied a map thoroughly before he’d left home, so he had a pretty good idea of where he was going. Still, the ruins made him feel on edge, hairs along his arms standing as the cold breeze blew through the plain, and Zhuang hastened his pace, not wanting to stick around too much longer. 

Canola blossoms filled the grasses around the ruined structures, painting the scenery around them in shades of yellow, orange, green, and gray. The stone stairs were uneven, blades of grass peeking up through the cracks and lizards crawling up them alongside Zhuang and Baishi. 

After crossing the center of the ruins, avoiding the strange, glowing ball implanted in the ground there, Zhuang trekked through the canolas to avoid a pond full of cryo slimes that blocked the dirt path. Jumping over the short edge, they continued back down the stone steps, passing a small stone dragon statue along the borders of the ruins, and continuing on a stone and dirt path out of the ruins. The hill began to dip down and Zhuang and Baishi followed it as it went, Baishi gurgling and pointing at a black and white striped gecko that skittered on by.

Eventually, after passing by and just narrowly avoiding two separate groups of hilichurls, they finally arrived at the break in the path, the bridge that led across the Dihua Marsh and over to Wangshu Inn, their next expected stop for the night. Zhuang didn’t have much mora on him in general, but he figured they had just enough for a night and a nice dinner, and when they got to Liyue Harbor, he’d hopefully have enough left to rent a room for a few nights so he could find work without having to worry. 

The bridge was grand, stone features rising up above the waters of the marsh and dipping down to meet the next island area. Upon reaching that strip of land, they were immediately greeted with dimmed geo structures and more of the dragons, though they had bodies this time around. They had tortoise-like shells on their backs, their small bodies sheltered underneath them as though they were made as protective helms. 

The structures and dragons made something pang deep in his chest, reminding him of the ones planted deep within the grounds of Chenyu Vale. Homesickness had been lingering just beneath the surface the last day and a half, but he hadn’t let it pierce through the layer until just now. He smothered the feeling for now, figuring it could wait until they at least got the Wangshu Inn.

As they walked the stone path, sometimes Zhuang would veer off to the side, picking swaths of mint and berries for meals later on. Cattails came in bundles, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of canola blossoms that run through the lands. He spotted some mist flowers along the way as well, but figured they weren’t worth the trouble of picking. Zhuang could practically feel the frostbite he’d get from trying.

Near the middle of the quaint isle, towering over the path at the top of a rolling hillock, was another Statue of the Seven. The empty stare of Liyue’s patron archon, Rex Lapis, felt more mocking than protective. The god’s relaxed sit upon the stone carved throne, the hood covering his head, as though he cared not how he was seen by his people other than to showcase his casual power, spreading the fact that he could tear all their lives down in an instant if he wished to, did nothing to calm Zhuang’s concerns about the next few years ahead. 

The stone archon’s eyes seemed to burn into the back of his head as he passed. Zhuang did not look back until he was sure the statue was long out of sight.

The scent of Dihua Marsh was thick in the air around them. He collected a few more helpful herbs as he went, letting Baishi take a tiny whiff of one of the mints, at which the boy scrunched his face, causing Zhuang to laugh. As they walked, Zhuang talked lowly to his child, rubbing his back through the blanket and assuring him of their safe arrival soon enough. 

“Everything will be alright,” he whispered soothingly as he helped Baishi drink a bit more milk from the bottle he had prepared. “Liyue Harbor will be a brand new start for the both of us, and everything will finally start looking up. For the two of us and for your mother and brother. Trust in the Geo Archon that it will.” 

The people of Chenyu Vale often had mixed opinions on said Geo Archon. Rex Lapis was quite a controversial figure, after all, with all the gods he killed. He had killed Chenyu Vale’s own goddess all those years ago during the Archon War, if the stories of the time were to be believed, her name long since lost to time.

Zhuang was conflicted about it. He had never given much thought to the archons and their prevalence before this. Objectively, he had always known of Rex Lapis. Rex Lapis, the lord of rock and the god of history and contracts, he who broke the ground and formed Guyun Stone Forest by launching stone spears at Osial, his greatest conquest. All of Liyue, if not all of Teyvat, knew those stories.

But Zhuang had always worshipped the adepti of Chenyu Vale above Liyue’s archon. Those faithful adepti who had served their goddess to the very end and were weakened greatly in their efforts. They had disappeared in the time since the Archon War, but many of those in Chenyu Vale still left offerings, still prayed to them for good harvests and good fishing seasons. 

With the plague, it was easy to forget to pray to those one couldn’t see. Zhuang and Shiqin both had grown disillusioned with the aspect of faith that required belief that things would be good eventually. It was difficult to keep a grasp on hope when things were so bad in the present moment. 

So Zhuang had never had much of an opinion on Rex Lapis himself. How could one form an opinion on a god they did not know intimately? One who had likely not spared a glance at him his entire life? 

Of course, he had still left him offerings years ago when he still had faith. He didn’t wish to suffer the wrath of the rock, just as many others within Liyue feared. But then Zhuang and Shiqin had stopped offering, needing the scraps more for themselves than any gods or archons did, and nothing had happened. At first he had believed that the archon and the adepti had understood. There was a plague going on, there simply wasn’t enough to spare.

At some point, Zhuang had ceased to believe that anything ever would have happened at all. 

But at times like these, with Rex Lapis’s heavy gaze coming down from the revered and magical statue, a symbol of his power, Zhuang reexamined those beliefs and put out a little prayer despite his discomfort.

Spare my sons, he thought to the statue, believing that the right person would hear, and let them live long and happy lives. They are not meant for the cruelty of the world around us . Take me, if you must, but spare them. 

He held Baishi just a bit tighter in his arms. 

Approaching the next gate, Zhuang met eyes with a Millelith Guard, who was standing at attention, a certain guardedness in his expression. Zhuang paused a few feet away, rocking Baishi and shushing him lightly before greeting the man.

“Good afternoon,” he said, bowing his head slightly. “Lovely day out.”

The guard, familiar in his red, black, and yellow Millelith uniform, nodded in return. His dark hair fell over eyes that searched for a threat. When he seemed to find none in Zhuang, he relaxed, letting his spear go lax against the ground in his hold and returning the greeting. “Good afternoon. Please, state your intentions.”

“I am making my way to Liyue Harbor with my son in search of work,” Zhuang explained, tilting Baishi down a little so the guard could see him. “The plague in Chenyu Vale has gotten rough for many families there. I doubt I am the first traveler from there you have met guarding this bridge.”

The guard chuckled, shaking his head. “No, you are not. Many came through altogether a year or two ago, though there have been stragglers following behind ever since. I regret the circumstances that have brought you forth, but it is nice to see some new faces passing through every so often. This job is quite a lonesome one at times.”

“One can only imagine,” Zhuang replied, unable to imagine it himself. He was used to being surrounded by neighbors, those who understood his day to day life and his struggles because they shared them as well. To be stationed out so far from home on a daily, it would be an unfamiliar and unshareable struggle, he imagined. 

“Well, I hope you will find what you are searching for in Liyue Harbor, and if you don’t, make sure to say hi on your way back if I’m still standing. It’s nice to hear the stories travelers bring along with them when passing through.”

Zhuang bid the guard goodbye and crossed over the bridge with haste, nearly stepping on a golden loach midway through. Picking up the silvery pearl it spit out and examining it in the sun, he pocketed it. He had heard from the local healer awhile that those pearls could be used for medicine sometimes, though he wasn’t certain what kind of medicine they could be used in. If anything, he could likely sell it to a physician for a small amount of mora like the herbs.

Fences were scattered around the path in groups, broken down and rotted at some parts, the upkeep obviously long forgotten. Zhuang wondered if they had simply forgotten, or deemed them unnecessary in the long run, considering the isles seemed rather peaceful from monsters aside from a few slimes here and there on the outskirts of them. Small oil-paper umbrellas were planted in the ground along the path as well. Zhuang figured they had most likely been planted there by the Qixing or by the Adepti themselves as attempts at warding off any evil-spirits that might have made their way towards Wangshu Inn or Liyue Harbor. 

Passing by a booth selling brews he couldn’t afford, the lanterns slowly began to become more abundant as they neared the bridge to Wangshu Inn. More of the oil-paper umbrellas popped up as they neared and Zhuang paused to pick some silk flowers before they ventured across the last bridge they would cross for the day. The bridge to Wangshu Inn was in much better condition than the previous few they’d crossed, the wood planks appearing new and neatly placed to avoid anything getting caught or tripped up. People crowded around the sides of the bridge, looking out over the marsh and laughing in the lantern light that shone out as the sky darkened over their heads. Small bluebirds hopped across the wood and Baishi watched them with wide eyes, his tiny hands flexing as though he wanted to reach out and grab one.

Laughing at the motion, Zhuang readjusted the sling so that Baishi was propped up against his shoulder and had a better look at the sights around them. They called out a few greetings to people who waved as they crossed and made their way up onto the wooden platform the Wangshu Inn stood upon. At the entrance of the Inn that led to the elevator, they met with a brown haired waitress, her smile somewhat mechanical as she greeted them.

“Greetings!” she said as they approached, voice falsely cheerful. “My name is Aihua, a waitress here at Wangshu Inn. I hope this night has been pleasant for you weary travelers so far. Are you in need of a meal, or a room for the night?”

“Ah, we were hoping for both, actually,” Zhuang answered, bouncing Baishi as he let out a small yawn and cough. “Long day of walking behind us, it’ll be nice to finally stay somewhere with a bed.”

“So I was right about you being weary travelers,” Aihua said, her mechanicality somewhat lessening as a smile crossed her face. “Where are you coming in from?”

“Chenyu Vale. We’ve been walking a long way already, might as well rest for a bit before continuing on our last stretch.”

Aihua nodded in sympathy. “Another refugee from the plague, I see. We’ve gotten many through here over the last few years. Though we like to consider our prices affordable to the average traveler, we have actually started offering the Chenyu Vale refugees a discount here, considering many don’t have the funds to afford both a meal and a room. If you’d like to hear more, please, ask my boss at the front desk up above. I hope your stay here is enjoyable!”

“Thank you,” Zhuang replied. “I’m sure it will be.”

As the conversation ended, Zhuang and Baishi took the elevator up to the top floor, Zhuang’s stomach turning a bit as they stepped off the lift at last. Avoiding crashing into an inconveniently placed stone statue Zhuang had been seeing most of his life—though he didn’t know exactly what their purpose was—, they went down another staircase to greet Aihua’s boss behind an enclosed desk. It was covered by a blue and gold patterned cloth and a candle, along with some vases and boxes pushed off to the side. A dog laid by the base of the desk, its dark eyes tracking him as it laid its head on the ground, heaving under its honey-colored coat.

The woman behind the counter was short with black hair pulled back into a high ponytail. Her qipao was burgundy with stripes of gold, similar to Aihua’s. The short sleeves it had were puffy and similarly lined with gold.  

When she saw them approach, she straightened, letting a customer friendly smile slip onto her face. “Hello! A new customer, I see. Welcome to Wangshu Inn! My name is Baorui and I’m the boss here. What can I get you today?”

“Miss Aihua downstairs said you had a discount for refugees from the plague in Chenyu Vale?” he asked hesitantly, wondering if he should not just cave and pay the full price anyway. Aihua had said they were rather affordable and he probably did have enough to afford it. 

Baorui, however, nodded immediately. “Yes, of course. It’s something the Qixing authorized us to implement upon hearing about the plague. A room for the night and dinner for half the price. Is there anything else you need?”

Zhuang frowned. He had been running low on milk lately, so he might as well ask. “Do you happen to have milk fit for infants? It seems I didn’t pack enough for the whole trip like I originally thought. I’ll pay what I can for it.”

“Yes, of course. No need for payment, we can just include it in the dinner, no worries. Please, you can go see our chef, Caiyun, just downstairs. She’ll serve you your dinner and after that I can lead you to your room for the night.”

Baorui pointed him toward the staircase and he followed her guidance after thanking her for her kindness. Baishi made a disgruntled noise as they descended the stairs, the same noise he made when he was about to start crying, and startled the chef, who was crouching down near the oven, from her reverie. She glanced towards them, expression disgruntled until she noticed Baishi, who noticed her as well and started babbling happily as his eyes locked in on the food she was cooking. Zhuang bit back a laugh.

“Good afternoon,” he greeted her. Gracefully, she stood from her crouch, wiping her hands on the apron she wore and nodding at him. “Miss Baorui told us to come here to get dinner and milk for my son?”

Caiyun gestured for him to sit down as she cleaned off her knives and shuffled through the kitchen, opening one of the jars she had along the side of the kitchen. “Do you have a jug?”

 Placing Baishi down on his lap, he shifted his backpack around and put it down beside him, pulling out the jug he’d been keeping the milk in and handing it over to her. Pulling off the cap, she dipped it down into the jar and pulled it back out, letting the milk settle and spill off the top of the jug until it evened out and she tightened the lid.

She handed it back and then went back to cooking. All she asked him was about allergies, to which he replied that neither of them were allergic to anything as far as he was aware. Caiyun hummed in response.

 Zhuang got the feeling she didn’t speak much. He began to speak quietly to Baishi as they waited, playing peek-a-boo as they waited for the meal.

Only a few minutes later, Caiyun placed a plate full of tofu with almonds and garnishes on top. “A Wangshu Inn specialty. It should be easy enough for your son to eat.”

The smell was mouthwatering. He had had almond tofu a few times before, but it was a rare delicacy in Chenyu Vale and the times came few and far in between. Zhuang thanked her profusely and began to dig in, splitting the tofu in half and sharing it between him and Baishi. He cut Baishi’s pieces small, alternating between giving him them and having him drink some of the milk they’d provided.

Once they finished, they thanked Caiyun again then returned to the front desk. From there, Baorui showed them to their room for the night and left them to sleep. 

Zhuang took a few moments to clean Baishi up and put him to bed before he finally rested himself, his head hitting the feather-soft pillow with a sigh. Soon enough, he was out like a light.

—

Waking up in the morning was much easier this time around than it had been the night before in the abandoned house. Zhuang’s back no longer hurt with every step and Baishi was laughing and giggling as they left the room, bags repacked, breakfast eaten, and Baishi safe and content in his sling. 

Pausing at the front desk, Zhuang greeted Baorui with a smile. 

“Thank you for your hospitality, Miss Baorui,” he said, placing the mora he owed her on the counter. 

“Thank you for staying with us, Mr. Zhaung,” Baorui replied. “Where will you be heading next?”

“From here, we will make our way out to Liyue Harbor. It should be less than a day’s walk from here, we hope.”

Baorui nodded in understanding. “Searching for work like the others? If you would like, I could consult my boss and ask around to see if they have any vacancies. We are always in need of new workers.”

It sounded like a good deal, but Zhuang couldn’t help but feel weary of the offer. “Who would your boss be?”

“Well,” she said, clearing her throat and looking around, “it’s not exactly something we advertise, but you seem like good people and in need of work, so as long as you don’t spread it around…”

She waited for him to respond. Zhuang nodded, gesturing for her to continue.

“The Wangshu Inn happens to have some connections with the Liyue Qixing,” Baorui whispered to him, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear and cupping her mouth. “If you would like—”

“Ah, thank you, Miss Baorui, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline.” He inclined his head in apology. “I have no desire to get involved with the Qixing, not with the danger it could put my family in.”

Baorui smiled, shaking her head calmly. “A completely understandable decision. Regardless, Liyue Harbor is always in need of extra fishermen and adventurers, and the Chasm is always looking for more miners. The jobs don’t pay much, but they’re always available. People in those trades often work multiple jobs without signing any contracts, which usually makes them a bit more money than working only one. I hope that luck finds you, Mister Zhuang.”

Bidding her goodbye, Zhuang and Baishi made their way back down to the ground floor, waving goodbye to Aihua as they left. From there, they crossed over the next wooden bridge into Guili Plains, the stone road turning back to dirt and wood the longer they walked. The smell of marsh began to lessen as floral scents pervaded the air, causing both Zhuang and Baishi to let out a few sneezes.

The roads of Guili Plains were lined with an intermixing of stone bricks and wooden fences, the lanterns petering out until each was yards apart. The sun was high in the sky above, the two of them having slept much longer than they had meant to, it seemed. Still, Zhuang predicted they’d be able to make their way to Liyue Harbor by nightfall regardless. Hopefully they’d be able to find lodging that late into the night. He wasn’t too keen on sleeping on the ground once again.

Approaching a fork in the road, Zhuang paused for a minute, readjusting the sling. He couldn’t quite remember which way the map had told him to go from here, so he examined the way in the distance carefully. He didn’t want to accidentally take the wrong turn and delay their arrival. 

Just as he was about to pause and ask some of the Millelith lurking about, someone behind him cleared their throat, making him jump. When Zhuang turned, he was met with the golden stare of a regally dressed gentleman, his brown and gold longcoat one of the finest clothing pieces he’d seen in years.

“Pardon my interruption,” the gentleman said, a gentle smile peaking up onto his expression. “You seem lost. Is there something you may be looking for?”

“Sorry, sorry, I must be blocking your way,” Zhuang laughed nervously. “I’m just looking for the route to Liyue Harbor. It seems I’ve misremembered the map route.”

“What a coincidence,” the gentleman remarked, his tone warm. “I happen to be heading back that way as well. Why don’t we walk together for a while? Time always passes faster when talking.”

With no other option, Zhuang agreed, though he was a bit reluctant. The gentleman didn’t seem malicious, but there was something off about him. No one would be walking out in the plains in such nice clothes if they didn’t believe they were powerful enough to fight off anyone who attempted to rob them, after all.

The other man walked ahead of him, his hands laced gracefully behind his back, leading him down the right way of the crossroads, if he was to be believed. Strengthening his grip on Baishi, Zhuang caught up to the man and walked by his side. Upon catching a glimpse of the vision that hung low on the other’s back, something inside of him relaxed. Of course the man was assured of his safety out here. Vision users typically had little to fear. 

“Forgive me,” said the gentleman after a few moments of silence. “I don’t believe I caught your name, or your little one’s.”

“My bad, sir. My name is Zhuang, and this is my son Baishi. We’re both natives of Chenyu Vale.”

“Chenyu Vale?” Something glimmered in the man’s eyes. “My, it’s been years since I’ve last visited. I have heard things have gotten rather bad lately, though. It’s unfortunate. The tea used to be one of great quality.”

“Yes, it was,” Zhuang said with a wistful sigh. “We used to be a prosperous place, but ever since the plague hit, it’s been difficult. My wife didn’t want to leave, but things were only getting worse with time and Baishi started getting sick, so we left her and my other son behind so I could bring Baishi to get medicine and pick up some work while we’re here.”

As if Baishi realized they were talking about him, he began to babble again, a chubby hand popping out the sling to try to grab onto the stranger’s ponytail. Zhuang panicked as Baishi somehow managed to get his hand that far and began to tug at his brown and golden tinged hair.

“I am so sorry, sir. He’s never done anything like this before,” Zhuang rushed to get out, trying to untangle his son’s fingers from the man’s hair. To his relief, the gentleman didn’t seem to disturbed, pausing his walk to let him do so. 

“It is of no concern, Mr. Zhuang. Children are naturally curious. It is only within our deepest desires to indulge them in their curiosities to provide them with the knowledge they want and with the futures they will eventually desire. In fact, I—”

As Zhuang finally freed the stranger from his son’s sticky hands, the gentleman paused as he turned around to face them, his golden brown eyes zeroing in on Baishi. His expression flattened out, turning unreadable. For a minute there, Zhuang was concerned that the stranger had decided to be angry after all. 

“I see,” the young man muttered, his hand going up to rub at his chin. In that moment, he seemed to age years older than he appeared, Zhuang wondering just what he could be thinking so hard about. Eventually, his expression cleared and in the end, he simply looked sad. “Would you mind if I held him?”

Blinking at the sudden question, Zhuang grew nervous again, unsure of what the man’s intentions were. The quick change up in mood had been strange enough, now the man wanted to hold his son? Vision holders were usually trust worthy, if the stories rang true, but something about this man still rang out abnormal to him. As though he was not what he seemed. 

Still, he didn’t seem like a threat to Zhuang, so, with an unfamiliar hesitance, he drew Baishi from his sling and placed him down in the gentleman’s arms. Like clockwork, Baishi began to cry loudly, causing Zhuang to wince. Luckily enough, the other man didn’t seem too concerned by the noise.

“He’s not usually like this, I swear,” Zhuang promised, fretting over Baishi while trying to stay in his own space. The gentleman looked down at his child with that same sadness as before, his gloved hand bracing the back of Baishi’s head and his other wrapping around the rest of his body. He held him with precision, obviously having much experience in the action. “Maybe his sickness is acting up again. It’s been getting better the farther we move away from Chenyu Vale, but it still has its moments. I’m just hoping Liyue Harbor will have the medicine he needs.”

“I’m sure that it will,” the man hummed distractedly, rubbing a thumb along Baishi’s scalp as though trying to soothe him. The motion worked slightly, his cries dying down just the smallest bit. “I worry over other things instead, however. Your son has a long and difficult path ahead of him. I only hope that he will one day see the end of it in the light. Not many have the chance to do so. When he is a bit older than now, please, tell him that though his journey may be treacherous, it is okay for him to take his time. There will always be those who will wait for him to reach that end alongside them.”

Heavily confused by the man’s words, Zhuang simply nodded and retook his son as the golden man handed him back at last. The weight of his child in his arms was familiar and comforting. He smiled at the gentleman and said, “You know, I don’t think I ever got your name.”

“Did I not say it? It must have slipped my mind,” the golden man said, rolling his shoulders back as they began to walk once more, Baishi’s cries ceasing once more as he was settled back into his sling. “You may call me Zhongli.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Zhongli. Thank you for walking all this way with me.”

“It’s of no consequence. I was heading this way regardless. This is but a pleasant additional step in the long trek of the journey. I should thank you for giving me this chance to learn some of your story.”

“Of course,” Zhuang said, still a bit confused, but smiling nonetheless. “Do you live in Liyue Harbor?”

“At times,” Zhongli replied, his smile turning a bit amused. “I enjoy visiting more than anything. Traveling is an art these days and I have found myself in a time of peace like none before. It is quite nice to visit the tourist spots of Liyue and ponder on the history of the lands before I am once again called to my duties.”

“What kind of duties allow you the time to wander so often?” Zhuang asked, amazed. “Your employer must be kind to give you so much time off.”

“Not as such. My duties stray far from the idea of employment as most would think. I gain little from them these days and they have slowly begun to weigh on me. The idea of retirement has been crossing my mind often as of late, but I should not think I will have the means for it for a long while.”

Zhuang let out an understanding sigh. “Retirement’s just a glimmer in the eye of most people these days. Maybe you have more of a chance than most, though, if you can afford to consider it.”

“Perhaps.” Zhongli regained the glimmer in his eye, the sunlight catching briefly on his golden eyes. Wisdom and age shone through them, though the man looked as though he could be no older than forty. “Why don’t we take in the views for a little while? I’m sure it will help your son calm down. The beauty of Liyue has never failed to place people at ease.”

With a smile, Zhuang nodded in agreement, shifting Baishi so he could look out rather than just up. Unexpectedly, Zhongli began to speak lowly about the rock formations and mountains that surrounded them, talking of their histories and how long they had stood there over the years. He spoke of the mint they passed and the groups of hilichurls they had to avoid. The changes in the grass did not escape his tales, and neither did the stone courtyards they walked through as they crossed under the bridge, or the geo constructs that lingered on the sides of the road, or the Statue of the Seven that towered up above them in front of the courtyard.

How exactly Zhongli knew half of these things, Zhuang wasn’t sure, but he simply assumed the man was a history buff. He had implied that he traveled often due to his love for the history of the land. Zhuang would have assumed the man to be a merchant of some kind, if not for the lack of merchandise and mora. 

Eventually, after they passed underneath the arching mountain, bustling Liyue Harbor was in sight at last. Zhuang let out a long baited breath and let his shoulders relax. He grinned down at Baishi and let his son grab onto his finger. 

“Look, Baishi,” he whispered. “We finally made it.”

He glanced to the side to spot Zhongli watching them with that same inscrutable expression from before. When the golden man caught his eye, the expression eased into a carefree joy that Zhuang couldn’t help but not believe.

Regardless, they would be parting ways with the man soon enough, so it didn’t really matter. 

The last path led them downhill towards the gate into the Harbor, and Zhongli walked ahead of him a few steps, Zhuang and Baishi still trying to take in the view of the harbor and the sea. It was unlike anything they’d ever seen before. Zhuang had been to Yilong Port a few times before to buy things over the years, but for whatever reason, Liyue Harbor seemed quite different from the closer port. 

He supposed he’d find out for sure soon enough.

Zhongli turned back to face them once more as soon as they reached the circular courtyard before the gate. His golden eyes glanced between Zhuang and Baishi and the melancholy expression made its way back once again.

“This must be where we part ways,” Zhongli said, tone tinged with regret. “Please, take this and remember my words for the future. They may not help much, but for now, they are all I can truly do.”

He held out a small pouch and placed it into Zhuang’s hand. Immediately, Zhuang began to protest, the feeling of a mora pouch unmistakable, but Zhongli held up a hand, silencing him with a simple look.

“Take it,” he insisted gently. “Use it well. If everything goes as it should, we will meet again. Thank me by reaching a point where you need not another. Farewell, my new friends.”

With that, the man turned and walked away, greeting the Millelith at the gate with familiarity. Zhuang looked down at the mora pouch in his hand, let out a breath, and tucked it into the sling alongside Baishi. Baishi grabbed at the strings keeping it closed and tugged at them. Zhuang smiled, but it was tempered by anxiety. He looked up at the grand gate before him and closed his eyes.

With a final resolve, he marched forward with Baishi in his arms, greeted the Millelith with a smile, and took his first steps into Liyue Harbor. This would be the start of a new life for the two of them. A better one. 

Chapter Text

In his six years of life, Baishi had learned the streets of Liyue Harbor like the back of his hand. 

He spent most of his days running, either with the children of the shopkeepers, merchants, and restauranteurs, or on his route as an errand boy, trying to earn a few extra mora to take home to his father. Baishi would take on the little tasks people asked of him, like heading to the shop for them when they were too busy to, or collecting worms for the fishermen that ran out of bait far too early. 

These tasks kept him running, and the small amounts of mora he made helped keep him, his father, his mother, and his brother alive. If it meant he didn’t get much time to play with the other children, then so be it. They would soon grow too and understand the meaning of responsibility. Mora made the world go round. Some just had to realize it earlier than others. 

Baishi’s father was a busy man, just like Baishi was a busy kid. His father was gone most days, working the odd jobs he could find in order to keep their small rented room, feed themselves, and send the rest back to Qiaoying Village, their hometown.

His father would return from work late most nights, when Baishi was already fast asleep, and get up early before Baishi could wake. In times when he was off work—a surefire sign to Baishi that he would have to make sure his father ate the next few days—they would walk the harbor together, talking about Baishi’s most recent amusements or just listening to the seagulls crow up above and the sound of the ocean waves. 

When his father didn’t feel up to that, tired from the continuous work, he would teach Baishi some tricks he had learned from some traveling Fontainian magicians a few years back. It wasn’t much, just some knife throwing and a few card tricks, but Baishi practiced them whenever he could after being first introduced. He had grown particularly fond of knife throwing, so much so that his father had saved what he could and bought him a real set of throwing knives when he was five. Baishi practiced with them on the bugs he saw on the ground of their room, never trying them outside in fear of losing them.

Despite his usual absence, Baishi never held it against his father. He knew his father’s reasons. His father had told him from a much younger age why they were there. He told him of the misfortune and plague that had struck their little town, how they had left when Baishi had gotten sick and endeavored to save up enough mora to bring their family a better life. His father would tell him stories of his mother and his brother, though they had left when his brother was only six months old, and would read him the few letters they had been sent back to teach him to read and write, letting Baishi pen his own responses at times. 

