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“Fangshi?”
“I think it’s ‘exorcist’ in common Teyvatian. I look for evil spirits and drive them away.”
His companion took slow steps through the marsh-side path, but her long brown curls still bounced with her every movement. Her bow was still in her hands, ready to embed the grass with precisely etched dots of ash. His clan was never big on archery, and the archer Allogenes he saw wielded the bow for something else – be it loops of Hydro strings or raw Adeptal power.
It was the first time he’d seen someone actually use the bow as it was, for all its pros and cons.
Perhaps, too, the first time he’d seen fire resting in one place with such control.
“But in Liyue, you don’t really have churches, right? Not like Mondstadt,” she piped up. Every Pyro Allogene he’d met faced life with a spark, and the cheery archer was no exception. “Are you in a group, or…what was it, a clan?”
At the word clan, he opened his mouth, but bit back what was about to come out. That wasn’t a story for someone who had sniped all the belligerent Hillichurls from their towers for him, and even less a story for the quickly constricting skyline around them. The trees of Wuwang Hill were hidden by the advancing cliff face, but the pervasiveness of its atmosphere leaked and tumbled down to their path, making him draw his jacket closer to himself.
He didn’t register his silence until the girl walking alongside him spoke again.
“Oh, please correct me if I said something rude! I really don’t understand many mystical things,” said Amber, apologia spilling all over the letters. “Or…most things about Liyue, in general. I’ve only been near Stone Gate for dispatch missions.”
“Don’t worry, you’re right. There are many exorcist clans in Liyue,” he answered belatedly. “And I don’t think I know anything about Mondstadt customs at all, so please don’t worry. Not many can fully understand Liyue, even if they’ve lived here their entire lives.”
Even he couldn’t, try as he might to perfect his craft. Liyue was undeniably a country of spirits, and for anyone not acquainted with how they worked outside human logic, that was one part of their home forever a mystery. However, as Liyue was birthed from earth, so its language was born from the cracks in its base given meaning. He knew the sounds those cracks made as they split open and formed the world he lived in, but he could never string them together to make new life, as Rex Lapis did thousands of years ago, and as two clashing poets did right in front of him every Tuesday.
“Still, I feel…weird, I guess, that even now, I barely know anything about where my grandfather was from.”
Wuwang’s presence was behind them before they knew it, and ahead was Qingce’s signature terraced rice paddies. The rope bridge to the heart of the village was right in front of them, swaying as Chongyun stopped, his weight left to the twine’s mercy.
“Is he the one you’re looking for?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, the rope bridge’s swaying increasing as she stepped on. “I haven’t seen him in a while, and he never talked about his hometown, or why he left. I only found out the name when I found something written in Liyuean and tried translating, though…I’m really bad at it!”
It did make sense. Put Amber in the sea of his peers in the harbor, and she’d fit right in, looks and personality-wise. It was just that out of all the elders that he knew from Qingce Village, none seemed to match up with Amber’s features, nor did he know of any that left for Mondstadt.
“This place is really beautiful!” Amber said, as she hopped ahead to take in the view. “Thank you…er, xie xie, Chongyun! I accidentally got you in a Mitachurl fight, then made you walk all the way here, too.”
“It’s the least I could do,” he nodded back at her sheepish grin. “I wander around Liyue regularly, so I’m used to trekking to many places.”
The sound of Amber’s doll’s feet broke his concentration, sending him whirling in alarm straight to the doll’s pondering owner. “Do exorcists in Liyue usually go around the country like you? I thought they’d be training in temples, or something like that….”
“Chongyun? What a pleasant surprise.”
The Yuheng’s voice answered Amber from one of the bamboo tables, making him hurriedly bow. Funny, when Keqing knew most of the gritty details of the answer, but Amber didn’t come here for his story. She came to find her own story, started even before she was born, and if there was anyone who’d appreciate a traveler in their lands, it was Keqing.
“Good afternoon, Lady Keqing. I’m here to guide Amber, a visitor from Mondstadt and a descendant of a Qingce Village resident. Amber, this is the Yu–”
“Just call me Keqing,” the woman replied, introduction clipped short. The Yuheng was a proud woman, but she was also his frequent companion when commissions took him all around the country. Whatever mantle a member of the Qixing had to wear came with the prudence to know when to bear it, and judging by her reaction, today was an off-day. “And you are?”
At Keqing's invitation, Amber jolted out of her daze. “Oh, uh, hello! I’m Amber, from the Knights of Favonius in Mondstadt, but I’m not on official business. I’m here to find my grandfather. Uh, hen gaoxing…”
The Yuheng standing above her people at the Jade Palace was a perfectionist to a fault, but “just Keqing’s” smile was genuine as she approached the fidgeting Amber. “We always appreciate people trying to find their roots. I’m sure the people here can help you. Did he ever tell you anything about Liyue, or Qingce?”
