Chapter Text
Quint – quint is a fictional time measurement explained in the in-game readable “Amphoreus calendar”. It is a fifth of a Period, of which five exist. Now you might think it is as easy as dividing the day into 25 pieces, which would make a quint roughly 58 minutes, but no, reading the description and using Athens as a reference for sunrise/sunset (it was what the first site I clicked on showed me and I couldn’t be bothered to figure out what ancient Greek city Okhema is based on the most, though Athens does seem like a good guess), we can make a case that the five periods don’t have the same length – the Curtain Fall Hour would be from roughly 7pm to 7am, so 12 hours already. The rest, luckily, we can assume to be 3h each (Entry hour 7-10am, Lucid hour 10am-1pm, Action hour 1-4pm, Parting hour 4-7pm), which also fits with their respective description. Which makes a quint during the Curtain Fall hour 144min, or 2h24min, long and otherwise 36min long, so Anaxa was discussing around 5h (10 quints) with the other sages and hoped for 3h (1 quint) of sleep. (This also fits with how the Roman kept time, which either was just from sunrise to sunset and an hour being a twelfth of this time (depending on the season between 45-75min) and four “vigilia” during the night, or the “civil day” system used to mark the time of birth, going from midnight to midnight, divided the day into 16 parts with only 6 being in the night.) However, I tried to write it ambiguously enough that you can both read quint as 58min or 36min. Btw, the rise of the Thief Star is also the notice that one day has passed, so midnight.
Little Ica – now, the many references to Ica eating everything was included for the comedy, but it has indeed canon roots. In the readable “Observation report on Little Ica”, Hyacine states that they (3.8. note: I am so annoyed at Hoyo now using female pronouns for Ica. That actually threw me off so much, considering Hyacine uses “they” whenever she previously spoke about Ica and most fanfictions that I read had Ica as male. I stuck with they/them bc I was already around 15k words to many into the fic to have any motivation to change it after 3.8) are vegetarian and mostly eats apples. But, and this is a very big but, in Cyrene’s letters to the Demiurge, specifically “Little Ica, you should eat less”, she says that in cycle 8668666, little Ica nearly ate all resources of the Grove, so Hyacine saw herself forced to leave. And then Little Ica started eating Black Tide creatures because nothing else were left where they went and grew up to be bigger than an adult Dromas. Which is worrisome, but I’m now the firm believer that Little Ica at full power can canon-ly become a Emanator of Voracity (which leaves me wondering if there is a deeper connection between Preservation and Voracity and this is Hoyo’s typical way of hinting at future lore with the most random stuff)
Archagathus – Archagathus of Peloponnese was a medical practitioner (similar to nowadays surgeon) in Rome around 219 BCE and apparently the guy who made it an actual profession in the city. At some point people started detesting him because he was too brutal in his practice and he gave up his publicly paid for shop himself. Peloponnese is the peninsula where Sparta (the main inspiration for Castrum Kremnos) was at
“My professor can’t possibly be this shy” – an in-game readable you will automatically get after the scene with Phainon and Mem in the Grove (together with “Forbidden Love: The Tree and the butterfly” and “One punch God: Aquila”). There’s only a kind of prologue, but that prologue made me think someone on the writing team was told to write bad Anaxa x Reader self-insert fanfiction and not to mention any names to make it less obvious
Scribes of War – Mentioned in the Divergent Universe Equation “War Scribes”. They were Kremnoan scholars, basically a mix between historians and tacticians, though they only bothered to record large battles and then analyzed them. They were highly respected in Kremnos. The Grove didn’t consider them scholars and they also liked to considered themselves warriors instead.