Despite his absences, his father was a good father. He cared for Baishi as much as he could, teaching him to read and write, to throw knives and gut fish, the basics of survival. He tried his hardest in between work days, and Baishi was content for a time with what he had. 

Baishi never blamed his father, though he was a hardened man. He had lost the laughter lines Baishi scarcely remembered once lined his face. Now his expression was set, his smile only coming through in the rare moments in between, when Baishi laughs at something he sees out on the pier, when Baishi finally masters the trickshot he’d been working on for weeks and barrels into his father to hug him in excitement, when Baishi dragged him to look at the birds in the garden on the other side of the harbor, reminding him of their journey to the harbor all those years ago.

No, Baishi never blamed his father for their hardships. Not when he tried so hard to make life better for them. It wasn’t his fault they could never quite make it out of that small room they rented. It wasn’t his fault the mora and supplies they sent back to Qiaoying village got lesser and lesser as time went on. Prices went up, mora became scarce, the mining, adventuring, and fishing jobs he took on merited less and less compensation since everyone was doing them, so the demand was lessened year by year.

At the times when they had a bit of extra mora, his father would take him on trips out to some of the outer villages, use that mora to buy some of the special products they had there, then return to Liyue Harbor to resell those products at a higher price. His father told him this was what people used to do at their village when their tea and oils were still profitable, so it didn’t hurt to do it back. The people he sold the products to in Liyue Harbor could afford the higher prices, and the mora they paid for the products would do wonders for the people in those small villages. Baishi saw no problems with it. His father used it as a chance to teach him how to negotiate. 

Most of the mora they got from doing that went towards their rent, or back to Qiaoying Village, but sometimes his father would let him pick out a thing or two from the products they bought, if any of them caught his eye. Most of the time nothing did, but sometimes there would be something just shiny enough or just sharp enough to draw his gaze. His father, who had praised the idea of being self-sufficient and knowing self-defense considering the dangers the treasure hoarders and monsters posed in the areas outside of the harbor, nodded at him proudly when he picked out a new knife or sword, though they could have been sold off for much mora. 

Baishi’s father took care of him as well as he could. It was the world they lived in that made it so it was not enough.

As bedtime stories, his father often liked to tell him stories of Chenyu Vale, the history of it and their gods and adepti. He said it was so he didn’t forget it himself, as the days wore on and the workload each day heightened. His father never signed permanent contracts, saying that was the way of signing your soul away to Morax, chaining yourself to one job and one employer. He told Baishi that he couldn’t do that, not when they were bound to leave the harbor eventually. 

Baishi listened to his stories of Chenyu Vale intently, his eyes closed tightly as he leaned against his father’s chest, picturing a world he never knew before, a brother who shared his face, a mother who loved him just as his father did. He painted out the archon war in broad strokes in the darkness behind his eyes as his father described it to him, his voice soft as he looked into the candlelight. 

His father had tried to explain the intricacies of the war to Baishi, but he didn’t understand most of them. In his childish imagination, Baishi saw a tall, intimidating and horned dragon, teeth sharp and eyes red, rising up in the sky above their mountain-encircled home, shooting down spears at the goddess who only wanted to protect her people. Put into dire-straits, she had done all she could to keep her life, to keep her people’s lives, but eventually she was turned upon and faded into nothingness. Morax had reigned victorious in the war overall, soaked in the blood of gods and humans from all over Teyvat.

Baishi wondered if the archon had ever regretted dipping his hands into the frey. It must have been a long and lonely existence, to kill those you once knew and to rule upon a throne that was built from their blood and bones. Eventually, it only made sense to Baishi that one would begin to wish that they had died with all the others rather than lived on because of their deaths.

Regardless of the answer, the story itself had slightly embittered Baishi towards the archon. He asked his father why Morax had done it, what the point was in the end if he would be one of the few left. His father hadn’t had an answer, only saying that it had to have been done, and that if Morax hadn’t, then someone else would have. Baishi thought maybe their own goddess could have done it, maybe even better than Morax.

The embitterment only strengthened when his father eventually told him of the origin of mora. The story itself was rather boring to Baishi, but he was old enough to realize that mora was the reason for their plight most days. It was the reason they couldn’t afford meals sometimes, or why his father would cry to himself some nights when he thought Baishi was asleep. 

His anger at the archons ebbed and flowed like the wine dark Sea of Clouds. In the easier times, the simplicity of life crashed over him all of a sudden, making the ball of rage that festered deep in his chest seem smaller, quieter. However, times like these often left him with a strange taste in his mouth, like the days aligned wrong and reality began to slip, unsettling him from his usual daily track.

There were days when his father would come home after having been gone most of the day—not working, as he always left much earlier in the morning for jobs—and greet him with a smile and a small gift, typically a treat he didn’t often get to each such as Drunken Plums in Snow or Fine Tea, Full Moon. Baishi only knew this because he left those days before his father and arrived home before him as well. Sometimes he didn’t return home until late in the night, stumbling through the threshold as the door swung open and sometimes waiting Baishi from his fits of sleep.

If his father hadn’t been his father, Baishi might have assumed him to have been drunk all those times. But since his father was his father (and from the acknowledgement that he never smelled like alcohol upon return, only rust and the thick salty scent of the sea), Baishi was left to come to a different conclusion.

When Baishi asked him where he’d gone or where he’d gotten the mora for the special dishes, his father would brush him off, saying one of his jobs had just paid him, or that he had some extra mora stashed away and thought it’d be a nice surprise. And Baishi would know these were lies, but he would take them at face value regardless. As long as it wasn’t a danger to him, then Baishi would let him have his lies. They were some of the few things a poor man could rely upon when it came to surviving to the next day.

But—the good always came to an end, the sun setting at the end of the day to usher in the moon, the last glimmering piece of mora running out just before the next meal. The mora he’d suddenly come upon would run out soon enough, split between rent, meals, and Qiaoying Village, and work would open up again, his father going back to his normal schedule of early mornings and late nights, and the unsettling feeling would melt away, but the resentment would stumble in after it to once more take its spot at the helm. 

Poverty took what it could from a boy. From Baishi it took his father, his health, and his childhood. For that, Baishi would be forever rancorous. 

—

The steady stream of patterned days suddenly came to a halt one harrowing afternoon when Baishi was six. 

Winds blew gently through the harbor, the Anemo Archon blessing  his neighboring nations with soft breezes on the best days, but with hurricanes and typhoons on the worst of them. Baishi made his daily route around the Harbor, calling out familiar greetings to the aunties and uncles who worked in the shops and fished down by the pier, waving aside invitations to play from the other kids. His feet took him over to the shops on the northernmost end of the harbor, where the merchants were a bit dicey and often underestimated him considering his age and small stature. 

However, Baishi had been doing this for the past year. He knew how to work around these kinds of merchants like the back of his hand. If whoever his client was at the time wanted him to get them the best deal he could, Baishi was sure to succeed.

That fateful day, one of the restaurateurs he often ran for asked him to see if they had any lavender melons and padisarahs for some new dishes she wanted to try out on her menu. Baishi had seen both products in stalls on this side of the pier before, so he knew exactly where to go and told the auntie that he’d be back within the hour.

Upon spotting a familiar, shady looking man with shoulder length black hair, glasses that hid his eyes, and a large pointed red and black hat that covered the rest of his face in a long shadow, Baishi smiled, skipping towards the man, mora jangling loudly in the pouch he’d been given as he did. The products he needed were blatant on the table, just waiting to be acquired, but the merchant looked him up and down with a twitching smile, greed pervading his eyes so much that Baishi couldn’t help but let conversation trickle in. It would help him get his desired discount in the end, anyway.

“The waves seem to be on the rise today,” Baishi noted casually, glancing back towards the ocean with a hand over his eyes to block out the sun. His silky black hair, reaching near midlength on his back, had been braided by one of the other children before he began his work for the day. He’d promised her two mora in exchange for it and he was already dreading the moment the coins would leave his hands at the day’s end. “The salt’s been burning my eyes all morning.”

“Gotta play it smart, kid. Get yourself a hat like mine, maybe some glasses to go with it. It’ll make walks through the harbor a breeze on days like this,” the man replied, pressing his hat down so that the point of it covered his eyes as he tilted his head back. “I’d sell you this one, but I got it in special from Natlan recently, so it’s as rare as it could be in these parts. Doubt you have that kinda money.”

Baishi didn’t know much about Natlan, but his father had said the nation had closed its borders to its own people at some point in the past, though travelers still found their ways inside sometimes. Baishi supposed the man could’ve gotten the hat from one of those few travelers who had actually done so, but it was more likely that the man was bluffing. Merchants like him, who Baishi was greatly familiar with, rarely told their customers the truth of products, lies being much more lucrative in the long run of things.

This man attempted to draw his attention to his hat and make him spend the mora he’d been given on it, but Baishi had a one track mind when it came to business and negotiation. Even as a six year old, anyone who dealt with him could tell he had a gift. If this merchant didn’t want to play a little before diving into the main course, then Baishi wouldn’t either. 

His hands slipped out of his pockets and he gathered up the few lavender melons and padisarahs that the merchant had on display, placing them in a pile on the wooden counter in between them. Baishi folded his hands and leant against the counter, the collar of his ragged and fading tangzhuang—a hand-me-down from his father to wear while working—bunching up against the edge of the wood. His head barely reached over the top of it, but he still met the merchant’s eye with a sharp look. The merchant seemed startled by his sudden sternness and cast his gaze away to the products.

“Three lavender melons and...six padisarahs? Quite the expensive taste you have there, kid. That’ll be 15,720 mora.”

Baishi nearly snorted aloud at the claim. Baishi was a child, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. Only an idiot would pay more than twice the market value for the products they wanted. Or a fool who didn’t know the market value of them. Unfortunately for the merchant, Baishi could be called a lot of things at six years old, but a fool—or an idiot, for that matter—had never been on that list. 

Instead of a snort, Baishi let out a tsk, shaking his head as he glanced to the side. “I apologize, Mr. Haoyu, but if you believe I cannot even afford your hat, what makes you believe this amount is acceptable to me?”

Haoyu ticked up an eyebrow, folding his arms across his chest. “It doesn’t really matter if the price is ‘acceptable’ to you, kid. That’s how much they are. Take it or leave it.”

Baishi rolled his neck, wincing as the collar of his tangzhuang rubbed uncomfortably against his skin. The suit was much too large for him, the sleeves folding out over his hands so much that he had to pin them back so they wouldn’t get in his way during work, and rather itchy, but it was the nicest thing he had, so it would have to do. 

“I see. You are rather resolute, Mr. Haoyu. I would love to pay the full price for these lovely products you’ve taken the time to procure for your customers. However, I’m afraid the quality of the products leaves…a bit much to be desired, should you truly be asking that amount.”

The merchant blinked, then blinked again, as though trying to wrap his mind around Baishi’s words. Baishi had been told often that he had the speech patterns of someone much older than himself, and he would be loath to admit he had learned most of them reading light novels he had picked up with quite light fingers from the vendors. He had also learned from the history books his father sometimes brought him, and from the story tellers he stopped to listen to whenever he had the time.

“For example, the rinds of these two lavender melons are already beginning to brown around the edges, meaning they’ve spent much too long out in the sun. And this third one, well, it’s beginning to get a bit squishy, if you would just poke there—”

He gave the melon a solid poke, demonstrating his point. “Yes, it’s not actually supposed to do that, if you weren’t aware. And the padisarah’s you’re offering, have you been keeping them properly hydrated since they’ve gotten to you? The spices that can be made from it may warrant the higher price, but surely the quality of the flower itself will affect the quality of the spices it makes? Why should I pay such an exuberant price for flowers that couldn’t even afford me the same amount when sold as eventual subpar spices?”

Some of the words he used were a bit difficult for him to wrap his mouth around, admittedly, but he tried not to let it show, gliding over each stumble with a graceful ease he hoped was conveyed outwardly. 

Haoyu narrowed his eyes at him. “Why shouldn’t you pay those prices? You’re the one who wants the products. I’m the one who has them.”

Baishi hummed. “Yes, you are the one who has them, but you are not the only one who has them. I know for certain Miss Fen sells them both as well. I only came here first as it was closer, though considering the price, I may as well head up to Miss Fen’s. In fact, I should probably head up there as quickly as I can. Her products are always in great quality and I’m sure they’ll be sold out soon enough. Have a good afternoon, Mr. Haoyu.”

Slowly backing away, Baishi only needed to turn his back to the merchant before the man was calling out to him to pause him in his movements.

“Wait a minute, kid. Fine, whatever, you’ve got yourself a deal. What numbers are you suggesting then?”

Baishi hid a smile behind his floppy sleeve as he brought his hand to his chin, appearing to think about it. “6,500 mora.”

The merchant blanched. “No way. That’s less than I even bought them all for. 15,000 mora.”

“Still not as good as Miss Fen’s prices, especially with the lack of quality of your own products. 7,000 mora.”

“I can’t go that low, kid. I have to make some kind of profit off these. 13,000 mora.”

Baishi scoffed at the statement. “I’m sure these products were all acquired just as legally as that hat probably was. I believe in the end that profit is all you will be making. 8,000 mora.”

The merchant frowned, pulling said hat down to cover his eyes again. “...10,000 mora, final offer.”

Baishi turned the offer around in his head, swishing the numbers around in his mouth, until a confident smile spread openly across his face. “Of course, I’ll take it. Please, I’ll just take a moment to count it all out.”

It wasn’t too much of a better deal, still much more than he should’ve been paying for such products, but when you were six, you won some and you lost some and you couldn’t do anything about it. Baishi took whatever he could get without the vendors outright laughing in his face. 

He began to count the mora the auntie had given him, knowing there was more than enough in the pouch, placing each coin down on the counter between them as he counted. 

His hand slipped and a few coins fell down, littering the ground around him. Baishi cursed under his breath, words he had learned from some of the sailors that passed through and made sure never to repeat in the vicinity of his father, and closed the pouch, crouching down to pick up the coins he’d dropped. He had thought he’d gotten all of them, then a glimmer caught his eye, leading his gaze to a coin that had landed a few feet away. Baishi crawled over to it, reaching out to pick it up, when another hand intercepted and did so for him.

Baishi looked up at the man the hand was attached to and bit down a scowl at the sight of warm brown eyes and brown hair with golden tips. 

“Mr. Zhongli,” Baishi greeted, taking the mora from the man’s outstretched hand near defensively. “What brings you down to this side of the port today? I thought you hated the smell of the rising tide.”

Mr. Zhongli hummed, his golden eyes vacant as he glanced down at him, then turned his head to the side to glance at the ocean. “It is not the rising tide that I hate, I must admit, but rather the things that come with it. How are you today, young Baishi?”

“Decent enough. Father is back at work these days, so it’s been nice to have a little bit of food on the table.”

Mr. Zhongli nodded in understanding, like Baishi knew he would, though the action put a bitter taste in Baishi’s mouth.

Mr. Zhongli had been in their lives for as long as Baishi could remember. The man walked around in near regal attire, his posture as straight as a lamppost and hands always folded behind his back politely, and yet he never seemed to have a single mora to his name either. Baishi had thought the man rich for the longest time before his father told him otherwise. Afterward, Baishi grew rather jealous that Mr. Zhongli could seem so put together and appear so affluent and unaffected when the effects of poverty were so evident when it came to him and his father. Baishi understood that that wasn’t Mr. Zhongli’s fault, so he tried tempering down his jealousy, but the off feeling the man gave him remained the same. He didn’t understand it. Mr. Zhongli had never done anything that should have made him feel as though the man had, and yet, the feeling persisted.

Therefore, Baishi tried to avoid him as much as he could, but Mr. Zhongli always somehow found him, and his presence almost always signaled disaster. 

Perhaps that was what gave Baishi the bad feeling. It was anyone’s guess.

“Is this food you are buying today for your own table, or your clients?” Mr. Zhongli asked him, assessing the products he was paying for. “Lavender melons and padisarahs…may you be making a hybrid dish of some sort?”

Baishi shrugged, starting to count out the mora again, starting from the top this time as he forgot his place. “Client. I’m not sure what she wants to make them for.” 

Mr. Zhongli nodded, eyes unreadable, then asked, “And how is Mr. Zhuang? It has been a long while since I have had the chance to speak with him.”

Because the last time you ran into each other, he got fired from his employer at the time for slacking off , Baishi thought bitterly. It hadn’t been Mr. Zhongli’s fault at all, considering his father and the man speaking had happened before his father had even gone to work, and the ‘slacking off’ bit had been a gross misrepresentation of his father trying to help out another worker who had collapsed from heat stroke, but the gist remained the same. Mr. Zhongli had appeared, and something had gone wrong. It was a continuous pattern over the years and Baishi didn’t know what to make of it.

“He’s out adventuring today, another rich client paying him little to nothing,” Baishi replied, not trying to hide the disgust in his voice. “Something about treasure in the Qiongji Estuary? He didn’t tell me much before he left. He went out to meet the other adventurers at dawn.”

Baishi pushed the full amount of mora forward and Haoyu nodded, pushing out the lavender melons and padisarahs, which Baishi stuck in his basket. Glancing back over to the side, Baishi paused at the expression on the man’s fast. Mr. Zhongli had never looked quite so disgruntled in all the times they’d met over the years.

“What’s wrong?” Baishi questioned, hesitant to involve himself in whatever the other was worried about. Mr. Zhongli’s problems were his own, not Baishi’s. Baishi had enough problems on his plate every day of his life. He didn’t have time to deal with the problems of others.

“Oh…well, I,” Mr. Zhongli started, stumbling over his words like he never had before. A long arm appeared from behind his back as he reached up to stroke his chin, looking out past the pier and in the direction of Guili Plains. His lips parted with a frown, as though he were going to say something that deeply displeased him, but he seemed to decide against it, shaking his head and letting his expression clear. His hand returned to behind his back and he nodded gently down at Baishi, looking at him with something more like pity this time around.

Baishi thought he preferred the vaguely angered look from the man. Pity was the worst possible thing to be shown, in Baishi’s opinion.

“Why don’t I walk you back to your client?” Mr. Zhongli offered, holding out a hand to take his basket. “It’s a nice day out, I could go for a longer walk.”

Baishi deliberated on the offer, glancing between the basket and Mr. Zhongli’s hand with suspicion, eventually letting loose a small breath and handing it over. Despite his distrust of the man, he didn’t believe Mr. Zhongli would resort to stealing, especially stealing as few things as Baishi had collected. And it would be nice not having to lug the lavender melons all the way back himself. His arms were rather thin and, as much as he hated to admit it, frail, and often they ached after long days of carrying things back and forth. They still hurt from the day before, where one of the uncles asked him to pick up a bundle of Noctilucous Jade and Cor Lapis he’d ordered and Baishi had had to drag the basket all the way across the Harbor. 

He tried getting stronger, the knife throwing at least teaching him how to put power behind each move, but it was difficult, in his situation. 

Mr. Zhongli took the basket carefully, holding it with both arms, and he set off towards the other end of the harbor. How exactly he knew which way to go, Baishi wasn’t sure, but he followed regardless, only half listening as Mr. Zhongli began to speak about the history of the harbor and the times before the pier they walked upon was built, before the stone paths in the city above were paved, as he often did. Baishi wasn’t sure exactly why Mr. Zhongli never tried to get a position as one of the storytellers, or even as a history teacher. Surely that would finally put all of his knowledge to use and supply him with the mora he sorely lacked all at once.

Trying to keep up with Mr. Zhongli’s swift pace, his eyes wandered to another aspect of the man that made him weary, and a little jealous. A neatly polished and glittering golden geo vision hung on a chain in the middle of the man’s back, held up by two matching yellow clasps sewed into the fabric of his long coat, placing the ultimate goal for many people with dreams far wider than the small worlds they live in in plain view of any lingering gazes. 

Baishi, despite his distaste for many of the archons, wanted to reach out and grab it, take the vision for himself though he knew that was not how they worked. He had longed for a vision since he had learned what they were and what they could do. Vision holders were Teyvat’s strongest, those who could withstand whatever was thrown at them and rise above all others, even given the possibility of ascending to godhood (in some of the stories his father told him, at least).

If Baishi had a vision, he wouldn’t need raw strength to do the jobs he was given. If he was a vision holder, he’d be able to move on from running errands and start committing to higher paying jobs like his father. With a vision, no one would doubt his strength and he could ask for much more mora than he could get now. His father would work less, to the point where maybe they could even finally go back to Qiaoying Village like his father had always wanted. He could finally meet his mother and his brother, and they could be one big family just like they had been before.

If he got a choice, Baishi would probably want a dendro vision, or a hydro one. With a dendro vision, the famine in Qiaoying Village would no longer matter. All he would need to do was snap his fingers and all the plants would grow right once more. And if he had a hydro one, they would no longer need to clean the water they drank, not when he could simply summon some clean water up. 

He supposed a pyro, cryo, or even an anemo vision would be nice as well. They would aid greatly in his efforts to go out fighting with his father and be able to protect him in ways he couldn’t now. 

Baishi glared at the geo vision dangling from Mr. Zhongli’s back. He might not have liked Morax, but he had to admit, he would have liked to have even a geo vision. At least with one, he could achieve more in his lifetime than he’d ever be able to without a vision at all. 

“Baishi?” Mr. Zhongli said, startling him from his reverie. The look from before had returned to the man’s eyes, concern piercing through his gaze and nearly punching Baishi in the gut. He wasn’t so used to dealing with other people’s concern for him. Most of the time, if it came from the aunties and uncles at the market or the restaurants he ran errands for, he could ignore it easily enough. They got what they wanted from him and he got what he wanted from them and that was the end of their dealings together. Sometimes they might slip in a little extra mora into his earnings, or give him some leftovers from the day as part of the payment, but that was simply par for the course.

And his father—well, his father typically wasn’t home often enough to show much concern over him. When he was, they had a mutual unspoken agreement not to speak of it. Their times together were rare enough as they were, it wouldn’t be right to bring them down with talk of their ailments and problems.

“What?” Baishi responded, harsher than he’d wanted. It wasn’t Mr. Zhongli’s fault was that he was upsetting himself over a petty jealousy. It wasn’t Mr. Zhongli’s fault that Celestia had seen him fit to receive a vision and Baishi not. 

But the way the man’s face only softened at his harshness only fueled his brimming anger. 

“Which Auntie was it that commissioned you this time?” Mr. Zhongli repeated calmly, as though he didn’t notice the bitterness that was surely evident on Baishi’s face by now. 

“Miss Adelaide,” Baishi said sulkily. He ran ahead a bit, directing them towards the auntie’s stall where she stood at the front while her husband cooked in the back. Miss Adelaide was originally from Mondstadt, but had moved to Liyue Harbor when she was much younger to get married. She and her husband had run the same restaurant in the Harbor since before Baishi was born, perhaps even before his father was born. 

Her graying hair was pulled back into a tight bun as she spoke to some customers with a sweet smile on her face. The smile only grew as she noticed Baishi and Mr. Zhongli made their way over and she waved, calling back to her husband as she left the customers to him. She slipped out from behind the counter and met them halfway. Baishi gestured for Mr. Zhongli to hand the basket over, which he did with a gentle touch.

“I see you’ve gained a helper today, Mr. Baishi,” Miss Adelaide commented, her voice creaky, though still just as high pitched as ever. “Mr. Zhongli, what brings you around here today? I would have thought you’d be at Heyu Teahouse like usual at this time of day.”

“I must admit, I did not expect to find myself here at this time when I woke up this morning either. It is only fortunate for the sake of our meeting that the pesky wind drew my gaze to the sea and whisked me down to walk along the pier, where I met little Baishi here completing your given task, Miss Adelaide.”

“A fortunate occurrence indeed. You know, my granddaughter is right around your age, Mr. Zhongli, and she also has an interest in those old dusty history books you like. Maybe you’d get along!”

Baishi stifled a laugh as the man seemed to pale at the words. 

He seemed conflicted on how to reply, but eventually settled on, “I am…quite older than I look, Miss Adelaide, and I am still quite happy with the companionship I currently have, as I told you last time. Though if she would like to simply discuss a book or a story, I am always free to speak to. You know where I will be.”

Miss Adelaide grumbled at the short dismissal, but smiled down at Baishi all the same as she dug through her pocket with a free hand, the basket having been slipped onto her other arm, and procured the mora he’d been promised. 

“Come by tomorrow and you can try some of what I’ve made with them,” she said, pinching Baishi’s cheek. He scrunched up his face at the action, but didn’t pull away, quite used to it by now. “You as well, Mr. Zhongli. As a thank you for the help, of course.”

“Of course,” Mr. Zhongli nodded, bowing his head. “I’ll be there.”

He then turned to Baishi, patting him on the head with his gloved hand . “I’ll see you again, Baishi. Please, stay safe in the meantime.”

Baishi paused at his works, but ultimately shook them off, nodding in response. He waved the man away and watched as Mr. Zhongli wandered back off towards the teahouse with his hands once more behind his back, covering his vision as he called out hellos and inclined his head towards the friendly merchants who shouted his way. 

“Strange,” Baishi muttered to himself, pocketing the mora he’d been given and shaking his head free of all thoughts of the interaction. He still had a few more errands to run before the day was over. Time would not stop to wait for him to be ready for it to come. Baishi moved his legs and kept on running.

—

By the end of his work day, Baishi had sweated through his tangzhuang and his arms ached even worse than the day before. 

He’d taken on a couple more deliveries than usual to make up for the time he’d wasted speaking with Mr. Zhongli that morning. Most of the restaurants and market stalls around there tended to run out of things on the spot, so it wasn’t difficult to find an auntie or uncle in need of some kind of assistance throughout the day.

He stumbled back to their home in a haze, his dazed mind taking much too long to keep up with his short legs, and when he arrived back, Baishi didn’t bother to look around before he plopped down into the bed and closed his eyes. Counting his mora could wait till later. He was sure he had at least enough for a few meals for a few days.

When his eyes blinked back open a few hours later, Baishi was still in a bit of a daze, the aches in his limbs seeming to have multiplied while he slept, but at least his head had been cleared of the exhaustion he’d felt. 

Night had fallen while he slept, he noticed as he glanced out the small window near the door, and his father had still yet to return. Baishi wasn’t worried just yet; his father tended to get back late when it came to the adventuring jobs he took on, sometimes even being gone for days at a time when he got too invested. Baishi knew how to take care of himself in the meantime, but it did put a damper on his excitement for the meals they’d have for the next few days. He supposed with only one mouth to feed, the mora would drain slower, but it would have been nice to share the results of his hard work with his father. 

A slow sigh billowed out his mouth. Retrieving his pouch from where he’d tossed it on the bed, Baishi took a seat at the small wooden table they had shoved in the corner of the room and upended the bag, pouring the mora he’d earned all over it. The dinging noise of coins hitting wood brought a smile to his face that he stifled as he quickly began to count, sorting the mora into piles.

26,700 mora. All that work for just 26,700 mora. Baishi let out a sigh and placed his head in his hands. It’d get them through a few days for certain, but it all seemed so bleak looking at it from the angle he had. If hours of work made him so little, how were they supposed to make enough money to eventually go home? How were they supposed to make it out if there was never the chance of getting ahead in the first place?

Feeling vaguely nauseous from his thoughts, Baishi stumbled back towards the bed, curling up atop the blankets. He wished his father was home. It wouldn’t make things better, but at least he’d have his father. His father understood, he always understood. Baishi didn’t even have to say anything and he understood. 

His hand grazed underneath his pillow, running his thumb along the line of the knife stored under it. His father always told him not to put it there, that he was going to wake up one morning with his throat cut on accident, but Baishi never listened. The knife, a rather cheap thing his father had gotten for him a few years before when he was just learning to throw them, was special to Baishi. It was one of the few things that was his and his alone. It gave him an outlet. 

