Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The night was quiet.

It was often so - save for the chattering of insects and the rustling of leaves as the occasional cool night wind rushed past the tops of the trees.

But the peace that seemed to linger in the air did not fool the little wind sprite. The little wind sprite who was darting in out of the bushes under the bright moonlight knew in his mind’s eye that peace was never possible in the dangerous recesses of the Abyss.

Instinct made the wind sprite wiggle out of the bush, guiding him forward to find shelter. He had to find a place safe enough for rest, so that he could continue on his journey tomorrow.

On his journey to find…something.

Of course, as a free little wind sprite, his only duty in this world was to dance and float along with the winds to endlessly travel the world, not to worry about anything or anyone.

But.

There was something missing.

The name of that something could never come to him, but he knew that it was of utmost importance and he had to find it.

A something that left a chess-shaped hole in his heart.

It didn’t take long for him to find a cave, carved into the depths of a lonely mountain. He flitted past the vines that hung down and covered the entrance, and found that the cave wasn’t really deep - just spacious. It was just a dent compared to the tower of a mountain that he was in, but it was more than enough.

He flew over to a small rock that lay in the deepest corner of the rocky cave, where soft moss covered the surface, providing him a bed for him to sleep for the night.

He dropped his small body onto the rock, and soon he felt himself slipping into the comfortable lulling sensations of sleep.

But before he could completely knock himself out, an unworldly screech came from outside of the cave, startling him awake. It was a bird’s call, but it sounded like one that could only be made by elemental monsters.

It also sounded like a warning, and probably it was, because the next second more screeches from other birds rang out, making the little wind sprite burying himself into the moss just to drown out the noises of screeching and loud flapping as the creatures outside the cave took off.

What was going on?

The little wind sprite peeked out of its hiding place, to see a figure stumbling into the cave with great difficulty, one of their hands clutching their waist like it would be the end of the world if they let go.

The figure finally managed to make it past the entrance, and they immediately collapsed, their back hitting against the wall with a loud thud before they slid down to the ground.

They muttered something that the little wind sprite couldn’t make out or understand - he wasn’t the being’s species after all.

But despite the urge to ignore the unknown being and return to sleep, the little wind sprite watched on, staring at the other’s scrunched up face.

His innate curiosity made him leave the moss and the rock behind, flying slowly towards the being as if not the startle the other. The being didn’t seem to notice him the entire time as the wind sprite crept closer and closer to him.

He’s pretty huge, the little wind sprite noted when he found himself floating towards the hand that gripped the waist, a dark red seeping through their fingers and dripping slowly onto the ground. There seemed to be something protruding out of them too, at exactly the same spot that they were gripping - an arrow?

Despite the bloody mess, the little wind sprite still decided to perch on his hand. It was a short time before the being’s blood soaked through the lower part of his body, washing his white garment red.

Wait, no, not just a being - human. This being belonged to a species called humans.

Now that he was absorbing the human’s blood, he was immediately hit with wave after wave of information - of the human’s name, of the human’s gender, of the human’s knowledge, of the human’s memories.

The human’s name was Carmen. A male, who had just turned 19 years old not long ago. He lived at…a human base - the Mondstadt-Liyue Base to be exact, confined and protected from the rest of the world.

“Oh, hello,” a whisper came from above, and the little wind sprite looked up. He could understand his words now that his knowledge was imparted to him through blood.

He didn’t seem to be in pain anymore - there was a sort of calm that overtook his features, a look of resignation to his fate.

“Hello,” the wind sprite replied, the language of Teyvat easily coming to him.

“You…can talk?” The human seemed shocked for a second, then a shaky smile spread across his face. “I didn’t know elemental beings could talk. You are a wind sprite, aren’t you?”

“Yup!” The wind sprite fluttered, hopping up and down. “And you are a human. What brings you to the Abyss?”

The boy chuckled weakly, his gray, fading eyes darting to his leaking wound, and his next words came out in weak puffs. “I don’t know what for either. All I remember…is that I was dragged out here just to earn a bit of mora, and a mishot later…here I am.”

The wind sprite didn’t need him to explain any further. After all, he had full access to his memories now, albeit it being still blurry and a little out of reach. But he knew what he was talking about - it was one of his recent memories, an event that couldn’t have happened more than a few hours ago.

He could see a few indistinct figures running ahead of him in Carmen’s memories, shouting something that he couldn’t make out - it was drowned under a thundering growl.

He glanced back, and barrelling towards him was a huge geovishap, glowing a terrifying and dangerous yellow. He sped up, but even as he did, the creature was still gaining on him.

“Help!” Carmen had screamed, and blurred faces turned to look back in terror and fear. One of the figures in front had a bow and a few arrows, and they turned around, their shaking fingers pulling the bowstring taut as they tried in a futile attempt to kill the geovishap.

Carmen had watched in hope as they aimed.

Carmen had watched in hope as they released the string.

And Carmen had watched in shock and despair as the arrow flew off course, driving home into his own body.

The excruciating pain came not long after.

“Fuck!” Someone shouted up front, but a quick glance made Carmen realise that they were not going to help him anymore. They were still running away. Leaving him behind.

Abandoned in the Abyss with an arrow in his waist that was shot by his friend, faced with his inevitable death.

“Leave him! H-he’s definitely done for…at least he’ll be a distraction!” Another cried out, and no one had argued with them.

“Wait- no-” Carmen choked, but the team had already climbed into a battered car in the distance, and drove off without another word.

They…really left him to die.

“I’m sorry that they left you for dead,” the little wind sprite whispered genuinely. Even though he didn’t know who the others were, he knew that Carmen had trusted them a lot, but in the end, they still betrayed his trust.

“How do you-” Carmen’s eyes widened for a second, but then softened again. “Right. You’re a wind sprite. I have heard that…your kind can take any creatures’ form and inherit their memories through absorbing their blood.”

The wind sprite looked down at his scarlet-painted gown, and hummed in agreement.

“But I can’t seem to see what happened after that,” he told the dying boy. “How did you escape?”

In Carmen’s memory were blotches of pulsing black spots, obscuring his vision. He didn’t have to be human to know that he was close to passing out back then.

“I’m not so sure myself…” Carmen laughed rather dryly. “I think I was about to die back then. The geovishap had bitten my arm a bit, but…there was another geovishap that came, and fought with the one chasing me, and so I was able to run away.”

“I wanted to find my way back at first,” he exhaled, his head resting back against the cave wall, braids falling back along with it. “But soon I realised I couldn’t. The Mond-Li Base was too far away, and I had no car, no team, just me and my legs and the arrow in my waist.”

“In my effort to find my way back home, I landed in the Abyss. I don’t know how I held on so long, or how I endured the pain. Maybe it was hope.”

“But alas, you can see I have given up,” Carmen ended his short tale with his lips curling up into a sad, resigned smile.

The little wind sprite frowned - or at least, he did what was equivalent to a frown for a tiny elemental being.

“Do you think I can help you get home?”

He saw Carmen lift his head a little, seemingly out of surprise. Then the same, melancholic smile came back again. “I can’t go back, little wind sprite.”

“Why not?”

“You’re just a little wind sprite, what can you do?” Carmen whispered, but despite his words, his tone was not harsh and it was free of malice. “I’m also done for anyway. I can’t even feel the pain anymore.”

“And even if you got me back, you and I would get killed. By the judges.”

“The judges?”

Carmen nodded slowly with much effort. “They are the ones with the ultimate power in our human base. They kill every infected person and elemental being on sight to protect the base. They are called…‘The Trial Court’.”

“Why?” If the wind sprite had human eyes, it would be wide open with shock right now. “Why kill us?”

“Out of fear. Most elemental beings are not like you. Most of them are vicious, violent…as one of the weakest species in the world, we must kill the strong to protect ourselves.”

A small sigh came from the boy, but somehow, it didn’t sound sad. “I’m glad that I could spend the last moments of my life with such a gentle elemental creature like you.”

The little wind sprite didn’t say anything in return, only fluttered around happily, and so Carmen fell silent too.

They sat together in companionable silence, the wind sprite still looking up at the boy who had already closed his eyes. If it wasn’t for his chest moving up and down irregularly, he would have thought that Carmen had already left this world.

It was odd how that thought brought him sadness.

It was as if he had known Carmen for a long time.

Of course, that wasn’t possible. The wind sprite had no memories of his past, and no big aspirations for his future, other than finding back the thing he lost. All he ever knew was the present.

Suddenly, the boy’s gray eyes opened again.

“Carmen?”

“You’re still here,” Carmen said softly, his voice a little weak and hoarse.

“Mhm.”

“I don’t have much time left, and I want to leave something in this world before I go.”

“What is it?”

Carmen was quiet. “I don’t know. I want to leave something behind but…I have nothing. All my life I never did something of great significance or anything really meaningful…just a small bard to entertain the people. I just…regret not doing anything with my life sooner.”

“What if…I take your form?” The little wind sprite suggested. “Maybe I can help you leave something behind in this world.”

Gray eyes lit up with surprise and gratefulness - it was hard to believe those relit bright eyes belonged to a dying person. “Really-? You really want to?”

“Mhm!”

“…Thank you. Really,” Carmen grinned, but even as he did so, a clear drop of a tear fell from his eyes. “I will be forever indebted to you, little wind sprite.”

Then he stopped, seeming to realise something. “I shouldn’t keep calling you little wind sprite…should I? What’s your name?”

The little wind sprite thought for a while, and found that he actually didn’t have one at all.

“I don’t know if I have one.”

“Then…” Carmen closed his eyes to think. “…let’s call you…Venti, shall we?”

“Ven…ti…” The wind sprite - no, Venti now - said slowly, finding that the name was pretty easy to pronounce, and it gave him a refreshing taste on his tongue. He liked the name.

That night, they didn’t talk anymore. Carmen had fallen asleep due to the fatigue from the torture that he went through in the day, and so had Venti.

The human boy with grey eyes and two black braids left the world peacefully that night.

***

It wasn’t until three days later did Venti wake up to a sour, rotting smell.

Wait — smell?

Venti blinked open his eyes, his nose instinctively wrinkled at the unpleasant smell that was getting more intense by the second.

Hold on…nose?

His body felt weird — it didn’t feel light like the wind, and instead it felt big, and heavy. His wings were gone, replaced by weird extensions that stuck out from the sides and bottom of his body.

He finally looked down at himself, and he found himself face to face with smooth, pale, and naked skin, so different, so unlike his original wind sprite body.

It was then did he realise that he had unconsciously turned into a human in his sleep.

Or rather, into Carmen, with Carmen’s blood.

He tentatively lifted himself off the floor, testing out his new limbs as he sat up. It felt weird at first, but the more he moved around, the more natural his movements came to him.

Now that he had propped himself up, he looked around, surveying his surroundings with his new, human eyes. Unfortunately, the human’s vision wasn’t as good as a wind sprite’s — he had to squint and focus intensely to make out what was in the dark cave.

The first thing he spotted was a rotting body, lying just right in front of him. There were already flies that sought out the dead corpse, and Venti instinctively waved away the flies that came too close to him.

The body should be Carmen’s, he realised, and an inexplicable sadness crashed into his heart, squeezing it and making it hurt.

Those bright grey eyes will never shine anymore, and no words will ever come out of the boy’s mouth anymore.

All Venti could do was to carry his form throughout the world, and hopefully help him leave something behind, like he had wished.

He raised a hand and shooed the flies away, and sent those who were unwilling to leave flying with a little bit of Anemo. Then he took off the other’s clothes, and wore it on himself, not minding the dried blood that had stained most of the ruined and torn fabric.

As he put on his pants, he realised that there was something inside the pocket of the clothing. It wasn’t very big — it was thin, and rectangular in shape. He drew it out, and it was a card, with words and pictures imprinted on it. The picture that was on the top left hand corner of the card was Carmen’s face, and there were words written right beside it.

Name: Carmen Dei

Date of Birth: 16/06/XX09

Assigned residency: Mondstadt-Liyue Base, District 5.

ID: PF351440MLA

This was an ID card. To access the human base.

Venti paused, suddenly thinking of something.

Should he go to the human base? He has travelled around the whole world, but he doesn’t remember having seen a human base before. Let alone having been in one. What if the thing he has to find is in a human base?

He knew that Carmen would disapprove of him going to the human base. Venti would be killed instantly if the judges ever find that he was an elemental creature.

…but what if he successfully tricked the judges?

I’ll go to the Mondstadt-Liyue Base first, Venti decided. He could help Carmen go home in his form — maybe it could bring the boy’s dead spirit some relief and closure. And he can search for his…something. It was killing two birds with one stone.

Venti smiled a little to himself, then shoved the card into his pocket.

Then he dug a small hole in the ground, and placed whatever was left of Carmen inside, before filling the hole with dirt again. He knew that humans had a custom to bury the dead based on Carmen’s knowledge.

“Once I find the thing I lost and helped you leave something of significance in this world, I’ll come back to visit you,” Venti promised, even though he knew that Carmen couldn’t hear him.

And then Venti left the tiny cave, continuing on his journey to find the thing he lost, and with a new goal to help his dead friend to leave a mark in Teyvat. (At least, he considered them as friends now.)

Little did he know that this journey was not going to be an easy one.

Chapter Text

Having a human body was pretty convenient at times, Venti realised.

Even though he couldn’t fly, he still could reach higher places since he was much, much bigger than his initial wind sprite form. Human fingers were useful too — he could grab things like leaves, branches, flowers — almost anything and everything.

Human limbs weren’t too bad either. He could run, climb, jump, or just simply walk. It was fun testing them out.

However, everything still has its own inconvenience.

Within the first day of wandering the abyss aimlessly, he heard a loud, weird growl come from somewhere. He thought it was another elemental being at first, but then realised that it was coming from his stomach.

Right. Humans get hungry.

Venti has never been hungry before — as long there was an abundance of wind, he would be alive. So it was the first time he encountered a problem that has to do with maintaining his body.

So he learned to get food. Plucking Valberries from the bushes, picking up Sweet Flowers that grew along with the grass, or grabbing apples off trees.

So far, the apples were his favourite.

It was easy to find, easy to eat, and they were sweet! They were much more filling than the other plants that he foraged for.

On the second day since he met Carmen, he found himself reaching the border of the Abyss. The forest had opened up to an open space, a vast plain that stretched on and on forever with no end. There were still some trees that were scattered along the bumpy plains, but they weren’t as packed as they were in the Abyss, so the wind flowed more freely, perking Venti’s feelings up every time he felt it rush past him.

Venti continued to trek through the dirt, moving forward in hopes of finding the human base.

Unfortunately, he still hadn't found his way out of there by the time night fell.

Being in a less densely packed area, the night was much, much colder, and this led him to quickly find another weakness of the human body.

It doesn’t adapt easily to the surrounding temperatures.

Okay, maybe having a human body wasn’t very convenient.

Venti was really tempted to revert to his original body so that he could live through this night without feeling so cold, but he was afraid that without Carmen’s blood, he won’t be able to return to his human form.

In the end, he decided to just put up with it and hide near a bush for tonight, in hopes of getting at least a little bit of warmth.

But just as he approached a tall bush, Venti heard a crunch under his foot. He looked down, and realised that he had accidently stepped onto a mint plant. He quickly lifted his foot, and was about to continue on his way, but then he stopped.

When did…mint plants produce a crunch when stepped on?

Before he could understand what was going on, something hopped out from the soil, jumping out at Venti.

A whopperflower! Venti yelped and evaded the first attack by a hair’s breadth. The blue, cryo flower-like monster was unfazed, and continued to chase after him as Venti took off.

He didn’t have any weapons on him, so obviously there was no way he could fight the elemental monster off. All he could do was run, and find a place to hide.

He ran as fast as his legs could take him, and unfortunately for the poor wind sprite who had just gotten used to limbs, his speed was not very fast. Venti risked a glance behind him, then slowed down in his tracks, a little confused.

The cryo whopperflower was gone.

How-?

“Behind you!” A voice screamed from his right, and Venti whirled around, just in time to see a blue creature popping out from the ground. 

He didn’t have time to react, to run, or even to scream, before a loud gunshot rang out. Within a blink of an eye, the whopperflower that was about to attack plopped to one side, dead.

Venti just stared wordlessly at the dead elemental creature. He didn't know what he was feeling. Relief? Pity? Shock? Or the fear that the thing dead on the ground right now could be him?

“Are you okay?” The same voice that had warned him just seconds ago was now approaching him, and Venti turned slightly to see a man approaching him, a hand of his brushing the stray strands of his blonde hair behind to where a long, heavy braid rested down his back. A sword was strapped to his waist, and a black pistol lay easily in his hand.

“Aether! Don’t go close to him, we don’t know if he’s infected or not,” A gruff voice warned, and Venti looked past the man to see three other people walking towards them. They held small guns, but didn’t seem to have a sword like the man before him did. And they all seemed to be wearing the same uniform, a dark green outfit embellished with a little red. The blonde was the odd one out, the only person who was wearing white and yellow.

The rough voice belonged to a tall, buff man, but despite his stature, he didn’t seem to hold any bad intentions. He just seemed to be vigilant.

“Right, sorry Cyrus!” Aether took a step back from Venti rather apologetically. “Why are you out here alone? Where is your team?”

“My team…” Venti coughed. He didn’t have a team in the first place. 

“...left me out here alone, ehe…” he finished, letting a short laugh out in his nervousness. He had gone with the answer that was closest to the truth. After all, he took Carmen’s form, and Carmen did get left behind by the people he called his “team”.

“And why is that?” Another spoke up. This time, it was a skinny, weak looking man that was looking at him with suspicious, scared blue eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re infected and they decided to throw you out here in the wild?”

“No, no!” Venti shook his head violently — a little too enthusiastically , perhaps. After all, he didn’t want them to realise that he was actually an elemental creature who took a human form. “I- uh…”

“Don’t scare him, Pallad,” the last man shook his head, sighing. He was a normally built person, mostly on the lean side. “He almost died just now.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” the man named Pallad protested. “We need to make sure that he’s safe first…”

“Do you have any wounds?” The man with the blonde braid - Aether, was it? - asked again, his golden eyes squinting as they looked up and down at Venti’s frame. “Not that I see any though.”

“One cannot be too fast to judge,” Cyrus pointed out. “We are not the judges after all. We can’t confirm that he’s not infected.”

Aether hummed in agreement, although frowning. “But then what do we do? Leave him here and return to base ourselves?”

“Wait, are you guys going back to Mondstadt-Liyue Base?” Venti cut in, after perking up at the mention of base. “Can you take me with you? I can’t find my way back.”

Three of them were silent — they seemed to be actually considering it, but then Pallad protested yet again. “What? You can’t be serious, we don’t have enough food and water for the return trip already! And what if you’re infected—”

“I’ll find my own!” Venti promised, then clasped his hands together in a pleading manner all the while doing a dramatic bow. “Please, please, please take me back to the base! I’m really not infected, I swear!”

Because I’m already an elemental being, was left unsaid.

“The average transition time is about two hours here…if he doesn’t turn into a savage elemental being by the time we finish packing up the whopperflower remains we should be safe to take him back, right?” The lean man offered, and both Cyrus and Aether nodded. Only Pallad looked apprehensive of the idea.

“So it’s settled,” Cyrus said in a tone that brooked no argument, and it was only then Pallad seemed to back down. “I’ll take care of the whopperflower head and you two-” he gestured at Pallad and the yet-to-be-named man. “-deal with the rest of the body.”

“I’ll help with the packing,” Aether volunteered before Cyrus could even give him a job.

“Alright. And you, little lad, give Aether a hand,” Cyrus gestured to Venti, who thanked the man before running off to Aether’s side.

The blonde led him a little ways away from where they had found Venti, to a rough, beaten up car that was parked among the trees.

“So, what’s your name?” Aether asked as he climbed into the car and started the engine, making the car start up with a loud vroom .

“Then let’s call you…Venti, shall we?”

“I’m Venti,” he told the man with ease, as if he had lived with the name his entire life.

“Aether. Although you might have known that already,” Aether chuckled, then got Venti to climb into the car with him.

Aether drove the car back to where the whopperflower carcass lay, and as soon as the other three dissected the first few parts of the elemental monster, Venti helped Aether load the goods onto the car.

“Who are the other three people with you?” Venti asked as he sorted out the whopperflower remains under Aether’s guidance.

“You should know Cyrus, he’s the strong looking guy,” Aether nodded towards the man who was busy clearing the head of the whopperflower. “He’s the head of the Adventure Guild, so you must have gone through him to get the pass to leave the base.”