Amber’s uneasiness seemed to fade away to the chipper girl cheering on her explosive doll back at Dihua. “I…remember one dish. He never talked about Liyue much, but he used to prepare this…I’m not sure what it’s called. It was like a sweet version of tofu.”
“Almond tofu!”
Chongyun’s head nearly smacked into the bamboo table. Yes, she’d been here before when he was on commissions, riding on the elders’ laughter at her enthusiastic campaign. Yes, she’d crossed his mind more than once on the trip here. No, he did not want her showing up now, not in this strange motley of characters he’d found himself in.
“This is a strange Liyue cuisine enthusiasts meeting,” the voice said as the sound of a chair being dragged filled his ears. There was only one chair left on the table, and the faint smell of incense wafting over confirmed just where Hu Tao had chosen to park and point fingers. “Rich girl, can’t eat spicy food, and…a newcomer, too!”
“I’m Amber, from Mondstadt!” the voice beside him starts, immediately taking to the spark carried by the newcomer. “I’m looking for my grandfather. He was from here, but I don’t have any clue–”
“Is, or was?” asked Hu Tao. “Average age of this village is smack in the middle of my customers’ usual age range, so you might be–”
“Amber, this is Hu Tao. She’s the director of a funeral parlor at Liyue Harbor.”
Something inside him felt responsible for Amber’s comfort during her search for her roots, and the not-so-subtle reference to a possibility of it being all in vain was the opposite of comfort. Slowly, he raised his head to take in the girl sitting right in front of him. Not a thing had changed about her demeanor in the face of a newcomer. She was still just as she was, slightly discomforting in its familiarity.
“...Oh, are you asking if he’s dead or not?” Amber piped up, with more confusion than horror. “I’m…honestly not really sure? I hope not, though.”
“If you can give the Ministry of Civil Affairs his name, you should be able to get his registered address, as well as other identifying information,” Keqing supplied, smoothly glossing over the unavoidable fact Hu Tao laid on the table. “Though the nearest branch office is still a ways off.”
“He went by a Mondstadtian name in Mondstadt, so I don’t know what he was called here,” Amber somberly replied. “There was a lot I didn’t know about him…”
“Huh,” Hu Tao said, apparently piecing together the facts. “Grandfathers, right? You never really know with them. You know mine apparently sailed the world with my grandmother, and even got arrested once?” She snorted. “Then everyone was calling him a wise old sage back then. Those beards tell the strangest stories sometimes.”
“Your grandfather?” Amber asked.
“I mean, everyone has grandfathers,” Hu Tao shrugged. “Two, even. Three, for the lucky ones. You’re not particularly special.”
Amber took the faux bluntness in stride, laughing as she replied. “Yeah, but they do have a way of making people feel special. I only knew one grandfather, but he taught me everything I knew about gliding, fed me what I wanted, told me all the stories I could ever want to hear, all that! That’s why I really want to find him.”
From the other corner of the table, Keqing seemed lost in thought, but the welcoming smile free from the Qixing name soon came to the surface as she said her piece. “Family is central to every Liyuean. My grandfather was like that too. He was a scholar, but he never said no when I wanted to steal a book away from him.”
“That’s so sweet!” Amber said, slightly wide-eyed. If her hopes ever deflated with Hu Tao’s suggestion, they were back in full force. “One of my Knight friends said that I was just spoiled rotten, but I knew that wasn’t the case!”
“Well, my yeye has the best shrimp dumpling recipe in all of Teyvat!” Hu Tao retorted, a sudden jolt of competition entering the conversation.“Better than anything Wanmin could ever make, too!”
“Oooh, my grandfather liked to make Almond Tofu,” Amber said, puffing up her cheeks. “And…what was it? Spicy stir fry?”
“Damn, your yeye actually fed you healthy things?” Hu Tao irked, disgust apparent on her face. “My yeye loved laying in on the soy sauce.”
“My grandfather…tried recreating an ancient recipe,” Keqing muttered, eyes mostly staring at nothing, but a smile definitely grounded in the now. “It was simple – just spicy meat stuffed in cornbread, but it never quite matched the descriptions in the texts. Still, those failures–”
“Are failures!” Hu Tao cut her off. “You said so yourself, Lady Keqing!”
“Yeah!” Amber echoed as she pumped both arms, fully immersed in the faux competition. “I think even I can make cornbread like that, and my grandfather surely could, too!”
The measure of displeasure Keqing’s smile screeched as it stretched resonated across the four. “And have your grandfathers successfully brought back a millenia old recipe?”
“Maybe it was lost for a reason,” countered Hu Tao, setting an elbow on the table. “We’re in Liyue, the wooden fence next to you might be a thousand years old.”
