"As you command, Your Highness."
Endis , the Abyss Lector who had returned bearing the alchemical elixirs, cradled the vials carefully to her chest as the eyes of every Abyss Mage in the chamber tracked her movement. She held the bundle as though it might shatter if she breathed too hard. And perhaps it might. This small, unremarkable collection of glass bottles contained something that five hundred years of suffering had never managed to produce: a way back.
A way to become human again.
Only those who had been stripped of their humanity, cursed by the Heavenly Principles, their bodies warped into the monstrous shapes they now wore, could truly understand what that meant. To be human. The Abyss Mages who watched Endis did not speak. They did not need to. The hunger in their hollow eyes said everything.
Endis pressed the vials tighter against her ribs. When she returned to her quarters, she had already decided, she would find a full-length mirror. She would stand before it, raise the elixir to her lips, and watch. Watch as the grotesque, distorted shape she had worn for centuries dissolved back into something soft and breathing and recognisably alive.
Five hundred years was a long time to dream the same dream. This one, at last, might have a beautiful ending.
The other Abyss Mages stared at her with undisguised envy. The plan, the great scheme of the Abyss Order , none of that mattered anymore, did it? Not when you could stand in this room and watch a fellow soldier return, in flesh and blood, to what they had once been.
Endis composed herself and spoke.
"The changes across the five nations began nearly half a year ago. Our ability to investigate has been limited, but our best assessment is that they trace back to the outlander, Ryen."
Aether gave a slight nod. He had already suspected as much.
"Prior to this, our full attention was on the plan. We did not waver, and so we did not watch Teyvat closely enough."
Aether raised a hand, cutting her off. "Skip the context. Tell me specifics. Beyond the alchemical elixirs , what else?"
Endis nodded and gathered her thoughts.
"Aside from the elixirs, there are enchanted weapons and armour of various kinds, "
Aether and the others already knew this. He had gone to the trouble of negotiating for a set directly from Lumine, after all.
"Have we learned anything new about that enchanted weapon?"
The Abyss Mage to Aether's side lowered his head quickly, voice subdued.
"Forgive me, Your Highness. Every method of analysis we have attempted has produced nothing."
"What we can confirm is that multiple Laws have been forcibly inscribed onto the blade simultaneously."
"The weapon itself is also… abnormal. Its weight far exceeds anything our instruments are calibrated to measure."
"And even when we brought it before… Him… the weapon showed no reaction whatsoever."
Aether's brow creased. That, he had not known. It sat outside what he had expected.
"A convergence of multiple Laws. That is complicated."
He pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose, exhaling slowly.
He had been so consumed by the Loom of Fate, by the grand machinations of centuries, that he had allowed Teyvat to drift out of his peripheral vision for too long. He had looked away for a season, and when he looked back, the world had rearranged itself into something he barely recognised.
He did not quite understand it yet. But something in the back of his mind told him this change , whatever it was , might be the thing that gave the Abyss Order a new kind of hope.
He gestured for Endis to continue.
She pressed her lips together, something complicated moving behind her expression.
"Your Highness, the enchanted weapons , as it turns out , are no longer considered valuable in the nations above."
She said it carefully, as though bracing for the impact.
"From what I have gathered, enchanted weapons have been largely phased out of frontline military use in Liyue and the other nations. They have been relegated to secondary roles."
The conflict that passed through Aether's eyes lasted the length of a breath.
Then, quietly: "So the weapon I went to such lengths to obtain from Lumine… is, in fact, something they consider obsolete."
No one answered. No one dared. But Aether already knew.
Somewhere in the silence, a deeply unwelcome thought surfaced: his little sister had used second-hand goods to negotiate with him, and he had walked away believing he had gotten the better of the deal.
He was not sure when Lumine had developed this particular talent. It did not sit well with him.
Though , in fairness , even if she considered it worthless, an enchanted weapon still held genuine significance for the Abyss Order. That much was true, whatever she thought of it. Still. The principle of the thing.
He swallowed the irritation and kept his voice level.
"Continue."
Endis, reading the room correctly, wasted no more time.
"The changes across the Alliance nations are difficult to summarise quickly. Our intelligence operations have been severely disrupted. We have effectively no foothold in Liyue or Mondstadt. Snezhnaya has seen little change and yielded nothing useful. In Inazuma, we had a standing arrangement with the Princess."
"At present, the only nation we can meaningfully operate in is Sumeru."
Aether's eyes narrowed slightly as he considered.
"Exceptional circumstances call for flexibility. The matter of the contract, "
He had been about to say that the contract with Lumine could be set aside. She had opened negotiations with an outdated piece of equipment, which was hardly the conduct of a trustworthy counterparty. He could justify it.
The Abyss Mage at his elbow leaned in and murmured, almost apologetically:
"Your Highness , that particular contract was witnessed by Morax."
Silence.
A long pause. Then a slow exhale that carried the weight of very specific, very practical resignation.
Aether let his hand fall.
"Sumeru, then. Make it our focus. Work from there."
In that moment, he found himself genuinely curious about his sister , about when exactly she had started operating like this. The girl he remembered had not been so difficult.
"We gathered a great deal at the Sabzeruz Festival today," Endis pressed on.
"The alchemical elixirs were only mentioned in passing by Lesser Lord Kusanali."
"Beyond those , there are enchanted soils that can be laid down and activate immediately, and trees that reach full maturity the moment they are planted."
"Sumeru's next moves are ambitious. They are planning a comprehensive campaign to transform the desert."
Aether raised a hand.
"The Dragon-Rider Corps we observed , has the investigation concluded?"
"Yes."
Something in Endis's expression became more troubled.
"They were units drawn from the original Four-Nation Alliance, with the largest contingent from Mondstadt."