Library of Garbaniphoro – Look. I don’t know why they can’t decide if they’re calling it the Library of Grabinaphoro or the Library of Gibranipar. Maybe someone in the translation team made a mistake. Maybe they mean a similar thing in Ancient Greek (though I guess a Greek fan would’ve pointed that out by now). I don’t know. But I am quite sure it’s the same library for multiple reason. Firstly, the books in Mydei’s character ascension text are from this library, originally named Gibranipar and later updated/changed to Grabinaphoro. Secondly, the Garbaniphoro Library is the Royal Library of Castrum Kremnos aka Mydei’s Library. There’s no reason why suddenly in 3.7 there suddenly would be another Library of similar fame that is not mentioned anywhere else. Third, when asking Phainon whether he was in the Gibranipar Library before, he wonders how TB knows and that he wanted to read some scrolls, but his eyes burned too much to be able to discern anything and then he accidently burned the library down too. Which is what was mentioned in the quest description of “Hero, ignite that primal sun” with the Library of Garbaniphoro (“How many vertebrae have you shattered? How many times did you drive your blade through his back? How did the Library of Garbaniphoro fall to flame?”). Fourth, coming back to Mydei’s character text, considering that those are historic scrolls about present-day Mydei, it must mean Khaslana wrote those when he tried to fulfill his promise with Mydei and if those are different places, Phainon would’ve went to the Gibranipar Library instead of the Garbaniphoro library and we wouldn’t have scroll from the Garbaniphoro Library. With this, I rest my case (please Hoyo, either fix this or release both libraries so we finally have something to work with. I’m also desperately in need of more Amphoreus content and a real library with actual books, not whatever sorry excuse the Library of Philia was supposed to be)
Vigethos – I’m not sure if there is an actual meaning to the name, the closest I found is Viggo, which is the latinized version of old norse Viggeir, which means “fight, battle, war”. So, let’s just pretend Vigethos is Okheman for warrior. I don’t think it’s a bad name (Wikipedia also lists 31 people named Viggo), but Anaxa disagrees for the comedy. (I also found the word βυθός, which is pronounced one of these three ways: /by.tʰós/ or /βyˈθos/ or /viˈθos/ (based on the century in which it was used) and means “depth, deep water”. While its Ancient Greek, I don’t really see the relation to Phainon for that, except maybe “still waters are deep” and “beware of deep water”?)
Nous – Anaxa doesn’t mean the Aeon of Erudition here, but the philosophical concept Nous which is the soul/intelligence/consciousness, based on who’s using it. Real life Anaxagoras (499-428 BC) believed that Nous is an independent cosmic mind that can’t be influenced by anything else as the opposing force to the infinite homogenous and heterogenous mass that originally makes up the world. Nous is moving and forming this mass to create a separation into what the world is now. This is likely both the basis for in-game Nousporism and part Nous the Erudition (though Nous as a concept exist in many different Greek philosophical schools, which likely all influence the Aeon). The part about dying I made up, honestly just needed an excuse for Anaxa to get invested in Mydei’s immortality, real life Anaxagoras didn’t concern himself with death, as far as Wikipedia tells me and I’m also aware that the thought process of Anaxa there had some logical errors (if I tried to write an actual logical philosophical discussion of life/death from Anaxa’s POV we would’ve been here for another 10k words and even longer endnotes while I would’ve spend weeks contemplating if it’s still IC for Anaxa. I assumed no one wants that and skipped it) (real life Anaxagoras was actually pretty cool and proposed theories that were either proven right or whose fundamentals still apply in today’s science, but I honestly I think in-game Anaxa got most of his inspiration from Socrates, considering his mannerism and approach to knowledge, e.g. mostly encouraging people to form their own opinion and challenge him instead of blindly believing him, questioning the state (which was also the reason why Socrates was sentenced to death, in a way just like how Anaxa died after breaking his deal with Caenis/questioning that titans not just humans and being “sentenced” by Aglaea) and refusing to conform to social norms) (On another note, something I find really funny but probably has no actual relation to canon: Lygus whole speech about the cave is a fundamental concept in Platon’s philosophy of “Theory of forms”. To put short what Lygus needed five hours to say: humanity is like a chained man in a cave, only seeing shadows on the wall of the cave. But because the man never knew anything else, he believes the shadows to be the real thing and the cave to be the whole world. This is commonly known as the cave or sometimes sun example (not sure if they’re actually called that in English). Platon however did not recommend killing God or your son or both at once, but instead that ideas, “forms”, witnessed by rationality and knowledge, are permanent and to see the true world, one needs to understand the pure idea of everything, however, he did not believe humans capable of such. The human soul, however is also a concept, so a soul can witness pure ideas. Now the reason I find this so funny is because Platon was Socrates’ student. If Anaxa really is more Socrates than Anaxagoras (I honestly don’t know more about Anaxagoras that what Wikipedia told me, so no clue what his personality was like, but it is believed that Socrates didn’t write anything down, or at least none of his writing survived until today, so everything we know of him we know through Platon who both wrote a lot and somehow also managed to make his writing survive Christianity, just like we only know Anaxa exists because Lygus fucked up the Scepter enough for the universe to take notice. Like, someone tell Lygus that influencing an experiment to give the result you want it to have, is in no way scientific and you shouldn’t try to argue based on that), this would mean Lygus created his own philosophical teacher – which is also interesting, because Lygus calls himself Zandar’s paranoia, so Zander would be his “teacher” in a metaphorical sense. As we all know Zandar created Nous, so we could assume that Anaxa is also capable of creating an Aeon. This is also in relation to Cyrene saying that Anaxa would become the 100th Genius Society member that manages to disprove the Imaginary Tree theory (which btw is also a concept in Alchemy). I don’t know much about hi3 (and honestly also not about hsr in general), but as far as I’m aware, the imaginary tree is very much real and the foundation of the universe, so this would be similar to trying to prove the earth is flat – but Anaxa is not one who would try to keep proving a fundamentally wrong theory, which makes me think that perhaps there the imaginary tree is like the shadow in the cave and Anaxa could potentially uncover the true idea of it.)