“Then there’s Pallad, and- ah, you’re mixing the shimmering nectar and the energy nectar up.” Venti quickly switched around the nectar that he messed up, and Aether continued. “-the other man is Lorgar.”

Venti nodded, and they continued to work together in silence, finding nothing to talk about in the moment.

As the two hour mark approached, the end of their endless work was also finally arriving. Venti reached for one of the last few whopperflower nectars lying around and grabbed it.. But just as he did, he spotted something that blotched a corner of the nectar case. 

Raising it closer to his face, he realised that there was a little trace of dark red along the sharp lines of the case. He didn’t have to guess to know that it was blood. 

Did one of them get hurt while dissecting the creature?

“Alright, we are done!” Pallad cheered, snapping Venti out of his thoughts. Venti didn’t think much of the blood and threw it in with the rest of the whopperflower nectars that they had collected for the past two hours.

“Good work, everyone,” Cyrus clapped. “Since the sky is turning dark, we should make camp here and then set for base the first thing tomorrow. We have had quite a good haul this trip.”

Camp didn’t take long to set up. As soon as they finished setting up the tents and getting a campfire going, the three men in red and green uniforms turned in almost immediately, leaving Aether and Venti outside by the fire for first watch.

“So, how long exactly have you been away from your team?” Aether was the one who spoke up first.

“Hmm…about two days or so?” Venti lied. Maybe it was not entirely a lie, since he left Carmen’s side just about two days ago too.

“Two days? On your own?” Aether’s eyebrow was raised, a look of surprise taking over his face. “That’s impressive! How are you not dead yet?”

“I guess I just got lucky, ehe,” Venti grinned rather guiltily, fully well knowing that the reason why he hadn’t been attacked was because the creatures of the Abyss didn’t care for a little wind sprite. The monsters outside of the Abyss were a little different though. “I just didn’t meet any monsters on the way.”

“Hmm, must be nice not needing to run for your life every two to three hours for two full days,” Aether mused. “Why did your team leave you though?”

“Elemental being attack. I was left behind when they thought I had no chance of getting into the car with them. But I got out anyway,” Venti reiterated whatever he had seen in Carmen’s memories, leaving out the part where he got wounded. 

He frowned as the vivid memories resurfaced in his mind — what happened to Carmen was truly upsetting and sad. But Aether must have mistaken that frown as Venti feeling hurt and betrayed.

“Don’t feel so upset, you have us now. We’ll get you home,” Aether comforted. Venti was about to flash the man a smile, but a piercing, terrified scream broke through the quiet of the night, and said scream seemed to be coming from one of the tents that surrounded them.

They both jumped up from their seats, gazes flying towards the seemingly peaceful blue tent, save for the blood-curdling screams that came from the inside.

“Pallad? Lorgar?” Aether shouted, but it was drowned by the panicked yells of “help, help!”

The tent was shaking now — it seemed as if there was something trying to break out from the inside. Aether rushed forward and unzipped the entrance, and out burst a petrified Pallad, who stumbled out of the tent and tripped over his feet in the process.

“L-Lorgar, he-”

He didn’t get to finish before something long, black and sharp stabbed into him from his back, going through his entire body, cutting him off. Blood sprayed from his wound, sliding down the sharp stick that stuck out from his stomach in a bloody waterfall.

Then Pallad slid down the stick too, along with his flowing blood, collapsing flat on the ground. His eyes were empty. Blank. Dead.

The sharp stick — no, leg — belonged to a hideous monster standing behind Pallad, one that had already lost all trace of its humanity. It wasn’t hard to guess that it was Lorgar — an infected, mutated version of the man that was still human a few hours ago.

Both Venti and Aether were too shocked by the gruesome and bloody scene to even scream.

The creature roared, letting out an ear-piercing shriek that kicked the two frozen people into action.

“Get Cyrus and let’s go!” Aether screamed over the long screech and tugged Venti to the other tent, where Cyrus was sticking his head out to see what the commotion was.

“Aether…?” Cyrus started, apparently having just woken up, but the blonde had started tugging the burly man away from the camp too, rushing for the car.

“Lorgar turned. Pallad’s dead,” Aether explained as flatly as possible, and a flash of understanding and sadness flashed in Cyrus’s eyes, but it quickly disappeared when he looked back at the advancing monster and recalled the situation at hand.

Venti followed tightly behind the two and clambered into the car with them, with Cyrus taking the wheel and Aether sliding into the front passenger seat. The creature was still persistent on not letting them go though, and it caught up to the car just as Cyrus started it up.

“Go, go, go, go, go!” Aether yelled, panicking as the huge, insect-like monster started poking hard at the windows, making small fissures and cracks run down the glass. It wouldn’t be long before it couldn’t hold up anymore.

Cyrus immediately reached out and tightly gripped onto the wheel, his foot quickly stepping on the gas, and the car sped off, leaving the corpse of Pallad and the mutated Lorgar behind.

***

A good 15 minutes later, Cyrus finally decided to slow the car down to a stop, letting the three of them catch a quick breather.

“What…happened back there?” The man at the wheel asked, and there was an uncharacteristic tremble to it, something of shock, fear, and an undercurrent of sadness and regret.

“I don’t know, it just did,” Aether’s eyes were clouded and downcast. “We were outside the tent when Lorgar turned, and Pallad had made it out, but…” He stopped, the memory being too upsetting to go through again, and despite that, all three of them knew exactly what happened next.

“He must have gotten infected a few hours back,” Cyrus sighed. “We did after all run into a cavern full of huge ants before we picked you up. Maybe he got bitten while we were there and didn’t notice.

Venti could see Cyrus look at him through the rear view mirror at the word “you”, and involuntarily spotted the red that circled the rim of his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said almost automatically to the both of them — after all, they had just lost two of their teammates — anyone would feel sad and regret over that.

But all Cyrus did was wave it off. “Nothing to be sorry about,” he forced a half-smile back onto his face. “Infections and losing teammates are a common thing in the Adventurers’ Guild. I wouldn’t be the leader of it if I wasn’t strong enough. All I have to do as their teammate is to carry their spirits on with me, isn’t that right?”

“You’re right…but…” Venti still felt slightly guilty. He had just recalled the blood stain that he saw on the whopperflower nectar just now. If humans were able to get infected just by wound to creature contact, then didn't the blood on the whopperflower nectar mean that the person who got cut by it got infected? 

“I saw someone got cut on the whopperflower nectar while I was packing it…if I told you guys about it, maybe Pallad’s death would have probably been avoided…” He confessed slowly.

Cyrus was silent for a second, and so was Aether, and Venti was slightly afraid that they were going to be mad at him for not telling them about this sooner. But instead, Aether just shook his head. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t your fault. Lorgar’s infection wasn’t because of the whopperflower, because he didn’t mutate into one. You’re not at fault, Venti.”

“That’s right,” Cyrus added. “The infection level of the area around here is lower than the cavern we had been in a few hours ago, and a prick from a part of a creature’s corpse is unlikely to do any damage. Besides, even if you pointed it out earlier, no one would own up to it.”

Venti couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow. If you knew that you had a possibility to mutate and accidentally kill your friends in the process, why wouldn’t you own up? “Why?”

“Because then you would be left behind because you’re a risk. No one wants that,” Cyrus answered quietly. His eyes wandered out of the window, staring at something distant, something unknown. “Everyone wants to go home. Even if it meant putting the people you care about at risk.”

No one spoke after that, for they all fell asleep in exhaustion as Cyrus continued their journey back to the Mond-Li base.

***

“We’re here.”  Aether’s voice was the first thing Venti heard when he was woken up by a light tap on his shoulder. 

“…oh.” With bleary eyes, he sat up and glanced out of the window, but only to be met up with a tall cement wall that stretched past the roof of the car and out of Venti’s vision.

Cyrus and Aether had already started clambering out of the car, and Venti followed. As soon as he stepped outside, he could finally see the wall in its full majesty.

It was so tall that he had to tilt his head all the way up to see the end that seemed to touch the skies, and when he surveyed the wall left and right, it seemed endless.

In his shock and awe, he couldn’t help but let out a tiny sound of surprise, and Aether raised an eyebrow at him. “Have you never seen the wall before? Don’t you live here?”

“Uh—never seen it from the outside. Not properly at least,” Venti laughed nervously as he stumbled through his vague, unconvincing answer.

Fortunately, Aether just shrugged and moved on. “Let’s go then.”

The two adventurers headed off to the right, where there were lines and lines of people queuing up in front of the wall in the distance. Venti trailed after them, figuring that it was the way into the Mond-Li Base.

As they approached the crowd, Venti could see that there were a few other humans patrolling the area, wearing a black, tight military-like uniform, their hands firmly gripping onto a pistol at their side, like they were ready to shoot any moment.

The people who were in line looked terrified and nervous — some seemed to hunch over as if they were trying to hide, while others were fidgeting on the spot. The air was so tense that Venti was sure that a knife could slice through it to cut it into two.

At this point, it seemed more like there was an execution taking place rather than entering of the base.

“What’s going on?” He unconsciously lowered his voice to a whisper as Cyrus led them into one of the queues.

“You don’t know? This is the Judging process.” This time, it was Cyrus that questioned him, his voice somehow didn’t hold suspicion. It sounded nervous and distracted instead.

Judging…? Judges? Venti immediately recalled Carmen’s words about the people of the Mond-Li Base that kill infected beings on sight. “The Trial Court”, Carmen had mentioned. Venti had been sure back then that he could trick the judges somehow, but now that it was suddenly happening, he couldn’t help but feel slightly anxious and doubtful that he could get through this without a hitch.

The line moved sluggishly forward, and there were no more words spoken in between anyone. Even though they were probably allowed to talk, no one dared to under the intense stares of the patrolling judges.

When they got closer to the front, Venti could see that there were four entrances into the base, with each line being attached to one. There was a judge in front of the four entrances, and there was an additional one standing in the middle, surveying each and every person that passed by carefully. 

Venti couldn’t really make out his features from this far away, but he could see that other than the gun in his hand there was a long stick jutting out from his back — a polearm, maybe?

Suddenly, he saw the figure turn to his left and whisper something to one of the judges, and that particular judge nodded. The judge turned to the returning adventurer that was standing at the front of the line and raised his gun hesitantly at him.

“Wait, wait, I’m not infected, I swear!” The person panicked and shouted, but the judge did not seem like they were ready to let them off. The man who finally realised that convincing was not going to work, immediately dashed out of line, but he was no more than a few steps away from the queue when a loud bang resounded in the air.

Venti saw the bullet cut through his skull, and watched as the light in the man’s eyes waver and die, his body flopping onto the ground, lifeless.

Everyone in the queue flinched, and the line shivered as it inched forward again, as if afraid of ending up in the same predicament as that adventurer did. But no one ran away, or screamed in fear. There was only the recurring tense silence.

Fortunately, no other executions were carried out as they moved forward, until Venti’s little group reached the entrance. Venti’s gaze unconsciously trailed to the judge that had given out the order for the kill just minutes ago, who was now inspecting the other lines.

The judge was about his height — or rather, Carmen’s, since his body was based on his — and he had a beautiful mix of blue and teal hair that hung around his shoulders, standing out rather starkly against his black uniform. Golden, yellow eyes seemed to stab into the crowd with his sharp gaze, picking out the infected and the not. A gloved hand periodically flitted from the gun at his waist to the sharp, green polearm behind his back, as if he was making sure that they were there.

And somehow…Venti couldn’t explain it, since he hadn't really understood human beauty, but even as he was wearing the same uniform as the judges…he seemed to stand out from the rest.

All of a sudden, he felt a tug on his sleeve, and he turned to find Cyrus looking anxiously at the judge. “Let’s go, don’t look at him—“

Just when Venti was about to ask why, another deafening bang broke the silence, making Venti freeze up momentarily in shock.

“Wha—“ He blinked up at the burly man before him, who stared emptily into the distance before collapsing, scarlet flowing profusely out from a hole right in the centre of his forehead, washing the yellow sand with a dark, murky red.

He then slowly turned around, to look to where the bullet came from—

—and found himself only to be met up with a pair of cold, yellow eyes, and a gun to his forehead.

Chapter Text

Everything was silent as the judge’s eyes scanned him up and down, as if he was trying to figure something he couldn’t decipher. But his aloof and cold expression remained still, refusing to show any hint of emotion.

Venti was frozen to the spot, and it was the first time in his entire life where the little wind sprite couldn’t feel the wind running through his lungs. Hell, he couldn’t even feel it rushing past his body. It was as if time had frozen along with him too.

He couldn’t even bring himself to look at Cyrus, to check if he was still alive — but he didn’t have to though. He already couldn’t feel the familiar air exchange all living beings had within him.

Cold. Was the first word that popped up in Venti’s mind when the gears in his brain finally decided to turn and assess the situation. The barrel of the pistol was cold, the judge’s intense gaze was cold, and so was the body that laid at his feet.

He knew that he was supposed to feel afraid, but even as he anticipated the bang and the pain following, he wasn’t. He didn’t act like what a normal person would, didn’t scream, didn’t run, didn’t beg or cry. He just stared blankly at the judge that stood before him, waiting.

The bullet never came.

“Xiao.” Venti could hear a voice ring out from behind him, one that belonged to Aether’s. It was slightly shaky, but mostly out of shock, not really fear. “Cyrus…he—”

Venti watched as the judge averted his gaze — Xiao, was it? — glancing briefly at the blonde standing behind him. “Honorary Knight Aether, I would prefer it if you do not step into the matters of The Trial Court.” His voice held no insult or sarcasm, only seriousness and a deadly calm.

He has a nice voice. Came the unconscious thought to the little wind sprite. It wasn’t too deep, nor was it too light. It was smooth and somehow calming — ignoring the situation at hand — one that could be beautiful when holding a tune.

Surprisingly, Aether actually went quiet, not asking or saying another word of protest.

Yellow eyes turned back to staring at Venti intensely, and the elemental being under scrutiny couldn’t help but tense up again.

After a few seconds, Xiao finally spared Venti from his inspection and lowered his gaze. The gun against Venti’s forehead was removed, and wind finally rushed back into the little sprite again, letting the poor boy finally regain a steady breath.

“Raise your hand. Palm up,” Xiao ordered, and Venti immediately did as he said, not knowing what the judge wanted.

In a matter of seconds, the judge expertly tucked away his gun and pulled out a pair of handcuffs, and swiftly attached one cuff to Venti’s wrist, Xiao holding onto the other cuff.

“What—“ The word jumped out of his mouth as he felt the metal slap across his skin, locking his wrist within the ring with a click.

“Come with me,” Xiao didn’t wait for Venti to protest or ask before pulling him out of the line, leading him to the entrance of the base.

“Hey!” Venti stumbled after him, not expecting him to suddenly drag him away like that. He looked back to see Aether staring after him, and the blonde had a face full of confusion. So were the adventurers who were standing in line, whispering to each other fervently as their fingers pointed and gazes directed towards the duo who were heading straight into base.

“Where are you taking me?” When Venti didn’t receive a reply, he tugged at his handcuffs — not to escape, but to trigger a reaction. But Xiao ignored him, and pulled him into the base.

Upon walking past the tall, huge walls, they were immediately greeted with an open, busy city, with people bustling around and rushing past buildings and roads but never coming close to the wall. In Venti’s mind, a word from Carmen’s memory popped into his head, which was most likely the name of this place.

Mond-Li. The central city, which also served as the border, was made up of the two regions Mondstadt and Liyue.

Venti, to say the least, was amazed by the complicated infrastructure that was scattered throughout the city, and by the number of people there were just past the wall. Imagine the rest of the base!

But Xiao didn’t stop to let Venti sightsee. He continued to drag the poor boy forward, bringing him to a nearby building, one that seemed to stand taller than the rest. The design of the building was simple, just painted with white and glass windows, and there was lettering across the side that said: “Trial Court Headquarters: Central Branch”.

Xiao led him inside, and the first thing Venti saw was an interrogation going on in a room. Through the glass window that faced the corridor, he could see a judge questioning a nervous young man.

Through Carmen’s knowledge, Venti was aware that this was one of the ways to assess if one was an elemental being or infected or not. Apparently, memory and critical thinking are affected when infected.

After walking past a few winding, complicated corridors, they finally arrived in front of a metal door with an intercom system attached right beside it. The judge approached the intercom and pressed down on a button, then spoke into the mic.

“Judge, Xiao, applying for DNA infection check.”

The metal doors slid open almost immediately with a soft whoosh, revealing a clean, pristine room, filled with medical machinery and tools. There was a table not far from the door, with a man sitting right behind a computer screen, busy with his work.

The man then lifted his blue, azure eyes from the screen, eyebrows going up at the sight of the pair standing in the doorway. His braided and tied up ash-blonde hair swung slightly as he tilted his head to the right in question.

“Never thought that you would ever come here, Colonel Xiao. This is quite a surprise,” The man’s gaze travelled from the judge to the boy behind him, then back to the judge — or colonel, now that Venti found out — again. “I always assumed that you would use a bullet to solve all your problems.”

“Please cooperate, Dr. Albedo,” Xiao was unfazed, and all the blonde did was shoot a light, joking smile at the judge before beckoning Venti over. Venti headed over to the man that Xiao called “Dr. Albedo”, but then stopped when he couldn’t walk forward anymore — his wrist was still trapped in the cuff.

Xiao seemed to realise that the same time he did, and he heard the cold judge mumble a “sorry” before he quickly released Venti. Somehow, Venti found it funny, and was about to laugh, but swallowed it back down when he was met with a warning glare from the judge.

Albedo directed Venti to a metallic, silver platform, and told him to lie down. He followed orders, and watched as the man locked in his limbs with the in-built circular cuffs. Even though he had felt any danger or threat when Xiao had cuffed him temporarily just now, Venti was starting to feel a little uncomfortable being locked to a platform like that. As a little wind sprite with the innate desire to be free, this was definitely not within his definition and comfort of freedom.

“Don’t worry,” Albedo must have detected his comfort, because he proceeded to reassure calmly. “I am only giving you a full body scan and taking a blood sample for the DNA testing. If you are tested as not infected, you can leave right after this.”

As he said that, he plucked a needle out of a drawer and inserted it into Venti’s arm in a practised manner, and drew blood. Venti unconsciously sucked in a breath at the pain that pricked into his skin, and watched with growing curiosity as red filled the originally empty tube.

“Alright. Stay put and do not move as the machine is scanning. It will take about 40 minutes to an hour. I’ll go check your blood sample,” Albedo removed the needle once he was done and turned back to his table, and Xiao followed him, seeming as if he had something to discuss with him.

Turns out he did.

From where Venti was lying, he could hear Xiao ask Albedo, “How is the new infection testing progress?”

Albedo hummed before replying. “Quite good. My team and I have been achieving consistent results so far. It wouldn’t be long before we can figure out a new way for infection testing. After all, we found out that when a person is infected, it would trigger a few special reactions in one’s DNA. That was what we focused on.”

“Congratulations.” It was flat, but somehow it didn’t sound sarcastic from Xiao.

“Colonel, if the cost and timing of infection testing was cut down by a lot, would it affect the Trial Court?”

“I’ll be looking forward to that day.”

“Is that so?”

There was no other reply from Xiao.

The room was silent as everyone minded their own business — Albedo examining his blood sample, Xiao standing on one side and watching Venti and Albedo periodically, and Venti just laid there, thinking.

As the clock ticked towards the 40 minute mark, he thought of what would happen if he was found out to be an elemental being. Would they kill him on the spot? Most likely.

But would they even find out? He doesn’t actually fall into the category of an infected. After all, he was an elemental being himself.

In the midst of his thoughts, the blue fluorescent light from the scanner suddenly dimmed, switching off. Albedo came over and freed Venti from the platform, announcing that the process was over.

Then he heard Albedo turn to Xiao and ask, “Colonel, if I may be so presumptuous to ask, why did you decide to send him for testing?”

“No.” The reply was curt and his tone brooked no argument.

Albedo sighed, but didn’t push for an answer and instead he returned to his desk, his hand reaching for his mouse and clicking a few things on his computer.

“Alright, here are the blood test and body scan results, ready?”

Venti turned his attention to Albedo, but he could feel that Xiao’s gaze was trained on him, instead of the doctor who was going to reveal the results. It was as if he was getting ready to shoot him any moment if Albedo announced that he had the elements in him.

The doctor was quiet as he examined the results on the screen, before finally saying, “Apparently there are no anomalies found in your DNA. Congratulations. you both may take your leave now.”

Venti’s originally tense state immediately relaxed, and he let out the breath that he had been holding in since a few seconds ago. He shot a grin at Xiao, but it dimmed a little when he saw the judge stare blankly into space, frowning, like he was considering something.