Gripping the handle tightly, Baishi pulled the knife out and suddenly flung it across the room, hitting the wall in a perfect arch, embedding itself in the planks. He scowled. He’d meant to hit one plank higher, but his aim had been off. He supposed that was what happened when he threw it laying down, but it didn’t make it any less frustrating.

Dragging himself up, he marched across the room and retrieved the knife, tossing it up in the air and catching it perfectly, not a nick on his skin to be seen. Baishi threw it again, this time at the opposite wall, aiming for the board three down from the roof. He hit it head on, knife embedded up to the handle. He was only glad the walls of the room were rather thick, or else he surely would’ve gotten complaints from the neighbors about knife-shaped holes in their walls. 

Baishi threw his knife over and over again, creating new holes slotted neatly next to the old ones, the remnants of his previous practices evident all over the walls of the room. It wasn’t as though Baishi could practice such a thing out on the streets of Liyue Harbor. A poor boy throwing knives out in public? The Millelith would be called on him within seconds. Out of concern, no doubt, but whether it was a concern over the safety of others or safety of himself, Baishi would always bet on the prior.

Eventually, his eyes began to droop, his arms arching so much worse than before, but Baishi felt rather numb to the pain. Still, he let the knife tumble from his grip onto the makeshift box they used as a bedside table and fell back onto the bed. His eyes closed immediately and he was asleep within moments.

His peace did not last, however, when he was woken abruptly in the night, barely an hour later, by the front door slamming open, a crowd of voices coming through the open frame, and the pained shouts he recognized eerily as his father’s own. Baishi shot up out of bed, fingers curling around the handle of his knife. He lit the candle they kept by the bedside so he could see what was happening, and dropped his knife as soon as he did, rushing to help.

It looked quite bad, at least from Baishi’s perspective. Most situations like this would through the eyes of a six year old. The agonized shouts of his father, the way his leg below the knee bent at an unnatural angle, clear at the way his pant leg had been rolled up. The other adventurers practically carried him into the room. Baishi grabbed his father’s hand and they led him over to the bed, laying his father down as gently as possible. 

“What happened?” Baishi asked tersely, his eyes not straying from the bend of his father’s leg. No bone poked through the skin, but there was a prominent bump where the bone had been snapped, the edge of it pressing tightly against the skin. Every touch seemed to bring his father another bout of agony, his cries ringing out in the night, surely waking half the harbor, but Baishi couldn’t quite bring himself to care at the moment. 

He began to gather some of their medical equipment, one of the few supplies he and his father actively kept replenishing when it ran low. Injuries were life-ending for people like them. If they couldn’t work, they wouldn’t live. Baishi didn’t want to think of the implications of his father’s injury at the moment though. No, what he had to do now was make his pain go away as well as he could. Then he could worry about the rest. 

“The treasure was a bust,” one of the adventurer’s, a short blonde woman in a set of grimy work clothes, answered. “A trap, if anything. A bunch of hoarders were lying in wait at the site and nearly got the jump on us. We took them down easily enough and were heading back to tell the client about it, but on our way back, we were ambushed by a group of hilichurls and mitachurls. One of them, well, they all had clubs, but one of them managed to strike and…”

She trailed off, gesturing to his father’s leg with a grimace. Baishi nodded numbly, pushing the story to the side of his mind for the moment as he dropped all the supplies he’d gathered on the bed. Sweat covered the thin sheets, dripping off his father like a waterfall had suddenly erupted from the ceiling. Baishi grimaced at the sight, nausea building up his throat the longer he stared, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the wound.

Just because bone hadn’t broken through the skin, didn’t mean there wasn’t blood. A thick layer of it ran down a cut on his thigh, the wound still gushing through the slice in the fabric. Baishi handed one of the adventurers the scissors he’d gotten and watched methodically as the man cut through the fabric, letting most of the pant leg fall away. If blood washed out, they’d make good shorts for the summer days, Baishi joked to himself. 

Handing a cloth he’d wet in the bucket they used as a sink and a bottle of herbal salve over to the blonde adventurer, he instructed her calmly—or as calmly as he could present himself at the time—to wipe down the wound and make sure it wasn’t infected. His father’s screams renewed as soon as she began the process, but they quieted down soon enough, the woman quick and efficient as she cleaned the wound, spread the salve over it, and bandaged it up again. 

Baishi wiped away the blood that had spread over the expanse of his father’s leg, though he wiped what got on his hands off on his clothes. He avoided the area of the break carefully, though it didn’t stop his father’s pained whimpering, his eyes closed desperately as the pain emanated from the limb. Baishi closed his eyes, steadying his breaths as he tried to calm himself, but he couldn’t seem to stop his hands from shaking. 

Eventually, he succeeded and began to instruct the others again. He handed the man, tall and rather out of place in his rather neat, only slightly dusted adventurer’s uniform, a straight piece of wood as he began to ready the longer bandages. 

“You’re going to need to hold the wood in place behind his leg as I wrap it. Miss, I’ll need you to hold him down so he doesn’t move.”

The adventurers raised their brows at him as he directed them, sharing a glance as though to question where exactly he’d learned how to do all this, but Baishi ignored them, preparing a small box to prop his father’s leg up on as they wrapped it in the splint. 

The truth was rather simple. Baishi had broken his arm when he was four after falling off some boxes down near the pier and his father had shown him how to cast it, splint it, and wrap it in the throes of the pain. They couldn’t afford to go to the doctor or any nearby healers, so his father had made sure to have some herbal cleansing salve on hand ever since, just in case of another injury. 

It had turned out handy in the end, it seemed. Baishi stayed as outwardly relaxed as he could in the midst of an emergency, but his insides were all shaken up with worry. The adventurers eventually just shrugged, following his directions and preparing to cast the leg.

The moment Baishi lifted his father’s foot to put it atop the small box, the stress increased. His father screeched , lashing out with his other leg, which Baishi pushed down with ease since he was already weakened, but he kept struggling. Eventually, the adventurer holding the splint leaned over and used one hand to keep his father’s flailing one down as he held the wood in place underneath his leg, moving his hand in accordance to Baishi’s directions as he wrapped it, pushing the bone back into place with the bandages. 

The adventurer holding his torso down seemed to do it with ease, her hands pressed firmly against his chest and arms. Even as his father slowly lost consciousness from the pain, she didn’t let go, making sure Baishi was fully finished before removing her hold.

Upon finishing up the last bandage, Baishi breathed out a sigh of relief, though the feeling didn’t course through him like it usually did when he accomplished what he set out to do. No, there was no reason to feel relief, even though the difficult process was over. 

He let his head fall into his hands at the end of the bed, blinking away tears. He was glad his father had returned alive, but the truth of the situation remained that he wouldn’t be able to work for the next few months. Not with a broken leg. Maybe he could pick up a few simple jobs, ones that didn’t require too much movement, but those often paid less and were more difficult to acquire. Most employers would probably look at him and simply shake their heads, not wanting someone injured as severely as he was on their job to drag everyone else down. 

Baishi had expected the adventurers to leave upon finishing, so he jumped when he felt a hand brush against his back. Looking up, Baishi couldn’t imagine the look in his own eyes that would have made the man flinch, backing away carefully with his hands up in the air. The woman stood behind him, staring at Baishi with a strange expression. Baishi didn’t take the time to try to imagine what her look meant.

“What?” he asked, not bothering to attempt to hide the misery in his voice. “You can go now. Thank you for bringing him back.”

The two shared an uneasy glance again. The man spoke up, “Are you sure you’ll both be okay here?”

“We’ll be fine,” Baishi replied, his voice rather dead. He could tell neither believed him, but didn’t have it in him to care. It wasn’t like they’d do anything to help. No one ever did. He repeated, “You can go now.”

Baishi looked away, his eyes catching on his father’s resting face. He didn’t seem at peace in his fitful state of unconsciousness, sweat still pouring down his forehead, his mouth hanging open and brow scrunched up, an expression of pain clear across his face. Baishi stood, turning his back to the adventurers, and wet a new cloth in the cold water. When he turned back around, both of the adventurers were gone, as expected. Baishi was left alone alongside his ailed father.

He leant down over him with a sigh, laying the cloth across his father’s forehead. His expression cleared up the slightest bit, though Baishi was certain the pain hadn’t eased yet.

Unsure of what else to do, Baishi pulled over the wooden chair and sat down, keeping his eyes on his father and holding his hand as he slept. He wasn’t sure what he was doing. Watching and making sure he didn’t stop breathing in the night? It was what his father had done for him those two years before. Neither of their injuries had been that serious, but Baishi, like his father, still wanted to be cautious. 

The candle flickered, painting the room in a thin orange glow, highlighting the sweat that beaded down his father’s face. Baishi could only hope the wound didn’t get infected and he didn’t come down with a fever. If he did, Baishi wasn’t sure what he would do.

At some point in the night, either minutes or hours later, Baishi’s adrenaline crashed and his eyes drooped closed. He nodded back off to sleep, his fingers slipping from his father’s and falling off to the side, inviting in the cold once more.

—

In the morning, Baishi awoke to the thin rays of dawn peaking through the narrow window high up on their wall. The beams rained down, hitting Baishi in the face as he sat directly in the way of their path to the wall. 

Baishi blinked, not having realized he’d fallen asleep. The aches in his limbs had tempered, not so much having soothed, but rather simply dulled into something more manageable. His head pounded with each bird chirp that reached through their walls, and he got up unsteadily to grab some water. 

In those few moments, he lived in a world where everything was fine, just as it had been before. The events from the night before slipped his mind in the few waking minutes. They all returned upon the sight of his father’s eyes squinted open, halfway glazed over as he stared mutely down towards his leg, which was still elevated atop the box Baishi had placed there and forgotten about. 

Baishi stood frozen in the corner, waiting for his father to notice him or say something, whichever came first.

Eventually, his father croaked out, “...Baishi.”

He didn’t say anything more than that, but Baishi still knew what he meant to say. His tone cracked, as though his mind was flooding with the knowledge that this would change everything for them. Even the roof over their head, which had been one of the only things they’d never been at risk of losing before, was in question.

As though reading his mind, his father shook his head, noticeably wincing at the movement. “No, no, it won’t get that bad. I promise you, Baishi. This is just a temporary setback. We’ll come up with something, anything. I’ll even sign a contract this time.”

Baishi stayed silent. He wanted to believe his father. He truly did. But he had been promising things would get better for years now. Things never had. Now, at their lowest of lows, how was Baishi supposed to believe him? Even if he did agree to sign a contract somewhere, who was to say any of the positions offered to him before would be available now? Especially with his injury.

Still, he couldn’t bring himself to say that aloud. His father was his father. He was trying his best to give them a good life and provide for the rest of their family at the same time. Rather, Baishi knew it was the system at hand that would not let him do so comfortably. Mora made people greedy, made them hoard it rather than let it flow to the people who truly needed it. The richest people in Liyue Harbor alone could afford to feed his entire family a thousand times over without even a dip in their pockets being made, yet they did little, if not nothing at all, to help people like Baishi and his father. The famine in Chenyu Vale would be no problem at all if those people cast just a glance and a little bit of sympathy, charity, their way. 

Instead, they looked past and ignored what the people begged for on the streets. Most believed Morax had created the coin to bring about prosperity, but Baishi knew it had simply brought about greed and suffering in abundance. Morax had created mora simply to feed his own ego in the end, knowing that the people would bow to it and therefore to him because of it. As its reach spread throughout the continent of Teyvat, Morax’s hands grew heavier with the weight of all those who perpetuated his system of finance. He held the scales and held them unfairly, his power growing substantially over that of the people who worshiped him.

It was a blatant disregard for the equivalent exchange that should have existed between immortals and mortals. Baishi, even at just six years of age, could see that clearly. He just didn’t understand why no one else could. Even his father, who spent his life trying and failing to earn the mora needed for them to survive, didn’t understand that the archon all those around them worshipped was the one who put him in this situation in the first place. Morax had killed their goddess along with thousands of others all those years ago, leaving no mercy left in his wake. Now he was going to kill them as well.

Baishi wouldn’t allow it. 

Baishi said none of this aloud. Instead, he inclined his head, hands laced behind his back, and stared down at the floor. “Of course. I trust you.”

His father’s hands shook as he reached out for him. Baishi followed his hands, walking back over to the bed and curling up beside his father, his eyes staying wide open. His father wrapped an arm around him and tilted his head back onto the pillow, his breaths quickly soothing back out. Baishi stayed awake, unable to lay his head down comfortably until he figured out how to solve this problem at its core. 

As his mind strayed, his eyes flickered towards the bedside table. Their candle had gone out sometime in the night, but now that Baishi no longer sat in their way, the sun’s rays shone down and hit the glinting blade of his throwing knife. One of the adventurers from the night before must have picked it up from the ground and placed it back up there. Baishi had forgotten about it.

A thought crossed through his mind. Just a simple, small thing. It would take a lot. It would take everything he had, and if he failed, well, it wasn’t as though things could get much worse at this point. As long as his father stayed out of it, everything would be fine, whether he got away with it or not. 

No one would suspect him unless he was seen. No one outside of his father even knew about his skills with knives. It would take planning, but Baishi had always been good at mapping things out in his head. If his father asked, Baishi could lie just as well as anyone else. As long as there was mora, hopefully his father wouldn’t ask too many more questions. 

Baishi closed his eyes once more, satisfied with the inklings of a plan he had begun to form in his mind. There was still much to do, but at least he had something. With that little notion of a plan, hope planted itself into his heart and took root. Baishi could only hope it wasn’t a mistake.

—

As Baishi had expected, sympathies were on high around the restaurants he did errands for upon hearing about his father’s injury. 

The aunties and uncles would send him home with meals after some jobs, with even more extra mora than usual after others, but it still was never enough. It would never be enough. Baishi and his father were barely scraping by as it was before the incident, but now they were in even more dire straits. Even if they were set for meals in the meantime due to those sympathetic thoughts, they would eventually run out. Baishi couldn’t rely on them. At this point, the only person he could rely upon was himself. 

And meals weren’t mora. The meager amounts of mora he made from his errands were nowhere near enough for everything else they needed to pay for: rent, clothes, and to send money back home.

For a good week after the incident, Baishi deliberated on asking his father if he didn’t think maybe his mother and brother back in Qiaoying Village didn’t need any more mora. The letters sent between them were few and far in between, but the ones they did get never mentioned anything about their situation. Baishi couldn’t imagine they were faring much better than them, but Baishi also couldn’t quite bring himself to empathize at the moment.

Well, that was a bit of an overstatement. Of course Baishi cared about them. Of course he didn’t want to stop sending them money. But…it was as though he lost his connection with them with each pang of hunger in his stomach, whenever the clothes on his back itched and never fit properly, when he was kept awake half the night listening to his father’s pained groans every time he shifted a bit too much in the night. His mother and brother were unknowable figures, those he didn’t even know the faces of (aside from the fact that he apparently shared a face with his brother), and yet he’d been sacrificing for them his entire life. He and his father had been suffering for them for the last six years. 

And yet he admonished himself whenever he considered the idea of leaving them to fend for themselves. They were his mother and his brother. His family. He couldn’t think of them so disconnectedly, not when they were depending on him and his father.

So Baishi gave up on the idea of asking. It made no difference anyway. If there was no mora to send back, then the result would be the same in the end. 

Baishi tried . He tried to make it all work without resorting to the plan he had. He took on more errands, worked himself harder than he ever had before, carrying boxes and lugging baskets and bags of whatever it was every client wanted all across the harbor over and over again for hours a day. It was still never enough. They would just barely rent with the extra hours he put in, but they could forget about buying anything else if they saved it all for rent. As soon as the sympathies ran out, Baishi wasn’t sure what they would do.

A few weeks after the injury, his father began to try to push past it. He began slowly, getting out of bed each morning to hug Baishi goodbye when he left. Baishi wished he could stay behind and help, but he had duties and they could not wait for his father. The few movements his father could make made little difference as well. He walked with homemade crutches, his limp evident as his father contorted in pain with every movement. 

He spoke about trying to go out and ask around for a job, but Baishi wasn’t sure it would yield any results. His father wasn’t trained for desk jobs or anything really to do with business. He was a laborer through and through and there was no work to be found for a laborer who had lost his ability to labor, no matter how temporary it might have been. 

The constant look on his father’s face, the swirling mixture of pain, concern, anger, and guilt, each time he tried again and again to make his leg work the way it had before was what finally broke Baishi’s resolve. 

Three weeks in, Baishi had prepared himself. He decided ultimately to start small. 

It began with a small case of slippery fingers. Baishi was small, rascally as some might say, even for a six year old. His hands could fit into crevices most couldn’t and they could easily get away with not being noticed slipping into the loose pockets of strangers as he walked by. 

The first time he tried it, he held his breath the entire time, the crime lasting a matter of seconds. He did it in the midst of the midmorning rush in the city square. He only took a single mora from his victim, his hands much too shaky to grab anything more, but it felt like a bigger victory than it was when the woman, a primly dressed lady who looked like she wouldn’t care even if her entire wallet had been taken because it wouldn’t make a dent in her accounts in the slightest, never turned back, never even checked her pocket and noticed it missing. 

As he did it again and again, only small amounts that none of the individuals he was robbing would think twice about missing, Baishi slowly gained more and more confidence in his skill. At the end of the day, he would count his earnings alongside the mora he made from his errands, mixing them in together so his father didn’t notice any differences. 

And if his father asked how he had made so much more than usual, Baishi blamed it on the sympathies of the people. His father, though he didn’t have much time to stroll through the harbor, was friendly to all those he met. The aunties and uncles Baishi ran errands for mostly did so because they knew he was helping out his father. Most of the people in the harbor knew they were rather down on their luck and tried helping out in the few ways they could. 

Baishi’s pickpocketing skills only got better and better as time passed. As weeks whisked by and he had never once been caught, Baishi decided to take a riskier step this time around. He had been watching a man who pranced around in sleek silver and sapphire blue jewelry loiter through the streets of the harbor for around a week by then. Of a different ilk, it seemed by the way he held himself as though he were unsure of his place on those streets, though he didn’t seem unkind like some influential strangers passing through tended to be. He entered restaurants and asked for their most expensive meals every time, making sure he was loud enough to be heard by other patrons, as though he were just asking to be robbed, before thanking the waiters politely and tipping generously every time..

Baishi shook his head at the man’s foolishness. Only someone looking for trouble would go so far as to act like that. And since the man seemed to be asking for it, Baishi didn’t mind giving him a little trouble. It would benefit him in the end and the man would be none the wiser. 

So one day, around two months into Baishi’s new endeavor of becoming Liyue Harbor’s greatest unknown thief, he just so happened to bump into the man while carrying a stack of boxes he was set to deliver down to the pier. Both of them went sprawling upon impact, the force of the collision sending Baishi’s boxes everywhere. 

“You—”

The silvery man looked about ready to shout at him for such an action before it occurred to him that the one who had bumped into him was little more than a kid who had teared up upon hitting the ground. 

Instead of shouting, then, the man tsked and sighed, rubbing at his back as he stood up and offered Baishi a hand. Wiping away his crocodile tears, Baishi took it, letting the man pull him up. 

“I apologize deeply, sir,” Baishi said, playing up the emotion in his voice as he bowed to the man. “I couldn’t see where I was going with all the boxes. I’m supposed to deliver them all across the harbor within the next half hour and I was in quite a rush to finish. I hope I haven’t caused you any trouble.”

“It’s no matter,” the silvery man replied, brushing himself off before bending over to pick up one of the boxes. “Here, let me help.”

Baishi and the man picked up the boxes together, the man placing them atop of the ones Baishi had already stacked up in his arms, until they were all back in their places. The silvery man looked quite proud of himself afterward, even giving Baishi a little bow of his own.

“There we go! Good as new. Good luck with your deliveries. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some place I need to be.”

The silvery man walked off briskly, not sparing Baishi another glance as he did. Baishi watched him as he wandered over to one of the newer teahouses in the harbor and began to speak with a man with a gray and red mask with pitch black coverings over the eyes. The man looked around a bit before shaking the masked man’s hand and slipping inside the teahouse with him.

Squinting at the scene, Baishi thought he recognized the mask the stranger wore, but eventually he shook the feeling off. Whether he recognized it or not didn’t matter. The silvery man had been nice. It was a nice change up from how the affluent typically treated people like him. It almost made him feel guilty about the gleaming pocket watch that had somehow made its way into the pocket of Baishi’s shorts in the midst of the chaos.

Almost. But not quite.

—

Baishi ended his errands late that day. The encounter from earlier, the silvery man meeting the masked man at the teahouse, had lingered in the forefront of his mind all throughout it and he couldn’t understand why. Where he had seen that mask before he could never quite place his finger on. It bothered him. It bothered him so much that before heading home for the night with his mora, he took a short detour back over to the Heyu Tea House to see if either of them happened to still be there.

To his misfortune, neither man remained, but another, much more unwelcome one, had taken a seat at one of the tables at some point that evening and had spotted him immediately upon arrival.

“Baishi,” Mr. Zhongli greeted, sounding and looking as refined as ever. His golden eyes flickered between Baishi and the two actors on the stage, who seemed to be in the midst of plotting something together, one an older man who seemed the miserly sort, halfway squatting for whatever reason, and a vaguely younger man, rather round chested and boastful as the two gossiped about some young lovers or something of the like. “Are you here for the play? It is a new one to my ears, something I must admit very rarely, but I have heard it is quite famous in Snezhnaya.”

Baishi shook his head. He couldn’t care less about some random play. “Ah, no, Mr. Zhongli. I was just stopping by. My father asked me to pick him up some tea to help him sleep tonight.”

Mr. Zhongli smiled fondly, traces of something unrecognizable melting in with the look. “You are quite a good son, aren’t you, Baishi? You look exhausted. Please, take a small break. I’m sure it will take the servers a little while to get to you regardless.”

Shifting uncomfortably and looking desperately for an excuse not to, Baishi glanced around, only to find that Mr. Zhongli was, in fact, correct. The tea house was quite packed at the moment, to the point where Mr. Zhongli’s table was the only one with free space. Even if Baishi did manage to get a waiter over, it would likely be a while before he got the tea his father definitely had not actually asked for.

Finally, sighing and resolving himself to the annoyance, Baishi slid into the seat across from the golden-eyed man, setting his bag of mora carefully in his lap, the pocket watch planted safely in the midst of all the coins. He fiddled with the ties on the bag, trying his best not to meet the man’s eyes. His ears tried listening into the theater piece, but he found that he couldn’t quite understand most of it. His eyes strayed to the men who were still on the stage, still seeming to be arguing. 

Mr. Zhongli must have noticed his confusion because he said, “Some of it they’ve rewritten in Liyuean, but most of it is still in the original Snezhnayan. I believe that most of the beauty of a play comes from the performance of it with its native sound. When translated, not all the fine diction or humorous language may come across the same. Having to shift the meanings so that they may not be completely lost in translation, it can do a play much disservice. Though it is pleasant as well to hear fanciful words spoken in one’s mother tongue.”

“Do you speak Snezhnayan?” Baishi questioned. Mr. Zhongli seemed to have little trouble following along with the play. 

The golden-eyed man inclined his head, his eyes following the actors as they chatted through the scene as though it were a dance, trading lines and continuing them for each other. “I learned once, yes, many years ago. A good friend taught me, though I know not if she thinks of that time as fondly as I still do anymore.”

Baishi wondered what might have happened between the two that would make him believe as such. “I’m sure she does. Can’t you just ask her?”

A small smile tipped at the corners of Mr. Zhongli’s lips. “If only things were so easy.”

Baishi opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, a server showed up to take his order. Quickly, he ordered the first tea that crossed his mind and the server nodded, disappearing back into the fray. 

“Baishi,” Mr. Zhongli said again, drawing Baishi’s attention back to him. This time, the golden-eyed man’s full attention was on him and him alone, a gaze strong enough to stop any grown man in his tracks. Baishi felt almost glued to his seat by it. “Though things may seem impossible now, your journey ahead is still great and troublesome. You will persevere through all the troubles life may impart your way, though you will not do so without great loss. I must admit, loss is the sole thing that we as beings have in common, but that does not mean that I cannot understand what you believe.”

Baishi paused. “What do you think that I believe?”

“You believe that you are alone in this world,” Mr. Zhongli answered, a glint in his eyes. “You believe you must stand on a pedestal of your own in order to make people see and hear you, and that you must go against all the odds in order to make something of yourself that people will appreciate. But that is not correct. You are not alone, no matter how much it may seem so. You do not need to stand at the top alone, though I do not doubt you could make it there. But if you do, if you must sacrifice everything for it, it will not make you happy.”

Mr. Zhongli paused this time, giving Baishi a moment to get a word in if he wished to. Baishi did not wish to.

“I do not know what exactly you want in this world,” he continued, gaze somewhere far, far away, “but there is nothing entirely out of reach, even for those farthest from it. All that must be done to achieve something is to seize opportunities, no matter how small, that will get you closer bit by bit. You do not need recognition from the archons to reach it. But you must know. Fighting for what you want and finally achieving it, they are two completely separate things. Your journey may be harrowing, but I have no doubt that you will claw your way up any mountain.”

Letting out a sigh, Mr. Zhongli closed his eyes at last. “I only hope that you should understand what you are getting into. That you will find a way to be at peace with yourself after it all.”

Baishi…didn’t know what to think of all Mr. Zhongli said. He remained silent.

Eventually, Mr. Zhongli continued. “I first met your father back when you both were first migrating here. Your father was lost on his way to the harbor and I, returning from a previous journey, led him there. As we began to walk, you pulled on my hair and started heartily crying the moment your father let me hold you, despite you still being quite weak from the lingering sickness you had acquired in Chenyu Vale. Your father was evidently quite worried for you, but he truly believed you would pull through. He always believed in you. He only ever wanted what was best for you. Never forget that, no matter what may come.”

Baishi was beginning to believe someone had slipped something into the man’s tea. Mr. Zhongli rambled often, but this was unlike his usual topics. With the attention on himself, Baishi shifted uncomfortably in his seat, hoping the server would come back soon. Mr. Zhongli didn’t seem to expect a response, luckily enough, so Baishi remained sitting in that uncomfortable silence for minutes on end until the server returned with the now lukewarm tea. Baishi grimaced as he began to untie his bag of mora and pay, but Mr. Zhongli paused him with a raised hand, pulling out some of his own mora from his pocket and paying for the drink. It was the first time Baishi had ever seen the man pay for something himself.

“Let this be a repayment,” Mr. Zhongli stated. “And a show of gratitude, for you humoring an old man’s words.”

Baishi didn’t quite know what he was thanking him for, but Baishi simply shrugged, nodding his own thanks, and finally took his leave.

The booming tones of the actors followed after Baishi as he departed from the tea house, their unfamiliar words creating a beating symphony inside of his head, matching to the tempo of the ones Mr. Zhongli had just spoken. Baishi wound them round and round in his head, trying to make sense of it all, but nothing added up.

It would no doubt be a long night ahead.

—

When Baishi arrived back at their small room, his father was awake and washing up for the night. He had been getting better and better at standing once more, practicing every day while Baishi was out. Though he still wore the split since the pain flared up each time he didn’t, he could walk on the leg with little reliance on the crutches any longer. 

Still, he was not yet in working shape. His father kept repeating any day now to him as though it would make that day come faster. Baishi had a more pessimistic view of it, one that said it would still be months before his father could reasonably return to work without quickly injuring himself again. He didn’t say this aloud to his dad though. 

“Baishi,” his father greeted him, tilting his head to the side. “Good day?”

“Long,” Baishi replied, “tiring, but fruitful.”

He had made sure to take out the stolen pocket watch before returning, so he had no concerns as he handed over the bag of mora to his father. His father set it to the side. They would count and divvy it up come morning. Quickly changing into his sole pair of pajamas, Baishi wasted no time before sliding into bed after making sure his father didn’t need any help. Pulling the blanket up over his head, mumbling something about the candle light beforehand so his father wouldn’t get too suspicious, he took the pocket watch from his pocket, holding it reverently in the palms of his hands. 