The Sages and Schools of the Grove – this is getting confusing (for myself), so here a table (TW: this section includes Greek myths and the SA/rape (Sage Syrinx) and murder (Sage Medea) mentioned in them):
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Venerationism – Sage is responsible for ceremonies |
Parmenides – in game unknown |
around 515-450 BC. Had an actual interesting philosophic standpoint and is considered one of the two founders of Ontology (a part of metaphysics) alongside Heraklits, the reason I use him as the sage for Venerationism is because he claimed a goddess told him his ideas. He put logic over experience to define reality and believed that it is impossible to imagine what isn’t it and what isn’t it can’t become, which makes the present the only existing state of the world. He also believed that our perception of the world is severely limited and can’t be trusted. Sadly, most of his writing didn’t survive the test of time. It’s not sure who Permenides teacher was, though Ameinias is the best guess (based on sources from Diogenes Laertius), another guess would be Xenophanes (other sources), however Permenides mostly refuses Xenophanes philosophy, so it’s often assumed that Ameinias was his teacher. What Ameinias believed in also isn’t known anymore, but he was a follower of Pythagoreanism, the belief that everything in life, be it the universe, society or the human body, can be expressed in numbers that constantly try to get into a harmonious balance. They also started a revolt against the government because of it, lost and nearly all got executed or exiled. (For all Genshin players: Parmenides was added as an NPC in the Temple of Space area, specifically the lowest level of the library! He only has one dialogue though, but it is an interesting dialogue! …Can you tell I was very excited to find him?) |
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Lotophagism –Sage is responsible for medicine, meals |
Medea – given in game |
Mythological figure, devotee of Hekate, the Greek goddess responsible for magic and mystery. It was her task to protect the golden fleece of her father Aietes, but after falling in love she helped Jason get it and flees with him (in the process also brutally killing her brother in most versions of the myth). Way later, Jason betrays her to marry the princess of Corinth and in retaliation she kills the two children she had with Jason as well as the princess and king and flees to Athens where she marries King Aigeus. Made her a Chrysos heir, because her mythological origin is already connected to gods a lot (was also a descendant of Helios, the Greek sun titan and even manages to summon a chariot of him to escape from Corinth in Euripides play) |
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Nodism – Sage is responsible for books, documentation |
Apuleius – given in game |
Around 124 –170. Born in what would be Algeria today, he inherited rich-rich, but somehow still managed to spent everything on learning under different teachers/schools and traveling around (honestly relatable, though I have to hope for that kind of money). Worked as a lawyer in-between. Famous for his novel “The golden Ass”, a story about the MC Lucius turning into a donkey (researching this made me realize that ass can also mean donkey in English, which is certainly an interesting realization) after experimenting with magic, which is the only Latin novel that survived in its eternity until today. Follower of Platonism (*hust* Lygus *hust*), but was part of many cults throughout life. Was accused of marrying a widow for her money by her son and other relatives, but managed to defend himself (his defense is also preserved as the “Apologia”) (Please consider this my official apology to every Apuleius fan, but I needed a villain) |
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Erythrokeramism – Sage is responsible for artistic education |
Socrippe – given in game |
Didn’t find any historic/mythologic person with this name, the closest is Socrates. Maybe the name was changed to make it less obvious? Honestly no clue |
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Nousporism – Sage is responsible for reviewing experiments, research |
Anaxagoras – given in game |
I’m not writing everything here again, look up my comment under Nous. Also, who gave Anaxagoras responsibility over experiments? He nearly killed himself for one (and I honestly doubt it was a single occurrence throughout his time in the Grove) |
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Helkolithism – Sage is responsible for physical training |
Egeria – unknown in game |
Mythological figure, divine nymph consort of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome (reigned 715–672 BC). She was said to advise him a lot on laws and ritual, including the founding of the Salii, a group of twelve young patrician (noble) priests around Mars (God of war, equivalent of Ares). They had 12 shields, one of which fell from heaven and 11 to disguise it, and Egeria proclaimed that wherever the shield was preserved, the people would be the dominant people of the Earth. Sometimes associated with Diana (Roman Goddess of hunting and the wild, equivalent of Artemis) and or childbirth, Egeria was commonly considered a water nymph offering wisdom and prophecies in exchange for offerings of water or milk. As she communicated with the gods on Numa’s behalf, including the Muses, she is listed as one of the Muses in later sources. (I also just realized that this is the inspiration for Egeria in Genshin. This wasn’t my intention, but I’m not a huge fan of Fontaine as a whole so I didn’t realize early, sorry for everyone that threw this of) |