“Are you sure that he is 100% human?” Xiao finally asked.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I couldn’t find any new anomalies that appeared in his DNA. People with infections will have at least ten anomalies or more. I’m quite sure that he is not infected.”

“Fine then,” the colonel nodded, then got up and proceeded to walk out of the door. It was only when he was halfway through the doorway did he then turn around again, this time looking at Venti. “Do you not want to go?”

“Coming, coming!” Venti quickly jumped off the platform and followed after Xiao. He didn’t want to stay another second in a room that might expose his real identity.

The return trip through the winding hallways were relatively quiet, mostly due to Xiao’s solemn nature. Even when Venti tried to start a conversation, Xiao only answered with one word answers or simply ignored him. So eventually, Venti gave up and just trailed after him.

Suddenly, after a long period of silence, Xiao suddenly spoke up, slightly startling the poor boy walking behind him.

“When I first saw you, I felt that you weren’t human.”

Venti’s heart clenched in on itself. He didn’t successfully trick the judge after all.

“Then…what about now?” He asked hesitantly after a long pause.

Xiao’s lips formed a tight line, and replied without answering the question. “This is my first time applying for infection testing,” he said quietly, throwing a glance at Venti. “You better be.” A warning.

Venti let out a nervous laugh and a cough, and Xiao raised an eyebrow in question, but before he could ask, they had turned a sharp corner, bumping into a group of people. Some of them were donned in the same black uniform as Xiao had — actually, no. If Venti had paid more attention when he was queuing outside the base about an hour ago, he would have realised that Xiao’s clothes had a few more complicated details that the usual uniform didn’t have. Privileges of being a colonel, he figured.

The judges were firmly gripping onto a man, seeming to escort him down the corridor. A woman was following nervously behind, her eyes not leaving the man as she walked.

The judges were the first one to notice Xiao and Venti’s presence. “Colonel,” one of the judges saluted. The man looked up right as the judge greeted Xiao, eyes widening with growing panic as he slowly recognised Xiao’s face.

“I’m not infected! I’m really not infected!“ The man screeched desperately, struggling in vain against the grasp of the judges. “Please, Judge Inquisitor, I’m not infected, right? Right? Tell them that!”

However, what the judges said next was contradictory to his words. “He is suspected to have a high chance of being infected. But his family insisted on an infection test, so…”

Bang.

Before the judge could finish his words, a loud bang had already shaken the four walls of the corridor, shocking everyone but Xiao. It left the begging man’s jaw to hang midway while he was trying to defend himself, and he swayed slightly before he fell, head and eyes rolling back. The white of his eyes stood out in the dark blood that slipped down from his forehead, the thick substance pooling into a small puddle onto the pristine, marble floor.

Xiao slipped the gun back into his weapon belt, and walked away, only bothering to leave behind a short sentence, “No need for testing. Waste of time.”

Everyone stared after his retreating figure in shocked silence, and it was only after the woman screamed in disbelief, devastation and fear did the rest then snap back to reality. Venti looked at the bleeding corpse held up by the judges’ hands, then to Xiao, then to the sobbing woman that had now collapsed to the ground.

He thought of the moment Xiao had fired his gun, and immediately shuddered. Xiao’s expression…was so cold. Empty. Especially when he killed the man. It was nothing like he had ever seen. Aether’s and Carmen’s were gentle and kind. Cyrus’s was confident, and had a fatherly feel to it. But Xiao…

He briefly wondered what he felt when Xiao took a life with his own hands. Would he feel remorse? Sadness? Fear directed at himself? Or nothing at all, like what showed on his face? Maybe killing was easy for judges, especially for such a high ranked and respected one like Xiao. Maybe killing was as common as breathing was to him.

Xiao turned around suddenly, shooting a look at Venti, and it was then he realised that he was supposed to catch up. And so he did, leaving behind the still shocked judges and the bawling woman.

A few minutes later, they finally arrived at the building’s entrance where they had originally passed through. There were two extra beds that were wheeled in and set right beside the sliding glass doors, with two still bodies laying on each. A white, clean cloth was draped over them, and there were two soldiers in typical green military garb guarding the two corpses. He could see that one of them was Cyrus’s, and the other was the man that was shot right at the front of the line back an hour ago.

One of the soldiers spotted Venti, and went up to him. He handed him a flat ID card, which Venti took with some hesitation. “This is…?”

“The Head of the Adventurer’s Guild is found to not have any other remaining family members, and also did not have a will. While his property will be reclaimed by the Mond-Li government, his personal items will have to be reclaimed by family. Since Honorary Knight Aether has rejected the offer, as one of the last people to interact with him, you will be receiving his ID card. With this, you can access his property. Please collect the items within a month, or else everything will be claimed by the government.”

“Um…I don’t think I can take it,” Venti tried to return the card, but the soldier just shoved it back into his hands. “Just keep it. If you would not like to take his things, that is alright. Just keep the ID card.”

But I don’t know him that well. I only knew him for a day… Venti wanted to say, but kept the card anyway under the soldier’s persistent prompting. He felt guilty for owning the things of someone who probably had closer friends that deserved this even more, but it was evident that they were not going to ask around for who Cyrus’s friends were.

As he slipped the card into his pocket, he looked to Cyrus’s dead body, and he could see just a blob of red on the cloth where his head was tucked under. He suddenly recalled the instance when he saw Cyrus die before his eyes, and how Xiao had shot him with the same cold, vacant stare. Venti then peered towards Xiao, only to find him staring impassively at the man he killed, eyes calm and expressionless.

He didn’t get it. How was Cyrus infected? He and Aether must have spent at least a day with him, and neither of them had gotten hurt from the moment Venti had met the adventure team. If he was infected, he would have turned into a monster already, wouldn’t he?

Even though Venti was aware that it was probably unwise and wouldn’t solve anything, he still decided to confront Xiao. “He wasn’t infected.”

“What?” Xiao tore his eyes away from the body and glanced at Venti, confusion set on his face.

“He wasn’t infected,” Venti repeated, stubbornly refusing to back down under the other’s stare.

Xiao continued his stare for a few more seconds, before he lowered his gaze and sighed. But instead of walking away like what Venti had expected him to, he instead stepped closer to the body, and gingerly lifted the white cloth. He then pointed to Cyrus’s hand.

Venti crept closer and squinted, trying to see what he was pointing at. Then he saw it.

A small dot of red, right in the middle of Cyrus’s index finger. It was obvious that it was a pierce or a cut wound, and around the bright red wound were ugly, black substances forming, flowing out and winding down his finger. It looked exactly like the same black substance that the whopperflower had produced when they had dissected it.

It was then he realised, the person who was pricked by the whopperflower nectar was Cyrus and not Pallad all along.

“Oh,” Venti backed away from the corpse, the multiple emotions flowing in him too complicated and messy to figure out for a small little wind sprite like him. But he could recall the words that he had heard Cyrus say in the car.

“Everyone wants to go home. Even if it meant putting the people you care about at risk.”

An inexplicable amount of sadness overwhelmed the rest of the complicated emotions that churned in his heart, and he backed away from Cyrus’s body.

It looks like he had wrongly blamed the judge after all.

Venti was about to turn and apologise to Xiao, but the man had already long disappeared from his side, exiting the building and already fading down the alleyway, his silhouette merging with the slowly darkening sky.

He watched until the Judge Inquisitor completely vanished from his sight.

Chapter Text

Having absolutely no idea what to do after he exited the building, Venti decided to go with the flow and joined the crowd of the bustling city, letting himself get lost in the blinding city lights and messy, enthralling infrastructure.

He wandered around with no aim for hours — he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, or where he was supposed to go now. He supposed that he could start searching for the thing that had always been his goal, but in a human base as huge as this? Where could he even start?

In the end, he decided that wandering around was doing him no good. It was his nature to wander and flit around, but now as a human he figured that he couldn’t resort to his usual, wind sprite ways anymore. As black was added to the sky stroke by stroke, the people that were out and about became lesser and lesser, and Venti finally decided that he should find his home — Carmen’s home.

He fumbled with his pockets for a few seconds before finding his ID card. “District 5…” He mumbled to himself as his eyes scanned over his assigned residency.

Where was District 5 though? And how was he going to get there?

He followed whatever little crowd that was left, and found himself entering an underground tunnel. To Venti’s general knowledge tunnels were meant to be dark, moist and subjectively creepy, but this tunnel was bright and clean, the electricity-powered lights above lighting the way.

He went further in, finding himself on a large platform with automated glass doors on either side, two tracks lining the length of the platform. A station, something whispered in his head in Carmen’s voice.

Above the two tracks were two different signs — the one to his right said “Mondstadt — District 1, 2, 3, 4, 5”, while the one to his left said “Liyue — District 6, 7, 8, 9, 10”. Venti, who was clear on where his house was, headed towards the right.

The train arrived quickly, and the ride to District 5 was uneventful. Everyone bustled around him minding their own business, unaware that the being that they were sitting near was an elemental creature that they feared so much.

A stop later, the train stopped at District 5, and he got off. The city was just as big as Mond-Li was, maybe even bigger, since it was a district that housed one out of ten of the residents in the Mond-Li base after all. Even though he had no idea what Carmen’s house number was, he could vaguely remember the way from his memories.

A turn, straight, then turn again, Venti recited in his head, his feet taking him all the way to a building right in the middle of the district. He found Carmen’s apartment in no time. On the door was a plated sign: 05.07.119 — District 5, Block 7, Door number 119.

He swiped his ID on the reader next to the door and it swung open after a quiet, mechanical clack.

This is tiny. Was Venti’s first thought. It was even smaller than the cave where he met Carmen in, but at least it was bigger than the car that he used with Aether and Cyrus to escape the outside world and get to the base.

All there was were the bare necessities. There was a bed, and a wall shelf above the headboard, neatly stacked with books and a lyre. A wardrobe lay off to the other side of the room, beside it a tiny desk that held a small television and scattered sheets of papers.

The open door at the end of the room seemed to lead to the bathroom, and near it was a stove and a small refrigerator barely squeezing into the space. The only visible ventilation was the window beside the bed, and Venti stared at the soft moonlight that filtered into the dark room, creating strips of white across the dusty sheets.

He wondered how Carmen was able to live in this suffocating environment for years.

He entered the room, passing by the bathroom, and caught a flash of himself in the mirror. He quickly spun around and went closer to his reflection, curious as to what he was going to see.

He looked exactly like Carmen, save for the vibrant blue tips of his braids, and the sparkling, bright green of his eyes opposed to the boy’s grey ones.

After a long, long time of examining himself, he wondered what he needed to do now. He found Carmen’s house, so he had a place to stay…what else do humans do?

He looked out of the window where night had completely taken over already, and decided that he should rest first — the full human life experience can wait.

***

When Venti woke up the next day, the first thing he felt was hunger.

It was quite a foreign feeling for him. As a wind sprite, he never went “hungry” as long as there was wind. Food was never really something within his consideration, but now that he was human, he couldn’t just rely on the wind to keep his energy up.

Luckily, he knew that he didn’t have to go far to find food. Based on Carmen’s knowledge, there was a canteen in every block that opened at breakfast, lunch and dinner, providing simple meals and ingredients. With payment, of course, since he could see Carmen pay with his ID card for food in his mind’s eye.

He took a quick shower and changed his clothes, since he had noted that that was what all humans did every morning. Not long after, he was out of the tiny apartment, heading down to the canteen.

Just as he arrived at his destination, he accidentally bumped into someone. He turned around to find the person hastily repeating “sorry” over and over again, who he flashed a reassuring smile at. But just when he was about to apologise too, he heard — or rather, felt — the person gasp.

It was soft, almost undetectable. But for the little wind sprite, he could feel the sharp incline of his breath, and felt the way oxygen flowed more quickly within him as his heart rate picked up.

“C-Carmen?” The man stuttered, and Venti looked up, squinting at his face to see him more clearly. He seemed…like the guy who had told everyone to leave Carmen as bait back then.

“Y-you’re alive? I can’t believe it!” The man’s smile seemed awkward, the enthusiasm in his voice almost forced. He looked more scared and panicked if anything. “How did you get back here? A-and your braids and eyes…what happened to them?”

“What do you think?” Venti asked, sarcasm edging his tone. He wasn’t about to talk to the man who abandoned Carmen. He tried to push past him and disappear into the crowd, but the man caught his arm and pulled him back.

“W-wait, don’t you remember me?”

Remember? Yes, he did. Or rather, Carmen’s memories did.

***

“What are you reading?” The man, who was Carmen’s best friend then approached him slowly, peeking over his shoulder to the book in his hands.

“Studying,” Carmen replied, his focus still on the book itself. “Being a bard can’t sustain me forever…so I’m planning to take the selection exam this year. If I succeed I’ll get promoted above our class! The jobs available are not bad, and the pay is good…”

But the man furrowed his eyebrows.

“You want to stop being a bard? But the exam is really hard.”

“It’s fine. If I don’t try, I’ll never know.”

“Carmen,” the man’s tone was sharp. Displeased. “You know that I always wanted you to join the Adventurers’ Guild. If you pass the exam you can’t join the hunts anymore!”

Carmen just shot him a light, apologetic smile. “I’m not fit for the outside world, you know that.”

“I’ll protect you!” He exclaimed, sticking out a pinkie for a promise. “I promise, I won’t leave you behind. I’ll make sure that we don’t go anywhere too dangerous.”

Carmen hesitated, but then reached out to seal the promise.

***

“Sure, as the guy who had left me behind as a ‘distraction’,” Venti replied coldly, trying to tug his hand out of the other’s grip. But he still held on, his features dissolving into full blown panic at the words that came from Venti’s mouth.

“I didn’t have a choice!” He cried. “I’m your best friend, don’t you remember? I wouldn’t have left you if I had a chance to save you!”

Liar. Venti hmphed internally. The geovishap wasn’t that close to Carmen, and based on his knowledge of geovishaps in the wild, they could have dragged Carmen to safety if everyone at least tried to help.

“I don’t remember you,” Venti decided to change tactics. “I was bitten and lost all of my memories.”

The moment he finished, the man immediately let go, backing away from him. “You’re bitten? No wonder your hair and your eyes…wait, t-then are you infected?! How did you get inside? Did you come back to take revenge?”

Venti was about to explain that he was allowed entry by the High Judge Inquisitor himself, but the man had already ran away, leaving nothing but an empty spot in front of him which was quickly covered up by the passing crowd.

What a “good” friend he is. He shook his head and tsked.

With a pest gone and out of sight, Venti continued with his day.

He walked around the food stalls, and found himself walking towards the fruit stall that was set up at the corner of the canteen. It was the only stall that had human foods that he was familiar with, since everything they had was fruits that could be found in the wild. As for the other stalls…he couldn’t recognise anything.

“Um…can I have this?” He asked the stall owner, pointing to a pile of apples.

“How many?” The person manning the stall was an old lady, and she smiled patiently at him.

“Two please!”

“That will be 5,” The old lady handed him a plastic bag with two apples and pointed to the card terminal. Venti understood what she was asking for and tapped his ID card to pay.

“My, my, you have 35 left only? Young man, I think you should try to find a higher paying job,” she gave a glance at his balance and shook her head worriedly. “Life these days isn’t easy…35 is definitely not enough to live off.”

“Ah…I’ll try, don’t worry!” Venti nodded, then left the stall, taking a bite of the sweet, sweet apple as he walked, the delicious juice bursting within his mouth. He finished both of them in the short span of five minutes.

Humans are quite troublesome, he sighed internally when he thought about the money he had left in Carmen’s card. Outside of the base, all he had to do was find a tree and he had food, but here, he needed to work just so that he could fill his stomach.

When he returned to his house, he started exploring it in detail, pulling open drawers and flipping Carmen’s wardrobe inside out. Even though he knew that Carmen’s previous job was a bard, he was aware that he couldn’t continue this job. It wasn’t well paying enough. He had to figure out another way.

So he decided to go through Carmen’s belongings to see what else he used to do. Maybe he could find his books and take the selection exam, then get a job from there.

In his drawer he found a phone — not really a phone, since global signals went out after creatures of the Abyss had overrun the world, so it was just a base internal communicator. Seeing that it was out of battery, he reached for the plug and charged it.

Carmen didn’t leave much behind in the drawers, so he moved on to books that were stacked across the desk. After looking through a few, he found a thin, dusty booklet titled “Mond-Li Base Handbook”. It had the official stamp of the government running the base on it.

Curious, he flipped it open, and the first thing he saw was a motto written on the first page. “The interests of the human race are above all else.”

Venti couldn’t help but narrow his eyes at the sentence, but continued reading.

The handbook was quite easy to understand. The base would provide electricity and water from 6a.m. to 8p.m., and food will be available in the canteen for exactly one hour during breakfast, lunch and dinner.

There weren’t any restrictions or limitations on what they could do unless it involved serious moral violations, but there was a requirement that they had to meet — they needed to contribute to the base to get pay and ensure their survival.

He looked through the possible places for a job, until he found a page with the bold heading, “The Free Market”.

Despite being called “free market”, it sounded more like a physical black market, the only difference being that it was government certified. Food and all sorts of items that you can find were being provided there all day, all selling at high prices, of course. But as long as there was nothing going on in the market that threatened the base, everything was technically legal.

Of course, there were still warnings at the bottom of that particular page.

Warning: The Free Market is not Base property, proceed at your own risk.

All jobs and transactions in The Free Market are not under the protection of Base law, proceed at your own risk.

All Venti saw was the word “jobs” and nothing else, and on a whim he decided that he would head to The Free Market for a job search. It wasn’t like he could do the other jobs that the base provided anyway.

The day was still early, so he wanted to set off for The Free Market immediately, but his hand caught on the next page which he could see was titled — “The Trial Court”.

He sat back down and skimmed through the pages on the judges, his brain trailing to a certain Judge Inquisitor that had serious and cold yellow eyes.

Apparently, the judges were required to patrol the base other than conducting checks at the entrances, and even do random checks around the apartments just to make sure that no elemental being or infected got in undetected.

A pair of yellow eyes flashed in front of his own, the memory wavering in his vision. “You better be,” Xiao’s voice echoed in his head, a reminder that Venti wasn’t supposed to be there, a warning of the danger he would be in if he were to be found out.

He resisted the urge to shudder, and shook the man out of his head. Quickly slamming the handbook back down onto the table, he stood up and left for The Free Market.

***

The Free Market wasn’t very hard to find — after all, it was located near the central city, near the north border. The Free Market was just a huge building, just like any local shopping mall but maybe five times larger. A sign with “The Free Market” engraved on it hung up front, inviting him through the front sliding doors.

The moment he entered the market, he immediately caught a whiff of the strong, heady smell of alcohol, coming from the bar right beside the entrance. Surprisingly to him, it wasn’t as bad as he expected, since Carmen didn’t seem to like alcohol very much when he was alive. He was even curious about how it tasted, really.

He must have approached too close to the bar, because a man who was standing at the entrance grinned at him. “Hey kid, what are you looking at? Want to learn how to drink?”

A woman’s voice called out from inside the bar. “Article 32, no drinking under 18!”

“So what, it’s not like you will get dragged away by the Judge Inquisitor,” the man shouted back.

As much as Venti would like to point out that, no, he was not under 18, and yes, he was curious about alcohol, he remembered that he had a job to scope out. So eventually, he left as the man and woman jokingly shouted back and forth at each other.

He wandered up the floors of the market, and all there were were random stalls scattered throughout the market, selling food, selling items, selling junk, even selling clean monster parts. He could recognise a few whopperflower nectars in the messy pile.

“Hey, hey, hey, want a phone?” A stall owner beckoned him over, waving a black shiny device in the air. “It’s one of the last models made in Mondstadt! Just give this baby and charge, and you’re ready to go! Can’t contact anyone, but you can definitely play games!”

“I’m good, thank you!” Venti politely rejected him with a smile and was about to move on when the stall owner called him back.

“Come on, I can give you a discount. How does 50 sound?”

“About that…I don’t have money,” he explained.

The stall owner’s attitude changed a complete 180 degrees within a second, his eager expression morphing into disdain. “Then why come here if you’re broke?” He muttered.

“I’m finding a job,” Venti said defensively. Being a wind sprite, could hear all the words the wind carried if he wanted to, so he definitely heard the other’s words.

“A job?” He glanced at him up and down, his eyes roaming from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, then he grinned. “I know one suitable for you. Head to Basement Three, you’ll thank me.”

Venti raised an eyebrow, but didn’t further ask what it was about. He bothered the man enough. With a quick “thank you”, he rushed off, making his way to the lowest level of the market.