When Amber erupted into laughter and Keqing, after a moment of blankness, shrugged with placid defeat, Chongyun noticed that he was staring at the bamboo table.
As expected, when Pyro girls, when one particular Pyro girl, came, his body moved before his mind. However, the bubbling inside his chest was not violent, demanding release from the shackles he himself put. It rose into the empty space in his chest, borne as a chip from Amber’s excitement in Dihua, crumbling as he realized what she was looking for, and forming a gaping mass of nothing.
He knew this. It was the feeling as he woke up with his clan’s adoration square in his four-year old palm.
“But I’m sure Liyue’s exorcists have cooler stories than food!” Amber said, placing one hand on his shoulder. “Chongyun, don’t let us overshadow you!”
“Oh, I never really talked to both of my grandfathers,” he mumbled. “One died before my parents got married.”
Yes, Chongyun never knew him, but he lived nonetheless. He carried the name to him, to his mother and her tainted bloodline, or so the whispers spoke before they found her.
Amber shrugged as she patted his shoulder. “Same-ish for me, too. What about the other one?”
The answer was in modern legend, a throwaway line in the rise of a heroine. Embellish it enough to hide the stench, and it becomes yet another feather on her coattails.
The truth, whole and ugly, was out of his mouth before he knew it.
“He went mad when his wife died, struck a deal with a malevolent spirit to get her back, left my aunt for dead, and killed himself soon after.”
He remembered the epiphany being like this. A quiet boil, into a quiet overflow.
The buzz surrounding the table immediately fell cold. Amber’s face visibly dropped as her grip on his shoulder involuntarily tightened. Keqing, mostly an observer with the occasional quip, seemed to jump right back into activity as her head sharply turned towards him.
Hu Tao’s face, in his peripheral vision, turned into a completely blank mask.
“Is…your aunt okay?” Amber asked, concern slowing her speech down. If the light wasn’t tricking him, there seemed to be tears swelling up in the corners of her eyes.
“Yes, she still visits sometimes,” he answered, softening his tone to match the sudden somberness and the guilt crashing into him. “She fought her way out.”
“...I wasn’t aware that was what happened with the Chonghua branch clan incident,” Keqing muttered, half to herself, half in what sounded apologetic. “I only knew that their village fell into disrepair after the deaths of the head of the branch.”
“That’s still right,” he answered, not meeting her gaze. If he never really thought of the man at the center of the incident as his grandfather, he doubted even the Yuheng and her declassified files did, either. “I truly apologize for the main branch not taking enough responsibility, even if I’ve temporarily…disassociated from them for that.”
“Oh no, is that why you’re wandering…”
Amber released her hand in his, covering her mouth with both hands. The words she eked out were barely audible. “I’m so sorry for prying, oh my gods please don’t blame yourself for that. You did absolutely nothing wrong in all of this.”
He stared at his hands. He’d been so committed to making Amber comfortable, but he’d been the one to inadvertently bring her to tears. The fears of being too distant had been realized ten-fold, like so many other times he’d overcorrected.
This, too, was a familiar feeling. The nausea of going from extreme to extreme made his head spin, until one voice stopped the pendulum in his mind.
“Amber, if your grandfather had truly passed, I’d know. I would have read about it in a will. He would have never forgotten you.”
Hu Tao’s entry into the fraught conversation was slow, so unlike her pompous entrance into the Qingce scenery. “You have my word for that.”
Amber turned towards her, eyes still glassy. “You really think so?”
“I know so. Grandfathers…actually, humans tend to be forgetful, but they’ll never forget what they held close to their heart, especially in death.”
From across the table, Keqing bit her lip, then looked down as she pushed herself to stand. “Amber, I happen to be talking to the leader of this village, Granny Ruoxin. She might recognize your grandfather if you give her a description. We can all go talk to her.”
“Really?” Amber asked, eyes widening. “Oh my gods, thank you so much! I’ve caused so much trouble since I came here, but everyone’s been so nice to me.”
“I’ll have to pass. Lady Keqing?”
Hu Tao’s voice struck his ears with a new tune. Her hands laid neatly atop the bamboo table as she turned towards her seatmate. “Sorry, but I think Granny Ruoxin won’t be too glad to see me. Can you take Amber there? I have something I want to talk with Chongyun about.”
Keqing looked at her, thoughts practically visible in the lines of her eyes as she squinted. The moment of consideration was barely perceptible, however, as she stood up. “I understand. Amber?”
“W–uh, yes, Lady Ke–”
“It’s just Keqing,” the Yuheng smiled again as she slid out of her seat. “Would you like to have some fish later? I’d like to try some Mondstadt-style food, too.”
“I–yes, I love fish! But are you all okay?” Amber said, turning her head to the other three as she adjusted her goggles. “Then, um, I’ll see you guys soon, Hu Tao, Chongyun.”
