Chapter Text
Her feet once again complained in discomfort from the soaking and muddy socks, but this time there was an additional pain: the discomfort that accompanied long hikes through uneven terrain in shoes that were not meant for walking long distances and served more as dress shoes that could take you from one side of town to another, a pain that Hu Tao felt because she had spent the entire night and would spend the entire morning now that the sun was rising walking away from Liyue Harbor and she was still in the middle of the Liyue countryside surrounded by continuous fields of untamed earth broken by the occasional plot of empty farmland observed by a central wooden hut with the remnants of a fire still burning inside that Tao had yearned to sit around just to feel the smallest hint of warmth, but she continued her hike, forcing herself to ignore the stinging sensation of cold biting into her muscles and the dull numb pain of blood retreating from her fingers and toes. She hooked her thumbs around the straps of a worn-down backpack she used for school that was not filled with books but instead a change of clothes and whatever food rations she was able to sneak out of the house without waking her parents, because after her Grandfather’s funeral concluded, and the Hu family and their friends said their goodbyes and retreated from the bleak, ashen gray courtyard into the warmth of the walls of the compound where they huddled around stoves and drank tea and ate dinner, Tao simply retreated to her room where she threw herself onto her bed and let herself cry because she could no longer control it because the feeling of the cold and her wet socks and scraped knees from falling to the cobble as she did and the sound of rain outside all reminded her that he was gone and that there was nothing she could do, until, later into the night when all had gone still and the stoves had been put out and her family were all asleep, did she remember that there was something that she could do if she wanted to see Old Hu one more time in earnest, where she could say goodbye on her terms: there was a place tucked away up north in Wuwang hill where the realm of the living and the spirit realm were closer than anywhere else, a place that was a long-kept family secret that she wasn’t supposed to know about but Old Hu had shown her once before when he had taken her on what would be his last trip to Wuwang hill, where she could go to the place where spirits waited to be whisked away to the afterlife, a place that was not entirely belonging to the living nor the dead, a place that she could visit, and a place where her grandfather might be, or at least where she hoped he would be, since the idea of him not being there was unimaginable. It was this thought, this idea that she might be able to say goodbye again that kept her walking through Liyue, navigating only by the light of the stars, a small lantern which would not be of use for much longer as it needed an oil refill even before she grabbed it off her night stand, and now the dim light of the sun slowly rising over the distant horizon.
After packing what she could, she turned off the oil lamp and exited her room through her window because leaving by the door was too loud and would have woken her parents, so she placed her backpack on the wet ground outside of her window before slipping herself out, her black shoes she wore whenever she went to the funeral parlor making a disgusting sound from impacting and sinking into the mud. She wore her uniform that her grandfather made her wear whenever she worked at the parlor, shorts and all, the same thing she wore during the funeral just a few hours before, with the addition of her grandfather's hat, which was too large for her head, but she wore it anyways, with a dull and faded plum blossom secured to it with a black ribbon that she would be able to replace in the coming weeks when the plum trees started to blossom again, but now her blossom which was fragile and crumbled when you tried to touch it had no scent and was there purely because the hat looked empty without it, and when wearing it she had to keep a hand on the rim at all times to prevent it from sliding around on her head and falling off into the muddy ground, as the last thing she wanted to do was to see her grandfather for the last time with his had soiled and ruined, just like how he had always told her to be careful with it and not to drop it whenever he let her play with it because it took so much effort to clean the black cloth and to replace the blossom if the hat landed on it because a blossom replaced before it lost its scent was a blossom wasted. So she walked through the terrain of Liyue, letting the major roads guide her but still keeping her distance from them just in case she ran into characters of a less-than-savory type, since it wasn’t until she was outside of the harbor itself and she had a run in with a man who she assumed was a farmer carrying his goods into town on a wagon which had seen better days that had seen her silhouette in the dark distance that she realized that being a thirteen year old girl by herself out in the Liyue country was a dangerous prospect, but she had set her mind to what she wanted to do and so she continued on, her heart racing from the run in with the farmer that had a lustful sort of venom in his voice that she had only heard tales of from her mother who she had quickly disengaged from the second she heard him call out to her, and she was sure he hadn’t even seen her face.