The lift didn’t serve the last floor, so he had to use the stairs, and the moment he headed down, he could see eyes glancing his way, some with worry, some with judgement. He didn’t understand why people were giving him looks like that, but he continued his journey down anyway, ignoring everyone else.

When he reached Basement Three, the first thing he saw was a counter right in front of the stairs, and a brown-haired woman sitting behind it, seemingly busy with her work. She seemed to notice Venti’s presence, and looked up, a slight smile spreading across her face.

“Well hello…are you here to buy someone or sell someone?” She asked in a soft voice, then her gaze flicked from his clothes to his face. “Or…yourself?”

Venti blinked. This was definitely not what he was expecting. “What?”

The woman hummed. “You don’t know what Basement Three is for?”

He looked past the counter and only saw a long corridor, lined with doorways that were draped over with curtains. There was a sickly sweet smell coming from the corridor, assaulting the poor nostrils of the wind sprite who was so used to fresh air.

He didn’t know what Basement Three was for, but he could guess.

“Aha, actually, neither…I must have come into the wrong place! Silly me…” Venti laughed awkwardly, backing away from the counter. He was about to head back up the stairs to make his escape, but he heard a loud bang coming from the top of the stairwell.

The sound of a door banging shut.

He looked back at the woman, who had a controller in her hand and a wider smile on her face. “Wrong place? Only people who have nowhere to go come to the last floor. Don’t worry, I’ll offer you good treatment! Big room, kind customers, no?” Her voice sounded so innocent and harmless, but Venti definitely did not trust what his ears heard.

“Really, I came to the wrong place! I just wanted a normal job, but someone told me to come here!” Venti explained, a little panicked now. He didn’t want to…sell himself.

The woman paused and squinted at him, then sighed. “I take pity on you, my dear. No one can exit Basement Three without serving, but you’re in luck today. Come with me.”

She stood up and walked down the corridor, and with no other choice, Venti trailed after her, trying not to peek into the curtains.

They turned right at the end, and arrived at a normal wooden door. She gave it a few quick knocks, and it opened, revealing another young woman standing inside. Bright, red eyes peeked out, along with a grin that screamed nothing but mischievous.

“Hello Ying’er! What brings you knocking on my door? Who’s this?” The girl looked towards Venti, red eyes twinkling with curiosity.

“This poor kid needs a job, and I can’t bear to throw him to the wolves…since your previous disciple suddenly disappeared, would you take him in?” The woman — Ying’er, Venti noted — asked in her gentle voice, different from the girl’s bright and loud one.

The girl scrutinised him, then nodded. “Deal!”

Before Venti could fully understand what was going on, Ying’er had already pushed him into the room and left, leaving the both of them standing in a room full of…lifelike dolls and coffins?

“Alright, let’s start with introductions, shall we?” The girl extended a hand towards his direction, the smile on her face not leaving even for a second. “I am your employer now, and my name is Hu Tao!”

Chapter Text

Venti stared at Hu Tao’s outstretched palm for a second, a little confused, before realising that he was supposed to shake it. It was a human custom, he remembered. He quickly covered up his hesitation by laughing a little awkwardly and placed his hand in the girl’s, shaking it.

“I’m Venti!” He said with equal cheer as Hu Tao did, slightly relaxing. Whatever that was in Hu Tao’s room did not look anything close to the job that Ying’er had offered, and while he was sure that coffins weren’t the best omen, it was much better than whatever…that was before. And Hu Tao seemed like a genuinely nice person too.

“Nice to meet you, Venti. Now, I’ll start by describing the work I do here—”

The sound of the door creaking open interrupted Hu Tao’s words, with Ying’er poking her head through the same door that she had just left seconds ago. “Oh right, along with taking the kid, I do have another request…” Ying’er spoke a little quietly and hesitantly, almost as if she was embarrassed.

“Yea? I’ll take it, as long as you name a fair price!” Hu Tao nodded.

“You might not though,” Ying’er stalled. “My friend requested me to create something, and even though my pottery skills are good enough to finish that commission, I still couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“Well…then maybe I’ll charge a little more?” Hu Tao raised an eyebrow. “Come on, spit it out, I can’t receive the request if you don’t tell me what it is.”

“Can you make the Judge Inquisitor?”

“Yeah, sure—” Hu Tao immediately said, then abruptly stopped, as if having just processed Ying’er’s words fully. “You want what?”

Venti, who had been standing silent and watching the conversation the entire time, practically felt his heart skip a beat when he heard that title. He slowly turned to Ying’er, eyes widening slowly like Hu Tao’s. Why did she want Hu Tao to make a doll of Xiao? The infamous Judge Inquisitor?

“I don’t make people who still walk alive in this realm. I only make dolls of dead people to fill coffins and other people’s empty hearts,” Hu Tao shook her head vigorously. “Making dolls of people still alive will only bring nothing but trouble, not to mention the Judge Inquisitor.”

A flash of anxiousness flitted across Ying’er’s features, but then was quickly hidden away under her skin. “Please, Hu Tao. My friend is crazy for Colonel Xiao, but you know how the judge is, cold and distant. Since they couldn’t get him, they said a fake body would suffice. Price can be negotiated, you know?”

Hu Tao sighed. “You’re lucky the Judge Inquisitor is only involved in the Trial Court and not with internal base affairs, or else I wouldn’t dare to touch this commission at all. Come collect it in a week or two, then.”

Ying’er’s eyes lit up ever so slightly as she nodded enthusiastically, before backing out of the room and rushing back to her counter.

“What would they want a fake body for…?” Venti whispered as he stared after Ying’er’s retreating figure, and Hu Tao just sighed dramatically again while placing an elbow on his shoulder. “For dirty purposes of course, what do you think?”

“Alright, Venti, let me just introduce you to my babies around here.” Before Venti could clarify what “dirty purposes” meant, Hu Tao had already spun Venti around to face the many coffins and dolls stacked in the room. “As you may have guessed, we’re a funeral parlour down here!”

“Nowadays, death rates by infection and attacks by elemental beings are much higher than ever before, so you can see business is thriving. Honestly, I like to see it as a good thing and a bad thing.”

“In case you were wandering, we make dolls for bodies that can’t be found back. Gives the family a peace of mind, you know? But now with Ying’er’s request…” Hu Tao scrunched up her face in thought. “Why don’t you make the Judge Inquisitor? It can be your first and I’ll guide you through it!”

“Uh…” Venti wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. After all, Hu Tao did say that there would be trouble involved in it if they got found out. But he just got hired, it wasn’t good to reject a suggestion like that. So he just shrugged. “I guess I can do it?”

Hu Tao clapped, grinning. “Great! Let’s get to work then!”

***

Making dolls was not easy.

At least, it wasn’t for a wind sprite who was not good at sitting still. To be confined to his seat for hours on end and carving tiny, intricate details into skin-like felt and wood was so tedious and boring, and if it wasn’t for the promised 700 credits for each doll made, Venti would have long given up.

And since this was a risky task, the price had been raised double. 1400 credits for a doll Xiao was 560 apples in total — yes, he did calculate. It was good money, really.

Luckily, he had Hu Tao around, who was constantly talking to him as they worked, telling him stories of how the funeral parlour came about and personal encounters. They even discussed about her previous apprentice after a few days of comfortable interaction.

“You used to have another apprentice?” Venti asked, curious.

“Yea! And I tell you, he was a funny guy. He never brings his ID card around, so when it’s lunch I always have to pay for him. In the end, I just decided not to pay him and gave him his wages by paying for his food.

“And he’s pretty old-fashioned — I had to teach him how to use a communicator. He was like a…a…” Hu Tao’s face scrunched up as she tried to think of a name to describe him.

“...A blockhead?” Venti laughed after a while. It seemed to fit Hu Tao’s description of him.

And somehow, this person she was describing seemed a tad bit familiar to him, like he knew a guy that acted almost exactly like this man. But he didn’t, so he assumed that it was part of Carmen’s memories that he hadn’t unlocked yet.

“Yes! He was like a thick blockhead!” Hu Tao giggled along.

“Then where is he now?” Venti asked again, a little more distracted this time, as he was trying his very best to carve out “Xiao’s” eyebrow, praying internally that his hands wouldn’t slip and ruin the entire thing.

“Where is he? Aiya…I have no idea,” Hu Tao instantly stopped laughing and let out a small sigh. “That Zhongli just disappeared one day. I tried contacting him through the communicator, and even visited his place to check if he was around, but apparently no one had seen him for weeks. He didn’t even leave behind a trace — it was almost like he didn’t exist! And even as someone who believes in the supernatural and ghosts, it was quite…shocking.”

Zhongli. Venti noted. Again, it was suspiciously familiar.

“Eventually I gave up. What can I do anyway?” Hu Tao shrugged, then shook her head as if to shake the bad mood out of her head. “Alright, alright, forget it. Speaking about buying lunch for him, it’s lunch time now! Go, go, go get your lunch.”

Hu Tao returned to her work after shooing him out with her hand, and Venti watched as she worked away at a coffin. Even though she was humming and acting like her normal, cheery self, it was obvious that she was slightly affected by the mention of her past apprentice.

So Venti gave her a pat on the shoulder, then reassured with confidence that he didn’t know where it came from. “I believe he’s still out there somewhere.” Before Hu Tao could say anything back, Venti had already reached the door, ready to leave for a short lunch break.

But right at the moment he pulled open the wooden door, he was met with another man right outside, a fist still in mid-air like he was about to knock. His blue, dull eyes were opened wide by a slight bit in surprise, and he ran a hand through his bright orange hair as he waved at Venti with the other.

Funnily enough, he didn’t look like he was from the base at all.

“Hey Childe! You here to collect?” Hu Tao piped up from behind him.

“Yeah. Who’s this?” He stuck a thumb out at Venti as he entered the room. “New apprentice? What happened to Zhongli?”

“Easier to say what didn’t happen to him,” Hu Tao shrugged. “Disappeared.”

Childe seemed to deflate slightly, a confused and slightly worried look rising between his eyebrows. “Ah.”

Hu Tao seemed to notice that, then sighed. “Sorry that you have to find out about this when Rosalyne just died. I tried looking for him too, but it’s like he was wiped off the face of earth.”

“No matter, I wasn’t that close to him anyway.” Venti wasn’t human, but even as an elemental being he could read the lie in Childe’s dull eyes and bright smile.

Hu Tao definitely also knew what Venti knew, but then let the entire thing slide and continued on. “And yes, this is my new apprentice! Childe, this is Venti. Venti, this is Childe. He’s a soldier from the Snezhnaya Base, who’s here on a military exchange program.”

“Ah, really? Nice to meet you,” Venti nodded to Childe, who said something along the same lines. No wonder he didn’t look like the people of Mond-Li. He didn’t expect that there was another human base. Maybe if he couldn’t find what he needed to find here, he could try going to the Snezhnaya Base.

When Childe and Hu Tao returned to Childe’s initial reason for arrival — which was to collect the coffin for a woman named “Rosalyne” — Venti left for lunch, knowing that he had no reason to stay behind.

He directly went up to the first floor of the Free Market, remembering that he had passed by a stall that specialised in food made out of apples. There was something called an apple pie, wasn’t there? Maybe he could try it…

As he walked through the first floor, he realised that it was much quieter than usual. During lunch hours it was the most busy, with people bustling around to grab a bite of food before returning to work. But today the market was fairly empty, with only a pathetic number of patrons in sight.

Those very few people seemed a little off too. They looked a little tense, their footsteps more hurried than the slow, relaxed stroll of an average person in the Free Market on an average day.

Obviously, this day was less than average.

Even though Venti was a little confused and alarmed, he still found his way to the apple stall — after all, his new human body cannot go without food.

Just as he found the stall, he spotted two figures in the distance, walking down the hall in a rather leisurely way, unlike the rest who carried a heavy tension.

He squinted at the two and froze when he saw a streak of teal hair. Then slowly turned around, and crept away from the direction of the store and the approaching people. No wonder almost no one was around.

Nope. Nope. Nope. He was not ready to confront the Judge Inquisitor today. Not when he still has a half-made doll of the man three levels underground.

Speaking of the doll, Xiao couldn’t have known about it, right…?

He was barely a metre from the stall when a cold voice called him. “Stop. Come back.”

While Venti had the instinct to keep walking on and pretend like he thought that he wasn’t calling for him, he couldn’t, for the corridor was completely empty except for the three of them.

“Aha…hello! Fancy seeing you again!” Venti laughed awkwardly as he inched back around. “Didn’t think I’ll ever meet you here.”

Xiao was donned in his usual military garb and equipped with his polearm and pistol, just like the day they first met. He didn’t reply, and only observed Venti silently with his sharp, golden eyes, his face cold and devoid of any expression.

Another boy stood behind him, and he wore a different kind of uniform from Xiao, one that looked much simpler. He didn’t look up at all, for he was busy brushing his bright blue hair away from his eyes as he scribbled away in a notebook.

After a prolonged, deafening silence, Xiao finally spoke, but not to Venti. “Stiff movements. Chongyun, write it down.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy named Chongyun called as he wrote another line with his pencil.

“Um…” Venti opened his mouth to say something. Even though he wasn’t really clear of what was going on, he could guess from the information that he glanced through in the base’s handbook. This must be one of the patrols that The Trial Court holds every few weeks in a district, to root out anomalies and infected humans.

He needed to say something to divert their suspicion.

But before he could think of what to say, Xiao stared at him with a gaze that seemed to pierce through his soul, a gaze that could see him from inside out. Venti instinctively looked away from the intense stare, which only made Xiao continue on without hesitation. “Avoiding eye contact. Write it down.”

“Yes, sir.”

Forget it. Even if he tried to explain himself, Xiao would only derive even more aspects that pinned his identity to be an elemental being.

“Conclusion?” Xiao asked the boy.

“Colonel, he is human,” Chongyun reported, and Venti sighed in relief as he said that.

“Why do you say so?” Xiao raised an eyebrow.

“He’s scared of you.” There was a trace of amusement in Chongyun’s voice as he said that, but after seeing Xiao’s stoic expression he immediately coughed and added on. “Which also means that he is capable of showing emotions such as fear, and therefore is not infected.”

Everything was quiet as both Chongyun and Venti stared expectantly at Xiao. He didn’t confirm the boy’s conclusion, and neither did he dismiss either.

“Soooo…can I go?” Venti laughed nervously to break the unnerving silence that was starting to get to him, sticking a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to anywhere but the direction of the judge.

“What are you doing here?” Xiao asked, not replying to his question at all.

“Work? I’m broke…ehe…”

“Which floor?”

“Three,” Venti answered, and following that was a raise of Xiao’s eyebrow. “Basement Three, that is.” The judge’s eyebrow flattened down into a scrunch, his expressionless face finally developing a silver of emotion. It was somewhere in between disgust, pity and worry, or maybe it was simply nothing at all and Venti was just reading it all wrong.

“Oh,” Xiao muttered, then finally gave Venti what he wanted. “...You may go now.”

Even as he said that, Xiao was the first to turn around and leave, with Chongyun trailing right behind. Venti couldn’t help but release another sigh of relief again, before going off to continue his search for apple pie.

***

“Other than pottery, I do love perfumes. They smell amazing, no?” Ying’er grinned.

“Well, I agree, but I do prefer the smell of fresh wind and leaves! Nature is much more relaxing, I must say,” Venti hummed.

Hu Tao had something going on in the evening, so Venti was let out right at the first hour of dusk. Apparently Ying’er left work around that time too, so they decided to board the train together on their way home.

There wasn’t much that happened on the trip, and all they could think to talk about was their hobbies. It wasn’t like Venti had any existing ones, so he chose to listen to Ying’er instead.

But they were halfway through their conversation when the train slowed to a stop, halting right in the middle of nowhere. A soft “ding” echoed throughout the carriage, followed by an dispassionate announcement.

“Dear passengers, we are experiencing a few technical difficulties. Please do stay calm and remain in your seats as we identify the problem. Thank you.”

Everyone seemed to slightly lift their heads up, as if hearing the announcement a little clearer would help them to make sense of it. There were a few confused murmurs passed around, wondering what the announcement was all about.

Then suddenly, there was a gunshot, the sharp and loud sound of it exploding from a few carriages down.

People froze in their seats, faces of confusion contorting into ones of horror as they quickly caught on to the situation at hand. Some fled from their seats, running as far as they could from the direction of the sound, while others flew to the doors, banging on them and yelling for them to open.

Venti and Ying’er were the rare few who were still rooted to their chairs.

“What is going on?” Venti whispered.

“You don’t know? I guess you’re still young,” Ying’er sighed, her voice carrying a quiver. “It wasn’t uncommon in the past. An infected person is on the train.”

“But it hasn’t happened in a really long time. Wouldn’t the judges have found the infected before they got onto the train?”

“Well, the Judge Inquisitor did patrol the Free Market today,” Venti commented, and he immediately received Ying’er’s intense stare.

“He’s here?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Ying’er didn’t explain, only stretched her neck out to stare down the corridor, to catch a glimpse of Xiao, perhaps. But the way her eyes widened in shock and terror told Venti that she wasn’t looking at Xiao, but instead was seeing something or someone else.

“T-that guy…” She murmured, fear and panic slowly flooding her dilating eyes. “I knocked into him while finding a seat just now.”

Venti found that she was staring at a man who was now lying on the ground, lifeless, his bright, red blood running across the dark grey floor. Standing right beside the fresh corpse was the figure of the infamous Judge Inquisitor, his face lacking of expression as usual as he tucked his gun away. Even his eyes, carrying the supposed colour of the warm sun, were cold.

Venti could see his mouth move as he spoke to the other judges beside him, and it didn’t take long before they all nodded and started heading towards their carriage.

“I-I can’t be infected right? Right?” Ying’er’s eyes were pleading when they turned to Venti, the panic behind her eyes fighting to let itself surface. “No, no, I can’t be. It was just one second, it’s impossible.”

“I’m sure you’re not infected. You don’t act like you’re infected,” Venti tried to reassure her, and discreetly sent a little breeze her way to calm her down. It was not much, since Venti couldn’t do much in this human form, but she managed to gulp down a few breaths and finally leaned back into her seat.

“It’s going to be fine,” Ying’er smiled, but it didn’t reach the eyes that were vacating into space, looking almost empty. Her words seemed detached, sounding more directed to herself than to Venti. “After all, Colonel Xiao saved me once. He knows me. And I trust his judgement. We’ll be fine.”

There was a tiny bit of wistfulness in those eyes, a prelude to admiration and love even — at least that was what Venti saw, with his limited understanding of human emotions. He was starting to think that the Xiao doll lying in the workshop was not for Ying’er’s “friend” after all.

But that fragile fantasy in her eyes seemed to shatter and morph into fear when the clacking of boots got louder and louder, until the sound stopped just right in front of them.

Sharp, golden eyes surveyed only two who were left in the train carriage — the rest of the passengers had already fled to the end of the train in hopes of preserving their lives a little longer.

Ying’er was smiling again, this time up at Xiao, the curve of her lips being a little more genuine despite her fear and nervousness.

“Colonel Xi—”

Bang.

She didn’t even get to finish saying his name when the gun went off, the bullet from Xiao’s pistol lodging itself between Ying’er’s eyes, tunnelling into her skin and traded its place with her blood. Her face was frozen where her lips were still up, but her eyes were open wide in shock with no trace of the trust and admiration that she had.

The sound of the gunshot was still ringing in Venti’s ears when the woman fell backwards, her eyes now truly empty.

“You—” Venti breathed, but then was shut up by Xiao’s stare. His eyes were searching for something, Venti knew, maybe for a sign that he was infected just like Ying’er, and Venti waited for his verdict. He knew that he wasn’t, because elemental beings cannot infect other elemental beings, but it didn’t mean that Xiao was not going to realise that he was not human eventually.

Xiao raised a hand, and Venti shrunk back instinctively.

Has he—

The hand reached out and gently wiped past the side of Venti’s face, taking with it the scarlet that had splattered across his cheek, the blood that had spilled out of Ying’er’s wound. He could feel the warmth radiating from his hand, contrasting the man’s coldness. Venti froze, his eyebrow shooting up in confusion.

Then, almost realising what he was doing, Xiao quickly retracted his hand, his usually stoic eyes holding rare surprise.

Before Venti could say a thing, the judge had already turned his head away, and left the wind sprite behind.

Chapter Text

"A total of ten infected have been found on the train heading from Mond-Li station towards District 1 yesterday evening at 6p.m., as reported by the Judge Inquisitor himself. The Trial Court reassures that this rare situation has been dealt with, with a promise that it will never happen again.