It was certainly one of the nicest things he’d stolen so far, and it hadn’t even involved any sort of a struggle. The watch seemed to be made of pure silver and sapphire, a silver star-like shape bending across the case with four holes near each pointed edge where sapphire spheres lay and an oceanic blue backing behind the star itself. Attached was a small linked chain to clip onto one’s shirt and at the end of it was a little charm that looked as though it were meant to be a snowflake. 

Baishi caressed it gently. He could probably get a good few thousand mora for it, if not a few hundred thousand, especially if it was genuine silver and sapphire. The star symbol was achingly familiar, like he’d seen it somewhere before, perhaps in a dream, but his mind couldn’t place it. He held it up to his ear, listening with closed eyes to the near silent tick tock tick tock it emitted. 

With a careful touch, Baishi pressed down on the latch at the bottom, wanting to see the inside, but nothing occurred. Brow furrowing, he pressed it again and again, pulling at it and pushing it, but no matter what he did, the watch did not budge. It would not open.

Getting frustrated, he reached a hand from out underneath his blanket to grasp his throwing knife on the bedside table. Once he had it, he lodged it in between the front and back of the watch and pushed down, trying his best to pry it open, but still nothing. He dug it further under the lid, poking around for a place that would give, but the knife slipped, following the ledge of the watch and landing a slice across his palm.

Baishi hissed in pain, dropping both the knife and the watch onto the bed. Blood seeped out lethargically from the wound, which traced a thin line across the entirety of his hand. With a sigh, he threw the blanket from off of him, preparing to get some water to wash the injury, but paused, looking around.

The room around him was empty. His father was absent. He shouldn’t have been.

Baishi hadn’t even heard him leave. A chill went through his bones. 

It wasn’t entirely strange for his father to go out late at night, doing archon-knows-what, but he hadn’t done it since he got injured. His leg still bothered him greatly most days, especially when it was cold out, and he avoided going out at night as much as he could, not wanting the ache the cold brought in to bother him throughout the next few days.

Baishi thought he was right to be concerned. He forgot entirely about the wound on his hand and slipped out the door, glancing around outside. 

A few hundred feet away to the left, he spotted his father’s figure walking slowly down the street, his one good cloak covering his head and sheltering him from prying eyes. The slight limp in his step made him stand out rather well despite the darkness. 

Baishi considered calling out to him, asking him where he was going, but he didn’t want to startle him, nor did he wish to wake the entire neighborhood. Not to mention, Baishi had always been rather curious as to what his father got up to on these nights he went out alone. If he simply followed at a slower pace, he could finally find out.

Decision in mind, Baishi quickly grabbed his throwing knife—a precaution just in case any trouble came to him—and shoved the watch into his pocket—in case someone broke in while they were both away— then closed the front door behind him, slipping out into the night to follow his father.

Following him in his state of injury was rather easy. Baishi would hide behind buildings or walls whenever his father looked back, and he never got caught. They walked for a long while, the streets of the harbor never seeming more endless than in the midst of the night when no one else was around, until his father finally came to a pause underneath a street lantern, the charcoal coloring of his cloak lit up by the sudden bout of light. 

Baishi tried peering around his father to get a better look at why he had stopped, but couldn’t see anything. He got a bit closer, sneaking around the sides of houses until he was only around thirty away. Glancing at his father, Baishi startled, seeing the figures of three men in the darkness in front of him. He heard faint traces of his father’s voice, quiet and desperate in tone, and the returned mumbles of the men in front of him, much too low for Baishi to hear their conversation clearly. He debated getting closer, but movement struck before he could make his decision.

All of a sudden, the voices quieted and two of the men stepped out into the light. Their faces were covered, masked by the same silver and red masks the men the silvery man had been meeting with wore. Baishi watched with his shoulders tense as they grabbed his father’s shoulders. His hand curled around his throwing knife as his father began to struggle against their hold, his injured leg flailing. 

A second passed, the third man came into the light, and Baishi struck, launching the knife with perfect precision into one of the men’s backs. The man holding his father’s left shoulder collapsed to the ground, the two remaining men staring straight at Baishi in shock. His father turned to look at him, eyes going wide and his mouth falling open to call for him.

For the moment, the world sat still. Baishi was caught in a moment in time, the world seeming to cease its spinning as he watched, slowly, as the man behind his father unsheathed a knife from a holster on his side, something Baishi hadn’t noticed before. His father seemed oblivious to the action, his mouth still moving though Baishi couldn’t hear a word from the way the blood flowed towards his ears. 

He had no more knives to throw. Baishi had only grabbed the one, expecting it to be enough. He should have known it wouldn’t have been.

In a split second, Baishi rushed forward towards the fallen body and grabbed the knife from his back. It took only a second for him to throw it, nailing the man directly in the eye, breaking through the red glass in his mask to reach it. Blood spurted out around it as his mask flew off, revealing a plain face etched in shock. He fell, body hitting the ground with a loud thud. 

For that second, everything was fine. 

The remaining man ran from the scene, fleeing without a trace, but Baishi paid him no mind. He turned back to his father, lips turning up into a smile now that they were safe again, but the smile faded away slowly. His father reached out a hand, pressing it to Baishi’s cheek with shaky fingers. The touch was a gentle wisp before it fell away. 

He whispered, eyes glassy, “ I’m sorry ,” before he fell forward, tumbling onto Baishi and knocking him onto the ground. Baishi gasped as they hit the ground, his hands fumbling around until they met the grip of the knife that had been stuck in his father’s back. 

“No,” Baishi said, voice shaking. “No, no, no, no, no . Dad? Dad!” 

He shook his father, trying to get him to move, to get off of him and stand back up, to put life back into his eyes and laugh like he used to before things went so bad. No such thing happened. His father’s eyes had closed and Baishi didn’t think they’d open again.

Baishi didn’t think. He pulled the knife from his father’s back, pressing his hand against the wound as blood began to gush out, and slowly by surely shifted his father off of him, rolling him onto his back. Standing on shaky legs, a pain shooting through him, Baishi stumbled over to the dead man who had wielded the knife that killed his father, gripping said knife in his own small hands, the grip and feel of it oddly familiar. Baishi crashed to his knees beside him, grabbing and pulling out his own knife from the man’s eye socket, ignoring the flood of blood that spilled across the man’s face, before raising both weapons above him and driving them down, impaling the strange man over and over and over again.

In his distant mind, he recognized that the knife the killer had had was not simply familiar, but the exact same one Baishi himself used. He brushed this aside, deeming it unimportant.

After he had finished, the man’s torso near unrecognizable with all the blood and injury, Baishi backed away, bringing the knives with him and pocketed them both. He crawled back over to his father’s body and wrapped his arms around him, crying into his chest, the warmth already beginning to drain from him. It had been a long while since Baishi cried, but now he couldn’t bring himself to stop, tears sliding down his cheeks and staining his father with their bloody grime. 

In his pocket, the watch did what his father could not and kept on beating, tick tock tick tock , with the flow of time. Though the blood splatter had reached it in the midst of the crime, the watch never ceased to tick. 

Baishi followed the sound as he sobbed, the world as he knew it over, and eventually, at long last, it lulled him off to sleep in the midst of that dark street, the sun never again to come up on his days left alive.

Chapter Text

When one’s world tilts, it does not often right itself quickly. When time stops for someone, it still bruises and aches all the same because it does not truly stop—no, time never truly stops. It only appears as such when the eyes no longer see clearly, the mind can no longer think freely, and the limbs become mechanical, walking aimlessly while masquerading as a being with a purpose. 

Time seeped along like molasses for Baishi after that fateful night. Liquid tar poured between the crevices of his fingers, still dropping grain by grain though he gripped so tightly to it in hopes that it might bring him back to the days before. No matter what he did, it never occurred, so he was forced to keep taking life step by step. His father wouldn’t have wanted him to quit, no matter what life threw at him every day, so Baishi kept walking, even as chains began to form around his ankles, tying him to his life of repetitive mediocrity: earn money, send it out, buy what he needed, skip a meal or two if there wasn’t enough left to go around, sleep, and repeat. 

The process got harder after his father died. 

The morning after, the pile of bodies was discovered immediately upon the first Millelith beginning their morning patrols. Baishi wondered for years afterward how they hadn’t been discovered before by some other patrolling Millelith, but he always shook it off. It didn’t matter, after all. What happened afterward would have happened regardless of whether they had been found in the middle of the night or after dawn. 

At first, the Millelith believed that all four of the bodies in the pile were dead. That was, until, they closed off the area and began to poke around. One of the guards attempted to pull Baishi off his father, only to get a major surprise when his grip wouldn’t loosen. Baishi had laid there for hours awake, unable to bring himself to move as all his muscles locked in place and he pressed his face to his father’s cold, unmoving chest. 

Upon realizing that not everyone there was dead, the guard called over some of the other Millelith loitering around. The guards all worked to disconnect him from his father, but Baishi hung on with all he had, eyes squeezed shut. Maybe if he just waited a little longer, this would all turn out to be just a dream. Yes, that was what it was. A dream. Just a terrible, terrible dream.

But eventually his fingers slipped, nails scraping against his father’s clothes and skin as he was pulled away. He kept his arms outreached as he cried, the Millelith holding him back from crawling back, their hands gripping his wrists and wrapping around his waist to drag him back coarsely. Baishi inwardly scoffed at the rough treatment. What could a six year old do to a fully fledged soldier? 

It wasn’t until an hour later, when he was brought before the Liyue Qixing, that he realized perhaps they were genuinely worried about what he could do to them. Somewhere along the way, the blades he’d stashed away in his pocket had disappeared. Whether they had been taken by the soldiers at some point or were simply lost amongst the bodies, he couldn’t be certain until one of the Millelith placed both of them before him on the table, the older man who had been speaking to him casually for the last twenty minutes gesturing to them with a furrowed brow. 

“These were found in your pocket,” he grumbled, voice scratchy and gruff, like his father’s after a hard day of work. Baishi looked askance. “Are they yours?”

It took him a minute to find his voice. When he spoke, it came out squeaky from disuse. “One of them.”

“One of them?” the man repeated, raising a brow. He didn’t seem to believe him. “Same make, same model, and yet only one is yours?”

“Yes,” he answered and said nothing more.

“And where did you get the knife you say is yours?”

The words nearly stuck in his throat. “My father gave it to me. He bought me a set a year or two ago for self defense.”

“And your father, he taught you how to use this knife?”

“Yes,” he said again. The room around them was small and cold, the chair underneath him flat and uncomfortable. He brought his knees to his chest and hugged them tightly, still looking down at the bloodied knives. No one had bothered to clean them off. He thought of the times when his father would help him sharpen them, the stone they used smooth and cool to the touch. He wished for those times again, though he knew they were now unreachable. 

The other Millelith had left the room at some point. It was only him and the old man that remained.

“And what about the other knife?” the old man questioned next, sensing he would say no more about his own. “It was in your pocket, alongside your own knife, covered in blood. The exact same knife, and yet you claim it wasn’t yours.”

“It’s not. It was the man’s,” Baishi answered quietly. “The one who stabbed my father.”

The old man pursed his lips, wizened fingers tapping along the table, a dissonant melody. “Yes. The man who stabbed your father. What was your name again?”

“Baishi.”

“Well, Baishi, were you aware that the two men found dead at the scene alongside your father were members of Snezhnaya’s military corps, known as the Fatui?”

Baishi paused. He shook his head slowly. The fatui. He supposed that made sense. It explained why he had recognized their masks. He’d probably seen them a few times in some of the books he read. 

“The Fatui arrived recently on a diplomatic mission to establish connections between Her Majesty the Tsaritsa and the Qixing,” the old man explained, rubbing his temples. “And now two of their members have died, killed by a child no older than ten. How exactly are we to explain this to them?”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Baishi said immediately, hackles rising. “They were attacking my father! They had grabbed his shoulders, they had weapons! What was I supposed to do, stand there and watch him die?”

“And yet there has to be more to the story. The Fatui only arrived two days ago, and yet for some reason, they decided to target your father almost immediately.”

“Nothing could have happened during that time,” Baishi stressed. “My father was injured. He could barely leave the house most days. I don’t know how he would have met them enough to anger them.”

The old man passed a hand through his graying hair, closing his eyes with a sigh. He tapped the table again, fingers moving one of the knives around so that the handle faced Baishi. He tapped the handle this time around, pointing at the symbol carved into it. 

Baishi paused, brain quickly making a connection. A flood of dread coursed through him all at once as the man opened his mouth to ask him another question.

“You say nothing could have happened,” he spoke slowly, “but you also said your father acquired this standard issue Fatui knife years ago to give to you. Tell me, Baishi, do you know exactly where your father got the knife?”

His mouth opened, hoping that a reasonable answer would come out, but he had no explanation. He didn’t know where his father had gotten it all those years back. He had presented it to him one day after work, claiming he’d bought it from some merchant who passed by his current worksite. Something told him the old man wouldn’t believe that. 

“He bought it off a traveling merchant,” he said lamely, words trailing off. 

“Did you see him buy it yourself?”

Baishi couldn’t even bring himself to speak this time. He shook his head. The old man heaved out a sigh, dropping his head into the palm of his hand. 

“Lies are easy to tell to children,” the old man said, tired. “Especially when they don’t know what exactly you’re lying about. You’ve never seen the Palestar Banner before?”

“I have,” Baishi replied miserably. “I just…didn’t think it was connected. Even if it was, he bought it from a merchant. Who knew how the merchant acquired it?”

The old man shook his head. “I can guarantee you, there was no merchant. Whatever connections your father had with the Fatui, they were not new, nor do I believe that what happened last night was a coincidence. At some point in time, your father came to an agreement with the Fatui, perhaps even began to work for them. What their deal was, I can’t be sure, but he evidently did something to piss them off. Something that culminated in one of the commanders, perhaps even one of the harbingers themselves calling for his death. The Fatui don’t just go around killing random citizens of foreign countries if they haven’t been wronged in some way.”

Breathing out a loud sigh, the old man continued, “And yet, we have little evidence of that aside from this knife, which isn’t sufficient proof to conclude anything of worth. What we do have proof of is the fact that you killed two of their soldiers, however. Regardless of whether it was in defense of your father or not, the death of diplomatic soldiers is not something to be taken lightly. Liyue may have rules against trying children, but I can’t say the same for Snezhnaya. If the Fatui decide they want to try you for killing their soldiers, the Qixing can’t do anything to protect you.”

Baishi scoffed, bitterness tinging his tone, as he tightened his arms around himself. He looked down at the knives again. “That doesn’t matter much. I’ve already survived this long without the Qixing’s protection.”

The old man looked at him with something like pity in his stare. He opened his mouth to speak, but he was interrupted before he could get a sound out, a loud knock ringing out against the door.

He cleared his throat. “Come in.”

The same Millelith from before peaked his head into the room an inch before fully entering, shutting the door behind him. He stood at attention immediately, bowing his head for just a second before righting himself, his spear close by his side.

“Sir, I’ve spoken with the diplomats.”

“And? Say your piece, soldier, what did they say?”

“They,” the guard hesitated. “They said to release him. They aren’t pressing charges for the deaths.”

Baishi inhaled quickly and the old man’s face contorted at the words. He brought a hand to his chin and stroked his short beard. 

“Indeed,” he said eventually. “Thank you, soldier. Take your leave.”

The Millelith did as instructed, the door pressing shut quietly behind him. The graying man’s gaze settled back on Baishi with slightly renewed interest.

“A turn of the tides,” he remarked. “But whether you view this well or with bad fortune, that is for you to decide. I can tell you this though: I have dealt with the Fatui many times before. Never once do they truly let a crime against them go. You may get to live another day, but the question remains exactly what they’re getting for letting you do so. What exactly did your father promise them while he was still alive?”

Baishi had no answer to that. “Can I go?”

He got a short nod in response. “We have no more reason to keep you here. In the Qixing’s eyes, the Fatui’s deaths were an act of defense. But…I should warn you. By now, I’m sure at least half of the harbor has heard about the crime. It was difficult to cover up the details when the crime scene was right in the middle of the square. Your father found dead alongside two Fatui…it isn’t a good look. The people here aren’t stupid. They know how the Fatui function as well as I do.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that some day in the future, you may wish that the Fatui had dealt with you after all. The people of Liyue do not respect traitors in their midst, not even the children of them.”

“My father wasn’t a traitor,” Baishi argued, standing suddenly, his chair falling behind him. He met the man’s eyes directly. “My father was Liyuean, through and through. It doesn’t matter if he—if he made a few deals or whatever with the Fatui to get by. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t loyal to the people he’s lived alongside his whole life.”

“You may believe that,” the old man shrugged. “But will the people?”

Baishi wanted to reply, but another knock rang out at the door. The man didn’t break eye contact as he called for whoever it was to come in.

The woman who entered had bright blue hair with red and black horns peaking out from the top of her head, her purplish-pink eyes flickering quickly between the old man and Baishi, a bundle of files held closely to her chest. She bowed her head towards the old man.

“Sorry to interrupt, Tianshu. There’s a matter we need you to look over with some of the paperwork from the case a week ago. It—it can wait a little longer if you need to finish up here, but it is quite important…”

“It’s fine, Ganyu. We were just finishing up here anyway. Hand me the papers, I’ll look them over. And, if you could, please escort Mister Baishi here out. I’m sure he didn’t pay much attention upon entering.”

The woman, Ganyu, bowed her head again. “Of course, Tianshu.”

She turned to Baishi, her multicolored eyes curious. “Please, follow me.”

Baishi stood quickly, eager to get out of that room, following close behind the petite woman and letting the door shut firmly behind him. 

The walk was quiet for the most part. The building they were in had many winding hallways and staircases. Baishi was glad the old man had sent Ganyu to guide him out. He was sure that he would’ve gotten lost within a few steps if he had attempted to get out by himself.

Something shone out of the corner of his vision and he glanced to the side, eyes catching on the glimmering cryo vision hanging at the woman’s side. His lip twitched. 

“You’re a vision holder?” he said, the first words he’d spoken to her. She jumped at his words, eyes wide as she turned towards him, her hand going down to her vision as though she had forgotten it was there.

“Ah,” she glanced down at it. “Yes, I am.”

“How did you get it?” he asked, curious. Perhaps if he had some insight as to how someone else acquired one, then it would be easier for him to do so. 

Ganyu chewed at her lip, eyes flashing between him and the hall ahead of them. They’d been walking for minutes now with no end in sight. Eventually she sighed, shoulders slumping and lips forming a small smile.

“It came to me the minute I decided to start working here,” she explained gently, thumb caressing the top of the vision. “I joined the Qixing with a desire to protect the land that I love, and I serve it willingly every day. I believe that this vision represented my willingness to help rebuild Liyue, a physical manifestation of that desire and nothing more. It is more of a symbol really than anything else.”

She spoke as though she had had the vision for years, decades even, though Baishi thought she looked like she was only in her twenties. Maybe visions slowed aging as well? He wouldn’t have been surprised. 

Baishi thought about her story. Her devotion to Liyue had been what earned her that vision. Baishi was…well, he was devoted to helping himself, helping his family. He had been devoted to his father, wanting to do all he could to help him, to make their lives easier, but, well, he had seen just how that had worked out. 

 Celestia must have been a cruel god sitting in her castle up in the sky, watching and laughing as he begged her night and night again for a vision, something that would make his life so much easier. She must have gotten much enjoyment continuously ignoring his prayers. Why else would she have refused him time and time again?

Maybe his devotion just wasn’t enough. Maybe he just wasn’t enough. He hadn’t been enough to save his father. Maybe the archons had seen that, seen all his failures, and judged him just enough to find him unworthy.

Ganyu must have noticed his rather downtrodden look as she interrupted his thoughts with a sympathetic tone. “I am sorry to hear about your father, by the way. It sounds like he was a good man.”

Baishi scoffed bitterly, mind still ringing at the words the old man had left him with. “A good man, yes, for a traitor.”

She frowned lightly. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

“Don’t you? The old man said everyone would.”

Ganyu tsked, tucking a strand of blue hair behind her ear with a sigh. “The Tianshu says many things, but most of them are simply his own opinions. Some may believe your father was a traitor perhaps, but not all. Those who knew him will understand that all he did was try to protect those that he loved. If that love led him to making a deal with the Fatui…well, who can truly say they wouldn’t go any length to save their loved ones? I think it was a show of strength, not a true desire to betray our nation.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” 

Baishi didn’t know what to think. His mind felt a thousand miles away, his limbs and clothes still covered in the dried blood of his father and the two fatui agents he’d killed, the silver pocket watch adorned in the Palestar banner—something he’d realized just as he’d looked at the emblem on the knives—still ticking away in his pocket, still unopenable. 

He remembered belatedly that he’d forgotten to take his knife back in his rush to get out of the room. He wasn’t sure if the old man would have even let him take it, considering it was technically a murder weapon now, but he still wished he’d tried. Baishi debated on whether to ask Ganyu if they could turn back and get it, but he decided it was a waste. He wouldn’t be able to use it anyway, not after what had happened. 

After a few more minutes of watching, they finally managed to make it to the front door. Ganyu opened the door for him, slipping out after him. He looked back at her, confused. 

“Are you going somewhere?” he asked, wondering why she was going outside as well. “Aren’t you working?”

“Ah,” Ganyu said, an embarrassed blush spreading across her face. “I apologize, I must have gotten distracted. I should be getting back to work now.”

But she still hesitated to leave. Her fingers laced together nervously as neither of them moved, her eyes glancing away and staring at something out in the distance. Baishi turned and tried to see what, but whatever it was, Baishi couldn’t quite catch sight of it.

“Do you have somewhere to go?” she asked quietly, drawing his attention back to her. In her gaze was something akin to pity, a little more like sympathy, but Baishi wanted none of it. He had survived on his own while his father was away for most of his life already. He didn’t need the pity of someone who knew nothing of his struggles, not when he knew no help would come of it. Little ever had. 

“Yes,” he said, unsure of whether it was a lie or not. Their landlord was a bit sleazy, but he also didn’t really care who rented the rooms, so long as they paid on time. And the rent wasn’t the worst either. As long as Baishi could manage to make at least that, then he would be able to keep the room. 

But…it wouldn’t be the same. Not with his father dead. Baishi had managed to keep them alive for the last few weeks, but he hadn’t expected it to be a permanent thing. Keeping only himself alive would surely be easier, but he also had his mother and brother to think about. He couldn’t just abandon them, though he certainly felt abandoned himself.

As for them, well, Baishi didn’t think it particularly necessary to tell them about his father’s untimely demise. As long as they still received the money they needed alongside his father’s words and promises on written paper, they would be happy. They would be content. They wouldn’t have to shoulder the misery that had come upon Baishi’s shoulders so suddenly. He could do it alone. Just as he often had. 

“Will you be okay?” she asked next, looking as though she didn’t really believe his previous answer. He didn’t understand why she was trying so hard to appear to care. It wasn’t like they’d see each other at all after this. Baishi was just a child. He had no business with the Qixing any further than being released by them. 

“Of course,” he said, letting the words slip smoothly from his mouth. “Thank you for your concern, Miss Ganyu. If that’s everything you needed me for, I’ll be—”

“Baishi?” a familiar, unwelcome voice interrupted, making Baishi’s head snap to the side, eyes narrowed. 

Mr. Zhongli stood behind him, his regal brown long coat flapping in the midday wind, his brow creased in surprise as his eyes passed Baishi and went to Ganyu. “Miss Ganyu? What brings you out here to the steps of the Ministry of Civil Affairs at this hour? I would have thought you’d be working right now.”

“Ah! Re—Mr. Zhongli! What a surprise!” Ganyu exclaimed, laughing quite nervously, her eyes twitching as she spoke. “I am in fact working right now. The Tianshu tasked me with guiding Baishi out of the building after—after the interrogation.”

Interrogation wasn’t exactly the word Baishi would have used for it, considering there was little interrogating done during it, but he didn’t say that aloud. Mr. Zhongli frowned, tilting his head to the side.

“Interrogation? What for?”

Ganyu blinked at him. “Mr. Zhongli, have you truly not heard?”

Said man shook his head, gesturing for her to explain. She glanced at Baishi, concerned. Baishi let out a breath. 

“My father is dead,” he murmured, just loud enough that Mr. Zhongli could hear him. The golden eyed man’s shoulders stiffened, his face going blank. Baishi cleared his throat and continued. “Along with two Fatui agents, courtesy of me. They brought me in to ask me about my father’s involvement with the Fatui and to see if they would have to give me up for punishment. Must be my lucky day since the Fatui let me go free.”

Mr. Zhongli seemed to finally comprehend the blood that covered him from head to toe. A gloved hand covered his mouth. He said nothing in response. Baishi was unsurprised.

“I see,” Mr. Zhongli said eventually, clearing his throat to wash away the silence. “I apologize for your loss. Your father was a good man. Any ties he may have held to the Fatui will surely have been dissolved with death. You needn’t worry there.”

Baishi nodded, unsure of why that had been what he had focused on, then paused. He wondered…

“Mr. Zhongli,” he said. “Yesterday, you mentioned something about great loss. Did you…did you know about my father and the Fatui? Did you know something was going on?”

For the first time ever, Mr. Zhongli appeared rather nervous. He shifted his stance, balancing from foot to foot, hands flexing behind his back, his brow furrowing in makeshift confusion. 

“Why would you think that?” Mr. Zhongli asked, his tone blank. “How would I have known about it?”

“I don’t know,” Baishi replied, getting frustrated as tears pricked in the corners of his eyes. “But it sure seems like you knew something was going to happen.”

“I assure you, Baishi, I did not have a clue about your father’s dealings with the Fatui. Nor did I know what was going to happen last night. All that I said to you was a simple lesson I wished for you to learn. I thought it was important enough to inform you of. I apologize that it was followed by such tragedy, though I suppose I am glad that you retained enough of it that you are able to accuse me of such things in the aftermath.”

His tone was light despite the topic. Baishi, though he thought most of the words he said were genuine, couldn’t help but still doubt him. Maybe it was just his preconceptions about the man, or the fact that his appearance underlined almost every bad occurrence that happened in Baishi’s life. It was as though he was a ticking timebomb for disasters. Baishi didn’t trust him one bit.

“Whatever,” Baishi replied, brushing past him. “I’m leaving.”

“They’ll have brought your father to Wangsheng Funeral Parlor for burial,” Mr. Zhongli said as he passed. “I can guide you there, if you—”

“No. Thanks. Have a good day, Mr. Zhongli, Miss Ganyu.”

With one last wave, Baishi was gone.

—

Wangsheng Funeral Parlor was rather sympathetic about his plight. 

Still, Baishi couldn’t afford even the cheapest option of coffin, therefore he settled on cremation instead. It was a better option anyway, in Baishi’s opinion. His father wouldn’t have wanted to be buried in Liyue Harbor, not when he had spent all his time here longing to return to Qiaoying Village. With his ashes, Baishi could spread them in the river that flowed through the town when he eventually returned. 

It was the most he could do for his father, who had spent the last few years of his life in a relentless and fruitless pursuit of something always just out of reach. Baishi had to continue that fight for him, but he expected himself to have no better luck. The streets of Liyue would be all he would ever know, never the rightful touch of the ballrooms and foyers of the rich and plentiful. Those were not made for “street rats” such as himself.

The thought of it fueled his hatred a little more each day. The next week passed slowly by him, his eyes blinking away dots in his vision that lingered from the little light the cracks in his walls let in. Baishi laid curled around the jar of ashes in the middle of the now-too-large bed he and his father had once shared.His stomach growled, meek and tender, but every time he pulled himself upward with the intention of eating, the image of the bloodied knife stuck in the depths of his father’s stomachs flashed behind his eyelids. Each time, he laid back down with the intent to lay there forever. 