The sun had began to peek over the horizon, and Tao could feel the sly tickles of daylight’s heat against her frozen cheeks providing a relieving distraction from the two things that were on her mind: how she would make it all the way to Wuwang Hill, and what she would say to her grandfather, since now that she was too far into her journey to turn back, she had her sights set on Wangshu Inn where she first thought she could buy supplies and food and stay if needed, but she soon realized that she didn’t have any money on her, something that she kicked herself out of frustration for now but in the moment while she was hastily throwing clothes and food into her bag her eyes still sore from crying as much as she had been, it hadn’t even crossed her mind to consider that this trip would be four days round trip and that she would need more than the day’s or so worth of rations she had prepared to properly survive both the energy-intensive hike through the marshes and uneven grasslands of the Liyue countryside and the cold weather of the Teyvat winter. And for the matter of her grandfather, she had to explain to him why she was there all on her own without the guidance of her parents or uncle, how she got to Wuwang hill herself, and then she would have to figure out how she wanted to say goodbye again, and that was all if he was actually there, a concept that she didn’t pay much mind to since she kept telling herself not to worry, that he would be there no matter what because he loved her and he would wait for her to say goodbye again.
The last time she walked over the tall and spongy grass that twisted her ankles to walk on that covered a majority of the walk from Liyue Harbor to Wuwang Hill and Qingce village when she was of ten years of age; it was during the warm autumn and the hike took place over three days, as they took a day of rest at Wangshu Inn where they explored the intriguing inn built into a massive tree that had been there for longer than most anybody could remember and was run by a lady that made Tao suspicious, even back then when she was just first developing her sense of who was a good person and who wasn’t, until they went to sleep filled up on warm soup and tea and woke up early next morning long before the sun had risen and by the light of their oil lamps they packed and departed for Wuwang hill where they reached what Old Hu had called The Border, and he took her in to meet with the lingering spirits that waited each for their own reason before finally leaving any tie to the mortal realm behind for good and transitioning into the spirit world. She had gotten to see the beauty and peace of death firsthand, and it was then where she saw all those spirits happy and content and accepting of their fate that she decided that she would protect this place with all her heart when it came time for her to take the responsibility of directing the Parlor, as the meditative peace and tranquility that permeated throughout the air in that place felt too sacred to her to let anybody disturb, and so she left that place and made the three day trek with her grandfather home thinking all the while of the conversations she had with the spirits that presided at that moment and the sights that she saw, and now as she walked there for the second time in her life, now alone and cold, she only wished that she had spent more time during that journey home cherishing the time she spent with Old Hu, since now she had nobody to laugh with around an improvised fire or under a tree warmly lit by the autumn sun while eating fresh wild sunsettias. She longed for companionship the further the sun rose into the sky and the closer she neared to Dihua Marsh which held Wangshu Inn in the middle of it, as the more natural light flooded into Liyue and illuminated what had once been brilliant yellow and gold grasses and trees with leaves of the most vibrant autumnal colors which were now dead and brown and cold and lifeless waiting for the warm sun to breathe life into them once more, the more she instinctively looked around for the parental figure that she had been so used to always having around to help her with any problems she might have faced, as even when she was organizing her grandfather’s funeral, her mother was around to help her and answer any question she might have, and she on a few occasions asked her uncle a couple of questions regarding the more technical side of things, but now she was all on her own with something she didn’t have many years worth of experience already since her family were not adventurers but instead worked primarily in an office in the midst of Liyue Harbor, so her legs were thin and weak and her feet were not accustomed to walking on anything other than the paved streets of the harbor and she didn’t even know how to make her own fire as there was always something around the house that made that easy, so she would have to improvise in a way that she never even fathomed.