"However, subsequent to the infection incident, protests against the Trial Court have intensified. The public opinion of the handling of this recent issue has its fair share of mixed responses—"

Hu Tao sighed, and switched off the radio, instantly cutting off the reporter's voice.

Venti glanced at the girl who shook her head slightly and returned to work, which was a brand new coffin that she was making for Ying'er.

Coffin for Ying'er. It was quite hard to believe that the brothel owner who was still alive and grinning yesterday needed a coffin for herself now. And by Hu Tao's grim face and lack of her usual carefree expression, it seems like she was having quite a hard time believing it too.

Hu Tao noticed the gaze that was directed towards her, and she looked up at Venti with resigned eyes. "In this world, you would never know when you will become a ghost yourself. Just never thought the grim reaper would come so soon for her. I love the dead and dying, but not when my friend is. Are you okay though? You were there during her death after all."

Venti nodded. It wasn't the first time he witnessed someone getting killed, by Xiao especially. He wasn't really terrified, or traumatised, like any human would be. After all, death wasn't really a great concept in the little wind sprite's mind. To his own kind, death only meant returning to the wind. To humans though, it seemed to be different.

But don't get him wrong, he was upset at the thought that people like Ying'er and Cyrus were now gone forever too.

They then returned back to what they were doing. Venti was finishing up the Xiao doll, which was about three-quarters done. Hu Tao had insisted that they finish up this commission even though the commissioner was dead — the receiver, her supposed friend, was still alive after all, and they had her address. Not to mention the deposit has been paid too.

Venti didn't have the heart to tell Hu Tao about his guess that Ying'er's "friend" was just Ying'er herself, so he just went along and proceeded to finish the commission. Plus, he might be wrong anyway.

An hour later, when Venti was trying to perfect the shape of the doll's face, Hu Tao leaned over to check his work. "How's the Colonel coming along? Woah, this looks better than I thought you would do."

Venti scrunched his face as he drew back from the doll, trying to scrutinise and judge the product as a whole. Hu Tao's teaching was really effective, for the Xiao doll that he made was scarily similar to the real thing. The accuracy was impeccable. But...there was something missing. (Other than the last leg that Venti hasn't installed onto the doll, of course.)

"I guess I'm almost done? But I feel like there's something missing." Venti made a face as he turned the doll around in his hands. He couldn't tell what, but the lifeless doll just couldn't catch Xiao's essence. There was no light in those eyes he carved out, no coldness nor temporary warmth. Just emptiness. The expression on the doll was stiff, and although Xiao held pretty much the same face as the product did, he had more...Venti couldn't really explain.

Hu Tao just shrugged. "That's the problem with replicas. They can never hold a candle to the real thing. But it's pretty accurate. Kudos to you for remembering his face so well! Even I can't work on something without a picture. Alright, if you're almost done, I'll go ahead and contact our delivery man."

Venti nodded and smiled with a "thanks", and continued to work on the doll as she went over to her phone to make the call.

But a few seconds later, this was all that answered the phone. "The number that you are trying to contact is currently unavailable. Please try again."

Out of the corner of his eye, Venti could see Hu Tao frowning at the screen, then punch in a few numbers again.

"The number that you are trying to contact is currently unavailable. Please try again."

"Can't be...he always picks up his calls...he's too broke to let any chance to work slip by..." Hu Tao muttered under her breath and tried to call the same number again, but only the robotic voice went through the line.

"Something's wrong, definitely," Hu Tao finally gave up and threw her phone onto the table. "Venti, quickly finish up the doll. We'll send it to the address ourselves. We need to get this off our hands as soon as possible."

"...Okay?" Venti raised an eyebrow. Hu Tao has never been this serious before, and usually solved or brushed off problems with a joke or a wave of a hand.

But today, Venti knew that Hu Tao could feel that something had to be up.

***

05.10.325. That was the address they were given. District 5, Block 10, Door number 325.

Both Hu Tao and Venti were now standing right outside of that house, staring at the exact address that was imprinted onto the plague on the door.

"Delivery!" Hu Tao called out, rapping her knuckles on the wooden door. A pause. Then, "Anyone home?"

No one answered. Just as Venti expected.

Suddenly, the door beside them swung open. Venti turned around to see a woman striding out, her arms crossing over her chest as she leaned against the door frame. "What business do you have here?" She asked, raising an eyebrow to glare at them. She didn't seem like she had enough patience to play friendly.

"Delivery," Hu Tao repeated simply, pointing to the heavy black bag in both of their hands. The woman wrinkled her nose at the sight of it. "Are they not here? Do you know when they will be back?"

"Back?" The woman stared blankly at Hu Tao's face, then shook her head. "Don't you know Ying'er's dead?"

"Ying'er?" Hu Tao's eyes went wide with shock, while Venti internally sighed. He was right, but it didn't bring him any relief. He watched as the shock in Hu Tao's eyes melted into understanding, then back to resignation. "Then how am I going to get rest of the money?"

The woman shrugged. "Not my problem. The Judge Inquisitor was the one who killed her, you can go ahead and get him to pay for this." Then she disappeared back into her house, shutting her door as she went.

"I never would have thought..." Hu Tao shook her head as she looked down at the black bag containing the Xiao doll. "How ironic."

Venti understood what she was saying.

"What should we do now? We can't throw this away — we're going to get caught, and the Trial Court will come after us."

"Should we bring it back?" Venti suggested, but was met with Hu Tao's wagging finger.

"Nope. Our delivery man is gone. There's something up, I know it. It's too risky because they'll come check..." She explained, then trailed off, as if remembering something. A second later, a grin surfaced on her face for the first time in the day. "Wait, your house is in this district too, right?"

Venti nodded, raising an eyebrow as he did so. He didn't like how Hu Tao had put on the grin that she usually does when she thinks of pranks to do to the customers visiting the brothel.

"Here's what we'll do. You bring the doll back to your house, and leave it there for now. I'll ship it off to someone else when I think it's safe."

"Wait—what?"

***

Venti regretted giving in to Hu Tao's request.

The doll was heavy even when the both of them were carrying it, and now that he was forced to carry it back to his house alone in the middle of the night — Hu Tao said that it was too late at that she had to catch the last train home — it felt like torture even if his house wasn't a long way from Ying'er's.

Reaching his block, he decided to give up and rest for a while before dragging the Xiao doll all the way up to the fifth floor where his apartment was. He groaned at the sight of the staircase, dread piling up as he imagined the climb with the heavy body bag.

Suddenly, he saw a figure rush down from the staircase, and Venti almost yelped. It took a few seconds for him to realise that it was just another person, and another few to realise that it was Carmen's "best friend".

"You...haven't been caught yet?" The man seemed to recognise him first, and paused at the bottom of the steps. He looked shocked at first, but then it slowly turned into a shaky smile. "But it's been so long... So that means, you haven't been infected?"

All Venti did was squint at him, not replying. He didn't want to talk to this two-faced person.

"Then...I apologise for what happened that day. And for what happened outside. Carmen...I'm your best friend, you'll forgive me, won't you?" The man slowly approached him, and Venti backed away.

"I don't remember you," Venti frowned, repeating what he said a few weeks ago word for word.

"That's even better! We can start anew then!" The man was persistent.

"Please, leave me alone."

"Do you know how much guilt I felt? How much I missed you? Why do you think I asked you to come with me to the Adventurer's Guild? That's because—"

He reached out, as if he was going to entrap Venti into a hug, but before he could touch him, a gunshot rang out through the silent night.

Startled, the man stumbled backwards, away from Venti. Then the both of them looked towards the direction of where the sound came from, only to see a silhouette hiding between the shadows of the many buildings in the district, heading towards them all the while tucking a gun into their waist.

Familiar yellow eyes came into view under the gentle moonlight as the other stepped out of the dark.

Venti swallowed. He couldn't believe that he coincidentally met up with the Judge Inquisitor for the third time this week.

Xiao threw a glance at the man, then directed his gaze back to Venti. "Who is he?"

"My neighbour," Venti answered, then inched away from the man.

Xiao was silent for a second, then approached them, closing their distance. Venti could feel the man stiffen beside him as he finally recognised who he was.

"My communicator number is QD249-1. If this man disturbs you again, or if anyone else harrasses you—" He stared the man down, which resulted in him shrinking back just a little more. "—just call me. You can put my number under Colonel Xiao. I will be here when you call."

"Oh...sure," Venti blinked, completely not expecting that at all. Was a normal citizen getting a judge's communicator number even legal? Not to mention the Judge Inquisitor?

The man seemed to stiffen even more after hearing the conversation, but Venti could barely care about him anymore.

Well, not when Xiao's hand was now resting on his black bag, a finger hooked lightly onto the handle strap, unaware of the offending contents in the bag. "I'll help you with this."

"No!" Venti immediately protested, and when his eyes met his questioning ones, he broke out in nervous chuckles. "No...no need. How can I have you helping me with my bag, huh?"

If the bag did not contain a doll that looked exactly like him, Venti probably would have been willing to cut himself of the torture and let Xiao do whatever he wants, but...

"I can do it myself, don't bother yourself," he tried to take back the bag, but Xiao's seemingly light grip was surprisingly strong on the strap.

"You can? So you live on the first floor?"

"Fifth floor, but that doesn't mean I can't climb stairs with this."

"I see," Xiao nodded, then ended the conversation by lifting the bag up and making his way up the stairs. Venti stared after him for a second, his mouth opening and closing as he thought of a protest, but then gave up and followed after.

He glanced back at the man for a moment, who was frozen in place and terrified to move, even though his wide, confused eyes were following after them. Venti chose to ignore him and turn back to Xiao instead.

The trip back to his apartment was silent, and with every single step they took Venti anticipated Xiao to ask what was in the bag. He didn't try to make conversation because he was afraid that it might incite the question. Or maybe he was too nervous. Most likely both. But somehow, the inquiry never came even when they reached Venti's front door.

Standing right outside the door number 119, Venti quickly swiped his card and let Xiao in.

"Make yourself at home," Venti waved him in with a wide, awkward smile, hoping that he couldn't see the tension in his shoulders.

Xiao nodded, expression unreadable, and set the bag down right at his door. Then a few moments later, he seemed to take Venti's words quite literally and set himself down on the bed.

"So...are you going to continue patrolling the district?" Venti asked a little nervously, hoping that he would leave as soon as possible so as to lower the chances of getting found out.

"There's no need," Xiao replied with no follow-up, as he stared into space as if he was considering something.

"Then...what are you going to do?"

"Return to Wangshu Inn to rest." Venti didn't like how Xiao's sharp eyes were now finding its way towards the black bag that he just dropped off.

"Wangshu Inn?" Venti continued questioning him, hoping that it would be enough to distract the man. "You don't return to your house?"

It didn't work. He was still staring at the bag, this time actually squinting at it. "No. It's too far. Wangshu Inn is closer to the central headquarters."

"Ahhh..." Venti's mind was scrambling for something to say to direct his attention away. "When are you leaving for Wangshu Inn then?"

Xiao looked up at him, eyes freezing cold.

Venti gulped. It worked this time, but not in the way he would have wanted.

Upon reevaluating what he said, Venti was starting to realise that his question sounded like he was a little too enthusiastic for Xiao to leave and even seemed like he was encouraging him to do so. "Haha...I was asking because I— I wanted to know if you have enough time to, uh, stick around for a glass of water or two...ehe...you know?" Venti quickly explained, going so fast until he almost tripped on his tongue.

Xiao's glare softened, then he looked away and nodded. "Sure. Go get a glass of water for me then."

Venti immediately grabbed a cup from his kitchen counter dashed out of the apartment. He definitely did not forget to close the door behind him as he made his way to the common lounge, where the only safe water source is being provided by the dispensers there.

Thank archons, the only water we can drink here is outside of my room. He felt like he was about to explode just from standing in there and anticipating Xiao's eventual realisation and his verdict after. Maybe he could hide out in the lounge for a little while before going back with the water.

As he refilled the cup with water, he couldn't help but wonder why Xiao helped him. He was the Judge Inquisitor after all, and being a busy, important man, why would he randomly just help him carry a bag to his house, and stick around not doing his patrolling job? They weren't even that close. Was it just for water? Can't be.

If he didn't remember wrongly, he knew that judges patrol in groups, and that time when he met Xiao at The Free Market it was with another boy. But now he was alone... And Xiao was a very sensitive man, and being the most accurate judge his intuition had to be really strong, so how can he not be suspicious of the black bag by now?

And Hu Tao also said that there might be something up...

Shit. It was Venti's first time using a curse word, but he felt that it was quite suitable for the situation at hand. He quickly ran back to his apartment in a panic, half-filled cup in hand, praying fervently that Xiao had not checked out the black bag yet, or that his guess wasn't true.

When he reached his door, he stopped himself from bursting in, and forced himself to breathe and calm down. Panicking was like winds crashing together and forming a tornado. Nothing good would come out of it.

Call Hu Tao first. Using his free hand to dig into his pocket to fish out his communicator, he quickly dialled Hu Tao's number to ask her for help. Or at least inform her of what might go down sooner or later.

"The number that you are trying to contact is currently unavailable. Please try again."

Ah. He's done for.

***

"Here's your water," Venti carefully walked past the doorway, and headed towards the judge who was still sitting still on his bed, eyes blank. Xiao did not reply, nor did he turn around to look at him.

Venti gulped, and stretched out his arm for him to take the cup. Xiao did not move a single inch.

Too still. Face too empty. Venti subconsciously thought, but then it manifested into a realisation.

Oh archons.

He slowly turned around, and saw another Xiao — the real one, this time — sitting right at his desk, face completely unamused and gaze piercing right through his soul. His legs and arms were crossed, as if he was waiting for something.

"Here's...your water...aha..." Venti plastered on a smile as he brought the cup to Xiao. He almost choked on his spit upon seeing the real Colonel Xiao sitting behind him.

He's dead, completely dead now. He found out.

Xiao stared at him for a few seconds, not reaching out to take the water at all, as if refusing Venti's "hospitality". Then he slowly opened his mouth and said, "I'm sure you have more to say."

"...I'm sorry?" Venti racked his brains to think of something to say to evade whatever consequence that was about to fall onto him, but honestly, what do humans do in the situation when they are caught doing something bad? Especially by the law?

Xiao's eyes widened a little, as if not expecting that. Venti swallowed. Okay, maybe humans don't usually apologise when they get caught.

"For what?"

"Huh?"

"What crime did you commit that made you to be sorry?" Xiao regained his composure and lifted an eyebrow.

"Um..." Venti glanced back at the doll, then to Xiao, and back again. He wasn't really sure what crime it was to possess a doll lookalike of the highest judge in the base, but by Hu Tao's initial reluctance to do this project there might actually be a law against this... "For making a doll of you?"

Xiao hummed quietly. But by the fold of his eyebrows, he actually looked slightly displeased.

"And...I won't do it again in the future! I promise!" Venti quickly added with a beam, hoping that it was convincing enough to the point that Xiao would be willing to let him go without any repercussions. After all, it was just a doll. Couldn't be that bad, could it?

Xiao was silent for a second, then finally reached out and plucked the cup out of Venti's aching arm. Venti grinned, thinking that he was forgiving him and letting him go, but the smile dropped off his face when he felt a cold piece of metal looped around his outstretched wrist, the other end of the handcuff held on tightly by the colonel.

...You have to be kidding me.

"You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in court," Xiao spoke the words with a deadly calm before Venti could protest. He then fished out his communicator.

"The target has been arrested. The contraband has also been confiscated. Mission complete. Send backup for transfer. Over."

Chapter Text

The trip to the holding cell was quiet. So quiet.

After Xiao cuffed Venti, backup quickly arrived and he was stuffed into a black car owned by The Trial Court. Then they headed to the base centre, Mond-Li, where there were holding and prison cells there.

There were so many times he wanted to open his mouth and break the tension, but the glares from the judges surrounding him — especially Xiao’s — made him swallow and sink back into the car seat.

It didn’t take long for them to go underground, where the cells were, and he was brought into a dim corridor with prison cells crowding the place left and right. He was mercilessly thrown into one of them.

“There will be a trial tomorrow by the law faction of the Trial Court. You have ten hours to prepare your defence in court,” Xiao said as he uncuffed him and locked the metal door. Venti knew that if he was fast enough, he could dash past him and escape, but he still stayed put.

“I don’t have one,” Venti uttered honestly.

“I thought so,” Xiao said almost matter-of-factly, shooting a look at Venti that he couldn’t comprehend. Then he turned around and left him alone, walking down the corridor without turning back.

The last sentence that he left Venti with was a quiet: “Rest well.”

Venti cautiously approached the metal bars, trying to peek out to watch Xiao disappear from the hall.

Suddenly, he heard a voice come from the cell opposite him. “Psst! Venti! Is that you?”

Venti snapped his attention to the person who was calling out his name. He peered into the darkness — the dim lighting was not helping at all — and by luck his eye caught a few strands of red hair. “Hu Tao?”

The person in front of him — Hu Tao, it seems — waved to him vigorously. “See, I told you we all are going to get caught.”

“I should not have agreed to help you,” a voice that came from the cell beside Hu Tao groaned loudly, and Venti squinted in that direction.

“Who’s that?”

“I think you already know him. This is Junming. He sells phones in The Free Market,” Hu Tao introduced. “Despite his amazing ability to repair phones that are useless in this broken world, he’s broke. So he does delivery work and some minor errands for me.”

“Shut up!” Junming huffed.

Oh. That guy. Venti remembered that that man was the same person who directed him to Basement Three.

“And what kind of “minor errand” is it to take photos of the Judge Inquisitor? And you didn’t end up using it anyway!” Junming continued to complain.

Venti could practically hear Hu Tao roll her eyes. “And who asked you to take so long to decide whether or not you wanted to take up the job? By the time you managed to retrieve a reference for Venti, he had already finished!”

“I better be compensated for this after we get out of here.”

“Go ask Ying’er for compensation instead. I didn’t make the order.”

“You can talk to the dead, you ask her for me.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Venti interrupted. He didn’t really pay much attention to their conversation, because he was trying to figure out why they were arrested along with him. “I made the doll, so why are you two arrested too?”

“Isn’t that obvious,” Junming lamented. “I took photos of the great Judge Inquisitor, and Hu Tao here was the one who told me to take pictures and told you to make the doll, so they all counted it into illegal acquisition of information on the Trial Court.

“Which I don’t understand, because all I did was take a photo!”

“I’ve seen people getting arrested for taking photos and collecting information of the judges in The Trial Court before,” a clear, unfamiliar voice cut into their conversation out of the blue, and it seemed to come from… Venti tried to scan the area to find where the voice was coming from, and realised that it was from the cell right beside his own.

“The Trial Court is quite wary because someone did it to plan an assassination against the Judge Inquisitor. He got executed after getting found out.”

The three who were getting arrested for the exact same crime sucked in a breath.

“Then…” Hu Tao started, with a nervous edge to her voice. “Since we did not do it out of malice or any bad intentions, we are pretty much safe right?”

Venti quickly added on to her question. “How long do we have to stay in here?”

“It depends on how the Judge Inquisitor is feeling. You can hope that he is feeling merciful,” the voice replied, almost as if he was shrugging.

“Hey, what about you? What are you locked in here for?” Junming asked.

“Spreading propaganda,” the voice answered. There was a short laugh right after his words, as if he found the prospect of it funny. “I’m a storyteller from the Liyue side, you see. I write and gather stories of the past to perform and tell, but before I knew it I was arrested and accused of spreading propaganda.”

Venti straightened up, curious now. It seemed that the other was in about the same industry as Carmen’s. But based on Carmen’s memory, being a bard or a storyteller was a pretty fun and legal job, despite the financial instability. So why did he get arrested?

“What did you write and perform?”

“Oh, just a little bit of history. How things were before the Mond-Li Base. And how it all got to this infected world. Do you want to hear it?”

The sound of bars rattling from Hu Tao’s cell made Venti pause before he could say yes. “Anddd let’s stop here. I don’t want us to get accused of listening to propaganda.”

The storyteller next to Venti’s cell just laughed and ignored her protests. “No worries, you all are already locked up anyway. Now listen carefully.

“Before the world spun and descended into madness that were brought upon us by elemental beings, before the base walls rose and locked us away from the rest of the world, we used to live freely with the elements and elemental beings. You all know that the Old Teyvat had seven nations, but what you all don’t know is that each nation corresponded to one element.

“That was the Golden Age. Where we managed to co-exist safely with the things that ravage our world today, where we used to touch and use what infected us now.

“That’s spreading propaganda alright,” Junming deadpanned.