But there was no mora to be made from laying around. To go a week without mora, even without buying anything, was a killer. A slow one. His skin felt melted to his bones, his hair sticky and sweat-leaden, eyes molded into the image of those few final moments. He couldn’t continue on like this. It wasn’t good for anyone. 

As expected, no one but himself was there to pull him from the depths of despair. Not once did a knock at the door ring out, nor did the shadows outside linger for more than a second or two. He wondered, should he simply decide never to move again, how long it would take for them to find his body. 

Not long, he eventually decided. Part of him was surprised no one had checked out of concern for the smell just yet. The water in the bucket in the corner had staled as the days passed and he didn’t replace it or use it up. The bedsheets were drenched in sweat, his own, spawned of the night terrors that plagued his near constant state of sleep. The lid of the jar of ashes had slipped off some time during one of the nights, and Baishi had had to sweep some of the spilled ashes back inside upon waking. He was only lucky that it was such a small amount, but even so, a few still inevitably escaped into the open air, becoming one with the room like everything else that dwelled silently inside of it.

Some part of him laughed at the irony of it. His father’s ashes, now decorating the very room he had slowly grown to hate. Of course, he had never told Baishi so specifically of his hatred for these four walls, but Baishi could see it in his eyes, each time they scanned around, tracing the lines of the cracks and the mold and moss that crept across the corners and ceiling. It was not enough. It was evidence of the years of his life he had wasted trying to achieve the impossible better. It would never be enough.

It took that whole week for Baishi to finally regain his senses. In the aftermath, it seemed something like a fever dream, the maroon that had decorated his vision, the shallowness of his breath as he breathed in the dry air. When he blinked awake at the end of that week, the normal sense of panic had seized him with an unfamiliar aggression. In his state of grief, he had forgotten entirely that he existed within the world. Baishi had forgotten his mother, forgotten his brother.

And, he frowned as a skeletal hand, unknown yet still connected to him, slid against his stomach, he had forgotten what survival meant for one solidarity, damning week. 

He could worry about mora and his family later. For the moment, what he desperately needed was food.

So Baishi went through the painstaking process of standing back up on his own two feet once more. He had done it before alongside his father and he’d do it again without him.

The water might have been stale and halfway dried up, but it did well enough to clean him of the lingering specks of blood and dirt from that night. It soothed his parched throat as well, though the taste lingered the slightest on his tongue. He put no thoughts towards worrying about the cleanliness of it. If it killed him at this point, Baishi would likely go on thinking it a blessing rather than a curse. 

But it did not kill him, and he moved on. 

His own clothes worn to rags and covered in mahogany stains that smelled of salt and iron, Baishi had no choice but to root through the few clothes his father had left. All of them were much too big for him, but he neither had the money nor the patience to try to retrieve new ones his size. He held up the pants and tightened the shirt with the same shabby belt his father had worn for years, returned to him by Wangsheng Funeral Parlor before the cremation, and knew that with his stringy black hair and amaranthine eyes, he would never be able to look in the mirror and see his father, but he could also not resemble him more than he did in that moment. 

It was then that he decided he would cut his hair. His father’s had been short, often a necessity in his lines of work, so Baishi’s would be as well. He would have dyed it, perhaps, to match his father’s muddy brown as well, but dye didn’t work so well with hair as dark as his own. He doubted it would take even if he did put the mora forth to attempt it.

Baishi had never before wanted to look like his father, but some part of him now yearned to keep a connection, one of any sort he could get. This was the easiest way.

When he finally deemed himself presentable enough to appear out on the streets of Liyue (though he hadn’t been able to quite rid himself of that stench he had quickly come to realize was that of death), Baishi slipped out with nothing but the stolen pocket watch clenched in his fist deep within his father’s pants’ pocket. He wasn’t certain how exactly he’d get food, but the least he could do was seek it out.

Baishi hadn’t been quite sure of the time before leaving the confines of his room, but with the sun high in the sky and the streets loud with bumbling strangers, trading and buying, the fullness of the street near suffocating, he concluded it was midafternoon at the latest. The streets were just as fast paced as he remembered, though he wasn’t sure exactly why he had expected any difference. It had not been too long since he last tred on them.

There were a few apparent differences that he noticed immediately, however. Ones he had expected, yet dreaded all the same.

Eyes burnt holes into his back with every step he took. Not just one pair, but many. Countless. Every one. They roamed his small being, as though searching for the leftover remnants of what had occurred, for the blood that had coated his hands for the last week, the last droplets of it finally washed away only moments before. The eyes seemed as though they could still see them anyway. 

Baishi let his sleeves fall over his hands once more. The glares did not cease, nor did they lessen. He lowered his head, wondering just what they were thinking, but the blood rushing to his ears was much too loud for him to overhear any of the conversations they were having. The world was near silent, even as he seemed to be surrounded on all sides.

When his blood finally settled, letting noise pierce through the silence at last, the first snippet he heard weighed heavily on his mind.

“---let him go. The Fatui. They don’t just do that if they’re not somehow still involved,” a woman whispered to her husband as he passed, his gaze lowered onto the reddish-brown bricks underneath his feet. “Especially not if some of their own were killed. I’m telling you, we need to stay away. He’ll only bring trouble.”

Trouble. Baishi didn’t want trouble. He had never wanted trouble. But…

His father hadn’t wanted it either, he knew, but he had still gotten involved in the Fatui. Trouble had come to them, whether they liked it or not. It always did for people like them. 

Now, it would be all Baishi knew. 

He rushed past the couple, making sure to turn his head to the side so they couldn’t catch a glimpse of his crumpling face. 

No. No. Baishi had to pull it together. This wasn’t the time or place for more tears. 

He wandered further down the street, stumbling into the market square as the gazes continued to linger on him and the conversations flowed about him, the weight of it all near unbearable. 

Maybe it would’ve been more so if he had known it was all being done out of grief, out of pity or sympathy for what had happened to his father. Pity had been a miserable thing a week ago, but now he missed it like a hug. At least there had been kindness in the expression Miss Ganyu had lodged at him. Now all there was in anyone’s eyes was distrust.

“Do we even know if Zhuang was telling the truth?” someone whispered so loudly Baishi dared not look up at them to see who. “How do we know they actually hail from Chenyu Vale at all? I’ve only ever seen Snezhnayans with eyes as violet and hair as black as his son’s.”

“Maybe there was some Snezhnayan blood somewhere back in the bloodline,” someone else responded. “But I always thought his accent sounded a bit funny on the ears. I’ve heard people from Chenyu Vale speak before and Zhuang’s accent always sounded a bit too rehearsed to be true.”

Baishi tsked under his breath. Give people an inch of a reason to doubt you and they start questioning everything you’ve ever told him. He understood it, but the bitterness that filled him didn’t care. His anger found its victims in the dead and the living too. There was perhaps a bit too much of it inside of him for someone his age, but his mind didn’t care if the world didn’t. 

Miss Adelaide was humming to herself when he came across her shop at last, her husband somewhere in the back working on a new project if the yells coming from the door behind her said anything. He paused outside her stall, standing a few feet away just in case, and just waited there, staring. Strands of graying hair had strayed from her bun and fell down into her line of vision. It was when she drew up a hand to push them to the side that she finally glanced up and noticed him.

As soon as their eyes locked, the older woman nearly jumped, flinching away at the mere sight of him. Her eyes scanned across him like all the others, but the look in her eyes, the distrust clear, hurt more than any of the others’ looks combined. He had been running errands for Miss Adelaide for as long as he’d been out on the streets working. To lose her would be like losing a family member. 

Well, another one.

What was one more?

“Miss Adelaide,” Baishi said stiffly, tilting his head as he kept his distance. Her eyes jolted from his arms, a bit of concern having formed in a moment of weakness before distrust entered them once more. It was an ugly look on the older woman, a foreign coldness on a kind face. Baishi wondered if it was the look he had deserved all this while. “Have you any errands for me this morning?”

He tried for normality. Perhaps if he didn’t bring up the lawachurl in the room, she would skirt past it as well. Baishi could earn his usual frugal earnings and finally buy himself a bit of food before he succumbed to the gnawing hunger that scratched at the sides of his stomach, making his limbs feel heavier than they ever had before. 

But it was to no avail.

Miss Adelaide shook her head rapidly, eyes darting from him to the people passing by, sparing them interested glances. The wrinkles on her face appeared to have increased tenfold since the last time he saw her. He wondered if the shop wasn’t doing as well lately. 

“I’m sorry, Baishi,” she muttered under her breath, just loud enough for him to hear, her gaze askance. “I’m afraid I’ve got no more work for you from here on out. You can—run along now. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of opportunities with the…well, with those folk.”

Baishi frowned. He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps to reject the implication that he had any ties to the Fatui aside from the fact that he technically did through his now dead father and the ties he had formed through taking the lives of two of them. Baishi himself wasn’t exactly sure what he owed for the transgression, and he was certain someone like Miss Adelaide wouldn’t know any better than he. 

All he knew was that the Fatui letting him go wasn’t freedom, or him getting away with the crime. His father had owed them something that he couldn’t provide, and that debt surely now fell onto Baishi’s shoulders. Perhaps that was the reason they had let him go. They wanted whatever his father had promised them, even if it meant making his six year old son work for it.

But Baishi quietly shut his mouth, deciding against it. What use was arguing when he knew no one would believe him. You could not inspire belief in someone who had already decided to believe something else. Miss Adelaide had drawn the line distinct in the few words that she spoke to him and Baishi received the message loud and clear.

He took a single step forward, hand reaching to his pocket to search for any mora he might have missed before, his other hand going out to point at one of the bread rolls on the shelf. Miss Adelaide, well, she had been having problems staying on her feet as of late, hence why Baishi had been running her errands for her so often. So his movements, apparently sudden in her eyes, had her stumbling backward until she hit the back wall of her shop and slipped down, her butt hitting the ground with a thump. 

Her fall had knocked quite a few things off the counter alongside her, spoons and bowls scattering on the ground surrounding her. She looked—scared. Of him. Of him? Baishi wasn’t sure when he’d become a figure to be feared by people. He certainly didn’t look like much, not someone to be scared of, he was sure. 

Her husband, a similarly elderly man, rushed out from the back of the shop and he leant down to grip at her shoulder, his expression reeking concern. 

“Addy,” he said in his familiar elderly shout. “Addy, are you alright? Ruoxi, come here, help me help your grandmother up.”

A crowd had begun to form around the stall, everyone curious about the sudden commotion. Still, people dared not to draw too close to Baishi, who watched the scene as though he was just a passenger in his own body. A younger man, tall and light haired, who looked just like Miss Adelaide rushed out from the back as well. Ruoxi, Baishi recalled distantly. Miss Adelaide’s loyal grandson.

“Wài pó, what happened?” Ruoxi said, immediately dropping to the ground in a way Xiaoping, Miss Adelaide’s husband, couldn’t. Ruoxi began helping her up, Miss Adelaide seeming a bit dazed from the fall.

“Well, I…”she trailed off, her eyes focusing on Baishi once again. She didn’t finish her thought, but she also didn’t have to. Ruoxi followed her gaze and recognition crossed over his face as he noticed Baishi standing there. His expression twisted and turned for a moment, as if he was deciding how to feel, before he eventually settled on anger. 

“You,” Ruoxi said, pointing a finger at Baishi as soon as Xiaoping took over holding Miss Adelaide up. Baishi had never seen Ruoxi look angry before, the man previously only ever being seen with a gentle smile and a quiet disposition. Baishi had, at once, looked up to the man in how he never failed to keep his calm, even when dealing with the worst of customers. It seemed even the most practiced people had breaking points. 

“You—,” he repeated, appearing to scramble for words in the midst of his anger. “Why don’t you just crawl back into whatever hole you crawled out of this week? I heard about what you and your father did, don’t think you can just waltz back here anytime and act like nothing’s wrong. You come along and now wài pó is hurt and on the ground. Did you push her? Did you plan to do to her what you did to those men? Or what you did to your father?”

To his—

To his father…?

What Baishi had done to his father?

Did they think—

The knives. He suddenly remembered them, their matching handles, twin blades. Fatui standard pieces. No one could tell the difference, but they knew he had been gripping one when pulled away from the scene. The Millelith couldn’t have masked the entire crime scene from the people of the Harbor. At least a few people must have seen him and drawn a few conclusions.

“I didn’t—” 

He couldn’t even finish the thought. Bile rushed up his throat as the people around him began to chatter, more and more rumors forming and spreading the longer he stood there, not saying a thing. He wanted to defend himself, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t killed his father, no, but he had killed the other two men. 

But what did the people of the Harbor want from him? Would they not have done the same, if they had seen three men trying to kill one of their loved ones? Who there would not kill to try to save a father? And yet they judged him for trying to save his own. 

Ruoxi looked displeased at his continued presence there. He turned his back, covering him from Miss Adelaide’s view.

“Come on, wài pó. You should relax. I’ll take care of the shop for the rest of the day.”

Miss Adelaide blinked at him, and then at Baishi and the crowd over her grandson’s shoulder, her face twisting the slightest in what appeared to be confusion as he and Xiaoping began to lead her away. “But I…”

“Come on,” he repeated, voice softening. Then, Ruoxi turned his head back around, eyes meeting Baishi’s head on. “There’s nothing consequential here. Nothing else you need to worry about. Get some rest.”

Baishi simply stood and watched, feeling like nothing more than a ghost that had kept on living past his own expiration date. His stomach burned, though whether it was from the hunger or the nausea this time, he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he had to leave. He had to get away. The people’s murmurs were growing louder and louder. Soon he wouldn’t hear a thing at all. 

He backed away from the stall, the people parting around him, and his eyes caught on a stray bread roll lingering on the ground near his foot. It must have fallen and rolled outside the stall when Miss Adelaide knocked against the counter. Everyone was looking at him, but no one dared to draw near. They didn’t know what weapons lingered in reach of his reportedly lethal hands. They didn’t know all he had to his name any longer was a broken silver pocket watch that ticked to the beat of his slowly dying heart.

Hunger overtaking his rational thought, Baishi bent down and scooped up the bread roll as quick as he could before darting off away from the gathered crowd. The people avoided his touch as he ran, no one even attempting to stop him. His departure was met only with scorn-filled whispers that faded, eventually, into nothing at all. 

—

Baishi found himself, rather than returning to the dark and dreary room he’d spent a good portion of his life in, on the lower floor of the pier, huddling in the shade away from the sun, in a corner where hopefully no one would recognize him or even gaze his way.

He tore into the bread roll, famished from his week of starvation. It tasted like nothing but ashes in his mouth, but it mellowed out the bubbling queasiness the slightest bit, so he counted it as a win. Baishi was still hungry after he had finished the roll, but he had nothing else on hand. It seemed that most of his eating would be reliant upon his quick hands from this time on.

He didn’t even want to consider just what he’d have to do to get enough mora to send back home from then on. He would do it, whatever he had to, but that was a thought for tomorrow. For now, he laid back in the corner of the dock, the concrete of the wall poking into his back as the wooden planks of the pier biting into the bottoms of his thighs. He propped up his knees, hoping he wouldn’t have to remove any splinters later on.  

Waves hit against the edge of the dock, filling the air with its salty spray. Baishi blinked away the droplets of saltwater that streaked across his face and into his eyes, mixing with the tears that threatened to fall, but dared not to. 

He wasn’t certain how long he’d been there by the time a shadow crossed over him and he finally looked up, a familiar figure looming over him with a concerned frown. Baishi bit back a groan. 

“What,” he said blandly, not in the mood for his ramblings that day. Baishi was already in bad enough mood as it was; he certainly didn’t need Mr. Zhongli’s help in making it any worse. 

Mr. Zhongli simply stared down at him, his golden eyes searching. Eventually, he seemed to find what he was looking for as a small smile slipped onto his face, the man at ease despite the eyes of the people that had been tracking him since the moment he approached Baishi. Baishi shied away, backing further into his little corner. Couldn’t he take a hint?

Apparently not, as it turned out time and time again.

Clearing his throat, the older man stated plainly, “It has been a long day, hasn’t it? I must admit, the sea has been stirring up my stomach as of late. The odor dredged up from the depths always gets stronger this time of year. Have you noticed?”

Baishi, admittedly startled and somewhat confused, shook his head. He hadn’t had the time to notice really. 

The corner of Mr. Zhongli’s mouth quirked. “I was thinking perhaps I would like to take lunch outside my home today. I would like to try the bamboo shoot soup they serve at one of the shops down here. Does that not sound lovely on a misty day such as this one?”

Having never tried the soup before, Baishi lifted a single shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. Mr. Zhongli appeared to be trying to get at something, but Baishi couldn’t bring himself to consider what at the moment. His eyes kept going back to the people loitering about, wondering which ones were trying their hardest to listen in and see what crimes Baishi might admit to in the midst of the conversation. 

The older man let out a soft sigh before holding out a neatly gloved hand. Baishi stared at it like it was a foreign thing. 

“Come along,” he said at last, his usually strong and harmonious voice soft this time around. “If you do not enjoy the bamboo, perhaps you will like the meat or the soup itself instead.”

“I can’t pay you back,” Baishi replied immediately, tightening his grip around his knees. His voice was raspy and words tasted unfamiliar, but he supposed that was normal after a week of complete silence except for the occasional sob. “You don’t want to be seen with me. Not today. Not ever.”

“There is no need for payment,” chuckled Zhongli, pulling back his hand for a moment to reach into his pocket and pull out a brown slab with a golden diamond, similar to the jewel that he wore on his tie, sewed on. He presented it to Baishi with an expectant smile. “I have at last recovered my missing wallet. It was underneath my bed, if you can believe. The soup will be on me today. Considering it a thank you, for all the times you have provided what you did not have to give to me.”

Baishi looked blankly at the proffered wallet, then back at the golden man’s expression. He seemed plenty serious, not that he had ever seen Mr. Zhongli in any mood aside from jovial or serious, but Baishi couldn’t help but think it was some kind of test. He thought about the incident just an hour or two before. He didn’t know if he could handle a repeat of that.

“But…” was all he could get out, however, before his stomach growled embarrassingly loud, answering Mr. Zhongli’s unspoken request for him. He swore internally at his stomach, wishing desperately that it was viable to fill up on just a single bread roll, but his prayers had never been answered by the gods before. Baishi didn’t expect this time to be any different.

With a heavy sigh, Baishi pushed himself up with shaky limbs, his legs nearly giving out on him as he stood up straight, only failing to do so as Mr. Zhongli twisted an arm around his back to keep him upright. As soon as Baishi thought he could stand alone without falling, he shook off the golden man’s arm and gestured for him to lead the way. 

Following closely in Mr. Zhongli’s shadow, Baishi knew the man’s tall figure blocked him from most people’s views as they approached, but he still felt  eyes on his back, squinting gazes trying to place his visage, accusing stares wanting him to leave. But his stomach guided him like it did all humans, and Mr. Zhongli had offered to pay. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity and the last bit of kindness he’d probably see in a while. He had to take advantage of it while the offer was still there.

Baishi didn’t catch exactly what Mr. Zhongli said to the stall owner, but he knew the middle aged woman must not have seen him cowering back in the shadows. Or, if she did, she made the executive choice to ignore him and keep a paying customer. He wondered distantly if she too was amazed that the notorious Mr. Zhongli was at last paying for a meal himself. Maybe that was enough to distract her from his presence alone. 

Turning from the stall with two steaming bowls in hand, Mr. Zhongli led them over to a semi private table on the edge of the dock. Baishi wondered why he would have chosen something so close by the ocean if he had claimed earlier that the smell was making him sick, but he didn’t dare ask. Not when the smell of the soup was making his mouth water and all he could think about was devouring it. 

Still, he waited politely for Mr. Zhongli to settle into his seat after Baishi had hopped up onto his own like he owned it. He waited for Mr. Zhongli to hand over the chopsticks and tuck a napkin into his collar. Baishi waited for him to pick up his own chopsticks and begin to eat before Baishi finally allowed himself to let his stomach take over.

(Mr. Zhongli watched, mildly amused, as the child in front of him ate like it was his last meal. The mild amusement dimmed as it occurred to him that he might have thought that it was.)

Minutes later, Baishi finally dragged his attention away from his food, his bowl empty and his stomach pleasantly full for the first time in what felt like weeks, and immediately caught Mr. Zhongli’s gaze. He looked askance, but Mr. Zhongli only laughed quietly. He had half finished his own soup in the meantime, the pork and bamboo aroma heavy in the air, and Baishi couldn’t help but stare at the soup remaining in the golden man’s bowl. 

When the other pushed the bowl towards him, a gesture towards silently telling Baishi he could finish it, Baishi couldn’t bring himself to reject that offer either. His stomach might have been full, but who knew when the next time he’d have something so good to eat would be. He might as well take what he could get right then and there. 

For the most part, their meeting was silent, no more words traded after the initial conversation, and the only noise as they ate was the ambiance of the dock and the ocean sweeping up against the side of it. Baishi tried to eat as quietly as possible, and though he was sure the sounds of him slurping down the soup after he finished all the meat and bamboo could be heard halfway across the harbor, he couldn’t bring himself to be embarrassed about it. 

After he had finished up the rest of Mr. Zhongli’s bowl, Baishi sat there, waiting for Mr. Zhongli to say something. At some point, the man’s gaze had been drawn out towards the sea, the sun’s slowly setting rays glimmering off his own golden pupils as he seemed intently focused on the rocky mountains of Guyun Stone Forest. Baishi didn’t know what was so interesting about the old things, but Mr. Zhongli was like that. Always focused on something Baishi didn’t think mattered until he began to talk about the cultural impact of a certain clothing garment a thousand years ago, or of the history of some random building that was a lot older than Baishi knew or cared to know. 

He expected Mr. Zhongli to go on another one of his tangents and Baishi was prepared to listen to it, even if it might put him to sleep. 

Instead, however, Mr. Zhongli, upon realizing he was finished eating, hummed softly, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a knife. 

Not just any knife—

“You—how?” Baishi gasped, eyes darting around to make sure no one was watching before he swiped the familiar knife off the table and slid it into his own pocket.

“Just a small favor from Miss Ganyu,” Mr. Zhongli said, folding his hands atop the table. The waning sunlight lit his brown hair aflame in its bronze glow, his dark gloves stark against the Cuihua wood table. “Nothing that will trouble her, of course, so there is no need to worry. Since the case has been closed and no charges pushed, no one will miss one or two pieces of old evidence. Besides, it was given to you by your father. It belongs to you. Though…”

He reached a hand into his pocket once more and pulled out the other dagger from that night. He placed it on the table between them with a pinched brow. 

“She did her job a bit too well,” he said, somewhat resigned. “I do not know if you wish to keep this one or not. I have made sure that the one you received just now is in fact the one your father gave you. This one is the device that took his life. It is yours to do with what you want. Whether that is keeping it or throwing it into the sea right here and now, that will be your choice. I will bear no judgment towards whichever option you pick.”

Baishi stayed silent. Slowly, without drawing his gaze upward again, he reached out and dragged a finger across the edge of the knife. A small trail of blood leaked out from the newly torn slice in his skin. Hissing underneath his breath, he did little else to stop the blood flow, instead watching as it coated the flawless, stainless steel of the dagger. His eyes latched onto it, entranced.

(Zhongli stared at him in concern, wondering if this was as good of an idea as he originally believed. Oh well. It was much too late now.)

As he broke from said trance, he turned his eyes away towards the ocean while taking the knife, a bitterness welling up in him at his actions. To keep the very weapon that had slain his father, well, it felt like a betrayal. But knives were expensive. Especially good quality ones such as these, even being standard issue. He was sure having an extra on hand would be helpful in the long run. 

Baishi cleared his throat as he wiped the spilled blood off onto his father’s old pants he had taken. It was just another stain to add to the lot, but the red seemed to stand out against the rest. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that. It was too late to undo now. He slipped the knife into his pocket and finally looked back up at Mr. Zhongli, face splitting into a mimicry of a smile.

“Thank you, Mr. Zhongli. And please send my regards to Miss Ganyu as well. I really appreciate what you have done for me. I’ll repay you for it someday.”

Mr. Zhongli took a few moments to reply, his gaze critical. “It is of no consequence. Do not bother with repayal. What will you do now?”

He asked it casually, but Baishi knew what the question was underneath that false display of calm. 

In response, he tiled his head to the side. “What I must, Mr. Zhongli. Surely you must know that by now. Despite the recent…developments, survival, no matter how impossible it may appear to be, has always been my greatest concern. I will find a way to live through this one way or another, no matter how bad the coming day may seem.”

Mr. Zhongli nodded gracefully. A finger ticked up for a moment, hesitated, then hit back down against the back of his hand. Baishi thought he seemed nervous, though for what reason, he couldn’t name.

“The Rite of Descension,” the golden man said abruptly, causing Baishi to blink in surprise. Talk about a sudden topic change. “It will be happening soon.”

“Yes,” Baishi replied slowly, unsure of where the man was going with this. “Next month, like it always is. Did you…plan to go?”

Shaking his head, the pinch in his brow seemed to gain a new line as Mr. Zhongli tried to figure out what he wanted to say. 

“It is a time where the people of the Harbor will gather all in one place,” he continued, still stumbling over his words at some points. “There will be—opportunities, if we should like to call them that, for any individuals who seek to take advantage of the chaos of the event.”

Baishi was the one to pause this time around, finally registering exactly what Mr. Zhongli had been trying to say. He nodded, mind racing. “I see. Opportunities, huh?”

“Many.” Mr. Zhongli nodded in relief. Baishi was sure they looked quite stupid to the outside eye, a grown man and a six year old sitting at a table and just nodding at each other. “It would be quite the travesty, but unable to be helped if a few things were to go missing here and there during that time. Nothing too important, nothing that will be missed too greatly, but still things of significant value.”

“Normal for most gatherings,” Baishi agreed, mind running through the possibilities. “Will you be attending, Mr. Zhongli? I’ve never seen you there before.”

“The Rite unfortunately falls on the date of an important anniversary for me,” Mr. Zhongli said, regret evident in his tone. “Thus, I am unable to make time to attend most years. I will be out at the Wangshu Inn this time around, so my watchful eyes will not be able to catch a glimpse of any potential crimes that may be committed. But there will be many others there who will not be so kind. I, of course, am only telling you this so you may be careful. You do not wish for the things you cherish to disappear and be sold to the highest bidder.”

Baishi replied, somewhat robotically, “Of course. Thank you for the information, Mr. Zhongli. All the years before, I had my father with me to fend off any thieves or pickpockets. This time around, it will be solely up to me.”

As he stood, the wooden legs of his chair scratching against the ground, Baishi glanced around one last time. People were still watching, but no one was nearly close enough to hear what they were saying and no one, as far as Baishi could tell, had witnessed the exchange of knives. They were in the clear, for now. 

Baishi looked over at the golden man, who was staring out towards the setting sun again, the worry in his brow settled once more, and decided that this would be the last time he accepted help from Mr. Zhongli. From then on, he would be competent enough that he didn’t need saving from situations such as this. Despite his age, Baishi had learned the ways of the world quite well already. If the people of the harbor no longer wished to spare him any concern, he would do the same for them.

“Thank you again for the food,” Baishi said quietly, more sincerely than his last words. “I’ll see you around sometime, Mr. Zhongli. Good luck on your journey.”

He turned and left the man sitting at the table on the pier, mind already trying to come up with plans of action that would allow him to make up the mora he needed. He kept to the shadows as he walked through the harbor, avoiding wandering eyes and the whispers that had followed him wherever he went. 

For the first time that day, his ears were blissfully silent.

(Zhongli watched him go with a despairing sigh. Just as he had seen, Celestia ordained what was to be and Celestia had never been wrong before. He could try all he might to put the child on the right path, but Baishi continued to veer onto Celestia’s regardless. The least he could do, then, was try as he might to make it a little easier, to soften the landing. But Baishi was a stubborn child, just as his father had been. Zhongli, as he was, could only do so much. 