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Caprism – Sage is responsible for overseeing beasts, forest |
Syrinx – unknown in game |
Mythological figure, a wood nymph that followed Artemis (Greek virgin goddess of hunting) and swore her vow of chastity. Pan (Greek god of the wild and shepherds) tried to rape her, so she asked the river god Ladon (who might’ve been her father, sources aren’t clear on that one, not to confuse with the monster Ladon that protected the golden fleece in Medea’s myth, this god Ladon also protected Daphne from Apollo’s assault by turning her into a laurel tree and washed away Poseidon’s rape from Demeter (“Demeter Erinys”) (this assault was the first explanation for famines before the Persephone myth started to replace it)) to transform her into reeds. When Pan breathed over the reeds, they made a nice sound, so he used them and wax to create his panpipes, who were also called Syrinx. Fun fact: the word ‘syringe’ is derived from the instrument, as well as ‘syrinx’, the vocal organ of birds. |
Mnestia-Cerces-Momentum-Chain – reference to Markov-Chain-Monte-Carlo, short MCMC. They’re algorithms to draw random samples of a probability distribution, which can’t be calculated using analytic means, which can happen a lot in real life. To cite Wikipedia so I don’t paraphrase wrong: “In statistics, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a class of algorithms used to draw samples from a probability distribution. Given a probability distribution, one can construct a Markov chain whose elements' distribution approximates it – that is, the Markov chain's equilibrium distribution matches the target distribution. The more steps that are included, the more closely the distribution of the sample matches the actual desired distribution. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are used to study probability distributions that are too complex or too high dimensional to study with analytic techniques alone. Various algorithms exist for constructing such Markov chains, including the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm.” It’s part of Bayesian statistics, which is kinda the reverse of ‘normal’ statistics that is mostly taught in school/university (‘normal’ statistic would make you guess what number you get in a dice roll (but like, what is taught in school (at least in my country) is a mix of a whole lot of different statistic approaches that all just get called statistics without distinction, so there’s no ‘normal’ statistic anyway), in Bayesian statistics, you have rolled a 3 and try to now figure out what kind of dice you rolled – d4, d6, d12, d20…)
Antisthenes – NPC that can be found in “Radiant Scarewood” Grove of Epiphany. A student of Nodism, he had started studying with hope of making it to Sagehood at some point, but after years of falling his classes, he at least wants to graduate. Who cares about the world ending when one’s thesis isn’t approved yet? (Talking to him is honestly hilarious)
“Castrum Kremnos had always seen public education as a foundation of a working society and many people in the Detachment are better mathematicians and scholars than me” – (TW: this references Spartan society and includes child abuse and rape) both a reference that studying in the Grove is canonly EXTREMLY expensive and it’s nearly impossible to get in without connection, as well as that access to knowledge and the Library of Philia is purposely kept from the non-student/teacher-body of the Grove, aka if you’re some commoner interested in science, going to the Grove in hope of being able to research the topic of your choice on your own (because you already know that you can’t afford the expenses of being a student), good luck, because you’re probably get kicked out before you get anywhere close to what is accessible in-game. But also, Sparta had something that could classify as public education – healthy boys at age seven were drafted into the agoge (if both of their parents had Spartiate citizenship, which weren’t that many but also not that few), where they underwent military training focusing on physical activities and strategies but could also include poetry, music, dancing, politics and other academic disciplines. They stayed in the agoge until age 21, upon which they obtained Spartiate citizenship and had a chance to get into the Crypteia (a kind of advanced form of the agoge, but also way more questionable, for example they went out to slaughtered people in public to keep the enslaved population in check). It wasn’t that great a place though, children were starved and deprived of sleep on purpose to make them more loyal to Sparta, between themselves they were encouraged to be violent, by Plutarch’s (a Greek historian who later obtained roman citizenship living around 50-120, so be aware that this might be biased) account this also included an encouragement of raping the younger boys to establish dominance. They weren’t allowed to interact with their family either. Girls didn’t take part in the agoge, but it is likely that they received similar state education in another institution. (Want to know another fun fact: The system of the agoge was likely an invention of Lycurgus, a legendary lawgiver of Sparta who was honored as a god by its citizen. He could’ve lived anywhere between the early 8th century BC to the early 7th century BC, allegedly he lived for centuries, nearly all aspects of Spartan society are attributed to him.)