He was right. If anyone were to hear this, they would think that the entire base thing was a hoax and that you can interact with elemental beings freely. But to Venti, what the storyteller said was true to him. After all, he himself could co-exist with humans, just like what he was doing right now, and he hadn’t infected anyone he had come into contact with either.

The storyteller tsked. “I’m not done yet. Elemental beings are still dangerous, and they still can infect humans now. Just not in the past.”

Venti could feel himself deflate.

“The reason for the safe co-existence of humans and elements are these things called the “gnosis”. They were possessed by the seven archons — gods — who overlooked each nation.”

Gnosis? There was something about that word that seemed…familiar to Venti, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on it. It was the same feeling he felt whenever thought about the thing that he was missing from his chest.

Venti’s thoughts were cut off when the storyteller suddenly raised his voice. “But Snezhnaya was greedy and wanted all of the gnoses! They went through each and every region to collect their gnosis, stripping it from their archon and making the elements unstable.

“The instability of the elements awoke the deep, ancient power of the Abyss, granting corruption and insanity. Gradually, the originally tame elemental creatures stepped out of their own territory and attacked mankind, and humans got infected and turned into elemental beings.” The storyteller’s voice was low. Grave.

“Abyss spots — where infection and corruption runs high — started appearing everywhere across Teyvat. Thriving cities were devoured by overflowing elemental beings, humanity was getting destroyed. Bases were built as a sanctuary for us, and now there is where we hide.

“But they don’t last forever.”

The storyteller paused, then continued. “The Inazuma base was the first to go down. No help could be offered there since they were so far away, and the elemental beings had overtaken their many islands before we knew it.”

“Nat-taine was next. Resources ran out. Then Sumeru. A collective fungus attack that clogged up everyone’s lungs. Only the Mond-Li Base and Snezhnayan Base remain standing.”

“The Snezhnayans say that the gnoses were lost the moment they were attacked, yet conspiracy theories say otherwise. But who knows the truth?”

Finally, he finished with an elongated sigh, a wistful tone to his last words. “Maybe someday we will find back the gnoses, and restore balance to our Teyvat.”

Silence followed his words, with the three listeners gaping at the direction of the voice, and the mouths that had fallen apart all formed perfect Os.

But the silence didn’t last long.

Just as the moment passed, the ground suddenly began to shake. Violently.

Venti, who was completely unprepared, stumbled forward and crashed face first into the bars, and he yelped as pain coursed through his nose. “What’s going on?”

“Is it an earthquake?” Junming cried.

“Can’t be,” Hu Tao answered loudly, trying to shout above the noises of chaos that had arisen in the mess. “An earthquake doesn’t feel like this, it’s too unstable for it to be one—” Then her voice turned into a scream. “—there’s something under us!”

Venti gripped the prison bars tightly to steady himself, trying to concentrate and figure out what Hu Tao was talking about.

Thump.

Now that he was listening more carefully, he could finally hear the loud, irregular thumps that were coming from the ground other than the screaming.

Thump.

Hu Tao was right. As a wind sprite, he could sense the exchange of air by a huge mass beneath the ground. There was something beneath their feet.

“What is it, what is it?” Junming screamed, his voice adding onto the panic that was already bouncing off the grey walls of the holding cells.

Hu Tao shouted back, “I don’t know!”

The sound of footsteps came all of the sudden, echoing down the corridor. Everyone peeked out of their cells to see a soldier running down, holding up a megaphone. “Everyone please do not panic! The prison walls are very strong, and we are still trying to check the cause of this incident. I repeat, please do not—”

Beep—

The sound of the evacuation alarm rang out with its long, loud and insufferable call, cutting him off before he could finish his sentence.

“The evacuation alarm already sounded, please just let us out already!” Junming begged, rattling the bars desperately.

The soldier looked down at the floor, but after a moment of hesitation, he fished out the keys and started unlocking all the cell doors.

“Unlock mine first! Please, please, I’ll owe you forever—thank you, thank you!” The soldier turned around and headed for Junming’s cell upon hearing his cry, but before he could insert the key into the keyhole and unlock his cell door, a loud noise stopped him in his tracks.

Something had broken through the floor — or specifically, through the floor of Junming’s cell.

A huge, round black object shot out from the floor, and Venti could hear Junming’s horrified and hysterical scream as he was lifted into the air.

Then the scream was immediately cut off as the terrifying creature crashed into the ceiling, squashing Junming’s body between its head and the concrete.

Venti witnessed as the man perished in the worst way possible, his eyes bulging from the pressure, his body later crushed into an unrecognisable shape, blood sliding down the creature’s head and dripping down into the hole that it had made in the ground.

Not a second later, Junming’s corpse fell down into the hole with his blood as the creature returned underground.

Venti backed away from the cell door, as if putting some distance between him and the gory scene just now could relieve any of his emotional turmoil. While he had witnessed many deaths prior to this, and not fully understanding its concept, this…this was…

It was the first time in his life he felt like puking.

“Fuck,” The soldier cursed loudly, his voice shaking as he crawled away from the broken floor. He struggled to get up, and ran out of Venti’s sight the moment he got onto his feet, leaving the keys to the prison cells on the floor.

“Hey, don’t leave us!” Hu Tao shouted at the soldier who was escaping the scene, desperately banging on her cell door. It was apparent that she did not witness what Venti and the soldier did, since her view of Junming’s cell was blocked by a wall, but she seemed to deduce as much from the soldier’s reaction.

But they didn’t get to know whether the soldier had planned to come back and save them or not. Because right after Hu Tao’s shout, another loud crash came from the direction of where the soldier had run off to, which was accompanied by another bloody yell of terror and fright.

Then silence again…and following that was the sound of bones crunching and breaking, as if it was being chewed on.

—The soldier was being eaten, either dead or alive.

Venti had to do something. Or else, the rest of them would be subjected to eventual death too.

In a moment of desperation, he tried to use the wind to guide the keys to his door, and it took quite a bit of effort to get his wind sprite abilities to work effectively in his human form. He figured that Hu Tao would notice, but he was betting that she was too distracted by the fact that the soldier was being devoured.

Luckily, he managed to coax the keys to his door in a few seconds, and quickly snatched it up and unlocked his door the moment he got it.

“Venti, you got it?” Hu Tao shouted, surprise blooming on her face when she saw Venti stumble out of his cell. “Quick, quick, help me unlock!”

Venti wasn’t about to leave her behind, so he let her out of her cell. “Get out first, I need to help the rest of the prisoners.” The creature had disappeared with the soldier’s body for a while, but there was no telling when it would reappear.

Hu Tao glanced worriedly at the hole in the floor in front of the first exit, and decided that she shouldn’t hang around for long. “Alright, see you on the surface, okay?” She dashed up the stairs of the second exit that was right opposite of the first.

Thank the archons that there was only one prisoner left, who was the storyteller that was jailed right beside Venti. Venti quickly released him, and they both ran for the exit that Hu Tao had escaped from.

After they ran up the stairs, they found that the corridor was divided into two, one going straight ahead and the other deviating off to their right.

“Where to go?” The storyteller asked anxiously, but before Venti could answer, they heard a loud, deep growl coming from the direction they escaped from, and a deafening crash.

Venti quickly looked around for any clues of where the exit to the surface was, but there wasn’t any. “Let’s just—”

He was cut off as the ground started shaking violently, tipping both him and the storyteller over.

Venti could feel it — the breathing of the huge creature just beneath their feet.

It had caught up.

“Just run!” He shouted, and dashed into one of the corridors that he had fallen towards.

He briefly looked back only to see that terrifying creature burst from the ground, breaking through the concrete. Now that it was directly in his line of sight, he could see that the creature was like an enlarged worm, if the worm had rows and rows of bloody sharp teeth and a penchant for human flesh and blood.

The storyteller was nowhere to be found, and Venti could only hope that he had run away into the other corridor.

The creature screeched loudly at him, and the moment it started sliding out of the hole in the floor to chase in his direction, Venti quickly turned back around and ran.

His mind was churning out curse after curse as he ran as fast as his human legs could take him. He wished that he was in his wind sprite form — he would be able to fly through the corridors and escape faster.

Venti couldn’t help but turn back every other minute to see how far he was from the creature, and it was…not looking good. The worm was gaining on him, fast, and it kept crashing and destroying the ceiling lights and its wires, shutting down the entire corridor and submerging the entire facility into darkness.

It wouldn’t be long before he crashed into a wall in the dark and fall into the same demise as Junming and the soldier—

And crash into a wall he did.

Venti quickly tried to push himself off and scramble away, terrified that the creature might catch up if he stopped even just for one second, but the wall reached out and held on tightly to him.

Wait. How—

Venti froze as he felt warm fingers warm around his arm, and a familiar whisper right by his ear.

“Is there anyone else behind you?”

“No?” Venti answered almost immediately, squinting to see whoever was in front of him, though he couldn’t make out much with his human eyes, especially in his panic.

The other hummed softly, then quickly administered a string of commands. “Prepare the bomb, fire in three.”

Before Venti could figure out what was going on, he was pressed onto the ground and they rolled over to the side. He reflexively tried to get up after they stopped, but the man pushed him down again, this time clamping his hands over his ears. “Stay down.”

Right after he finished his sentence, something seemed to shoot through the corridor — another huge, black mass that, unlike the worm, had no breathing. It shot past the both of them and exploded into bright, white light, the loud sound of explosion and the dying screeches of the worm making Venti flinch.

The light from the explosion lit up the entire dark corridor, and for the brief second that Venti’s eyes recovered from the temporary blinding, he could see who was lying on top of him.

It was Xiao.

The sight of the Judge Inquisitor kind of shocked him a little more than the bomb had.

Xiao seemed calm, even with the loud noise exploding in his uncovered ears, like he was used to it. All he did was stare down at Venti. There was no “don’t be scared”, or “don’t worry”, the only warm comfort he provided being the hands he pressed over Venti’s ears to shield Venti instead of himself.

It felt more than enough.

The light slowly faded away with the sound, dipping the corridor back into darkness. They both laid there for a few seconds before Xiao slowly removed his hands and got up.

“Let’s go,” Xiao helped Venti up, and practically dragged him to the exit. Venti didn’t realise how shaken he was by the entire ordeal, his legs turning into jelly now that it was over, and he let himself get hoisted up onto the surface by Xiao.

He didn’t know how long they took stumbling along the darkness — or rather, it was him alone who was stumbling — but soon they finally found their way out, and Venti could finally breathe in the delicious fresh air of the outside world again. So much better than the stuffy, underground air.

He clung onto Xiao as he tried to take the air in, but the sudden intake of fresh air made him cough and wheeze, his head spinning slightly as he came down from the adrenaline that was running through his veins just minutes ago.

“We’re alright now,” Xiao said to him. Venti couldn’t tell if he was trying to comfort him or not.

“Ventiiiiii!” A call from Venti’s right made him look up, and he found a red figure rushing to him. “You’re out—”

They stopped when they spotted Xiao standing beside Venti. “...ah. Hi, Judge Inquisitor,” They greeted.

Venti’s vision finally started to clear, and he could recognise the figure as Hu Tao, and broke into a bright grin. “Hu Tao! Wait, where’s the storyteller?”

Hu Tao pointed to a spot where all the victims were gathering, and some people who were in the uniform of the Trial Court were tending to the more injured ones. The storyteller was sitting quietly on the ground, waiting for his turn.

“Superintendent Schubert,” Xiao suddenly spoke up, and Venti turned in the direction he was talking to. “You’re late.”

A man, who was in a military uniform, approached their little group, with rows of soldiers in tow. He seemed to be the leader…Venti glanced at the logo on his arm. He could vaguely recognise it…maybe he was the one overlooking the holding cells too.

“We weren’t,” the man retorted. “We were planning to do an area bombardment, but of course, since Colonel Xiao has overstepped the Trial Court’s boundaries and entered the holding cells, we couldn’t do so, could we?”

“My criminals are still in there,” Xiao replied, voice cold. Venti could feel the man glance at him for a second. “But with the emergency equipment here, you still want to blow this entire place up?

“There’s no need for you to concern yourself with our operations. Maybe you should get down to checking if there are any infecteds.”

“There’s no need for you to concern yourself with the Trial Court’s operations,” Xiao replied in kind. Then without another word, Xiao turned around and left as Schubert returned to the soldiers under him and started giving out commands.

What Venti didn’t expect was Xiao reaching out to grab him by the wrist and pull him along.

“Wait—” Venti followed, though he was confused. “Where are we going?” He glanced at Hu Tao, who was left behind, her confused expression mirroring his own.

Xiao continued to lead him away with no answer.

Chapter Text

Xiao led him all the way around the main building — where the prison and holding cells were — and brought him to a separate building that seemed to belong to the same compound. It was considerably smaller, and less detailed and complicated than the main building. By the apartment-like way it was structured, Venti guessed it to be the living quarters of the long-term guards that work here.

Xiao brought him inside and into a room devoid of any decoration, only holding the basic necessities of a bed, a desk, and a chair. Only the window provided any life to the room, the weak rays of dawn casting upon the dull furniture.

The moment Venti was brought inside, Xiao immediately locked the door behind him. Venti figured it was to prevent him from getting out if he turned out to be “infected”.

But he didn’t quite know what Xiao wanted to do, so he just stood there and watched as the other crossed the room, ruffled through the desk’s drawers until he drew out a roll of bandage from it.

“Venti,” Xiao called out to him, and Venti jolted. This was the first time Xiao ever called his name, despite the many encounters they had before. It felt…quite odd, to hear his name come from his mouth.

And Venti never remembered introducing himself to him, so how does he…

“How do you know my name?” Venti blurted.

“I paid attention,” Xiao explained, then paused, a frown taking over his face, as if something sounded wrong. But the expression was gone in the next second as he continued, “Take the bandage.” Then he held the roll of bandage out to Venti and nodded at his right arm.

Venti instinctively followed Xiao’s gaze and glanced at his own right arm, only to realise that it was bleeding, red seeping through a long cut that somehow he hadn’t felt on the way up to the surface. Blood cascaded down his arm, the vibrant scarlet in startling contrast to his pale skin.

He slowly walked over to Xiao’s side and plucked the roll out of his hand, then started bandaging himself — except, he has no idea how to.

Carmen never really needed first aid skills, so there was no hint on how to bandage a wound in his memory too.

So all Venti could do was struggle as he tried to tear a piece of the white fabric and sloppily wrap it around his arm. He couldn’t help but wince a little as it touched the open wound — the pain was starting to stab a little at his mind now.

It wasn’t long before he heard a disapproving sigh from his right.

“I’ll do it,” Xiao gave up watching the poor boy struggle. Without warning, he pulled Venti closer until the bandage was within reach. Venti was expecting to slightly hurt as Xiao grabbed hold of the bandage and started wrapping it around his arm tightly, but surprisingly, he was gentle yet efficient, his fingers quickly cleaning up Venti’s sloppy work.

It didn’t take him long to finish up with a knot.

“Thank you,” Venti muttered. All Xiao did was stare mutely at him and didn’t reply.

Suddenly, a loud, distant explosion resonated through the air, seemingly coming from the direction of the main building. Out of curiosity, Venti peeked out of the window, trying to catch whatever was going on at the main building.

All he could spot were soldiers storming in and out of the building, going underground to retrieve the remaining prisoners they could find while still bombing up the insides of the building. The repeating explosions ringing in Venti’s ears were a sign of their determination to wipe out the infecteds and the hostile elemental beings beneath the ground.

Suddenly, he felt a presence beside him, and he almost jumped back in surprise. Xiao had approached the window so silently that Venti didn’t notice him.

Xiao didn’t pay Venti much attention as he fished out his communicator, punched in a string of numbers, and held it up to his ear.

“Colonel Xiao of the Trial Court, requesting for communication with the Lighthouse.”

“Please wait…” The operator replied.

Lighthouse? Venti was close enough to Xiao to hear everything, but it didn’t mean he quite understood what was going on. Well, he did find the name slightly familiar though…he felt like he had seen it in the Mond-Li Handbook…was that the name of the government running the base?

“Hello? What’s going on at the prisons?”

“Elemental being invasion from underground by a huge infected worm. But we are mostly safe as of now.”

“Understood,” the other side of the line immediately responded. “There should be more as these worms are social creatures that all gather in one corner. We’ll dispatch some backup. Just make sure to protect our emergency equipment.”

“Sure.”

Xiao hung up, but the communicator rang again on its own accord a second later.

“Superintendent Schubert,” he picked it up, calmly addressing the caller that happened to be the superintendent that they met just moments ago.

“We can’t bomb the place anymore — we found the tunnel that the worm came from and my men are fighting it out. There’s quite a few injured people. We already put down the ones who were heavily wounded by the worm and sent out the ones that had light injuries. But you need to watch out for them.”

“I can see from here,” Xiao replied, and looked out of the window. As if to prove his word, he pulled out his gun and pushed the window open, aiming the barrel down to fire once.

When Venti joined him in peering over the edge, all he could find was a man lying flat on the ground, a bullet mercilessly stuck between his eyes.

A quiet “fuck” came from the communicator. Schubert must have seen Xiao’s instant masterpiece too.

But Xiao seemed unfazed. “Protect the emergency equipment too.”

“Yea, yea, it’s not destroyed, it’s stronger than this entire prison stronghold, alright.” An eye roll could just barely be heard from Schubert’s voice. “You worry about your own job.”

Venti was losing interest in the conversation, so he stepped back from the window and decided to explore the room instead — which honestly, wasn’t much, so he resorted to rummaging through the drawers on the desk.

By the black duffle bag that laid beside the desk, it seemed that Xiao had just newly settled into the room, for seemingly temporary purposes. But he had been quick enough to slip his things into the drawer, because when he pulled the second drawer out, there laid a notebook that seemed to belong to Xiao.

Human instinct might have told Venti to hold back and not touch his personal things. But Venti wasn’t human.

He quickly shot a glance at Xiao, who still had his back to him and was staring wordlessly out of the window. He took it as permission to let his curiosity take over and reach his hand into the drawer, fishing the notebook out.

It seemed to be a diary. A work diary, if he was to be specific.

Venti was slightly amused at the start of the most recent entry, which was one about yesterday.

13/04/XX89

Patrol at the Free Market. Met suspect ID PF351440MLA (who addresses himself as “Venti”). Chongyun ruled the suspect as human. I partially believe in that, but cannot prove otherwise.

Venti couldn’t believe that he was addressed by his ID in Xiao’s notebook. The addition of his name after was an interesting touch. But he wasn’t really amused by the rest of the report though.

Infected invasion on train at 6.04p.m. 3 infecteds caught. Report has been made.

12/04/XX89

Patrol at West Gate. 12 infecteds caught. All seemed to come from the Second Plains side. Report has been made.

11/04/XX89

Patrol at District 7. 0 infecteds caught. Normal day.

10/04/XX89

Patrol at District 1. 1 infected caught. Allowed in from South Gate. Report has been made.

.

.

.

14/03/XX89

Patrol at North Gate. 8 infecteds caught. 1 ambiguous suspect.

This is the first time I couldn’t figure out if someone is infected or not. Albedo tested him and said that he is not infected, yet I feel that he is not human either. I will keep a close eye on him.

Venti shuddered a little. Xiao’s intuition was sharp. Really sharp. He had figured out that he was infected but not human from then — he just never considered the fact that he might have been an elemental being.

Maybe Xiao’s attention on him was why he had been running into Xiao lately.

Other than that though, most of the pages seemed to be pretty normal and “mundane” like that, so he skipped a few pages ahead, until something caught his eye.

An entry that did not contain any of the words “infected”, or “patrol” at all.

27/02/XX89

Exploration into Abyss. Found and collected traces of uncorrupted elements despite it being close to the entrance. May be a sign of

The sentence stopped there.

This was an entry that Venti couldn’t quite understand. He didn’t know that venturing into the wild and deep into the Abyss was part of Trial Court’s job description — hell, other than Carmen who had stumbled aimlessly into that area, he didn’t think that humans would even go near it and come out alive.

What “entrance” was he talking about? And “uncorrupted elements”? Something about that sounded like what the storyteller had told them just before this entire disaster happened.

Maybe the storyteller’s propaganda was not propaganda after all. Maybe it was a truth that no one knew. Except for Xiao.

Then does he… Venti couldn’t help but recall the empty hole in his heart, and the peculiar connection he felt towards it when the storyteller mentioned a word. What was it again?

“...these things called the “gnosis”.”

That was the word. Does Xiao know anything about that?

At that thought, he instinctively looked up to look for Xiao, expecting to still see him looking out of the building. But instead he found yellow eyes trained on him, seemingly unimpressed at the sight of Venti flipping through his diary.