It had to be enough.

It never would be.)

—

For the next month leading up to the Rite of Descension, Baishi tried making each day count.

It was difficult, trying to make a living when no business would hire a six year old and the ones who used to let him run errands were either scared of him or scared of what people would think if they hired him. He had learned to keep a hood over his head to conceal his face and eyes each time he left his house, making sure no one was outside to see him when he did. 

His hands had become even more slippery as time went by, snapping up whatever he could get his hands on from the people he bumped into as he rushed through the streets, pretending to be just another kid running to retrieve something from the shops for his parents. At night, he would make his way over to the Mingxing Jewelry if he had lucked out and gotten something of better quality, or the stalls down underneath the harbor, where the merchants cared less about where a piece had been gotten and more about what they could sell it for if they bought it off him. 

On the best days, he could get enough from a stolen watch or necklace to last him a week. Or half a week, really, as most of the funds were immediately stuffed in an envelope and sent to Chenyu Vale. Qiaoying Village was still struggling, according to all the merchants who tried hawking their wares there. Some tea plants had grown resistant to the plague as the years tumbled by, but not nearly enough to put the town at its former glory. The plague had not yet dissipated, but people had yet to die from it, so Baishi held off on requesting his mother and brother to come to the harbor. His father hadn’t seen reason to do it, so Baishi should not either, no matter how much he missed having someone to look after him and friends to play alongside in his rare bouts of free time. 

A murmur had come up among the people of Liyue Harbor about a thief in their midst, but no one had drawn the connection to him just yet. In fact, it seemed as though they had forgotten him just as quickly as they had been to judge him and declare him a murderer. The whispers about him had died down after almost two weeks and everything had gotten back to normal, aside from the shops still refusing to let him run their errands for mora. 

Maybe if they had given him another  chance, he would’ve felt worse about snatching a snack or two from off the stall counters when the owners weren’t looking or grabbing what he could from the pockets of passing crowds. Mercy was a hard thing to have when you had no one to lean upon. Baishi was by himself in this world now, so he had easily begun to act like it.

After he sold his collections each night, not wanting to get caught stashing stolen goods in his house where there was no place to hide them, he would return back to that one solitary room and curl up in the middle of the too-big bed. His father had left little trace of ever having lived at all within the place, but Baishi couldn’t help but be reminded of him each time he came back and slid his knives underneath his pillow. He worked hours similar to his father now, leaving early morning and returning late at night, to avoid returning home and leaving himself with nothing to think about except all he had lost. 

Three weeks after his lunch with Mr. Zhongli, Baishi went to Mingxing Jewelry in the daytime, carrying along with him the jar of his father’s ashes. He’d been saving some mora on the side, stealing most of his food from unsuspecting stall owners who glared at him whenever he passed in those first two weeks. Baishi had long since pushed down the guilt until he felt it no longer. Survival was all that mattered anymore.

The jeweler, a different worker than the one that ran the stall at night, stared at him with suspicion, but not recognition, so he counted himself lucky. The suspicion could be explained away by the fact that he was a lone six year old barely even tall enough to glance over the counter carrying a small jar of ashes. He supposed it wasn’t the most typical sight. 

The woman behind the counter, a stout older woman that would have reminded him bitterly of Miss Adelaide if not for the stern expression on her face, frowned at him, squinting through her glasses as though wondering if he was going to try to steal something. 

She was quite lucky, then, that this was one of the few stalls he couldn’t steal from. They would surely notice, after all, if he was trying to sell something he’d stolen from them back to them. 

Baishi bowed his head in a respectful greeting before opening his mouth. “Good afternoon, Miss. I was wondering if you did custom commissions?”

He knew they did, having been told by the nighttime employee, but he figured it was better to ask when the jeweler seemed so suspicious. 

She inclined her head, brow furrowing. “We do, but they can be quite expensive. Are you sure you have enough?”

Baishi had enough. He’d counted and recounted based on the price the night employee had told him. He would have placed the order with that employee, but he had been told that only the lead jeweler could decide whether or not to take on commissions. He assumed that this old woman was said main jeweler by the way she did not immediately tell him that.

“I have enough,” he replied, giving her a glimpse of the mora satchel hanging from his belt. “Though, I do have a special request. My father passed away recently and I want to get something practical so I can carry him with me wherever I go. Do you happen to make custom rings?”

He had considered a necklace first, but quickly realized that his own thieving career depended on his victims wearing loose jewelry such as necklaces. Rings weren’t entirely safe either, but it was much harder to get them off in a hurry without someone noticing the absence. With his quick fingers and knives, it would be difficult for anyone to get this ring from him hopefully. 

“We do,” the jeweler replied, her suspicion having cleared up and transformed into a soft kind of pity at the mention of his father. “What design would you like, son? I’ll even give you a bit of a discount. Consider it a condolence gift.”

Well, Baishi certainly wasn’t going to say no to something like that. He described the design he had thought of, nothing too complicated, of course. A simple metal ring, no intricate designs apart from a helix design made from a mixture of the ashes and some sapphires around the band. The jeweler nodded in approval at his choice, the chains on her glasses jingling as she did. 

“I’ll have it done within the week,” she said distractedly as she wrote down the details and drew a rough sketch of the ring. “That look about right?”

Baishi nodded. It looked just as he had pictured in his mind. He wanted to reach out and touch the paper, but he doubted she would appreciate that. After measuring the finger he said he wanted it for (his pinky, he had decided last minute), she uttered a price and he handed over his mora bag, watching as she carefully counted out each coin until she was satisfied that he had given her enough. Placing his jar carefully on the counter, he was hesitant to let go of it, but still did. Getting attached to things was not good for him. He had to learn that early. 

“Come back the day before the Rite,” the jeweler said, shooing him away. “You can pick it up then. Don’t worry about the ashes, I won’t use any more than needed.”

He left the jeweler’s a mora pouch and an ash jar lighter, but more content than he had been in a while. Baishi knew he’d feel even better once he had the ring on his finger. A solid, permanent reminder to have when he eventually went back to Chenyu Vale and spread his father’s ashes. He wouldn’t have to worry about the loss, not when the ring would always be with him.

Only a week to wait. No problem at all.

—

The Rite of Descension soon arrived, and alongside it came the crowds of people Mr. Zhongli had promised him. 

Baishi got a head start on his work for the day, his hands slipping in and out of the pockets of passersby as he maneuvered through the masses in the streets. Not everyone had something valuable or interesting to grab, so not every grab was useful, but more often than not, he would come back with a handful of mora or something he could easily pawn for a couple more. When he was feeling braver and when given a chance, he would sneakily unbuckle watches and necklaces, storing them away in his quickly filling pouch as he slipped away after each robbery. His fingers grew sticky with sweat after just a few grabs, but he still went back for more and more. 

After an hour or two, he’d gotten so much that he needed to drop off what he’d earned back at his house, hiding it in a worn down wooden chest he had underneath the bed. He went back out, trailing up and down the crowded streets of the Chihu Rock and Feiyun Slope, raking in more and more mora. He figured that overall he’d make enough that single day to eat well for at least a month, not counting that which he’d be sending home. 

Sweat covered him from head to toe by the middle of the day, his fingers twitchy and unnerved from checking behind him for wandering eyes every few seconds. His hood had been up the entire time, but the sun bore down on him in disregard, the edges of his cape plastering against his skin from the heat. His breaths came out short and heavy and he took an hour long break to rest up and gulp down water before the ritual was due to begin.

In the evening hours, Baishi found himself standing off to the side in Yujing Terrance, right outside Yiyan Temple, loitering behind the crowds as they waited for their archon to descend.

For whatever reason, Baishi could hear his heart beat in his ears as he watched the procession begin. The altar in the middle of the square was made up of stone infused with cor lapis and decorated with offerings and candles for the archon and the adepti alike. The Tianquan, a stern older man with a geo vision displayed proudly on his waist, spoke some words that Baishi couldn’t hear over the chatter. When he began the summoning, rocks flying up and around the stone basin in the center of the altar until they converged into it and a beam of light shot up towards the clouds, the crowd quieted, watching in awe. 

Silence overtook the crowd as a tornado formed in the air around the beam, soft white clouds swirling around and around. Baishi watched with wide eyes. He had seen the Rite time and time before, Rex Lapis’ annual visit to their humble Harbor, but it never failed to amaze him. For a few moments each year, he forgot his resentment towards the archons, towards Morax in particular, and let himself feel the excitement that ran rampant through the crowd. This was a being none of them could ever hope to match in power and fame. Anyone would let themself do the same, Baishi reasoned.

Like every year, the beam of light slowly faded and the dragon-like archon followed after it, greeting his people with a deafening roar, his golden brown rock-like skin shimmering in the light of the sun. Atop some of the nearby buildings, the adept appeared in their animal forms, summoned alongside their god to counsel the people for the coming year. 

Most of what the archon and adepti said went right over Baishi’s head, his mind not comprehending all the intricacies of economics and trade just yet, but he was sure he would eventually get the hang of them. He already haggled and bargained well enough. With time, he’d be able to figure out investments and economics overall, with or without the teachings of others.

The archon spoke to his people for a long while, the dragon’s words only ceasing as the sun began to set in the sky up above. It was as the ceremony had begun to draw to an end—though the people would be up for hours afterward in celebration of another successful year—that Baishi finally thought to pray. 

He had never done it before, prayed to Morax when he came down for the Rite of Descension, but it occurred to him that if he truly wanted to know if the archon had been hearing his prayers all along, this was the perfect time to do it. Get across his message, his desperate and fleeting plea for a vision to change his life, and maybe this time he’d actually receive an answer.

Baishi bowed his head and held up his hands, folding one into a fist and the other over the top of the fist. He closed his eyes and began to pray, the familiar words forming in his mind like they had never left, a chant to forever and ever be repeated until it was answered. 

But he cut himself short to three chants this time, eyes squinting open to see if the archon had reacted.

Holding his breath, Baishi kept still as he glanced at the dragon archon only fifty feet away. At first, nothing appeared different, the Tianquan speaking to the people and gesturing towards Morax with a respectful tone. 

And then—

A glance. A glance. That was all it took. A simple meeting of the eyes.

Morax glanced his way, met Baishi’s gaze head on, a familiarity in his bright gold eyes, then glanced away. 

It was enough for Baishi though. He knew the god had heard. And he knew, then and there, that Morax had chosen to reject his prayers, chosen not to share his divine power. Baishi, for all that he did, wasn’t enough. He would never be so.

The archon disappeared back up into the clouds, and with him, he took the rest of Baishi’s hopes and dreams, leaving behind the shell of a boy fueled by a wave of hatred he had never felt so strongly before. 

This was not the end. It never would be.

Chapter Text

The door laid ajar.

The sight confounded Baishi. Not once in the last six years that he’d been doing this had he broken into a wealthy merchant’s house and approached the room that supposedly held one of their most prized possessions—

Just to find the door wide open.

It was like the merchant was just asking him to take what he wanted. Baishi giggled quietly at the thought. A dangerous thing to do with the way sound echoed throughout the towering halls of the mansion, which was one of the fanciest houses he’d ever been in. Out of all the places he’d broken into, the second most beautiful place, which had belonged to an affluent Liyuean merchant on the other side of Yujing Terrace, couldn’t even hold a candle to the extravagance that laid within these walls. 

If Baishi had come here with no purpose other than to get rich, then he would have grabbed all he could within his first few minutes inside and ran. There certainly wasn’t a shortage of things to steal in a mansion such as this one. 

However, he had, unfortunately, come with a purpose. One he couldn’t bring himself to give up on.

The Wise Doctor’s Pinion. 

A shimmering, splendid quill with blue and white barbs and a silvery body. Baishi had heard whispers about it on the streets of Chihu Rock. An invaluable pinion, engraved with the Fatui’s pale star, second to none in beauty and infamy. Held by one of the harbingers themselves years and years before, the feather had transferred from hand to hand the last few centuries before it came into the possession of a certain Snezhnayan Merchant-Diplomat, a Mr. Kliment Fedorov, who just so happened to be visiting Liyue Harbor at the moment, and who apparently never traveled far without the quill nearby.

As soon as the words had hit his ears, Baishi had brought a hand to the pocket where he kept that forever ticking pocketwatch from all those years ago. The pale star had lingered close to his heart ever since that night, never straying too far away. Baishi understood Mr. Kliment Fedorov in a way. Artifacts such as those were hard to find, and even harder to part with.

Unfortunately for Fedorov, Baishi could not bring himself to focus on anything other than that quill for the last week. Something about it enchanted him, drew his eyes though he had never even seen it in person. The twelve year old dreamt about the feather, about how it would look alongside the watch, a match handcrafted by the finest Snezhnayan craftsmen hundreds of years ago.

The others in the set, which he had learned included a steel flower, a goblet, and a mask, were lost in the wind. But this pinion, it was within his reach for the first and potentially last time. Baishi couldn’t just let it go.

Even if this would be his riskiest exploit yet. 

Snezhnayan merchants in Liyue Harbor were known for their ruthlessness as much as they were known for their frigid dispositions. Baishi had heard others say that they got it from the weather of their homeland, though he could not be certain of that. He had never met a Snezhnayan Merchant before for long enough that he was able to grasp those aspects of their nature. He was sure they were all different, anyway, as people tended to be, but he didn’t think the people he was eavesdropping on would appreciate his little inputs, especially as he was perched up on a roof one building over. 

That being said, if he happened to be caught by this Mr. Kliment Fedorov—though Baishi had never been caught before thanks to his ability to slip into most places unnoticed (something due greatly to his lack in size, which was, in turn, due to his near-constant malnourished state of being) he was always prepared for the moment that he was—then he surely wouldn’t be let off as easily he was all those years ago. Mr. Fedorov might not have been involved with the Fatui—Baishi had come to the conclusion all by himself that not everyone in Snezhnaya could possibly be involved in the organization—but surely, if he was as ruthless as the others in the tales he’d heard whispered across the streets of the Harbor, Baishi shuttered at the thought of being caught alive. 

What was he thinking, risking his life for a mild fascination with a feather he wouldn’t even be able to sell? He must have finally been going insane, he thought. Fingers raked through his short hair as he sat on his bed thinking the night he made his decision to break in. He toyed with the jaggedly cut ends. After that day six years ago, when Morax had glanced his way and rejected his prayers, Baishi had gone and lopped off the whole length of his pitch black locks. He had thrown them in the ocean that night after everyone had gone to sleep and sat there on the pier, watching them sink. Then, he sat there a while longer, wondering what was so beautiful about the ocean that someone like Mr. Zhongli, who was fascinated by history and rocks, would look out at it so longingly.

Baishi had never seen the ocean as anything other than an obstacle to overcome. Even when he was six, his opinion had been the same. In fact, he’d grown into it even more over the years. There might have been some beauty in the way the water twisted and turned, sparkling under the light of the sun and the glow of the moon, but there was nothing else to it but drowning and death. At least he knew where to go if he wanted a quick goodbye one day. The water would always be there, waiting. 

A quick death was one of the few things he could picture in his volatile future. In Baishi’s occupation, one he’d somehow gotten quite lucky with over the years, it was all most could ask for. To be caught meant to face a slow and agonizing one, so it was always good to know quicker ways to go out if you thought you had been figured out. 

Truly, this venture of his was also his stupidest one yet. Not only was he risking everything he’d built for himself, but he was risking his life as well. He didn’t know what traps might be set up, or who would be on guard there, or even if Mr. Fedorov preferred to keep the feather at his place of residence while he was out on the town or not. It was a risk in all factors of the word, and yet he was still taking it. Still risking it all.

Most would call Baishi an idiot for doing it. He wouldn’t protest the insult, not this time, though in the moments before the crime, he convinced himself it was a crime of passion, something he would achieve because he wanted that quill so very badly. Baishi told himself that his goal wasn’t impossible, though every part of him believed that to be false.

He took both knives this time. Usually, he only took one, but he had a feeling this break-in wouldn’t go too smoothly. Baishi could only hope that the two knives would be enough. If they were not…well, they were sharp enough to do the job. That was enough for him.

Baishi spent the last week preparing. He packed up his meager amounts of things and placed them all in a cloth bag he’d gotten at the market a year or two ago. They only filled it up halfway. Regardless of how much money he had made over the years—most of it sent away back home in bags attached to letters written in a false hand and signed with a false name—he had never gotten over the frugality he’d learned as a child. Baishi had never been able to bring himself to eat much more than two small meals a day. Not only did he need to stay small to keep up what he was doing, but his stomach revolted against him each time he tried to eat a single bite more. 

He packed the bag just in case. His pocket watch came with him, just like it always did, shoved into his pocket, clipped to the edge of the fabric so it wouldn’t get lost if he had to run. If Baishi was caught and able to escape, he would run for the mountains first, maybe take up residence in an abandoned temple or house on the verge of ruins if he could find either. If he was found again and again, then, well, he had at least two solutions at hand. Baishi wasn’t too keen to use either, never being one to believe that death was an answer any more than a bland life was, but he would if he had to. 

He had killed people before while in duress. What was one more when it was himself?

The house—more of a mansion really—was airy, specs of light underlining the dust in the air, the mansion previously not having been lived in for a month or two until Fedorov’s sudden arrival, and lacked the guards that it should have had. One’s Baishi knew it had had only a few hours before.

 The mansion appeared, as Baishi saw it, abandoned. But he did not let his guard down. One room being empty did not mean the rest were. 

Baishi didn’t like it, the feeling of being watched eerie in the back of his mind. The front room was freezing cold, the fancy furniture, numerous expensive knickknacks, and priceless artwork all sitting silently, frozen in the darkness. Some windows, the ones high enough that the average person wouldn’t be able to climb through, were propped open, likely to let in a nice, salty breeze in the daytime, but no one had shut them as dusk hit, letting the nighttime chill perforate the halls. A few leaves were scattered here and there across the floor of the room, evidently having blown in with the wind.

He did not turn on the lights—that would have been particularly stupid of him—, but a part of him wanted to, if only to get a glimpse of the place better. The curiosity belonged to a child, something he couldn’t be, so he shoved it down deep within him, into the pocket of his mind he had kept locked up the last few years. He slipped it through the cracks in the metaphorical door. Remembering it all now would do Baishi much more harm than good.

Baishi took the stairs, which were well oiled and lacking the squeakiness most wooden stairs had, up and up and up until he reached the very top floor, where he’d determined the room must have been. Having scouted out the mansion over the course of the last few days, he had seen guards standing outside one of the doors near constantly. The window he saw them through was only visible from the very tops of the taller buildings in Chihu Rock, so he didn’t worry about getting caught spying. The guards had stood silently for hours on end, before they switched shifts with other guards. 

That, he thought, made the absence of anyone in the mansion even curiouser. Why leave their posts now, in the middle of the night, when there was still a relic to be guarded? Unless it had been moved recently, but Baishi had heard nothing of Fedorov departing the Harbor or moving, so he could only hold onto hope that he hadn’t accidentally missed whispers on some very crucial information.

It would also be rather unfortunate if Baishi had managed to pick one of the nights when Fedorov took the pinion with him to whatever gala he was currently attending. He knew there was a gathering at Yujing Terrace that night and that a number of influential merchants were invited, as always. He also happened to have heard that Mr. Fedorov was invited, on the express invitation of the Tianquan himself. Only a fool would reject a direct invitation from the Tianquan, especially as a foreign diplomat looking to make deals with some of the major merchants in Liyue Harbor. 

Baishi could only assume that considering the man’s apparent fame in the world of commerce that he was no fool. Apparently, that might have been much truer than Baishi had originally believed.

Upon reaching the highest floor of the house, panting from walking up more flights of stairs in one sitting than he had in the last few years combined, Baishi immediately noticed the door he had been watching the last few nights. There was nothing truly special about it when the guards were away. It was a normal wooden door with a golden knob, just like every other door in the mansion. Every time he saw it through the window, it had been closed, giving him the perfect chance to memorize every detail and the position of it.

But this night, it was ajar, a light shining through the miniscule crack. Alarm bells rang in Baishi’s mind. No other lights in the house were on, no other doors ajar. Was this all a trick? A set up to capture the indomitable thief who had been plaguing the streets of Liyue Harbor for six years now? 

It wasn’t Baishi’s fault no one had ever looked towards him as the suspect of the crimes. Many had forgotten about him over time, forgotten about the things that happened all those years ago, but he hadn’t. He still remembered the undeserved judgement, the lingering stares and too-loud whispers. Baishi had never forgiven the people of the Harbor for refusing him the moment he needed them most. He suspected he never would.

The weak and meandering boy they had rejected back then, believing that he killed his father without a doubt in their minds, was no longer. He hadn’t grown much bigger, only a few inches upward, but his knife-throwing skills had advanced immensely. There wasn’t much to do but practice when he wasn’t out on the streets stealing or selling that which he stole. Baishi had known how to survive on his own back then, but he hadn’t wanted to. Now that he had done it for six years, he still wished it wasn’t this way, but he had learned slowly to accept it. 

Nothing he wished for would bring his father back to him. 

Nothing he prayed for would be answered anyway.

But none of the people around him knew he wasn’t the same. Their eyes now glided past him in the streets, or watched him with pity, but were still unwilling to lend a helping hand to someone in need. And in some ways, he was still exactly the same. Baishi never bought new clothes or needless accessories. He had kept his father’s clothes from back then, getting them patched over and over again until the original fabrics were no longer, but still he continued to wear them. He had gotten the pinky ring with his father’s ashes resized time and time again. Baishi couldn’t let go. It was all he had left of who he was before.

So no one suspected the poor boy accused of murder and shunned six years before was responsible for all those thefts. How could they? He was weak, the murders a fluke. And yet no one would stray near him on purpose for nearly a year afterward. The lack of warmth had left him shivering, thin bones and pallid skin accepting the cold as a constant, but not a comfort. 

Or, at least, if anyone had suspected him, he’d never realized it before. 

The idea dawned on him the very moment he saw the door laid open. That someone might have been watching all this time. That someone might have been waiting for this opportunity. 

But it didn’t make sense to Baishi. It couldn’t have been the Snezhnayan Merchant. He had never heard the name Kliment Fedorov until a week ago. If the man had come to Liyue Harbor in the last twelve years, and he was as big a name as the whispers on the street suggested, then Baishi would have known him. Unless the man himself was fiction, a figure created by those trying to lure him in and capture him.

Something told Baishi that wasn’t the case, however. All the whispers had sounded too real, too genuine, and the people couldn’t have known he was listening in. The man and him having the artifact had to be true. It was only the validity of his plan and whether they knew he was coming that was to be questioned.

Despite his sudden lack of confidence, Baishi still pushed the door open wider and slipped right into the room, letting it creak shut behind him. His hands went to his pockets where the knives were hidden and he gripped their handles, prepared for a fight if there was one to be given. 

But there wasn’t. The room, aside from a tall stool with a velvet pillow, a plastic cover, and a simple light hanging overhead, was starkly empty. It was drab in comparison to the rest of the mansion; there were no flashy chairs, no sturdy tables, no awe-inspiring portraits to draw his gaze to the walls. A window was positioned high up towards the ceiling on the opposite wall, but that was about it. No one else was inside.

Baishi didn’t trust it. Places that looked empty often weren’t. He searched around in another pocket of his for a moment before pulling out a small red ball. Quiet and it would do the job. He bounced it a few times on the floor, before throwing it to the side, hitting it hard against the wall. It hit the wood and launched over to the other wall, rebounding immediately towards the ground. It kept going until it eventually hit something, a pressure plate on one of the tiles, with a click.

Baishi flinched back as a volley of arrows flew out of the side wall, thin enough that the holes they came through were near invisible to the eye. One arrow pierced his ball straight through its middle, pinning it to the opposite wall. The plate the ball had hit did not go back up. Baishi let out a sigh of relief. It was genuinely well protected, which likely meant it was not a trap for him. 

He didn’t have any more balls to throw out, but that didn’t matter. If there were more arrows, he could duck easily enough, his reflexes quite quick after so many years of this. If there were other traps, he’d either figure them out on the fly or die to them. He’d either get what he wanted in the end or never know that he didn’t. It worked out fine either way to Baishi.

(Of course, he didn’t truly want to die. Someone needed to send money home to his mother and brother. But it was easier to pretend that he did. It made taking risks less heavy on his shoulders.)

Cautiously, he stepped further into the room, hand pressing lightly against the door frame to push himself off. The first few steps were light, the tips of his shoes feeling around on the tile before he fully placed his foot down. If a small ball was enough to trigger the trap, then the front of his shoe would be more than enough to set one off and let him miss it entirely.

But the walk towards the stool was free from anything to hinder his progress towards it, strangely enough. The tile the ball had set off was directly to the side of the stool, so he stayed alert as he got closer, kneeling down to see if he could spot any difference in the tiles, but there were no noticeable ones. Baishi pressed down on the tiles right in front of the stool, but nothing happened. His steps onto them were hesitant, but Baishi let out a sigh of relief in the end—neither of them went off.

Then something had to be off about the stool, pillow, box, itself, he reasoned. There was no way there was only one single trap in the room and it was in a place most people wouldn’t even step to get to the prize.

Keeping the knives on hand, Baishi leant forward and brushed a hand against the plastic box. Nothing happened. He pressed harder and harder until his whole palm was up against the top of it. He could see clearly underneath the clear barrier. The quill laid there, just as lustrous and eye-drawing as he had originally imagined.

It would be his most prized possession, he decided right then and there, after the pocket-watch. 

He placed his hands on either side of the plastic to lift it up and off the pillow. 

Baishi only got it an inch off the stool when a metal wire came slamming out of one of the ceiling tiles, wrapping tightly around his wrist and dragging it roughly upward. Letting out a shriek of surprise, Baishi was forced to drop the plastic box, which tilted off to the side. The left side, which likely had an arrow trap like the right had, one that hadn’t set off yet.

Before another wire could shoot out, he slapped his hand against the side of the box, making sure that it fell the way of the already triggered trap. When he was sure it wasn’t going to set anything else off, he lifted his knife and began trying to hack at the wire holding him, metal grinding against metal grating at his ears. Still, he didn’t stop and refused to let panic get to him. This wasn’t the worst bind he’d gotten into, nor would it be the worst one he’d gotten out of. Traps like this often didn’t have any way of alerting the owner, so he had a decent amount of time to get himself free, so long as nothing else was triggered. 

A loud clunk sounded, the only warning he got before another three wires shot out from all sides of the walls, two of them wrapping around his ankles, the third shooting for his free wrist, but getting his bicep instead as he instinctively jerked his hand out of the way. 

Stuck in an awkward position that was already starting to hurt, Baishi gritted his teeth and continued to hack away at the wire, the angle making it harder, but not impossible. The wire grew thinner and thinner until it snapped, sending the wire whipping upward. When it came back down, as it had nowhere else to go, it lashed at the side of his head and shoulder, cutting through his hair and shirt, marring the skin. He pressed his now freed hand to the long thin wound and it came back bloody. It reminded him of—

Nevermind that now. Shakily, he grabbed the knife from his other hand and began doing the same to the wire on that side. He pulled at it experimentally, seeing if maybe he’d be able to pull the wire from the ceiling instead, but it was no use. Whatever the wire had come from wasn’t moving.

So he continued the same process of cutting away the wire, trying to ignore the lightheadedness that had suddenly overcome him, the feeling of blood trickling down the side of his face making it itch. His bloodied hand was sticky, the knife handle slippery due to the crimson substance, but he gripped it with such resolve that there was no way he’d drop it. The wire thinned as the minutes passed until it was only holding on by the barest thread. 

The minute it snapped, lashing him again painfully, another noise rang out across the room, an echoing sound, two forces pounding against each other over and over again. His ear drums rattled at the simple noise, simmering under the surface of his skin. Baishi tried and failed to turn around to see what was causing it, his ankles tied in place by the wires that dug into bone. All he could manage to catch was a glimpse and blur of black out of the corner of his eye. This wouldn’t do.