Megnakken – mentioned in Divergent Universe Equation “Send-off Carnival”. A small city that celebrated death like a carnival because they believed Thanatos was Zagreus in disguise (I’m sensing potential for a CasCipher fic)
Aedis Elysia – in Ashikai’s (yt) 3.6 story recap, she mentions that she believes that Aedis Elysia and the Demiurge matrix could be the same place or at least two versions of the same place (beginning and ending of Amphoreus) and I find her reasoning quite sound. Also, the existence of the fairies in Aedis Elysia is highly suspicious and Aedis Elysia literally meaning “Temple of Elysia” with Elysia being the Demiurge (head of Irontomb)? There’s no way that’s a normal farming village. Kind of tried to tap into that with Aedis Elysia being a village that is kind of outside the cycles (like the Demiurge matrix) and therefor outside the perceptions of the people of Amphoreus, while still so far in it that they managed to interact with the outside world (therefor merchant groups from it that don’t exist in the outside world but still trade or travelers subconsciously avoiding the place) (Though this part was written before 3.7, it seems to me that 3.7 supports this theory, or at least that’s how I interpreted Demiurge-Cyrene’s comments when she went back to Aedis Elysia: “Aedes Elysiae... The place where it all began. It's like time itself has stopped… And the breeze and sound of the waves never seem to rest.” […] “Now the journey through "memory" has reached its end. Once the anchor is placed, what awaits us... is thirty million lifetimes of reunion.” […] “Whether it's for Cyrene, the Deliverer, or every sprouting branch of Amphoreus, I leave this tale of "love" here. May the river of time flow backward, bringing scenes of the future before our gaze. In The Eternal Land that no one remembers, the legend of the Trailblaze [Flame-Chase Journey] is about to begin.” And some other scattered in-between. All of this made me change the original explanation to something I feel is more canon-ish, but since Anaxa isn’t aware yet that Amphoreus is simply a simulation (or that it goes through cycles) he arrived at the next best explanation, since the Demiurge must be present in the myths/religious texts surrounding the titans, as we have also seen in Eye of Twilight, where the demiurge is depicted in murals). On another note, this is also why Anaxa isn’t aware Snowy (Phainon’s dog from the dating sim ad) was around some 10-ish years ago and thinks dogs went extinct a century ago
Toward substrate-Independent age estimation of blood stains based on dimensionality reduction and k-nearest neighbor classification of absorbance spectrodcip data and Comparing two scoring indexes for assessing decomposition of juvenile remains – two interesting papers that actually exist. The first one is by Tommy Bergmann et al., published 2017 in Forensic Science International (DOI). The second is by Tamara Gelderman et al., published 2025 in Forensic Science International (DOI). If you want to look them up yourself, be aware that in Gelderman pictures of a dead pig in various states of decompensation are included. Also, for anyone interested in committing murder, you won’t find anything related to that there, I just used it because I’m familiar with the papers and they also sound cool enough
Cerces’ Leaves of Wisdom – mentioned in readable “Festive Culinary Guide” sold in Librarium (the bookstore in Okhema), specifically in Volume 2 of it. Both volumes together include a total of 9 recipes dedicated to a specific titan (leaving out Oronyx, Aquila and Kephale) and while I don’t know much about it nor enjoy cooking, the recipes actually sound doable and tasty. Cerces’ Leaves of Wisdom are mixed sheep cheese, nuts and cooked barley, fried inside a large leaf (this description reminds me of Chinese Zongzi? I also found the Greek Dolmades, though cheese doesn’t seem to be a common filling for either one) and were invented for the main celebration of Cerces in the Grove. Only famous scholars were invited to the celebration, which created the rumor that you can obtain Cerces insight by eating the leaves. The Grove also puts bitter seasoning randomly between the leaves to keep people’s awareness high.