His expression made Venti realise that what he was doing was probably inappropriate in human standards…

Venti quickly let out an awkward laugh, and dropped it back into the drawer. “I was…curious.”

Xiao did not acknowledge his effort in explaining himself at all. In fact, he didn’t seem to actually care all that much for the notebook. “The observing period is over.”

“What?”

“I meant you may leave now. I suppose this room is boring enough for you to start snooping into others’ belongings. You don’t seem like you would turn into an infected at any time, so you may return to the survivors’ tents.” Somehow, Xiao managed to not make his words sound sarcastic.

“Ah…” Venti glanced at Xiao’s notebook. He was so close yet so far from his ultimate goal. He couldn’t just walk away and leave knowing that the notebook held a hint of what he was finding.

He needed to take another look through it.

“But it’s cold,” Venti pouted, complaining. “I don’t want to go down there again.”

“Don’t forget that you are a criminal.”

“You know, technically, I didn’t do anything that has to do with the “illegal acquisition of information”. I didn’t collect anything,” Venti retorted.

Xiao shrugged, leaning against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “Using the Trial Court for profit, then.”

“But we didn’t receive the money either…” Venti lamented.

“I’m a Judge for the infected, not for the law, you can go argue with the legislation,” Xiao pushed himself off the wall and headed for the door.

Venti sighed. It seemed that Xiao was going to force him out either way…

“But I can’t sleep today. I also have things to attend to.” Xiao stopped at the doorway, a hand on the slightly ajar door. He didn’t look back as he spoke. “So you can choose to stay or go back down. It doesn’t matter either way.”

Before Venti could even thank him, or nod, he had already left, closing the door tightly behind him.

The little wind sprite could only stare blankly at the shut door, not quite understanding why this one particular human’s words were one thing and his actions another.

But now that Xiao had trusted Venti enough to have free reign over his room, delayed guilt started trickling into him, making him wonder if he should take another peek at the notebook again.

After a moment of deliberation, he shuffled back to the desk, his curiosity and need to complete his quest greater than that weak feeling of guilt.

Just one minute. Just one minute. He promised himself.

He picked up the notebook yet again and flipped it open, going back to the page where he stopped.

The rest of the entries were quite typical, but after going through another three months’ worth of pages, he found yet another entry similar to the oddly written one.

.

.

.

20/12/XX88

Exploration into Abyss. For the first time, the source of Abyss has been uncovered. A gnosis has been found near the entrance of the source, heavily guarded by a mob of various elemental creatures. Creatures have been fought off and the gnosis has been obtained. Returned to the Lighthouse for further research and analysis.

(Suspect that the gnosis can attract corrupted elemental creatures.)

Venti was right.

Xiao did know something.

But this entry barely answered Venti’s questions. What is the “source” of Abyss? Venti had lived in the Abyss and had never really ventured out of it for as long as he could remember, yet he didn’t quite understand what was written in Xiao’s notebook. He never knew it had a “source”.

He supposed that the “entrance” mentioned in the previous entry was the entrance of the “source”, but it didn’t make anything clear either.

Though, despite the many burning questions he had in his head, there was one thing that he found out.

Xiao knew what a gnosis was, and the Mond-Li Base has one.

.

.

.

Venti laid himself gingerly on the bed, his mind still stuck on recalling the pages he went through in Xiao’s notebook.

So the gnosis was real, and not some made up propaganda that the storyteller was jailed for. Which also means, the Lighthouse and the base itself were hiding something. And they had the gnosis. Venti needed to find the gnosis and see it for himself to check if it had anything to do with the gaping hole in his heart.

Now it seemed that leaving the Abyss and staying at a human base wasn’t so bad after all. Even if it meant being constantly put under the Trial Court and Judge Inquisitor’s scrutiny.

After that entry about 20 Dec XX88, the other entries didn’t hold as much weight or information as that write-up. It was mostly normal operations. But what he realised, though, was that Xiao would go exploring in the Abyss every two months, usually somewhere around the 20th of the month, and most of the time he came back from exploration with two empty hands.

The only thing that caught his attention was a sentence written right at the back of his notebook, a line that sent a cold chill down Venti’s spine.

“The priority of the benefit of humanity is greater than that of anything else.”

It looked so cold, written in the Judge Inquisitor's sharp handwriting, just as cold as Xiao’s eyes whenever he raised his gun to eradicate infecteds in the name of humanity’s benefit. A sentence uncaring of all other factors, unfeeling for anything but the benefit of humanity.

Venti curled himself up on Xiao’s bed, and tried to bring himself away from the notebook and focus on sleeping instead.

...It smells like Xiao. The smell was weak, probably even unnoticeable to the average human, but as an elemental being, he still could smell Xiao on the bed that the Judge Inquisitor probably barely used for a day.

It was quite indescribable. It felt dangerous, to be wrapped by this scent, yet somehow comforting at the same time, just like when Xiao had clasped his hands over his ears to shield him from the explosion.

With his mind still lingering on that thought, Venti drifted off to sleep.

***

Venti was first rudely pulled back into the waking world by the sound of yet another blaring alarm.

Then, “Venti. Evacuate.”

“What…?” Venti, barely awake, tried his very best to peel open his eyes to figure out what was going on, but before he could even start to register anything, his entire world was turned upside down.

Quite literally so.

A man with yellow eyes — Xiao, no doubt — pulled him out of his bed and flipped him over his shoulder, holding tight onto his legs before rushing out of the door.

“Wait— Xiao!” Venti, who was obviously not prepared for this series of actions, flailed in his arms, and his name accidently slipped out in the midst of his panic. “I-I mean, Colonel Xiao! Where are we going?”

“The alarm is already ringing. We are under attack. I will explain more later,” Xiao replied as he rushed through the entirety of the building, trying to find the exit. As they dashed through the corridors, they bumped into other judges and militarians too, who all greeted Xiao with a loud “Colonel Xiao”, and Venti with a shocked stare.

It must not be everyday to see the most feared and respected man in the Mond-Li Base carrying a random person around as if they were a light sack of potatoes.

Halfway to the exit, Venti was starting to slip from Xiao’s grip. Xiao sighed and easily flipped him over to carry him on his back, and Venti instinctively wrapped his arms around his neck, clinging onto him for dear life.

When they finally found their way out of the building and headed for the survivor tents, he could feel intense gazes and jealous eyes burning a stare into his skin, with that including Hu Tao and the storyteller.

“Thank you,” Venti quickly thanked Xiao and struggled off when Xiao came to a stop.

“No problem. You should return to the tents now.”

Venti nodded, and turned to make his way there, but then was stopped yet again by the approaching figure of Superintendent Schubert.

“What’s going on now?” Xiao asked.

“Suddenly a new wave of bugs came. After people from the Lighthouse came and checked the radar, we found that there were a lot of elemental creatures and infected bugs beneath the surface. Not just the huge worms but swarms of little ones.”

“Full evacuation?”

“Full evacuation,” Schubert confirmed. “And you need to leave too.”

“Let me see the radar.”

“There’s no need, there’s no saving this place.”

“All the emergency equipment is here. Including the dispersion protector.” The dispersion protector was an important part of the base, and there is one in every district controlled by the Dispersion Centre, the sector of base that protects the base from infection and prevents elemental creatures from coming in. While the Trial Court is focused on destroying the infecteds, the Dispersion Centre was more on the prevention side.

The dispersion protector was something that blocks the invasion of infected birds and flying insects from above, as well as elemental creatures.

“I already told you, there’s no saving this place, and that includes the emergency equipment and the dispersion protector. After we get out of this place I’ll contact the centre and get them to raise the power of the dispersion protector to see if we can dispel the bugs from this place.”

But Xiao barely budged, and only moved to rest a hand on the gun right by his thigh. “Let me see the radar.”

“You!” Schubert huffed, obviously annoyed at this point, but seeing Xiao’s ready hand at his gun, he reluctantly relented. He handed Xiao the radar, and Xiao quickly looked through it.

Venti watched as the expression on Xiao’s face dropped from stoic to downright chilling.

“Their target is not people,” Xiao furrowed his eyebrows, his grip on the radar getting tighter and tighter. “It’s the dispersion protector.”

“Colonel Xiao, I’m inclined to not believe in that as Lighthouse’s conclusion is vastly different from yours.”

“I spent half my entire life researching the Abyss, Superintendent. I’ve seen more elemental creatures than you have, and I know how they behave.”

Schubert went silent, and suddenly, he spoke again, as if he had just thought of something. “Then the other dispersion protectors—”

“Contact the Dispersion Centre. Now,” Xiao interrupted.

Schubert took out his communicator and quickly placed a call. “Superintendent Schubert, requesting for communication with the Dispersion Centre.”

“Please wait…”

The line went silent. This tense silence persisted until a minute later, broken by the slight shaky voice of the operator.

“We’ve lost contact with the Dispersion Centre.”

Chapter Text

Silence lingered after the end of the operator’s sentence. Xiao’s expression barely changed, but Venti could see the horror spreading behind those eyes.

Without another word, Xiao immediately turned on his heel and walked off. Venti was about to follow along, but someone else was faster than he was and quickly stopped Xiao in his tracks. “Wait, colonel!”

All of them turned to see a boy in a judge uniform rushing out from the tents, his light blue hair in disarray from all the events that had happened for the past day. Venti recognised him. It should be Chongyun, one of the judges directly under Xiao’s command. He must have been listening in from the camp area.

“Don’t need to follow me,” Xiao shook his head, shooting a look at Venti to imply that he was to not follow after him too. Then he looked back to Chongyun. “Stay and protect the survivors.”

“Do we need to gather the entirety of the Trial Court?”

Xiao paused. Then nodded. “Yes. Issue a lockdown and have them all gather in District 6.”

Before Chongyun could reply, Xiao turned back around and left the tent area, heading towards where all the Trial Court cars had been parked. Venti watched as he left, his gaze only disturbed when he was addressed by the young judge.

It was only when he saw Xiao disappear into one of the cars did he realise that Xiao’s jacket, the one that he used as a blanket, was still around him. He must have gripped onto it unknowingly the entire way, but didn’t quite know why Xiao didn’t ask for it to be returned. Maybe he should return it the next time he sees him again.

“You’re that guy from The Free Market, right?” Chongyun asked, breaking Venti out of his thoughts. His smile radiated friendliness.

“Oh, you remember?” Venti raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah…I don’t know, your interaction with Colonel Xiao kind of struck me as a little peculiar…” Chongyun shrugged. But before Venti could ask in what way, a sharp, piercing alarm rattled the air, cutting their conversation short.

An announcement by a calming sweet voice came right after it, echoing throughout the entire camp, most likely the entire district too.

“Attention all citizens. The Dispersion Protector has temporarily ceased to work. Due to that, infected flying animals such as swarms of bugs may enter the base. As we investigate the cause of the problem, please keep your doors, windows, vents, and any other opening leading into your house tightly shut, and refrain from going outside until instructed otherwise. I repeat, attention all citizens. The Dispersion…”

Everyone in the survivors’ camp were ordered to move further into the district and hide out in select residential houses. In the midst of the mess, Venti found himself reuniting with Hu Tao and the storyteller again, and he was instantly squished into Hu Tao’s welcoming arms while they were dragged along with the crowd.

Eventually they arrived at their destination, and the three of them were herded and shut tightly in an empty apartment, then left alone.

“Alright, spill, what happened with the Judge Inquisitor?” Hu Tao confronted Venti with a smirk the moment the door locked shut behind them. “Why did he take you away? You know, for a moment I was terrified you truly offended him or something, or got infected. I thought you weren’t coming back — but you did, so, spill!”

“He saw that I cut myself, that’s all. He helped me bandage my arm and told me that he needed to make sure I wasn’t infected,” Venti recounted, pulling up his sleeve slightly to show them the bandage. At the end of his short story, he was greeted with two gaping faces.

“What?”

“You’re telling me the Judge Inquisitor, the cold and unfeeling and ruthless judge who is known for discerning an infected from an uninfected person in less than one second with zero mistakes, bandaged your arm and said that he ‘needed to make sure you’re not infected’?” Somehow, Hu Tao seemed entertained by it. “No fucking way. He’s definitely in love with you.”

Venti conjured up the image of Xiao’s face in his mind, the one that was always unchangingly stoic and cold, then tried to piece Hu Tao’s words to his face. All it did was make him laugh. “How did you even get to that conclusion?”

“[1]女人的直觉。” Hu Tao beamed. “It’s never wrong.”

With Carmen’s slightly good knowledge on Liyuen, Venti could kind of guess she was talking about her sixth sense. And the unfortunate news for her was, she was wrong.

“Hey, it’s true! He even gave you his jacket,” Hu Tao crossed her arms. She must have noticed the expression on Venti’s face. “Look, my sixth sense tells me that we can definitely make it out alive here even if infected bugs attack us. You can’t tell me that’s not true.”

“I think that’s just your optimism talking,” The storyteller said drily, looking out of the window as he did, squinting as if trying to see if there was anything out on the horizon. “If the Dispersion Protector malfunctioned, it only could mean something happened to the Dispersion Centre, and that would mean that the entire base’s Dispersion Protectors are all disabled. You know what that means for us?”

Venti and Hu Tao looked at each other for a second, then shrugged. “What?”

“We’re under huge risk of infection. Elemental creatures, especially cicins, crystalflies and birds in the Second Plains or even the Abyss, would suddenly detect a huge source of potential prey coming from our base. Humans.”

The storyteller turned his head slowly to face them. “Not only prey, but breeding spots. Cicins are known to chew their way through skin and lay thousands of eggs in a wound unnoticable to the naked eye.

“You won’t notice it at first, but once you do, it’s already too late. The cicin’s DNA have already mixed with your own, turning you into an infected incubator for their cicin babies, and these little worms will chew into your body and ingest your organs as food, and as soon as they grow to become adults they would crawl out of every single crevice you have on your body…”

“Okay, that’s enough, my ears have consumed enough trauma for today,” Hu Tao protested before he could finish, clasping her hand to her ears.

“Just telling the truth.”

“Then what should we do?” Venti wasn’t really concerned about himself. His organs were made from the fabrication of wind anyway, there was nothing enticing inside him for the cicins to lay eggs in him. He was more worried for the two other humans in the room.

The storyteller simply shook his head gravely. “All we can do is pray. Pray that the Dispersion Protector is still functioning at least a little, or pray that the Dispersion Centre is not down and everything goes back to normal in the next few minutes. Or else…the entire base would be infected, and Judgement Day would be upon us.”

“You know Judgement Day?”

“I’m a storyteller, aren’t I? I have to know all stories, even the tragic ones.”

“What’s Judgement Day?” Venti asked. Both Hu Tao and the storyteller turned around to look at him.

“Do you know how the “Trial Court Verdict” and the Trial Court came about?”

“Am…I supposed to know?” There was nothing in Carmen’s memories that had “Judgement Day” and “Trial Court Verdict” inside.

The storyteller sighed. “I guess not. Miss Hu Tao, would you do the honours?”

“Mm…I heard the story of Judgement Day from my grandfather when I was really young. He said that back in his day, The Dispersion Protector didn’t exist yet. Bases were really vulnerable to infection — it was how the Sumeru base got overrun. And since Mond-Li were the closest to that base, the people here were terrified. Then the Dispersion Protector was set up. Terror receded, because people thought they were finally safe.

“But they were all proved to be wrong when a security camera footage of our water pipes were leaked out to the public. An entire horde of infected fungi that most likely snuck in from Sumeru, were seen approaching the water and dissolving themselves into it. What was even worse was that the footage was only discovered an entire day after the incident.”

“Can you imagine, realising that the water you drank the day before could have been infected and would lead you to your death? The entire city was infected, and the base was declared to be in a state of Emergency, then was completely locked down! And in less than five hours after the footage was uncovered, the Trial Court and the “Trial Court Verdict” was born.

“Over the course of the next week, people were forced out of their houses and placed in lines of death. There was no way to check if you were infected back then, and infection didn’t happen by wounds, so the only way the original judges could execute their job was by pure observation and instinct. Even if you were in that ten percent chance of an inaccurate judgement, if the Trial Court wants you dead, you’re dead. It was that brutally simple.

Hu Tao sighed. “It was a bloody massacre. It’s said that after that week, at least half the base died by infection or by a bullet fired by a judge. And thus the horrifying event was coined: Judgement Day.”

Silence settled over the room. Venti could barely picture the story that Hu Tao just talked about — it sounded so horrible, the circumstances of the situation unbelievably unfair. But it had happened anyway.

“You know, you should consider joining my career path,” the storyteller said after a while to Hu Tao as if to lighten the mood.

“Is there good mora in the industry?” Hu Tao lifted her eyebrows.

“Well—”

Thud.

The three of them immediately looked towards the source of the sound, which was just barely past the windowsill. A big purple bug, almost the size of a human’s palm, had crashed into the glass, its bat-like body struggling to orient itself back up.

But that was not what took them aback. It was the huge violet mass in the horizon that seemed to increase in size by the second, a cloud that hadn’t been there just a few minutes ago. If Venti squinted, he could just make out similar bat-like bodies of the cicin vibrating around in that impending mass of doom.

The storyteller backed away from the window, and whatever light atmosphere that he had initially tried to build immediately dissipated away. “Don’t worry about the cicins though. This place is locked shut.”

Hu Tao already had her head buried halfway into her hand, her red eyes peeking out from in between her fingers. “Archons, this is actually quite revolting to watch.”

The storyteller seemed a little disgusted too, and he took another step back from the glass before looking to Venti. “You don’t seem scared at all?”

If Venti said no, it would be quite a lie. His encounters with cicins back in the Abyss were quite frequent, for such was the relationship between the wind and all things that could fly.

But now that he took on a human form that posed him as their prey and not as a fellow elemental creature, he didn’t quite know how the cicins would react to him. Plus, he has never seen cicins act so feral like this before.

Venti shot a wry smile at the storyteller as if to answer his question. “I just don’t show it on my face, that’s all!”

“Good for you,” the storyteller sighed, then flinched when the ball of cicins finally closed the distance between them and the horizon and started attacking the glass like crazy, each and every thud echoing throughout the room, almost like the sound of amplified raindrops, except this one was an apocalyptic rain.

Something felt off to Venti. While he could feel the rapid air exchange of the cicins that lingered right outside their window, he could feel the presence of something slithering through the…building?

An entire line of them seemed to march through pipes, making their way into—

“Do you hear that?” Hu Tao interrupted the silence other than the thudding outside. “The buzz. The cicins are outside so we shouldn’t hear it, but…”

“The vents!” Venti shouted. The cicins found a way in.

“Shit! We got to block them!” The storyteller broke into a panic. “Get a cloth and block the vents!”

Venti knew where the vents were — it was the only source of airflow in the enclosed house. He quickly grabbed a chair and a rag hanging near the kitchen, rushed to the vents, and stumbled onto the chair, frantically reaching for the vent.

His fingers latched onto the edge of the hole and he stuck the rag in just as a cicin managed to pop its head through the gap.

Without thinking, he lifted a finger and frantically poked it back into the vent, and stuffed the cloth in to seal it shut. When he confirmed that the line of cicins waiting in the vent had left the way they came after realising they weren’t going to be let in, the dizzy adrenaline rush finally passed, and he released the tight grip he had on the rag.

Then he felt it. A sting. The cicin must have bitten him.

He stared at the blood that beaded at the tip of his finger for a second, unbelievingly so, until Hu Tao and the storyteller called out his name to confirm that he blocked the vent.

“I did it!” Venti answered, quickly mending the slight injury with a quick manipulation of his form. Could elemental creatures infect other elemental creatures? He didn’t think so, but he should be careful from here on. He didn’t want his human companions to think that he was infected or something not quite human.

“Great! Now here’s task two!” Hu Tao announced the moment Venti returned to the living room. “Call your boyfriend to come pay us a visit.”

If life was a cartoon, a question mark would have formed on the top of Venti’s head. “He’s not—?”

“If he’s not, then how do you know who I’m talking about?” Hu Tao grinned, way too brightly for someone who could get killed or become infected in the next few minutes. “Just call him! The rag is not going to hold up forever! Unless…don’t tell me you don’t have his communicator number?”

“My communicator number is QD249-1. You can put my number under Colonel Xiao. I will be here when you call.”

“Well, now that you’ve mentioned it…”

***

Ten minutes after leaving Mond-Li prison stronghold, Xiao was on the road to the Dispersion Centre, located outside of the districts and near the base walls. That was where the main Dispersion Protector was also located, as the Dispersion Centre was facing the direction where the Abyss was, opposite the sea.