It was late morning when she was just beginning to enter the area of Guili Plains, and she started to worry what her parents and family thought had happened to her, and she kicked herself for not thinking to leave a note somewhere saying where she was, since for all they knew she had been abducted or had died while they slept, when in reality she was alive, maybe not safe, maybe not even well, but she was out in Guili Plains now on her own volition, alive, and nobody forced her there, and she imagined that was all her mother would have had to know in order for her not to worry about her little plum, as her mother was kind and caring and understanding of the wild emotions and untamed jollility of her little girl since she took after her mother when she was young, being fiery and fierce and always burning like a magic, everburning flame with plenty of heat and comfort to spare, and as long as Tao’s mother understood that whatever Tao was doing was for her own reasons, whatever those may be, she did not worry about what she was doing since she knew that no matter what she did or said it would not stop Tao from doing that, since she had been much the same as a little girl, but now Tao’s mind could not shake the guilt of leaving her mother without telling her that it was her own fault that she was gone and nobody else’s, not hers, not anybody else’s because she hated making her mother worry for any reason at all because she did not deserve that at all, but she tried to tell herself that there was nothing to worry about, that she would be home soon, that she was safe and sound, but her head still could not shake the guilt. Tao imagined her compound, cold and quiet and solemn the day after they all said goodbye to Old Hu, and they awoke knowing that Tao would be sulking and not wanting to get out of bed, but they would have to shake her out anyways since she still had to go to school and they would have knocked on her door and received no reply, then they would have slowly opened the door to her room and seen it empty, lacking their daughter and a backpack and a lantern, which would have been normal had it not been for the missing lantern which Tao would not have had a reason for if she simply had left early for school, so they would have searched the house for her, and somebody would have noticed that Old Hu’s hat would have been missing from the shrine which Tao still held firmly to her head as she trudged through the grass and approached old stone ruins from many generations ago, and they would have immediately become worried at the prospect that Tao had been long gone by that point, since she was, and they would have started shouting her name and would have put in a report with the Millileth saying that their daughter was missing, and with all of that uncertainty the house now would have been suffocating in anxiety and fear that something had happened to their little plum.
She found a spot in the remnants of stone structures that once stood here long long ago when Rex Lapis was still young where she could rest her legs as her muscles ached and felt like they were about to give out since she had never been one for long distance walking, since when she played in the courtyard or at school she sprinted and let her energy out in large bursts to which she recovered quickly, ready to explode at another moment’s notice at the exact same intensity before, but now that her legs were forced to slowly let that energy out they didn’t quite know how to respond and now they could barely carry the small girl. Her brow was drenched with sweat even though she thought it was too cold outside for her to be sweating, and while she rested she took off the hat and cleaned it, letting her mind calm as she did, releasing all of the stress and fear and anxiety that came with walking by herself and letting her mind run wild, and letting herself enter a meditative state while she wiped the black cloth clean and made sure the dull plum blossom looked nice and the emblem at the front was shining and polished and brilliant, although it still was much too big for her head.