In a bout of frustration, Baishi eyed the wire tied to his right leg, brought the knife up high above his head and, with all his might, threw it down, splitting the wire in two, the knife slicing it through before hitting the ground with a thunk, blade embedded in the grout between the tiles. One ankle now free, he crouched down and collected the knife again before he turned to see the source of the continuous noise. 

Baishi’s gaze immediately caught on a man leaning against the door frame, clapping slowly. The door was closed behind him. Baishi hadn’t even heard it shut, too focused on the traps throughout the room and his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. He wondered how long the man had been standing there. Evidently long enough for him to watch as he painstakingly sawed through each of his wires—because there was no doubt in Baishi’s mind that this was the merchant everyone on the streets of Liyue Harbor had been whispering about.

The man was tall, but not broad, his shoulders and build slight, framed by a pitch black long coat embroidered with falling snowflakes and pale white stitches, a tan fur lining peaking out from a creased edge. His face was long and his mouth kept twitching upward into a small and unusual smile, though a sternness lingered behind the cut of his brow and narrow eyes, glimmering gold peaking out from behind a pair of thin glasses. Hair dark and braided over his shoulder, a few bangs had slipped out at some point over the course of the day, pushed back behind his ear alongside the temples of his glasses. He leant against the door frame with ease, like he owned the place, a leg perched out in front of him, and his long gloved hands coming together over and over again in a mocking round of applause.

Baishi hated him already. Gritting his teeth, he stood on edge, Baishi’s purple eyes refusing to stray from the man as he crouched back down and began to saw at the final wire. He watched and waited for Fedorov to make a move. They both knew why he was there. They both knew the situation. Who had the upperhand was obvious, but Baishi wasn’t going to stop here simply because he had gotten caught by a man who didn’t even appear to be armed. 

Fedorov stared back at him unblinkingly, his lips curling up as his gaze lingered on his knives. His hands eventually fell back to their sides and were tucked away into his pockets. Baishi let out a breath as the clapping ceased at last. Now all he had to deal with was the sharp noises that came with cutting metal.

Silence was dominant in the room for the next few minutes. Neither took the first step towards speaking. Baishi stayed on edge, unsure of what Fedorov planned to do. His golden eyes were unnerving, reminding him all too well of similar golden eyes from his past. They seemed to see through him, piercing his soul through his skin and laying all his deeds, good and bad, out on a table, sorting through them and weighing them against the truth of necessity of survival.

Baishi knew if that were a true test, he would certainly not win it. He had done many things over the years he had shame for. Many of them were for his own continued survival.

Others were not. 

He did not speak about those.

But Fedorov seemed to recognize them all in those few minutes they regarded each other, Baishi still working towards his ultimate goal, Fedorov refusing to show his own. The cards were set, decks shuffled, all chips in on the table. 

Baishi had never learned how to play poker, but he knew his father had. Fortunes were rare in games of luck for people like him and his father. Baishi had bet everything he had on this feather. He would not be leaving this room without it.

The last wire finally snapped, and he narrowly avoided the whiplash this time. Baishi could feel the wounds on his head and shoulders still sluggishly bleeding, burgundy painting his already tattered clothes new shades, his head spinning as he stood up straight. 

He refused to let his weakness show, stabilizing himself with both feet planted firmly on the ground, knives gripped tightly though his palms were still stained with blood. Some had dripped down and pulsed against the blinding white tiles with a splatter, marring the perfection of the room. Some part of Baishi wanted to laugh, because even if he didn’t get away from this, he had still left his mark in the end. He had still gotten close. Even if no remnants of the attempt remained after the little droplets of blood were wiped away and the traps all reset, he would still have been there. So very close to ultimate success.

All Baishi needed to do was reach a little further. 

“Your traps suck,” he started, broaching the subject with a feigned casualness. 

A lip ticked. Fedorov hummed, long fingers slipping out from his coat to tap along the wall beside him. Baishi let out a gasp as noise filled the room in a sudden breath, loud spinning blades sliding out from the walls and slicing overhead. Baishi was just short enough that he didn’t have to duck for them not to hit him, and Fedorov simply tilted his head to the side for them to miss. 

“Perhaps I did not expect he who would have the soul to break into a room such as this to be but a…child.”

When Fedorov spoke, he did so with a heavy Snezhnayan accent, reminiscent of that which he had heard years ago speaking to his father. His tone was calm, however, and somewhat amused, as though the words he had just spoken were not to be taken seriously, though Baishi couldn’t imagine why.

Instead of thinking it over too hard, Baishi scoffed, hands tightening around his knives. “Maybe you should have. Most people would want the things you tell the world you have.”

“But most people would not have the stomach to come and take them,” Fedorov offered plainly, elbow steadied against an arm wrapped around his chest, his hand splayed out, palm up against his chin. He tsked. “No, not many at all. Quite a disappointment, you see. But you are here now, and that is all the more interesting than anything any other could offer me.”

Baishi didn’t understand what the man was trying to say. He shook his head as it pounded, the motion sending blood rushing to his ears. He pressed a hand to the area that hurt, forgetting for a moment about the wounds. 

“My traps ‘suck,’” Fedorov said, tone lightly mocking, “yet you were still wounded by them.”

“It was a fluke,” Baishi hissed, pressing harder against the parts that hurt. Pressure would stop the bleeding eventually, but now it just seemed to be making it worse. “Recoil. None of your stupid traps hit except the wires. Speaking of, you should really invest in some better ones. My knives cut through them like butter.”

They both knew that was false, considering the amount of time they’d stood there, waiting for him to cut through the last one, and Fedorov’s muffled laugh confirmed this, but he said nothing to argue against the claim.

“Yes, those knives of yours are quite intriguing. I should ask, where exactly did you get them? Tools marked by the pale star are not so easy to acquire in these parts.” 

The merchant finally moved from his spot against the door frame, the movement near imperceptible, and all of a sudden he was a foot away from Baishi, his hands outstretched towards his left hand, still pressed against his head, and the knife gripped in it. Baishi stumbled at Fedorov’s unexpected appearance, his back hitting against the stool.

The black haired merchant was able to slip the knife from his grasp with ease at his surprise. Baishi gasped, fumbling to try to take it back, but a piercing pain ran through him as he took his hand away, head and eyes swimming. Fedorov glanced up from the knife he was turning around in his palms with a sly look.

“‘A fluke,’ you claimed. Recoil, perhaps, yes, but that does not make it a fluke.” Shaking his head, Fedorov drew his thumb across the bloodied handle, uncovering the pale star that had been coated. “You think so little of my traps, and yet you do not understand what they are for. I have no intention of killing those that try to steal from me. Death, I have had far too much of.”

His voice was grim as he spoke, staring down at the pale star with thinned lips, his golden eyes somewhat dimmed. “The snow brings death far easier than any weapon. In the cold, cold light of the pale star, all falls away eventually. No, these traps are not meant to bring death. The truth of this room is that it in itself is the trap. I knew you were here from the moment you stepped foot inside. I simply wanted to see how far you could get.”

A wave of humiliation rushed over him. Pushing back the pain for the moment, Baishi swiped the knife back from the golden-eyed merchant’s hands and pressed the tip of the blade against his chest, trying to stop his hand from shaking. 

“You say you wanted to see how far I would get, but you didn’t set up any real traps,” he bit back, letting his anger and frustration shine through. “A test, I could have withstood, but you made it easy. How can I accept that?”

“You fail to understand,” Fedorov replied, not looking at all concerned by the blade, potentially because he could plainly see how much he was shaking. “Liyue Harbor is boring. The ocean, boring. The shops, boring. The stories, boring. The people, though. The people are interesting. You are interesting.”

Baishi paused, his hand stilling, pain forgotten just for the moment. His grip loosened and he pulled the knife away the slightest bit. “Me?”

Fedorov smiled, showing off his sharper than normal canines. “You see, you are not the first to come here in an attempt to take this feather of mine. There have been around five before you in the past week. For each of you, I have done the same thing: empty the house, leaving all the lights off except for the one in this room, set up my meager traps and wait. It is like racing mice in a darkened cage, so small and pitiful as they scramble their ways towards the light.”

“So you’ve, what, been testing the people of Liyue Harbor?” Baishi asked, confused. “To what end?”

“To no end, really. In fact, you are the only one of the five so far to break free from my traps. All the others were adults, so it was easier for them to get caught in the traps. Such as the one you missed just as you walked in, a trip wire just a little higher up across the door. Should you have triggered it, the floor would have given out around you and dropped you down into the room down below. Without the feather, of course. I cannot make it too easy.”

“Surely not all of the rest of the thieves were caught by that,” said Baishi, his brow furrowing. 

Fedorov tilted his head to the side. “No, they were not, but none of them made it much further. You actually managed to miss many of the traps I set up. I was quite disappointed, but I truly did not account for a child to come along and try, especially not one of your…stature.”

Baishi frowned. He brought the knife back up to the merchant’s chest. Fedorov let out a short sigh. 

“You are a—” he said a word Baishi couldn’t even begin to comprehend, “no?”

“I’m a what?” Baishi questioned, unsure of if he should be offended or not.

Fedorov paused, thought for a moment, then said, “A ‘street urchin.’ It would explain your short stature and malnourishment. You are what, fifteen?”

“I’m twelve,” he responded, unsure of why he gave him a truthful response. “But what does that matter? This conversation is pointless. You’re at the disadvantage here. One move and I’ll pierce your heart with my blade. Let me take the feather and go free, and I’ll let you keep your life.”

The black haired merchant regarded him for a moment, expression unreadable. His golden eyes flickered between Baishi’s purple ones, his clothes, the wounds on his head and shoulder, then back to his eyes once more. Maybe, since he was injured and his hands were still shaking, Fedorov would underestimate him.

It would be the last mistake he’d ever make if he did. 

“Twelve,” the merchant muttered, as though the word were foreign. “Such a young child, and yet you were the only one who could break free from my wires. Do you know why?”

Baishi didn’t respond, only pressing the knife further towards him, indenting the fabric of his dark button up. 

“It is because of those.” 

The merchant’s eyes dropped to the knives. Baishi followed his gaze and swallowed.

“No Liyuean should have ever been able to get their hands on weapons of the fatui outside of warfare, not when the Fatui have never yet traversed this land as enemies. So how exactly did you come across these blades, made of the only metal that can even make a dent in my wires?”

“My father gave them to me,” he said, leaving out the fact that he had only been given one. “He bought them from a traveling merchant. Maybe the Fatui are more neglectful than you think, going as far to sell them off to the highest bidder at quite the cheap price.”

“The Fatui are the most loyal soldiers of any nation at the moment. To sell their weapons like that would be a death sentence. Each and every one of them knows that. So either your father was a member or he got them off the body of a Fatui he killed. Either way, he certainly lied to you.”

“What does this matter?” Baishi said, anger coursing through him at the familiar insinuation. He had heard it time and time again. He didn’t want to hear his father shamed by a man who probably had more ties to the Fatui than his father had years in his life. Pressing the knife even further, Baishi was almost certain he heard a hiss escape Fedorov’s slightly parted lips. “Let me leave with the feather, or I kill you here and now.”

“Come now, this is such an undignified way to treat a man who is trying to make you a deal.”

“There is as much dignity in theft as there is in murder. That is to say, none at all. Why should I care about empty promises made by you at knifepoint? You’ll say anything to get me to spare your life.”

A glimmer shone through the merchant’s eyes at that, a sardonic smile slipping onto his face. “Trust me when I say, I would love for this encounter to end in bloodshed. In fact, I would say that I desire it much more than you do right now. But the only blood lost tonight will be that which has already been spilled. Listen to my offer, and if you do not like my terms, then I will listen to your own once more.”

Baishi debated it, but eventually the ringing in his ears starting up again made the decision for him. He didn’t pull the knife away, but he closed his eyes, gesturing for the man to speak before pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to soothe his headache. 

“Each and every person before you, as they were not able to escape the traps I set in anticipation for them, I turned into the Millelith and the Liyue Qixing immediately upon capture. There is no doubt they will treat them with much more leeway than the proper Snezhnayan authorities I should be turning them into, but I digress. As I mentioned before, I do not desire to put the lives of anyone at risk for my own entertainment. Though it may seem untrue, I am not that kind of man. I have known that kind of man before and…let’s just say we do not necessarily get along.”

“Should we get you a crown?” Baishi sneered, “A medal of honor?”

“I am requesting no admiration, just stating facts. Moving on. Despite the aid you had with escaping the wires, since I was unaware anyone had knives such as those here, you still showed an admirable amount of strength. You lack the outward appearance of muscles and height, and yet you were able to throw the knife a short distance with enough power that it sliced right through one of the wires, which should be nigh impossible. You must have trained with these knives for a very long time now to show that much skill.”

Baishi looked askance at that. “Around eight years now. Get to your point.”

“Right, yes. To get to my point, I must first explain my predicament. The truth behind my presence here in Liyue Harbor is that I am in the process of retiring. I work a very important position within the Merchant’s Guild of Snezhnaya, one that I cannot easily leave without accomplishing all that is left on my plate to handle. I was sent here to settle many of the contracts and acquisitions that the Guild needs to establish within the next few years, hopefully one of my last few on-duty jobs. I am getting much too old for the repetitive process that is the world of economics and business brokering.”

Blinking in surprise, Baishi looked back over the man, trying to spot the signs of age he so outwardly suggested. Now that he looked a bit closer, Baishi found a number of gray highlights throughout the man’s hair he hadn’t spotted before, but that was about it. No wrinkles covered his face, not even when he frowned, and there was no slope to his back or sagginess of his limbs. At the latest, Baishi could imagine the man to be no older than forty. He wondered, in a momentary lapse of judgment, just how old the man could truly be.

“I was sent here with a few guards, but no one to help me out with paperwork or scheduling appointments since my assistant recently got married and quit right before he left on his honeymoon, so I’ve been in a short search for a temporary assistant.” He readjusted his silver framed glances, fingers intertwining with the chains attached to them as he looked down from the tip of his nose at Baishi. 

His hands were stained red from the blood that covered Baishi’s knife, but he paid it no mind. 

“The world of commerce is a cutthroat business. I need someone who thinks and acts such as I do, who can work on my wavelength and won’t be afraid to act out if needed. That, in reality, was the truth of these little tests I have been putting on. A desire to find someone who comes prepared for anything and is willing to hack himself free from bindings at a moment’s notice, or threaten a very important man with no regard for what might happen to him should said man be found dead by his guards in the morning.”

Baishi froze, recognizing the not-so-subtle threat in the man’s words, while also trying to digest the rest of what he’d said.

“You want…to hire a twelve year old to be your assistant?” he clarified, brow furrowed in confusion. 

“It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that,” Fedorov insisted, bringing a hand up to massage his forehead. “Look at this way. I can see in your clothing and your general raggedness that you wish to appear quite down on your luck, but from the skills you have, I highly doubt you’re new at things such as this. I heard many rumors from other merchants about how thieves have been running rampant throughout Liyue Harbor over the last few years, and how they could never seem to catch the culprits. The Millelith and Qixing all seem to be of the mind that there are multiple thieves at work here, but I happen to have formed a different opinion over the last few minutes. I don’t believe I need to say it aloud, do I?”

Gritting his teeth, frustration building up once more, Baishi shook his head. 

“And I don’t believe I need to reiterate just how much of a mistake it would be to try to kill me, do I?”

Baishi so desperately wanted to try anyway just to see the look in the merchant’s eyes, but he refrained, forcing his hand away, placing the blade back in his pocket, hand near numb. 

“Good, good. This is going very well so far, I should think. Better than I expected, actually. I did believe that I would be leaving here with at least one stab wound at first.”

“I can still make that come true,” Baishi offered, holding up his other knife. Fedorov shook his head silently, but seemed rather amused. 

“I believe I’ll be fine as I am, thank you. Now that you have heard my dilemma, would you now like to hear the options I have prepared?”

Baishi pressed at his wounds once more. They were still bleeding, but slower than they had been before. The blood flow had stopped hitting the ground and tarnishing his already ragged clothes, but the amount of blood he had lost, most of it pooling around his feet at that very moment, meant that his head still swam at most of his motions. Regardless, he nodded and listened to what Fedorov had to say.

The dark haired merchant held up one long finger as he began to count off. “Your first option would be the easiest: I let you go right now, without the feather, and you leave a free man. I do not tell the Millelith nor the Qixing about you and we both go back to how our lives were before.”

He held up another finger along with the first. “The second option is a little more complicated. You escape with the pinion, leaving me alive, and I call the Qixing and the Millelith and tell them about you and your little life of crime. You will live on the run for the rest of your likely-short life, if you don’t go ahead and take your own life like many thieves do after knowing they’ve been caught. Though that would make this option pointless, it is still your decision in the end.”

A third finger sprung up with a slight chuckle coming from the merchant. “Third option, my personal favorite simply because I can imagine the amusement that could come from the possibility, you steal the pinion and kill me in the process. You escape from the manor and leave the guards to find my body, perhaps having triggered the tripwire on the door to make it harder for them to do so. They alert the Snezhnayan authorities along with the Liyuean ones, and this whole mess becomes an international manhunt for one twelve year old orphan boy who only wanted this simple, priceless feather.”

Baishi didn’t find the option nearly as funny as Fedorov made it out to be. 

Finally, a fourth finger was raised and the golden-eyed merchant became serious once more. “Your last option, and yes, these are the only options available to you, is that I give you the quill.”

He paused, perhaps letting Baishi comprehend that. Baishi was somewhat thankful, as the words drew his mind to a stalling blank.

“You…give me the quill?” he repeated, slowly, suspiciously. “In exchange for what?”

Of course he knew what Fedorov had said he wanted, an assistant, but there had to be more to it than that. The Wise Doctor’s Pinion, it was one of a kind, priceless. Fedorov was the kind of man who might not care about valuable things because of the amount of money he already possesses, but he was evidently also not the kind of man who would simply give something so valuable away for free, nor for such a simple job.

“This is no trick, I can promise you that. In exchange for the quill, you will become my assistant for as long as I remain here in Liyue Harbor. You will show me around the city, introduce me to people you believe it might be important for me to meet, and aid me in my business negotiations when needed. Taking notes, organizing papers, blah, blah, blah, all the normal assistant work.”

“And all I get in return is the feather?” He knew the feather was priceless, but since he wasn’t planning on selling it, it seemed rather like he was getting the shorter end of the stick in this agreement. “Would I be able to continue stealing while playing the part of your assistant? I need to eat somehow.”

“Food will be of no concern to you anymore. Nor will shelter, if that was a concern to you before. You will be provided with a weekly stipend that you can use however you desire, so long as you give up any activities of theft for as long as you are in my employment. If you somehow mess up and get caught, even if it hasn’t happened before, your association with me would reflect negatively on Snezhnaya’s diplomatic relations with Liyue, something I presume neither you nor I desire. If you truly want to continue your life of theft, then I suggest you pick one of the other options I’ve given you.”

Fedorov raised a black eyebrow, waiting for Baishi’s response. His thin lips pursed, as though expecting to hear one he didn’t like.

Baishi hesitated. “If I…If I should agree to all this, giving up my theft and helping you out in all those different ways, I want one more thing from you.”

A long finger tapped in thought against Fedorov’s cheek. He looked down with curiosity in his wheat-colored eyes, a strand of gray hanging down in front of his face, having slipped out from behind his ear. He made no move to fix it. “What request do you have to make?”

“I am not yet an orphan,” Baishi explained, speaking through the piercing pain, hoping his desperation would shine through regardless. “My father and mother separated from each other when I was just a baby. My father left our home village with me to go here to Liyue Harbor in search of making mora to send back home to my mother and my brother. He died six years ago and I have had no choice other than to steal in order to make enough mora to keep them and myself alive. On top of the weekly stipend, I want another sufficient amount of mora to send back home to them, along with some food and clothing. Whatever can be spared.”

As his words flowed, Fedorov slowly began to smile. It was an unpracticed and unnatural looking thing, but Baishi couldn’t help but think that perhaps that was just what the merchant’s smiles looked like. 

“That, I can do easily. Think nothing of it. Family is one of the most important things in the world. Should you agree to my proposition, I will acquire whatever it is you believe they need and give it to them.”

Baishi stared at the man in shock, not trusting his words. He had no reason to lie, the job itself was an easily fillable spot, but he also had no reason to go that far with a lie. The look in the merchant’s eyes, something darkly serious, told him that what he said was the truth. Fedorov’s stern face was otherwise blank. 

“Okay,” Baishi said slowly. “Then…what about afterward, when you leave to go back to Snezhnaya? What will I do then? Will you leave me here? Can I go back to stealing then?”

“When I go back to Snezhnaya…” Fedorov got a faraway look in his eye, his lips moving silently, as though stuck in a memory. After a moment, he shook himself and gave Baishi a closed mouth smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Well, that will be up to you. I believe that with your stipend, you will be able to save up enough money that you will hopefully no longer need to steal, at least not for a long while after I’m gone, but whether you do or not will be entirely up to you. You can stay here in Liyue Harbor and go back to your life as it was before me, or you could go with me to Snezhnaya. I would be able to get you a job there easily enough, and make it so you’ll never have to go hungry again. You could consider it a thank you, for all the work you will have done for me by that point.”

“What if I wanted you to bring me back to my home village, to see my mother and brother? Would you do that?”

“If that is what you want at the time, then of course. It would be my pleasure.”

The options were, well, no options at all. None except for the last one. Baishi suspected that that was the point. It was, after all, one of the rules of business. Building up the things you want the person to choose while making all other options seem less desirable. Fedorov was a very important merchant in Snezhnaya. Of course he certainly knew how to manipulate more subtly, it was just that Baishi knew he didn’t think Baishi needed subtlety to agree.

To Baishi’s utter dismay, the dark-haired merchant just so happened to be right. 

Baishi closed his eyes gently, the pain and dizziness falling away completely for the first time since the injury occurred, and he let out a deep sigh. The feeling was back in the next second, but the momentary break was nice.

“As long as you keep all your promises, I’ll do it,” Baishi said, holding out a hand to the man. “If you go back on any of them, I will quit and never look back. I expect we’ll be setting down even more ground rules later on?”

“Of course,” Fedorov agreed, taking his hand and shaking it, another unnatural smile creeping up his face. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Here, I will fulfill the very first of our agreements right now, if you would like.”

Oh right, the pinion. Baishi nodded, trying not to move more than he had to. He would have been more excited about it, he thought, if he didn’t feel like he was on the verge of passing out. 

Stepping off to the side as Fedorov approached the stool, Baishi watched blankly as the merchant picked up the quill with both hands, the plastic casing already off to the side, and turned to him, holding it out for him to take. He reached out mindlessly, taking the stem between two of his unbloodied fingers and brought it close to his face. As though in a trance, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the pocketwatch as well, only having just remembered it was there. Out of the side of his vision, he saw Fedorov gaze at the watch with a look of mild surprise. He ignored that because he didn’t really care what the man was feeling at the moment. 

The two artifacts matched each other well, silver and blue accents alongside the grand pale star. Baishi could see his reflection in the silvery gloss of the feather. He looked like death warmed over. He felt quite like it as well.

“I really don’t know why people wanted that old thing so badly,” Fedorov pondered distantly, sounding somewhat affronted. “The name is quite stupid, really, and completely inaccurate. The man who owned it once is more dangerous than wise. He’s really rather aggravating, actually, and—”

Whether the merchant trailed off, or Baishi’s ears stopped working, he wasn’t quite sure. 

What he was sure of, however, were the black spots that dotted his vision, only moments before everything went dark.

—

When Baishi awoke, all he knew for a few achingly beautiful seconds was that he was laying on the softest bed he’d ever laid on before, and that there was a pleasant numbness throughout his body, blocking out all his habitual pains. 

His arms were leaden by his sides, legs tingling as he tried to wiggle them, and distantly he wondered if he had been drugged. He could hardly move his neck, something thick and uncomfortable plastered against one side of it. It stretched as Baishi tilted his head, but it quickly pulled him back into his original position, a stickiness flinging him back into place.

As soon as his limbs unstuck, Baishi sat up gingerly with a groan, glancing around the unfamiliar room. It was rather plain, looking like many of the rooms he’d broken into in the last few years, just with less lavish furnishings and decor, and smelled distinctly of violetgrass, though there was none in sight. He scrunched up his nose at the scent. It reminded him of too many days spent sick as a child, when his father would spoon feed him medicines he’d made based on recipes a nearby doctor had given him, unable to afford to buy it premade. 

A knock sounded at the door and Baishi clutched at the thick blanket that covered him. He considered, just for a moment, pretending to still be asleep, but he wasn’t sure if Fedorov would take the hint that he didn’t want to talk. If he just didn’t respond, it was just as possible that the merchant would simply walk right in regardless and try to wake him.

“...Come in,” he said eventually, resigning himself to have whatever conversation they were going to have. Baishi expected the complications to come in waves. What Fedorov offered him was much too good of a deal for there not to be extra expectations put on him. The only question was whether he would learn them now, at the start of their partnership, or later on, when Baishi eventually grew lax and let his walls slip. He supposed he would only find out as he went along with it. 

The dark haired man peaked into the room, half his torso visible as he smiled innocently over at Baishi. 

“Good morning,” he chimed, voice all too awake for Baishi’s liking. “I hope the bed is up to your standards. I wasn’t entirely certain what kind of bed a twelve year old would need, but one of my guards informed me that children grew out of cradles within the first year or two of life, so I presumed a regular bed would be just fine.”

Baishi…wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that, the words all jumbling up in his brain, but he simply nodded, assuming the man simply wanted to know if the bed was okay or not. 

Fedorov looked pleased. He slipped completely into the room, thin body sliding through the small gap between the door and the frame with ease, but he didn’t close the door like he had last time. He left it open, even going as far as to push it further open with the toe of his slick leather boot, as though he was creating an opening to leave any time as needed.

“I realized after you fainted that we never actually exchanged names,” Fedorov continued, waving a hand around in the air before gesturing towards myself. “My name, though I am certain you knew it before ever stepping foot into my home, is Kliment Fedorov. And yours?”

Baishi hesitated only a second, before answering him. “Baishi.”

Nodding thoughtfully, Fedorov rubbed his chin. “Baishi, Baishi. It is a lovely name. Tell me though, Baishi, are there people here in Liyue who will hear that name and begin to frown? Do you have enemies, who will curse your name should I wander across their shops and utter it aloud?”

The sound of his name slipping from the lips of another for the first time in years startled him. It was as though he had lost and regained something within a thoughtless breath, something he had never realized he’d lost in the first place.

Baishi wondered who exactly this man thought he was, but his mind couldn’t help but go back to what had happened all those years ago with Miss Adelaide. He hadn’t tried talking to her again since then, hiding his face and slipping by her stall as fast as he could each time he had to pass it. Sometimes, he wondered if she still remembered him, still remembered when she would laugh with him and share food with him, giving him jobs and helping him survive another day. Other times, he wondered if she had ever forgiven him for what had occurred. 

He was too cowardly to ever try to find out the answer.

“It might not be the smartest thing to do,” he muttered, unsure of what difference it would make. “But what does that matter? It’s not like you can just change who I am or the people that know me.”

Fedorov tsked, wagging a finger in the air. His eyes were closed as he smiled his unnatural smile, glasses hanging low on his straight nose. “No, I cannot, but that matters not, as you have said. I cannot change the people that know you, or the reputation you might have, but I can disguise it, if needed. I have people setting up in the other room, but while they work, I thought we might chat about what I might call you in public, if your real name is not available.”

Closing his eyes with a sigh, Baishi slid back down into the bed, resting his head on the cloud-like pillows. And just like that, it slipped right back through his fingertips. He supposed it was never to be. “I don’t care what you call me. Choose a name for me.”

