Interlude Chapter

In Liyue Harbor, Ningguang announces a contest: whoever gathers the materials to rebuild the Jade Chamber — sacrificed against Osial — may ask her any question, answered truthfully. The hunt brings the Traveler together with Shenhe, a strange, unnervingly blunt young woman raised among the adepti by Cloud Retainer after her own father offered her to a monster as a sacrifice; red ropes bind the hatred that ordeal left in her.

Together they retrieve Sunset Vermillionite from the abode of the late adeptus Sea Gazer, and with the opera performer Yun Jin — whose new piece, "The Divine Damsel of Devastation," unknowingly retells Shenhe's own story — they secure the ores for the Wonder Cores. Cloud Retainer provides the Adepti Sigils herself, confiding that the adepti sense a calamity approaching and hoping the journey will help her disciple rejoin human society.

The rebuilt Jade Chamber ascends — and the sea beast Beisht, Osial's wife, rises to destroy it. Forewarned by Beidou, Ningguang meets the assault with mortal strength alone: the Millelith, Keqing, Ganyu, and the Crux Fleet. When a tsunami threatens to swallow the battle and the Traveler is struck down mid-charge, something in Shenhe snaps free: she freezes the wave with a talisman, dives into the vortex, and Beisht is driven back into the depths. At the victory banquet, Yun Jin performs her opera, and Shenhe takes her first uncertain steps toward belonging among humans.

Returning to the giant nail they uncovered in the Chasm, the Traveler and Paimon stumble into unlikely company: the legal adviser Yanfei on secretive business, the oni brawler Arataki Itto with his level-headed deputy Kuki Shinobu, and the enigmatic Yelan, an intelligence agent in Ningguang's service. Mid-quarrel, the ground gives way and drops them all into a lightless ancient ruin far beneath the Chasm — a place where hunger, thirst, and time itself blur, and where every path loops back to its beginning.

The group deduces they are caught in an "antlion's den," a chaotic domain that traps its victims in illusions: one door opens onto each person's deepest fear — for the Traveler, the darkness of the Abyss that took their sibling. Following a distant voice, they drag the yaksha Xiao free of the illusions; he came hunting the fate of his lost brother-in-arms Bosacius, and a lingering memory confirms the general perished here fighting the darkness beneath the Chasm.

Xiao proposes to burn his own life force to hurl the others back to the surface. The group refuses the sacrifice, and Itto punches open another path instead. Riding a platform conjured from an exorcist's Fantastic Compass, they climb toward daylight, Xiao holding the ascent together until his strength fails — and Zhongli, quietly forewarned of the whole venture, catches the falling yaksha. Above ground, Xiao makes a rare peace with survival, and with Liyue's unnamed heroes of the past.

Defeated and imprisoned in Sumeru, Scaramouche now probes Irminsul on Nahida's behalf. Inside the world tree, the puppet uncovers the truth of the Tatarasuna tragedy that shaped him: the kindly overseer Niwa Hisahide never abandoned him. The Fatui's Dottore, disguised as the researcher "Escher," sabotaged the Mikage Furnace, murdered Niwa, and staged the scene to shatter the kabukimono's faith in humanity — then reported his success to Pierro.

Devastated, Scaramouche asks the Traveler whether the past can be changed — then plunges into Irminsul's heart and erases himself from history, buying his long-dead friends a kinder fate. Reality rewrites itself around the Traveler, who alone remembers: in the new Inazuma, Niwa died a hero purging the furnace, the Raiden Gokaden still fell to an heir's inherited hatred, and no one — not Paimon, not even Nahida — recalls that the puppet ever existed.

But Nahida had quietly backed up his memories. Tracing the erased puppet to a merchant's stall in Sumeru City, she returns his past to him; when the mechanical god Shouki no Kami rears up out of his pain, he masters himself and destroys it, and an Anemo Vision answers him. Named "the Wanderer" with the Traveler's help, he acknowledges a debt to them and vows revenge on Dottore — while an unseen voice warns that the fate of Teyvat cannot be changed so easily.

Returning to Mondstadt for the Windblume Festival, the Traveler finds the city subtly wrong — citizens acting out of character — and Albedo on trial for murder, accused of burying bodies by night. Kaeya's defense fails and Jean pronounces him guilty, while a covert invitation leads the Traveler to Venti and the deacon Dahlia, secretly Barbatos's herald. At the retrial comes the stunning turn: the proceedings were staged by Albedo and the Knights to bait out an imposter — a spawn of the dead dragon Durin that had replaced Captain Hertha, one of many shapeshifters seeded through the city. Albedo's "victims" were such creatures, killed in self-defense and quietly buried.

Unmasked, the false Hertha unleashes a monster assault on Mondstadt. Diluc, Kaeya, Eula, Klee, and the Knights hold the gates while Venti lends the winds, and the attack is broken. Albedo then convenes a Tripartite Conference with the Anemo Archon and the witches of the Hexenzirkel: Durin's remains are stirring with jealous hunger and must be dealt with for good.

After passing Alice's chessboard trial to earn the needed reagents, Albedo plans not merely to kill Durin but to remake him. As Venti, crowned Windblume Star, sings at the festival's height, alchemy transforms Mini Durin — the dragon's pure-hearted counterpart — into a human boy, granting Rhinedottir's "evil" creation a second, gentler life, and Albedo a quiet triumph of his art.