It was approaching afternoon when Tao reached Wangshu Inn, where she marveled at the scale of the ancient tree with buildings for rooms and balconies for eating and lounging built in between the twisting and winding branches that loomed over Guili Plains behind her as well as Dihua Marsh beyond, a sight that she had only seen once before and even though she had grown a considerable amount she still found the size of the inn impossible to a dizzying degree which made it hard for her to approach the inn–a difficulty that was not aided by the fact that she did not know how she should even begin asking for a room, or if she could even get one in the first place since she had not but a hand full of mora on her person, a few coins strewn about the bottom of her bag that were left over from the money her mother had given her for lunch the week prior. She figured that she could at least get something out of the nice lady that always manned the front desk since she was alone and cold and young and helpless, even with an amount of mora that would barely buy her a small meal much less a night spent in the nicest in on this half of Teyvat, so she took a deep breath and approached the enormous tree that cast a grand shadow onto her and sent chills down her spine which she didn’t know if they were chills of fear or from being cold. If I can’t buy a room, I can at least buy a nice cup of tea, she thought as she boarded the elevator from the ground floor seating which was empty now as people much preferred to dine at elevation around warm stoves and lamps which were absent from the ground floor, and as she ascended through the air in the small box with a few grown men that looked at her with looks ranging from suspicious to concerned, she could feel the air around her warm considerably, the bare skin of her legs springing to life with a jolt of energy flying through them which made Tao want to sprint to the front desk but she didn’t as she forced herself to be mature and composed since she was in a place that was filled with socialites and the wealthy and adults that expected more of her just like her father told her to behave and be calm and to compose herself whenever guests were over to do business, so when the elevator reached the top and the men stepped calmly off onto the deck, so did she, where she followed her fuzzy memory of the place to where she remembered the front desk was. She walked up and greeted the nice lady at the front desk and asked how much a stay there would cost and the lady did not answer, instead asking what she was doing there alone and Tao did not answer, instead continuing to ask how much it would cost to stay there, but they talked past each other, Tao not listening to her concerns as anxiety throbbed in her ears deafening her, and the lady at the desk not paying any attention to Tao’s inquiries since to her there was a lost girl in front of her, and so eventually they strike a deal that Tao could stay in a tucked away janitor’s closet that didn’t see much use and was more like a room anyways at this point, where she could gather a mat and some blankets for her to sleep with to which Tao said it was fine and that she only needed a pillow but the nice lady insisted, and so an hour and a half later Tao sat against the wall of an unused and empty janitor’s closet with a mat placed on the floor with a folded pile of blankets and a pillow at the base of it, a lamp dimly burning, and she simple stared at the ceiling, with not a single thought running through her mind until she figured it was late enough to go to sleep and she made her bed and changed clothes, neatly folding her uniform and placing the hate delicately atop the folded pile and she slipped under the covers and went to sleep.
The next morning the world swam around her as she blinked her eyes open which did not want to open, wishing to stay shut for as long as possible, but she forced them open with her mind becoming aware of the rest of her body which ached and felt petrified and her joints felt like stone which she remembered feeling the last time she woke up in Wangshu Inn like this, except the last time she had a day to shake it all out and let her muscles and joints recover. This time she was on a time limit, however, so even though her body complained loudly she got up and neatly folded her sheets and left the room in a state that would be of minimum bother to the inn-keepers and she packed her bag and stepped out of her impromptu room and saw that the world outside was barely lit by the sun as it was early morning, to where she descended and made her way back out into the country, this time instead of traversing the long and spongy grass of the plains she was tasked with traversing the mud and water of Dihua Marsh which she had to cross before reaching Wuwang hill where her destination lay, leaving half a day’s travel to The Border, and then the rest of the day left looking for her father in The Border, and while she knew she probably should have had a plan after that point, in her mind time after that moment didn’t exist, because nothing mattered more than seeing her grandfather again, so when her feet touched the dirt road that if she continued to follow it would eventually lead her to the rolling hills and jagged cliffs of Monstadt, her legs launched her into a determined stride that carried her through Dihua Marsh in what to Tao felt like the blink of an eye, and as the sun was a quarter of the way through its orbit around the sky, she stood at the base of Wuwang Hill: the last obstacle in her pilgrimage, a towering thing that extended into the sky that hid many things within it, including an entire village that she had never actually seen but heard plenty about.