Humming, Fedorov observed him for a long while. Baishi nearly fell back asleep waiting for him to respond, jerking awake again when the man finally spoke. 

“What about…Petya?”

Baishi blinked. “Okay. Does it mean something in Snezhnayan?”

“Nothing bad. In fact, it’s really rather a common name there. Many will probably just think I’ve brought you over with me. It would be better if you stayed quiet during most of my meetings or discussions, as you should be focused on taking notes, but if you must speak, perhaps you could attempt an accent?”

“You want me to try to sound Snezhnayan?” According to the people of Liyue Harbor, he didn't have much trouble sounding like he was faking an accent already. How hard could it be, trying to sound Snezhnayan when he didn’t speak a lick of it? “I guess I could attempt it.”

“Great!” Fedorov clapped happily, sitting down with one leg crossed over the other on the end of the bed. “I can help you with pronunciations if needed. You do not need to know much Snezhnayan at the moment, just enough to ask and understand some simple questions. We can use the excuse that you don’t know much Liyuean, or aren’t as practiced in it, should anyone question why you aren’t speaking.”

The merchant seemed to have much of the terms of their agreement and how all this would go already prepared and set in stone. 

If Baishi were a true, patriotic Liyuean, then he would have insisted the man create a contract with him, a reassurance that they could not betray each other, lest either of them risk Morax’s Wrath of the Rock, but Baishi, as it was, couldn’t care less. Betrayal was something he knew intimately. It was something he could do at the blink of an eye, and something he expected others to do similarly. Creating a contract over such a shady deal with a foreign businessman would be stupid, much less something that he believed Fedorov would agree to. 

“Sure,” he said. “Teach me Snezhnayan. Do whatever you want. Anything else you’d like from me? Change my hair, change my clothes? How about the color of my eyes while we’re at it?”

Fedorov didn’t seem to catch onto his sarcasm, instead examining him with a critical glance, glasses slipping down his nose. He didn’t seem to notice. “Not your eyes. Never change your eyes. They remind me greatly of—”

He paused, then smiled. “They’re beautiful. That is all you must know. Eyes are the window to the soul. As long as your eyes are as they are, you will never forget who you were before. No matter which name you are called, no matter where you are.”

The tip of his finger underlined the crease below his own golden eye, pushing his glasses back up as he did, a wistful look on his face. Baishi wondered what he was thinking about. Then he remembered he didn’t care. 

Coughing, Fedorov remembered what they were doing only seconds later. “Of course, as my assistant, I cannot have you walking around in bloodied rags. I’ve already sent out some guards to scour the market for clothes that may fit you, but I will take you there myself as well, in case there is anything in particular you would like to purchase.”

Baishi had had enough money to purchase all the clothes he wanted for a few years now. He had stuck to his rags regardless. He said nothing of this aloud.

“And as for your hair…”

Fedorov grimaced as he reached out and grabbed a strand of it. Baishi had been cutting it whenever it got too long ever since he was six. The product was never great, considering he did it in the reflection of the ocean at night, so no two strands were the same length. Fedorov must have only just noticed this once he pointed it out. 

“It will need some work,” he acquiesced, letting go of the strand. “I can search for a professional, or I can cut it for you myself, if you desire.  It will be short for a while, but I should like you to grow it out long. It would be easier to pass you off as my son than an assistant, truth be told, considering your age, and I’ve noticed that we look quite a bit alike, so it would not be implausible. However, I do not think anyone would believe I would let my son run around looking like this.”

His stomach turned. Baishi hadn’t been someone’s son in years. He had barely been his own father’s son, so busy trying to survive to truly connect in a normal manner. He didn’t know if he was ready to be one again.

“Assistant is fine for now,” he muttered. “Merchants around here have children as assistants all the time. It won’t be abnormal on the streets of Liyue Harbor.”

Fedorov tsked. “Yes, we have them in Snezhnaya as well, but I am a reputable and serious merchant to the people of the Harbor. How should I prove myself as that if I have a child running around after me?”

Baishi didn’t believe that would be a problem at all, but he didn’t tell Fedorov that. Instead, he just shrugged. “Sounds like something you’ll have to figure out. You wanted me to do this, after all. We’ve already agreed too, so no backing out, right?”

“Of course. I don’t go back on my word. You can trust me on that, Petya.”

It took a moment for Baishi to remember he was referring to him. He had to get used to the name sooner rather than later, he supposed, but it still felt strange. No stranger than his own name felt at moments, but something in him rebelled against the idea of receiving a new one. His parents had named him Baishi. He was named after his mother, his father had told him so many times before. A mother he had never met before, but still dreamed about sometimes. He shared the other half of his name with his brother as well. The name Baishi tied him to the parts of his family he had never truly felt connected to in the first place. 

Sometimes he wondered if his father had done that on purpose. Tying him to people he would never know or see so that he would keep on working towards that one unobtainable goal of reaching them. Baishi wondered if his father had ever realized they would never be going home. He couldn’t bring himself to forgive the man somedays, but he couldn’t bring himself to hate him either. 

His mind a mess, Baishi replied, “I trust you,” and left it at that. He sunk back down into the bed and stared off to the side, a bit of light peaking in through the curtains, tantalizing in its tumultuous light. Fedorov didn’t leave, though Baishi wished he would. The graying man stood there and stared at him, scrutinizing him with a divot in his brow, like something about Baishi concerned him greatly.

Baishi thought he would say something. Instead, Fedorov took the cowardly path and bowed out. 

“I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said quietly, gloved hand placed on the doorknob even as he looked back at Baishi. “We’ll go to your old home and retrieve your things. Then we’ll figure the rest out as we go along. Get some rest.”

Fedorov slipped away quietly. Baishi wouldn’t have even noticed he’d gone if not for the silted ending to his words and the small click of the door shutting. 

Turning onto his uninjured side, Baishi let his eyes slide shut again, wishing the pain, for once, would drown out the agony of existence.

Like every time before, he had no such luck.

—

The walk downtown was just as difficult as Baishi had expected. Fedorov wanted to stop for everything and everyone.

Baishi compared the man to a tourist in his mind, before realizing that technically, that was what he was. Fedorov had, according to his own words, only arrived there a week ago and hadn’t had much time out of work to actually explore Liyue Harbor. In some function of the term, Baishi acted as his ‘tour guide,’ though not a very good one, considering he was to hide his face and the bandages, while also avoiding speaking in front of other people. 

Which meant that most of their trip consisted solely of the mindless chatter of Fedorov, who seemed to dislike the quiet, as far as Baishi could tell. It was a trait they shared—not that Baishi would ever tell him that—but Baishi had been forced to grow used to it. He was lucky for that, in a way. It made it easier to simply sit back and watch as the golden-eyed man went from stall to stall, chatting with the owners Baishi had once worked for, half a lifetime ago. The same ones who had almost run him out of town the same amount of time before.

Baishi insisted upon the fact that he did not hold grudges—not towards humans, anyway (though he knew there were a number of people he would never be able to forgive for what they had done to him). Humans were flawed beings who reacted based on emotions. Baishi could understand that; he unfortunately was part of the category. He could make sense of human emotions. He could not blame the people of the harbor for reacting with fear against the unknown. Even if he did, it wouldn’t get him all those years along back. It wouldn’t make everything right again.

The grudges he held transcended humanity and shot the archons straight through the heart. When he thought of them, his whole body burned with some messy, righteous fire, an anger that had been building and building and had yet to plateau. The archons played with human lives as though they were puppets on strings. Rex Lapis had stared him straight in the eye and pretended not to see him, not to hear his desperate pleas. 

One day, Baishi would bring Morax to his knees and make him wish he had done differently. It was only his right, after all. He would disrupt the balance that gave the archons their powers and hand it back to humanity. Maybe humanity didn’t quite deserve it either, but at least it would make things more fair. No one would ever have to be powerless again. No one would ever end up like Baishi had again.

Fedorov chatted amicably with a young man running a lavender melon stand as Baishi stood behind him, arms clasped behind his back and staring off into space as he waited for the man to finish. They had been at this for nearly two hours by then. What had originally begun as a trip to go get his things had turned into something of boredom and a test of his carefully plaited patience. He was only lucky that whatever medical concoction Fedorov’s nurses had fed him while he slept seemed to have cleared up his headache and most of his pain. He supposed that was worth the lingering smell of violetgrass constantly violating his nose as he had tried to fall back asleep earlier. 

He didn’t try listening in on what Fedorov was saying to the man. Baishi’s days of haggling and bartering for products was long since over, his skills as a thief having taken precedence over his business skills ever since his father died. Maybe he hadn’t lost all interest in economics, but he had lost his necessity for it outside of selling his stolen goods. 

Now, he would not even be able to do that anymore. Would Fedorov make him go back to haggling when he was finally unrecognizable to the people of the Harbor? Would Fedorov even be around long enough for that to occur?

Baishi had no time to even attempt at conceptualizing answers to those questions, as Fedorov looked back at him and handed him a bag to hold, slipping it from his long, spindly fingers onto Baishi’s thin arm. Baishi took a glance into the bag, unsurprised to see three fresh, juicy lavender melons piled atop each other. 

He still remembered when lavender melons were rather rare in the Harbor, not as much of a market for them at the time. Since he’d stopped running through the streets, it seemed as though they’d managed to hit it big enough to dictate the opening of an entire stall dedicated to them.’’

“The stall owner said there will be a performance tonight at the teahouse,” Fedorov said, a tinge of excitement decorating his voice. He brushed a strand of long black hair over his shoulder and pushed his glasses up from where they had been falling down his long, straight nose. “They’ll be performing a rather famous play from Snezhnaya. I’ve seen it a few times over, but I would like to see how they put it on here. Perhaps it will be different, more insulting than they might make it back home. I understand the hesitance, but honestly, it is not as though anyone truly believes we’re like that. I can take a joke, yet they cower away from making them. This may finally be my chance to see a true performance of it. Tell me, Petya, will you attend with me?”

Though Fedorov neglected to mention the name of the play, Baishi knew the one he spoke of. It was the same one he had seen the night his father died. He could still remember sitting down at that table with Mr. Zhongli, not understanding the words the man had been saying to him.

Looking back on it now, Baishi knew he had been naive. He had been stupid. There was a reason why Mr. Zhongli had always been someone he’d avoided. He never should have stayed with him and shared his tea that night. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference overall, but then at least Baishi would have known for sure that Mr. Zhongli wasn’t the one causing all the problems in his life. 

It wasn’t as though he could tell anymore. The man had been missing from the Harbor for the last few years. That last lunch he’d shared with Mr. Zhongli, a week after his father’s death, had been the last time he’d seen the man. After a few months of trying to catch a glimpse of the man around the harbor and failing, Baishi had been tempted to ask around, see if anyone had heard anything from him since he took off on his journey.

In the end, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask. He presumed the man had either died on the trip, or moved away permanently. It wouldn’t have been the first time for either. 

Some part of it was happy about it. If there was no Mr. Zhongli, then Baishi’s life surely couldn’t go wrong, right? If the man was the cause of his problems, then they should have resolved themselves when he left.

Except they didn’t. So he didn’t know what to think. Therefore, Baishi eventually decided not to think about it at all. 

Baishi pushed the topic aside entirely, just as he had been doing for the last few years, and instead focused on Fedorov. 

The man somehow retained the air of elegance to him even when ranting and expressing excitement. His tone changed little aside from the vague appearance of satisfaction, his lips only curling upward the slightest bit. Golden eyes traced across the market area, going from vendor to vendor before eventually settling on Baishi, who had begun to walk next to him as they trailed off to the next place. 

“You know, most assistants wouldn’t dare walk next to their masters. It must be quite a strange sight for the people to see you step and step with me.” He said it like a hint. Baishi ignored it.

“Strange, perhaps. But something they’ll have to get used to,” he replied, voice lowered so no one would overhear. “I may be your assistant now, but it’s only because you wanted me to be. If you don’t like how I’m doing it, then fire me and get it over with.”

Fedorov didn’t deign that with a response. Instead, his eyes lowered to Baishi’s hands, flickering across his fingers until they reached the ring. He paused walking for a second and made an inquisitive noise.

“That is a beautiful ring you have,” he remarked, golden eyes glittering, hand flexing as though he wanted to reach out and touch it. Baishi instinctively tucked his hand away. “Did you purchase it around here?”

“From the jewelers,” Baishi said, somewhat unnerved as he glanced around. They were stopped in the middle of the street, people maneuvering around them on all sides. “A few years ago. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s just—quite eyecatching. Perhaps I should get one like it made. It might add more to the whole ‘father, son’ facade, don’t you think?”

Baishi didn’t think a second longer before he spit out a harsh, “No.”

Fedorov blinked in surprise. His hands paused from where they grappled with his long black coat, as though searching for his wallet already. “No?”

Baishi shook his head haltingly. “No. This ring…I got it made after my father died. It’s got his ashes in it. It’s…special, I suppose. If you were to get a copy of it…”

“It’d be like I was replacing him,” Fedorov finished for him, brow dipping in dismay. “I understand. I didn’t mean for it to come off like that. I apologize.”

Shifting uncomfortably, Baishi shrugged. “It’s nothing. Doesn’t matter.”

Fedorov looked at him a few moments longer before glancing away. “If you’re certain. Here, let’s head over to your place at last. I don’t feel like working the market any longer today. I’ve gotten enough contacts already. We’ll be sorting through them for the next few weeks, certainly.”

Baishi had no argument with that. His feet automatically turned and began to lead the man the other way towards the little hole in the wall he had called home his whole life. As they did, people stared. People whispered.

Fedorov, in his affluent attire, appearing all the rich man he was, had been getting glances all afternoon. No one had dared to ask who he was because everyone in the Harbor already knew. The stall owners he spoke to greeted him by name, their tones full of respect Baishi had never heard before. Fedorov had a way with people that Baishi never had. Maybe with the man’s help, however, Baishi would be able to learn. 

It had something to do with his affluence, of course. Everyone recognized the man, having apparently heard of him long before Baishi had been hearing about him, and just never having said anything before. He supposed it made sense, considering Fedorov had never visited Liyue Harbor himself according to the whispers he’d heard, but it still rang out as strange to him. It was as though there was a crucial aspect of the story that Baishi was missing. He didn’t know where to start when it came to asking Fedorov himself about it, however. 

For the length of time they worked together, Baishi decided that he would avoid learning about the man as much as he could, aside from the necessary information. It would make it easier to leave when the time came, whenever that would be. As far as Baishi could tell, Fedorov didn’t appear to have an end date for his time in Liyue Harbor just yet, but he seemed to think it would be long enough for Baishi to make a good amount of money from the work he was doing, so Baishi expected it to be quite a while. 

They eventually happened upon Baishi’s room. Baishi didn’t look over at Fedorov as he opened the door, but he could tell that the older man was analyzing the place with a critical eye. Some small sounds came from the back of Fedorov’s throat as he glanced around the small room, but he quieted after Baishi gave him a hard look, daring him to say anything about it. 

Baishi knew it wasn’t a good room, nor a good place to grow up in. Cracks lined every wall, the door was thin and hardly shut properly anymore (Baishi had taken to dragging some of the boxes he had under the bed over and stacking them up in front of it as a modicum of safety during the night), his sheets and blankets were threadbare and stained. Baishi had never wanted to leave a place more, but he wouldn’t have a man who had likely never faced poverty in his life laying judgment upon it. The room had done its job and kept him and his father sheltered for years. He had hated it, but he could never bring himself to leave it before. Fedorov could keep all his opinions about Baishi’s life to himself. 

Inwardly thanking himself for packing his things the night before, Baishi grabbed his bag out from underneath the bed and plopped it in Fedorov’s unprepared arms along with the bag of Lavender Melons. He nearly laughed when Fedorov almost stumbled underneath the weight of it, but focused instead on searching the room to see if he had missed anything. Stuffing a few extra pieces of clothes he didn’t want to give up into a box, he eventually emptied the place entirely of all there was (which, in the end, wasn’t much at all). Checking the drawers, he took out the paper, pens, and wax stamp that he used to send his letters off to his mother and brother, placing them carefully in the box alongside the clothing. 

When he turned back to Fedorov, the man had placed the bags onto the bed and was examining some of the drawings Baishi had carved into the wall over the years. Most of them had been done when he was just a child, stick figures of him and his father alongside a mother and brother he had never known. Others were of random objects, flowers and trees and teacups and masks he’d seen in some opera productions he’d snuck into over the years.

One of the oldest drawings was down near the floor. Fedorov crouched down, risking dirtying his coat, just to look at it. Baishi had attempted a number of times in the past to draw over it, to rid the wall of it entirely, but no matter what he did, the drawing wouldn’t fade. He had nearly forgotten all about it in recent years, but Fedorov’s searching eyes had uncovered it in seconds, reminding Baishi of it as well.

The drawing had been done when he was two, or so his father had told him, and had just learned about their archon, Rex Lapis, and how he came down from the heavens in the form of a giant dragon. Baishi had been, at the time, enchanted at the concept of a dragon, and tried drawing one, but he could never get it right. His father had eventually sat down next to him and helped. The small dragon had shaky lines and awkwardly shaped limbs, but it was still identifiable. He hadn’t, at the time of drawing it, understood exactly what it meant to be an archon. He hadn’t understood what Morax had done to their home. 

After the rite six years ago, he had returned here and immediately gone to cross it out, but drawing had been there so long that it had been imprinted into the stone of the wall. 

Fedorov swiped a thumb across the drawing with an unreadable expression.

The next words the golden-eyed man spoke were not what Baishi had expected. 

“You have lived here for a long while,” he said quietly, rather than questioning anything. Fedorov stood, brushing his coat off lightly as he turned back toward Baishi. Baishi hadn’t noticed it before, but the man was so tall that he only just barely fell under the height of the ceiling. He certainly had had to duck in order to enter. “And yet there is so little to show for your existence here. Nothing but a few bags of things and some barely legible drawings.”

Baishi tsked, turning away. “This room was never for the staying. These walls hold nothing but age, not memories. Those drawings were the lies of a child who once believed in things other than just survival. I haven’t had that luxury in years.”

“And the dragon?” Fedorov questioned, curiosity covering up whatever else lingered in his tone. “I have been told before that the people of Liyuean take great pride in their archon, yet you mar the image you have crafted of him. Do you not feel the same?”

“Morax is no archon of mine,” Baishi bit out, crossing his arms over his chest. A hand went back to his watch. He swiped a thumb across the cold metal with a sigh. “He’s nothing but a tyrant that has deluded the people into believing he’s worth all their prayers. I long for the day when he is found crunched under the foot of humankind, who has no need for his guidance and falsehoods any longer.”

Fedorov hummed. Baishi acknowledged the danger of saying this all aloud, especially in the heart of Liyue Harbor. Perhaps he wouldn’t be arrested for the criticism, but there were a number of ways his experiences on the streets could get worse if people knew that he thought like that. 

In front of Fedorov, however, he held onto very few of those worries. The man did not hail from Liyue as far as Baishi had learned, and likely cared little for his perspective on the archon. 

“Such a temper for quite a small boy,” Fedorov noted after a minute, a hint of amusement in his voice. “Though I cannot help but commend your honesty. Not many would be so willing to say such things about those who are said to see and hear all.”

“I don’t care if Morax hears my word,” Baishi muttered. “If anything, I’m glad. He needs to hear it. Someone must tell him what they truly think.”

“I have heard that he isn’t the most present archon,” said Fedorov, now running his hand across the sheet on the bed, grimacing and pulling his hand away at the feel of it. “Is it true that he only comes down once a year to share his guidance?”

Baishi tilted his head to the side. “Yes. Is it different in Snezhnaya?”

“Much,” he laughed. “Her Majesty, the Tsaritsa, is…an overarching presence. She lives within the Zapolyarny Palace alongside many of her carefully chosen Harbingers, though not all. She can often be found wandering the streets of Snezhnograd and entertains the people as she has the time to do. Though…I must say, despite her constant presence, she feels as though she is an untouchable force, so it is not often that her people will approach her. Most avoid her, if not to ask for her aid in settling matters.”

“What’s she like?” he questioned, turning back to face the other, curious about whether the Tsaritsa was truly as cold and inflexible as the history books tended to say. “Have you met her? The Tsaritsa?”

Fedorov seemed to pause at the question. A sardonic smile spread across his lips. “Of course I’ve met her. Everyone has. With a position such as mine in our Merchant’s Guild, I deal with her directly on matters of Snezhnaya’s finances at times. I bet you have heard tales about her being cold and ‘frozen-hearted,’ am I wrong?”

Baishi shook his head. Fedorov let out a sigh. “That is all they ever seem to take note of. I do not blame them, however. Even if the Tsaritsa is an amicable presence to her people, she does not let many in. Not about her true feelings. She believes that it is her duty to provide her people with a strong and confident leader, and, well, her own views of the position lead to her believing that means she must close herself off from the world.”

He begins to strip the sheets from the bed, folding them into a messy pile and placing them into the box Baishi had brought out. Baishi watched with a distant stare as Fedorov continued to speak.

“Five hundred years ago, the Tsaritsa’s life changed entirely when the Cataclysm occurred. In the aftermath of the war, with Khaenrei’ah destroyed and all its inhabitants either cursed or dead, she ascended to the throne and made a deal with some of the remaining survivors, offering them shelter in her land. To avoid the eyes of the Heavenly Principles, she had them swear their loyalty to her and declared them citizens of Snezhnaya. To protect her people from the wrath of the Heavenly principles, that which she believed she could have incurred from her weakness of being too sympathetic towards those people who had sinned, she let her heart grow cold, ruling with an iron fist and controlling every aspect of her people’s lives, so that they should not be blamed for her own actions. No longer did anyone claim her kind, and in exchange, she was able to save her people from similar damnation.”

“What happened to her during the war?” Baishi questioned, feeling queasy over the tale already. He had long since known not everything was black and white, but to hear of an archon who became tyrannical to protect her people spun around his head in circles. 

He didn’t know what to think of it. It sounded like an excuse, but he did not know what the Heavenly Principles were like. He had read about Khaenre’iah in some of his books, but they had never gone into too much detail. Maybe he would have to find some better books in the future. 

“Many things,” Fedorov said, closing his eyes as he laid a hand over the now-folded sheet. He let out another sigh, lighter than before. “His Majesty, the Belyi Tsar, our first Cryo Archon, died during the Cataclysm, leaving her the gnosis as his daughter and only heir. The Tsaritsa had never expected to become the archon, not when her father had been such an overwhelming force in the land, and his death hit her the hardest out of all of the people of Snezhnaya.”

“He died during the Cataclysm as well?” Baishi repeated, furrowing his brow. None of the history books had ever mentioned that before.

Fedorov shook his head. “Yes, but not in the way you must be thinking. The Belyi Tsar never went to fight in the war. Instead, he sent the Tsaritsa in his place. But while she was gone, the Belyi Tsar died from unknown causes, forcing the Tsaritsa to return early from the war to ascend to the throne and take the Cryo gnosis. She had to leave again to continue to fight soon after. When she returned after the Cataclysm was over, she was…different.”

Baishi thought the whole thing over. One thing stuck with him. “You speak as though you witnessed it personally.”

Fedorov smiled grimly. “That, I believe, is a story for another day. Please, come. I think we have spent more than enough time here. My guards are probably panicking by now.”

With reluctant agreement, Baishi followed Fedorov in gathering up the bags and the box of things. Baishi made sure his hood covered the bandages on his head before propping the door open and letting Fedorov, who was holding both of the bags, through first. Baishi followed after him, head low, carrying the box. 

“I am quite excited for the performance at the teahouse tonight,” Fedorov mentioned casually as they made their way back to the mansion. “It has been a long while since I had the opportunity to sit down and watch an opera. Have you seen any before?”

Could he truly count the small portion of the one he saw while speaking with Zhongli?

“I’ve seen bits and pieces of a few,” he said, only halfway lying. “Mostly from afar though.”

“Well, tonight you can see it all from the front row. Even if you will not be able to understand half of it, the beauty is in the performance much of the time, not necessarily in the words spoken. If you have any questions, you can simply ask me them after. I would be delighted to explain things to you.”

Baishi didn’t have the heart to tell the man that he had little interest in a play he wouldn’t even be able to understand. He hadn’t been too interested in it six years before and he hadn’t gained any interest lately either. 

They made it back to the mansion before the guards sent people out to search for them, having been gone much longer than Fedorov had originally suggested to his guards. When they entered, one of the guards was pacing in circles across the front room. When he noticed Fedorov’s presence, he began to speak in rapidfire Snezhnayan, his face glowing a bright shade of red from stress. Baishi would have laughed, but he thought that it might make things worse. Fedorov certainly looked as though he was going to laugh, but he managed to choke it back, laying a hand on the guard’s shoulder and saying something back to him in a calm tone. The guard eventually closed his eyes, let out a breath, and relaxed. 

Fedorov let go of him and led Baishi up the stairs back to the room he was staying in.

“How have you been feeling?” he asked as they walked up the stairs. “Any lingering pain? I can have my nurse bring in some more herbs if you are in need.”

“Ah, no.” Baishi shuttered at the thought of more violetgrass. “I’m fine. I think the first dose was enough. It was quite…strong.”

They arrived in front of his new room, Fedorov kicking the door open lightly. Baishi followed him in, still somewhat mystified that this grand room was now his. 

“Yes, Ania tends to go quite heavy on the violetgrass. It works wonders, however, so I have never corrected her. Besides, I have little knowledge of medicine. Maybe that is the correct amount. I would not know. I’ll let her know the lower the amount she uses for the next dose. You may not be feeling the pain right now, but that just means the dose is still in effect. You’ll start feeling it all again in another hour or two. I’ll send Ania up around then. For now, get some more rest. I know I woke you up quite early. I’ll make sure you’ll have enough time to prepare for the opera.”

Fedorov set the bag down on a chair beside the bed and dusted himself off, keeping a hold of the bag of lavender melons. 

“I’ll send her up with some fresh lavender melon slices as well, if you’d like. Do you enjoy lavender melon?”

Baishi shrugged, sitting down on the bed. “I’m not sure. I’ve never had it.”

Golden eyes widening, Fedorov looked horrified at the proclamation. “Never?”

Shaking his head, Baishi replied, “Never.”

“This just won’t do,” Fedorov muttered to himself, rubbing at his chin. “What else haven’t you tried? Harra fruit? Bulle Fruit? Sunsettia?”

“The first two, no, but of course I’ve tried Sunsettias.” He rolled his eyes at the dramatics. “I’ve just never found the time to try them. I’ve been a bit busy trying to survive these last few years.”

“Well, you’re going to try them today,” Fedorov said, determined look on his face. “I’ll send some up alongside the Lavender Melons. You can tell me what you think of them. You’ll have to make me a list of things you haven’t tried. I can’t imagine going through life without ever having tried a Lavender melon.”

“I thought I was just your assistant,” Baishi stated, confused by the insistence the man displayed. “You don’t have to do all this.”

“I promised you that I would supply you with whatever you need, yes? I think that I can decide in part what I believe you need, and what you need is to try things that you have never tried before. It’s not like I do not have the funds for it. I suppose…if you wish for me not to do this…”

Fedorov looked at him, awkwardness clear on his face. Baishi suspected that no one had ever told the man that they didn’t want what he offered to give before. Baishi, on the other hand, had never met anyone who genuinely just wanted to give him things for so little in return. It was difficult to trust, but he supposed trying some food Fedorov wanted him to try wouldn’t be too bad.

“...It’s fine. Doesn’t matter. Do what you want.”

His face cleared immediately and Fedorov bowed his head. Baishi can’t help but think he’d just been tricked. “Of course. I always do. I’ll see you in a couple of hours. Get some rest.”

Baishi sighed as Fedorov slipped out the door, leaving him alone in the room once more. Not bothering to even attempt unpacking, he shuffled underneath the covers, closing his eyes and letting his exhaustion from the day crash over him. 

He was out within seconds.