She bowed, somewhat frantically, judging by the way her hair fell into her face as she recovered. “Also, Chongyun, I’m really sorry. I made a mess at Dihua, and–”
“Don’t be,” Hu Tao said, cutting off the frantic no rising in his throat. “He won’t take it against you.”
Amber looked at him, and he gave her a small smile and nod, but in his periphery, Hu Tao was still looking right at him, business pose unperturbed. As Amber called back her walking doll and followed Keqing, still stealing glances at their table, he found the strength to look right at her.
“What did you do to Granny Ruoxin?” he asked, more interrogative than he intended.
“Nothing,” she said, hands still planted on the table. “Might have made her bust a lung when I pitched something about Yun Jin sealing her coffin. Literally, this time.”
The levity in her words wasn’t shared with her face. “Why did you want to–”
“I didn’t know. About you spite-leaving your clan.”
He stared at her. Her eyes were directly on him, red burning with urgency. For all the distance he felt from him, they operated in close circles. Where the Yuheng saw a civil case of child abandonment, the Wangsheng Hus probably saw a disruption in the cycle he once witnessed the late director talk about. “I didn’t…leave, and I don’t feel any spite at all. I just found how they wanted to sweep all of Aunt Shenhe’s experiences under the rug and just celebrate her being under Cloud Retainer’s wing…disrespectful.”
That was it. The emptiness he felt as Amber scoured an unfamiliar place for family, like he was staring at something too dazzling. The emptiness as his clan members praised his “innate talent” and Shenhe’s “prowess under the Adepti”, like what remained of both of them when that was stripped away.
Her eyebrows furrowed. The hard-lined gaze’s edges softened slowly, for reasons he still couldn't grasp.
“Do you like your clan?”
He pursed his lips. Many times, he thought he should be the one asking her that. Their circles linked together in ways beyond the harbor happenings, and in the gaps of the intersection, he often caught her smiling, as if speaking haughty words only meant for him.
“They’re all I knew.” Still, he answered.
“And you left them.”
“I…still want to go back. Someday.” Family, as Keqing had said. “But they’re not all I have, especially now.”
She took his words into her fold and closed her eyes, drawing her hands back to herself with a sigh. “I’d like to think my yeye is the main reason why I have a good enough head on my shoulders,” she said, massaging one shoulder with the opposite hand. “Maybe I’m just amazed you turned out alright despite having a shit one.”
“I don’t want to ever be like him,” he immediately said as she opened her eyes. “I don’t want to hurt the people I love to chase something that might not even be possible.”
For a split second, he thought he saw Hu Tao’s eyes widen, and in that split second, he wondered why she would. That much has always been obvious ever since he’d found Shenhe again. For years, he had wanted his family to see behind the all-encompassing gift, and so he had pursued every path just to become something to them.
But he was already something in others’ eyes, he realized. Keqing’s occasional travel companion. Briefly, Amber’s melee partner, taking on the heavy shields her arrows couldn’t pierce.
To this girl whom he’d known for so long, yet so little, just who was he that made her want to ask?
“Then,” Hu Tao started, pushing herself away from the table, “Seeing that I obviously had the best grandfather out of the three, let it be my honor to give you a certified authentically great grandfather experience!”
At full height and with her arms crossed in a grin, it was like the somber girl had never existed. The danger that went through his mind at Amber’s Pyro vision, the mischief he associated with the mist of Wuwang – all of his thoughts as he crossed from Dihua to Qingce were there.
Out of instinct, he closed his eyes, bracing for some impact. Was she going to do an old lady caricature? Was she going to feed him something?
He was about to open his eyes and know when the faint smell of plums tickled his nose.
“This is my yeye’s hat, just resized a bit to fit my head,” her voice came. “Is my head really that big? Wow.”
Indeed, the hat partially covered his eyes, submerging him in partial darkness. If he squinted, he could just make out the dirt underneath, punctuated by brown and red kneeling in front of him.
“He let me wear it even when he was still alive. It made me feel important, like I was already the boss of the parlor. When I had this hat, everyone had to follow. Zhongli had to make me tea. Ferrylady had to complete my couplet. Yeye himself had to piggyback me until his doctor said no.”
Where Amber and Keqing clearly talked from memory, true to her poetry slam background, Hu Tao wielded her stories as weapons, using them to steer the conversation to her mercy, whoever be caught in it be damned.
He wondered what she wanted to achieve with a tone so steeped in nostalgia.
“Why all this?” he asked, his slice of Qingce still but blurred streaks interlaced with her colors. If he let them bleed into each other, perhaps he could see the stories that she’d brought that day, feel a little closer to something he never truly felt.
“Nothing, I just think my grandfather would like you.”