The climb up the hill had been the hardest part of the journey, which meant that very little crossed Tao’s mind as she climbed, step by step up steep inclines and traversing over the many ruins of civilization long gone and forgotten by all but Rex Lapis himself, and finally she found herself in the dead and dark grove of trees and ghostly lights where her grandfather had once shown her was the entrance to The Border, and she sat on the ground and let herself fall into that place just as her grandfather had shown her and she fell and fell until she was in a pool of water that didn’t soak her clothes her make her hair wet at all and instead just slipped off of her like sand and when she climbed out of the pool she found herself in The Border with many transparent spirits surrounding her and looking at the strange little girl, alive and breathing frantically looking at the face of anybody that remotely looked like an aged man, running and not speaking to a single person that tried to ask her if she was okay or if she was looking for somebody or if she was lost, but she never paid any of them any mind, instead running off to look for the next spirit if the one she had been examining was not the person she was looking for, and the more she looked, the more frantic she became, running faster and faster until she was almost sprinting and the time it took for her to look at a face and deciding if it was her grandfather or not decreasing rapidly with tears starting to leak into her eyes although she tried to hold them back until she tripped on a loose stone on the path of that strange place and she fell to her knees where she tried to get up to continue but her legs would not respond, so she just sat there, hunched over and breathing heavily almost as if she was gasping, like she had been holding her breath the entire time and just now was allowing herself to breath, with the spirits around her just looking at her with wide eyes. Once her breathing tamed itself, tears began to stream down her face, and her gasps for air turned into sobs because she could not find her grandfather, and now her sadness turned into fear and despair, and she cried for hours and yet nobody talked to her, only standing by and watching the strange girl who just appeared and had not said a single word since showing up sit in the middle of a path and cry real tears of a living person.
She fell asleep crying, planted there in the middle of the path, and when she woke up, she did not move. She simply sat there and waited, watching every spirit that passed by, shooting each one an unwelcome and angry eye, for days and days she repeated this, becoming more and more tired the more she sat there and ran through her already miniscule rations, until one day, probably the last day she had left for her rations, a spirit finally walked up to her and spoke. She was an old lady when she died, with a smile printed onto her face and wrinkles telling of a life long and accomplished. She said:
“Look at your stubbornness.” She leaned down to the Tao who had planted herself on the rough stones for multiple days by then. “You're exactly like Old Hu. That means the family business is in good hands.” The old lady, through many grunts, sat down and looked at Tao in the eye, her spectral cane set neatly next to her on the ground.
“Listen to me,” she said, her voice solemn and serious but also still soft and gentle like the voice of her grandfather, “It's a shame, but none of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor Directors would ever linger here. You come from a family of plain speakers, so let me return the favor... Go back. Go back to where you came from." And so she did. When the old lady stood up, so did Tao, and she head home remembering an old saying that her grandfather had said time and time again:"Live in life, die in death. Follow your heart, do what you can,” and she retraced the steps of the path she took to get to Wuwang hill until she arrived at Liyue Harbor in the dead of night where she walked to her house and found that her mother was sitting out front in a chair she had carried out to the front gate and had waited there every night for her to come home and when she saw her little plum in the distance she launched up from the chair and ran across the field to scoop up Tao into her arms and she spun her around in joy with tears in her eyes and Tao laughed a simple laugh that was dulled by the exhaustion she felt, and her mother told her to never do that to her again and Tao softly promised that she wouldn’t, and Tao’s mother put her down and then they walked into their house holding hands, and she guided her daughter back to her room where she unpacked what was in her bag, throwing the long dirtied clothes onto the floor, expecting nothing else to fall out since she had eaten and drank all of her rations, except something solid came flying out and rolled across the wood floor: a bright red vision–a symbol of her strength and endurance, and one last gift from her grandfather.
In the following days, Tao had sent her grandfathers hat to get resized to where it would fit on her head, and when she got it back, it fitting snugly on her head, the band hugging her forehead tightly, it was the end of winter where the plum blossom trees in her courtyard were in bloom once again and she snipped a bloom off and undid the black ribbon and placed the fresh blossom against the body of the hat and tied the ribbon again and put the hat on, to which she showed her mother and for the first time in many weeks Tao smiled a genuine smile that did not hide any pain, but instead looked forward to the rest of her bright and happy life that would make her grandfather proud–a life that she lived, where she would do what she could until it was her time to pass.