Although the village still suffered damage, the core area was miraculously preserved thanks to this rampart built from items familiar to every household.
What was even more miraculous was that after the seawater receded, people found that these clay jars, which had endured the impact of divine power and soaking in seawater, were actually intact. The gaps between them had been firmly filled and solidified by sand and marine organisms, forming a single entity that became even more indestructible.
The survivors stood before that curved rampart made of countless clay jars, silent.
[Chapter Two: The Legacy of Jar and Tile]
The surviving villagers realized that the "Jar Dike" born of despair might look ridiculous, but the wisdom it contained far exceeded their imagination.
The curved structure could divide immense force, the jars filled with sand were as steady as boulders, and the gaps could be solidified by natural forces.
They had defeated a "God."
Thus, under Old Pickler's leadership and the villagers' spontaneous organization, a long-term project began. People no longer discarded broken empty jars at will but organized to collect them, fill them with sand, and began to build a true "Jar Dike" along the coastline, just like building a stone wall.
As time passed and trade flourished, this once small fishing village gradually developed into a prosperous market town where merchants gathered. New building materials, such as solid stone transported from The Chasm and high-quality timber purchased from Guili Assembly, were widely used.
However, the older generation of craftsmen stubbornly adhered to an unwritten tradition: when constructing the most important pier foundations, ancestral hall walls, or the piers of stone bridges over water, they would solemnly bury several intact clay pickling jars filled with sand at the core.
This was not superstition, but a spiritual inheritance; they called it "Setting the Foundation."
The jars filled with sand symbolized great virtue carrying all things; their circular shape signified reunion and perfection; the tightly sealed mouths further implied stability and thoroughness.
More importantly, those jars contained the memory of a time when mortals once stood against a deity.
This small ritual prayed for safety and commemorated those years of fighting the sea for life and turning the mundane into the miraculous.
Later, Rex Lapis defeated the "Sea God" and sealed him away. He led the people, and Liyue Harbor was officially established, with construction flourishing.
The arrival of peace meant the "Jar Dike" no longer expanded; people would only maintain it every so often. Later on, the "Jar Dike" gradually fell into neglect and vanished into the long river of history.
Many years later, a genius architect inspired by the story of the "Jar Dike" captured inspiration from the curved structure of the pickling jars.
He directed craftsmen to fire clay into uniform, hollow "tiles" in batches. After several improvements, these evolved into "Tubular Tiles" with concave-convex tongues and flat "Plate Tiles," which were widely used on roofs.
These tiles not only fit tightly together with extremely smooth drainage, but their light, hollow structure could also withstand strong winds and was durable.
Looking out, the rows upon rows of tiles on the houses of early Liyue Harbor bore a faint resemblance to the "Jar Dike" stacked by the villagers back then.
As for the Glazed Tiles that would later become radiant and a symbol of Liyue architecture? Their birth was even more wondrous.
According to ancient records, the breakthrough in firing technology originally stemmed from the absent-mindedness of a young kiln worker.
While transporting a batch of clay tiles specially made for the General Affairs Department, he accidentally tripped, knocking over the color jars he was carrying to paint patterns. The jars contained sea minerals and seashell dust, which were all spilled onto the unfired clay tile bodies.
The kiln worker was terrified but could not undo it, so he had to steel himself and push this batch of "waste" into the kiln. To his surprise, after the nirvana of the fierce fire, what came out of the kiln was not the expected waste, but beautiful "Glazed Tiles" that presented a jade-like warmth and a deep seawater-like luster!
From then on, Glazed Tiles guarded the myriad lights of Liyue's homes.
[Chapter Three: The "Jar" of Hidden Merit]
Centuries passed in the blink of an eye, and Liyue Harbor had become the prosperous commercial port of the Teyvat continent.
A thousand sails gathered and traffic flowed like water; Glazed Tiles shimmered under the sunlight, and the tiered buildings displayed the grand scenery of the mortal world.
That story about the God, the ingenuity, and the pickling jars had long since become like distant silhouettes of sails, buried in the vast mists of history, never to be mentioned again.
Today, only a few damaged bamboo slips in the General Affairs Department's archives still bear a faint record: "...requisitioned folk clayware and pottery to resist the sea breeze and strengthen city defenses..."
What that "sea breeze" referred to and the story behind it were known to almost no one.
Occasionally, workers would dig up ancient pickling jars from the soil by the sea; the jar bodies remained intact but had merged with the earth and rock. They would be briefly scrutinized by archaeologists and then categorized as "ancient domestic waste." No one knew the mission they had once carried, nor did anyone know the story of Old Pickler and the villagers.
They remained silent, as if wanting to speak but stopping.
Only those old-fashioned shops or families who valued the past would follow the ancient tradition when renovating ancestral property, burying a clay jar filled with sand under the new foundation.
The craftsmen would mutter about "protecting the house" or "gathering energy," but no one could clearly explain the original source of this ritual anymore, treating it merely as a lucky rule passed down from ancestors.
Today's Liyue people walk on smooth and solid streets, live in magnificent houses, and enjoy the sturdy city defenses left by Rex Lapis and skilled craftsmen.
They do not know that the original "solidity" of this land did not stem solely from the protection of Rex Lapis, but also from those simple pickling jars that once carried the flavor of every household's life and resisted the wrath of a God.
They condensed the ingenuity and unity that mortals burst forth with in desperate straits.
Liyue Harbor remains prosperous.
And its "foundation" remains deeply hidden in history, silent, yet never having disappeared.
[The place where we stand originates from this land; our solid immortality belongs to this land.]
(End)
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