"However, that is not the whole picture."
"According to our sources, two months ago Liyue deployed two hundred Dragon-Rider cavalry toward Inazuma. The total strength of the Alliance's Dragon-Rider Corps is now an unknown quantity."
The weight of that settled over Aether. He pressed the heel of his palm against his temple.
"Where are they finding this many dragons?"
He meant it. It bordered on envy , the kind that sits behind the eyes and burns slightly.
Back in Mondstadt, he had spent considerable resources trying to make a war-beast of Dvalin, the East Wind Dragon, and had nothing to show for it. And yet these nations had assembled entire mounted dragon corps, unit by unit, nation by nation. Individual dragons might not match Dvalin in raw power, but numbers had their own logic.
If he had dragon-riders like that at the Abyss Order's disposal, he would have been willing to cross the Sunless Sea and drag a god back in chains to use as a weapon by now.
He recognised the feeling as envy. He did not bother denying it.
"There is one more matter of significant importance, Your Highness."
Endis's tone shifted, quieter, more deliberate.
"When I attended the festival in disguise, I overheard Lesser Lord Kusanali say, at the gates of the Akademiya , that there exists something capable of curing all illness and breaking all curses. She called it milk."
The room changed.
Every Abyss Mage in the chamber straightened at once, the ambient murmur of the audience cutting to nothing. Even under Aether's gaze, under the weight of his presence, they could not quite contain themselves.
"Cure all illness. Break all curses." Aether's first instinct was to dismiss it. He had heard promises like this before, across dozens of worlds. The words of the desperate and the fraudulent tended to sound remarkably alike.
But then he looked to his side.
Where there had been an Abyss Mage, there was now a man. A human man, standing in the same spot, wearing the same unfamiliar expression of someone who had forgotten what it felt like to have a face.
The certainty Aether had been assembling began to quietly dismantle itself.
So many impossible things had already happened. What was one more?
"Your Highness , I swear it is true."
Endis gave a deep, deliberate nod.
"I verified it myself. I witnessed someone whose Blight had been completely, fully cured. Gone , not suppressed, not managed. Gone."
Aether's gaze dropped. His eyes stilled.
Nobody understood the Blight the way the Abyss did. The Order had studied what happened when the forbidden knowledge of the deep seeped into the minds of those who encountered it. They knew the damage it left. No one in Teyvat understood the Blight's true nature , not as a disease, not as an affliction that could be treated, but as something external. As a force from beyond the world that had sunk its fingers into Teyvat's skin, and the Blight was simply where those fingers showed through. A cry from the world. The sound a world makes when something is eating it alive.
Teyvat itself was already unstable , poorly anchored on the Imaginary Tree, perpetually on the edge of collapse. The Blight could not be treated because it was not a symptom of a human body failing. It was a symptom of a world failing.
Aether had walked through worlds. In his experience, that kind of corrosion was irreversible. The wound did not close. The contamination did not clear.
And yet.
The Blight , gone.
Something shifted in the stillness behind his eyes. Quiet, and very intent.
"Set that aside for a moment."
He raised his head, and his voice, though soft, carried clearly to every corner of the chamber.
"If what you have said is accurate , if the Blight can be resolved , then the curse the Heavenly Principles placed upon the people of Khaenri'ah five hundred years ago can also be resolved."
The room detonated.
Even with Aether present , even with the authority of his bearing pressing down on every figure in the chamber , the Abyss Mages broke. They turned to one another, voices overlapping, hands gesturing, the composure they had maintained through the entire briefing simply gone.
He did not stop them.
He understood. He understood exactly what had just been said, and what it meant to people who had worn these forms for as long as any of them could remember. To be an Abyss Mage was to be hunted on sight, to be called a monster by the people you had once been, to live with the knowledge that every hilichurl stumbling through the wilderness was a former Khaenri'ahn who no longer remembered being human.
Khaenri'ah had been a nation without gods. Its people had taken extraordinary pride in that , in their self-sufficiency, in the proof that humanity needed nothing divine to be great. And then the Heavenly Principles had stripped them of the one thing that had never required divine sanction to possess: the right to their own humanity.
It was the most precise cruelty imaginable.
Now there was a chance , actual, material, touchable , to undo it.
The plan could wait. The Loom of Fate could wait. Vengeance was a luxury that could be deferred.
Being human again could not wait a single day longer.
When the chamber's noise finally ebbed, Aether looked back to Endis.
"This milk. We need it in quantity. Can it be obtained?"
A long pause. Endis's expression became one that had no precedent in the Abyss Order's five-hundred-year history.
"Your Highness… within the Alliance nations, milk is distributed freely."
"They treat it as a universal remedy for common illness. In practice, people collect it even when they are not sick , simply to have it with breakfast."
"To be entirely clear: while it does resolve all illness and all curses, this substance is produced by dairy cattle."
"It is, in fact, simply milk."
"In Mondstadt and Liyue, it is given away at no cost."
"As for Lesser Lord Kusanali , I do not know her precise stockpile, but she stated openly that she intends to cure every last Blight patient in Sumeru. Which implies the quantities are substantial."
"She also mentioned that additional resources from within the Alliance would arrive in support, with the stated goal of ensuring there are no remaining patients in Sumeru within the month."
"The implication is that the supply is effectively inexhaustible."
Another silence , but this one was different from every silence that had come before it in this meeting.
Every Abyss Mage in the room, and Aether himself, hit a wall they had not known was coming.
The thing that could free them. The thing the Heavenly Principles had made them believe was beyond the reach of any power in any world.
Free of charge, from a cow, distributed to anyone who asked, and currently being used as breakfast in Mondstadt.
No one spoke for a very long time.