Every few minutes he glanced at his communicator to make sure that he was still on the line with another operator, who was helping him monitor the conditions of every district. He didn’t want his signal to drop halfway as he got further and further away from the city. One second of missed communication can come at a cost of many lives.

As he got closer to the base walls, the Dispersion Centre finally came into view. Or rather, the Dispersion Protector on top of the Dispersion Centre did. It was a long, black device, structured like a long chimney that stretched just barely above the base walls.

Xiao squinted, inspecting the Dispersion Protector from afar. It didn’t seem physically altered or destroyed, so it must be something that was going on inside—

It was then his eyes caught a glimpse of something that made his foot step harshly on the brakes, and he spun the wheel to make a quick emergency U-turn back the way he came.

He was already too late.

A dark mass had suddenly crawled its way past the base walls, spilling over the grey structures and onto the Dispersion Protector. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that those were infected bugs and elemental insects forcing their way in, and they took over it by storm, literally.

It didn’t take long for the elemental creatures to notice him escaping from the scene, because not a minute later down the road, a horde of them had already caught up to his car, their little bodies hitting aggressively against his windows, demanding entrance. Xiao ignored them and continued to step on the gas, hoping to outrun them.

“Colonel Xiao!” The operator’s voice briefly broke Xiao out of his intense focus. “District 2 has sent an emergency signal. Elemental bug infestation. They are requesting help from the Trial Court.”

A short pause. Then with a shaky voice, the operator finished, “So is district 3, 4, 7, 8 and…Mond-Li.”

“Tell the districts that contacted you to turn to the military. They have more hands than we do,” Xiao ordered, but then paused. After a thought, he then said, “Link me up with Mond-Li.”

“Has everyone from the survivor tents safely evacuated to nearby apartments and buildings?” He asked after he heard the beep signalling connection.

“Yes, sir! However, cicins have been making their way through the vents and we have quite a few infecteds — we need assistance from the Trial Court!”

A terrifying silence settled over the line as Xiao’s grip subconsciously tightened on the wheel.

“Execute those who have been infected,” Xiao said after a while. “The rest of you, continue to hide and wait for assistance.”

“Yes, sir!”

“The Trial Court is ready and awaiting your next order,” the operator told him right when he got off line with Mond-Li.

“Tell them to distribute themselves and assist the districts and the city. Make Mond-Li a priority.”

“The Lighthouse is also asking for you to head down to the Lighthouse. For protection. They said that the Lighthouse has a Dispersion system separate from the Dispersion Protector and is probably the safest place of the base.”

The Lighthouse was the safest place, alright. If the Dispersion Centre was situated facing the Abyss, the Lighthouse was on the complete opposite side of the base, facing the ocean, and had the least chance of getting attacked. It was also rather far from the main city and districts, away from the densely populated prey pool for elemental creatures.

Xiao frowned. “What about the rest of the citizens then?”

“The Lighthouse would like me to inform you that despite your status as Judge Inquisitor, you have no control over the situation right now and cannot save anyone. As you are an important asset to society and our base, your safety is the Lighthouse’s priority. Therefore—”

“Tell Lighthouse no. I have a job to do. I’m not an asset if I do not carry out that job,” Xiao curtly answered.

“I’m sorry Colonel, but the Lighthouse is still insisting—”

Suddenly, Xiao saw a notification of another call incoming, one from an unknown line and not from any of the official channels, but he still briefly put his call with the operator on hold and accepted the unknown call.

“Xiao— I mean, Colonel Xiao!” A rather familiar voice greeted him. Then there was a pause of hesitation. “Uh…your jacket is still with me. I think you should…come and get it. Before the bugs eat it up or something, you know?”

Xiao instantly understood the underlying meaning behind his words. And despite Venti’s relaxed tone, he could hear the slight tension within it. “Where are you?”

There was a pause as he heard Venti turn back to someone beside to confirm their location.

“Hu Tao says the address she saw on the door was M-L-dot-twenty-three-dot-nine-six… something.”

Mond-Li, Block 23, Door Number 96-something. Xiao made a quick mental note.

“Wait for me.”

And against the operators’ protest, or rather, the Lighthouse’s protest, he did not go down the path to the Lighthouse and instead headed towards the base’s city centre.

***

“Venti, can you tell your boyfriend to hurry up? If he takes any longer, we’re going to be dead meat,” the storyteller winced as the bugs on the opposite side of the glass crashed into the window harder, speeding up their attack. “Or tasty meat to the cicins.”

That earned him a swat from both Hu Tao and Venti himself.

The storyteller seemed to have followed in Hu Tao’s footsteps, calling the widely feared Colonel Xiao his boyfriend. Venti didn’t bother correcting him anymore. The both of them were just as relentless as the insects finding their way into the apartment.

Suddenly, the apartment door burst open, tearing a collective scream from the three of them. At first, Venti thought the elemental creatures had somehow managed to break through the lock and found their way in, but standing at the door was…Xiao.

“Ah—!” Hu Tao grabbed a vase from the table and threw it at the door, but cut herself off mid-scream after seeing the humanoid figure in the doorway. Though, she wasn’t fast enough since the vase had already long flown out of her hand.

Luckily, Xiao reflexively dodged it before it could hit him, but he definitely looked less than amused. Hu Tao instantly dropped her defensive stance and shot him an apologetic smile.

“Follow me closely,” Xiao said, his tone strict as if he was giving out an order. “My personal Dispersion Protector device only works at a 10 metre radius.”

Then he grabbed the jacket out of Venti’s hands, but instead of putting it on he swung it over Venti’s head. Looking towards the other two who were watching this interaction with entertained expressions, he addressed them, “Try to cover yourselves on the way. I cannot guarantee the device one-hundred percent works.”

Before they stepped out, Venti could almost swear he heard Hu Tao mutter, “I was right, wasn’t I. He’s even giving him special treatment.”

With that, the three of them followed Xiao’s lead to his car.

“Where are we going?” Hu Tao asked the moment they were safely locked inside.

“Somewhere safe,” Xiao answered, his answer revealing absolutely nothing. He didn’t elaborate, and instead started the car up, and pressed a button on the communicator resting beside the wheel.

“Report on the district conditions?” He asked, a question directed at the communicator.

“1, 6, 9 and 10 have also succumbed to elemental insect infestation and have requested help. Just like you asked, I have directed them to the military,” a voice came from the phone.

“Good,” Xiao said, and after a second Venti saw his expression change a little in the rearview mirror. “Wait. Has District 5 contacted?”

“...Not that I know of.”

“Connect me with them.”

A soft beep came after that, and someone else took over the call. “Hello, this is District 5, how can we…”

The trio sitting at the backseat all exchanged a look. They were too calm in an apocalyptic situation like this.

“This is Colonel Xiao from the Trial Court,” Xiao interjected. “What is the condition of District 5?”

There was a pause, mostly of confusion. “Everything is normal in District 5. May I ask—”

“Everything is normal?”

“Yes.”

“The Dispersion Protectors are working?”

“Yes, sir… is there something happening?”

“Yes,” Xiao’s reply was short. “Raise the District 5’s defensive walls. Please immediately prepare the reserves in District 5 and carry out emergency refuge procedures.”

There was a beat of shocked silence before a nervous, “Yes, sir!”

Finishing the call with District 5, Xiao returned to the operator. “Tell all districts and Superintendent Schubert of the military that there has been a change in plans. Evacuate the districts and transfer all citizens to District 5 for refuge. Get District 5’s Trial Court in-charge to organise a screening for all refugees. And link me up with the Lighthouse’s military centre.”

“Yes.” Beep.

“Colonel Xiao from the Trial Court, requesting for permission to carry out Trial Court procedures on the entire base.”

“What is the predicted death rate and period of execution?”

Xiao stopped to think. “Sixty percent of the population. A week.”

“Please wait…”

“This is…” The storyteller started, and trailed off. Even though all he said were two words, the fear was vividly evident in his voice.

“Judgement Day,” Hu Tao finished for him, her eyes not moving from Xiao, as if anticipating that he would whip out his gun any moment and declare one of them an infected — which would have might as well announced their deaths.

Barely a minute passed before a voice came from the communicator again. “Your request has been approved.”

Venti heard a soft sigh come from the driver’s seat, but it was far from one of relief.

***

It took them about twenty minutes and a fight through a bug storm to get to the outskirts of District 5. As they approached the district, Venti saw newly erected walls that cordoned off the district from the rest of the base. It must have been the defensive walls that Xiao told District 5 to raise.

When they finally arrived near the walls, Xiao dropped them off and pointed to a spot where all the refugees were gathering, who were surrounded by military in uniform. Huge military trucks were all parked off the road, ready for transporting the people deeper into the district.

“Follow them in. I’m going in to assist the screening preparations first.” Just like that, Xiao left without a goodbye, his car disappearing past the walls and into the forest that led to District 5.

The three stood there and watched him go, before someone from the military called them to gather with the rest of the people.

The bunch of refugees didn’t look quite like what a “bunch of refugees” would be described to look like in books. Instead of dirty, hungry, and homeless people who had just escaped from a war, this crowd of people was something you would see on a normal day in the Free Market.

Yet the similarities were there. The fear in their eyes, the worry in their shaking hands as they clutched and clung to each other tight, the instinctive twitch to look into the skies as if anticipating another attack.

“Why can’t we go in yet?” A child whined from somewhere in the crowd, holding tightly onto her mother’s hand. “It’s really hot. And stuffy.”

The mother looked at the heavily guarded gates despairingly and opened her mouth as if to answer, but then closed it. She shook her head. “I don’t know. Just hold out a little more, okay?” A lie.

“The screening probably hadn’t been set up yet,” the storyteller must have overheard the conversation too. “But she probably couldn’t tell the little girl that the adults are organising a plan for a massacre inside.”

“Man, now I know why they want to set up forests between districts and set the emergency protective wall in between,” Hu Tao shook her head, glancing past the gates. “Discourage people from forcing their way in or running their way out.”

“Both are dead ends either way. And not metaphorically. It just depends whether you die by getting infected or whether you die by the judges’ hand. I don’t know about you guys, but I prefer a quick bullet.”

Venti thought about the storyteller’s words. He was right.

Outside of District 5, it was elemental creatures killing people, but inside it was people killing people.

Time trickled on as they waited, the crowd growing bigger and bigger with more and more cars that came by. Finally the soldiers started herding people group by group onto the transport trucks, and the trio stuck close together and followed the flow. They must have gotten clearance to let the refugees in.

The storyteller was the first to settle down the moment they got into the people-packed vehicle, the smell of sweat from fear and anxiety suffocating, smothering the clamouring voices of the crowd into whispers.

He looked no better than the average person in the truck, but he still laid down in a relaxed position and told both Venti and Hu Tao to catch some sleep while they were travelling.

Venti, with nothing better to do, followed suit.

The adrenaline that was keeping him up and running must have finally died in his veins, because when he closed his eyes, the darkness snatched him into oblivion.

.

.

.

“Your… you lost… too?”

Wind.

Dying wind.

“What could we have done?”

He flew over a bright city, full of life.

He watched the lights fade out, one by one.

It was the last time he ever did.

Chapter Text

Bang.

The sound of a gun going off jerked Venti out of his sleep.

The remnants of his dream were immediately chased away as he was pulled out of the truck, his feet stumbling to keep up with the soldiers that were hurrying them out. He tried to cling onto the pieces that he remembered — it felt somewhat important because he never really had dreams of his own other than Carmen’s memories — but it scattered yet again by another—

Bang.

Hu Tao, who was standing beside him, winced and averted her eyes from whatever that was happening in front of them.

“It’s been a hundred years,” an old man near them whispered, his eyes staring unflinchingly at the site of the massacre. “Judgement Day is here again.”

Splatters of blood had already started to gather near the feet of the judges despite the screening having just started, the military hauling more and more bodies off to the side as people fell like flies. The queue they were in inched forward hesitantly, flinching away every time a gunshot rang out in the air.

Other than the relentless sound of guns going off, distressed cries from children and murmurs of fervent prayers to Barbatos and Morax — the gods of the original Mondstadt and Liyue, it seemed — filled the rest of the silence. Every single person’s expression in the vicinity was taut with tension and exhaustion, mentality wearing thin from the overwhelming terror and agony that consumed them, including the judges.

The only exception was Xiao, who stood at the end of the line with his face still as unchanging and stoic as before.

The judging system here seemed to be different from the screening back outside the base. It was definitely much more stringent, and bloody. There were three rounds one had to cross, and more often than not someone would fail in one of the rounds and collapse on the spot, and get dragged off by the military surrounding the gate.

First round was the more inexperienced judges, who only shoot based on the recognisable characteristics of an infected. The second round of judges seemed to be more experienced, who shoot on intuition. After all, the converting process of an infected person was usually slow.

Then there was the last round.

Xiao.

The final stage that many did not pass.

Beneath his feet, scarlet had already soaked into the ground and into his shoes, but he still held his stance. Despite having executed almost triple the number of people the second round of judges did, he still looked as calm and unaffected as ever.

Bang.

A child, who looked not more than a day older than twelve, fell at his feet. In his head was a bullet which Xiao had just fired.

One of the judges in the first round who saw this sight couldn’t help but turn away and gag, yet he couldn’t hide the horror that filled his eyes.

All Xiao did was shake his head. “Change.”

The judge was immediately swapped with another, and the disrupted flow of screening continued again.

The queue crawled forward, the trio slowly approaching what could mean their doom. Hu Tao and the storyteller ended up quarrelling in furious whispers on who should go first, and in the end they chose Venti as their sacrificial lamb. (“Don’t worry, even if you die, I’ll give you a discount — no, I’ll make you a coffin for free!” were Hu Tao’s words to him as he was pushed in front.)

The poor little wind sprite definitely did not consent to this arrangement, but by the time he wanted to make his own argument he was already pushed to the front of the line. So all he could do was nervously walk down the corridor of death.

Despite it being the fourth time facing judgement ever since he entered the human base, he was still a little terrified. After all, he still remembered the sting that he got from the cicin just a few hours ago. Even though nothing has happened — other than the odd dream he had when he slept — there was no telling that the judges wouldn’t spot something wrong.

The judges in the first and second round just gave him a once over and let him pass, and Venti finally arrived at the final and most difficult stage to get through.

Xiao stared at him, yellow eyes boring into his soul, his expression just as stoic and cold as the day he first met him.

Venti swallowed, closing his fist protectively over the bitten finger. He could practically feel his gaze travelling to where his fist rested.

After what felt like an eternity, Xiao raised his hand and waved him through.

He was cleared.

Venti couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief and quickly walked past Xiao into the safe area, but halfway through he remembered that he was still holding on to his jacket. He turned around, having half a mind to pass it to him there and then, but then dismissed the idea after seeing Xiao evaluating a very nervous Hu Tao.

He figured it would be quite inappropriate to hand it to him now and decided that it would be better to give it to him after the entire ordeal. So he stayed behind instead of hurried into the district like how everyone else did.

In less than a minute, both Hu Tao and the storyteller passed the judges’ evaluation and went to join Venti.

“I lived!” Hu Tao cheered happily. “I knew we would pass it. After all, we didn’t get infected when Colonel Xiao picked us up, and he was the one who brought us here, so there was no way we would get infected.”

“And who was the one who quarrelled to push me forward in the line?” Venti deadpanned with a smile.

Hu Tao let out a sheepish cough, and pointed at the storyteller. “What do you mean? It was him.” Then she quickly changed the topic. “Also, I really need a good nap after all of that. Venti, this is where you live, right? Bring me to your house!”

“Ah… I’m not going home just yet. I’m waiting to return this to Xiao,” Venti lifted Xiao’s jacket.

“On a first name basis too, huh,” Hu Tao muttered under her breath, then sighed. “Forget it, leave the space in your house for your boyfriend. I’ll go to the refugee camp instead…”

Before Venti could stop her, the girl had already walked off in the same direction as all the other refugees. He could hear the storyteller step up beside him, shaking his head. “Hu Tao’s still as carefree as ever during these trying times. I’m quite impressed, honestly.”

“You know her from before?” Venti asked, slightly curious.

“Hu Tao’s the infamous director of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlour operating in Basement Three. Everyone knows that in the Free Market. Not personally though, if you’re asking.

“Speaking of Basement Three… you worked there with Hu Tao, right? Have you seen Ying’er before?”

Venti nodded. “Yeah, why?”

“I used to be good friends with her. After all, a brothel is the best source for information and gossip. Though, she was genuinely a nice person and a great friend. I don’t know where she is now… it would be quite a shame if she died in this whole ordeal…” he trailed off, his gaze wandering to somewhere distant.

Venti pressed his lips together tightly, not willing to reveal her final fate. He knew that humans do not take the news of death that easily, especially if it was someone close to them. Venti may not understand grief much, yet he does share the sadness that comes with death.

“There you go, showing that expression again,” the storyteller commented out of nowhere. Venti didn’t even realise that he had already turned back around to look at him.

“What?”

“For such an easygoing person, you always seemed so distant. Like you are removed from everything that happens around here. When everyone was panicked and scared, I could barely detect any fear from you. It’s as if you were merely an observer, watching over us, and just now I could swear I felt some sort of divinity on you.”

Venti blinked, scrunching his eyebrows. He may not be human, but all he was was an elemental creature. A mere wind sprite.

“I was just joking,” the storyteller punched him lightly in the shoulder after a while. “It’s a good thing to not get swept away by the mob of emotions. Have fun waiting for your man, I’ll be taking my leave now.”

“Where are you going?” Venti knew that he didn’t have his ID card or his communicator given how long he had been in prison unlike him and Hu Tao, so it would be inconvenient for him to get around.

“Wherever my feet takes me!” The storyteller shrugged and left.

Left at the gates of the district, he simply stood there and waited, watching the trial run its course. He wasn’t alone, for there were a few people who were also standing around and gathering, celebrating, or waiting for their family and friends to come through.

The trial remained as bloody as ever. More people died at the hands of the judges than the amount of people that managed to gain access to District 5. Gunshots rang out one after another, to the point Venti’s ears turned numb to the sound.

As the hours passed, the bright afternoon sun started crawling its way to the horizon, scattering orange rays through the trees. The trial still hasn’t come to a halt. Soon the sun sunk into the buildings, and along with it came the dark, night sky.

Venti was slightly bored after standing there for hours on end, but it wasn’t so bad because he had been busy reviewing all of Carmen’s memories the entire time. But as he ran out of memories to review, he had turned his attention to Xiao instead, who had been facing away from him the entire time.

Some part of him thought that his back view was rather pretty, especially with the way the polearm on his back glinted every time he moved. But another part of him also thought that it was quite… lonely.

The sound of footsteps approaching him shook him from his thoughts. “What are you doing here?”

Venti whirled around to find a familiar face coming towards him. It was Chongyun, who still retained his friendliness despite the clear suffering on his face. The endless trial must have taken quite a toll on him. “Chongyun, right? Are you alright?”

“Didn’t realise you picked up my name,” he smiled, then shrugged. “I’m fine, it’s just… this entire thing is just horrible, you know. What about you? Are you not going with the rest of the refugees?”

“I want to return… Colonel Xiao’s jacket.”

Chongyun nodded. “I see. Colonel Xiao has been working for quite a long time, so he would probably clock off in only about a few hours. You think you can wait until then? Or do you want me to help you give it to him?”

With Chongyun’s offer, there wasn’t really any more reason for Venti to stick around, so by logic he should just pass Chongyun the jacket and leave. But he took one last glance at Xiao’s lonely silhouette, hesitating.

He did not know why he was hesitating. But the fact that his hand was refusing to pass him the jacket still stands.

Something in him knew that if he passed off the jacket now, he probably wouldn’t ever cross paths with the Judge Inquisitor ever again.

“...Nah, it’s fine. I already waited so long, what’s a few hours more?” Venti said after a while.

“Well, if you say so…” Chongyun stopped suddenly, his eyes looking off to something past Venti’s shoulder. His friendly smile faded away, turning into one of worry.

Curious, Venti turned around to see what he was looking at.

The scattered groups of people that have been hanging around the entrance of District 5 have somehow merged into a massive crowd gathering at the side, furiously whispering to each other and clutching some sort of board or paper in their hands. Each and every one of their faces carried some sort of seriousness and boiling anger.

“Oh god, here we go again,” Chongyun muttered and jogged off, back to his post. Venti’s gaze followed after him as he went up to a nearby soldier and pointed out the gathering of people lingering not too far away. The soldier then gestured for the rest of his colleagues to go ahead for questioning.

Yet just as a group of soldiers approached the crowd, they immediately scattered, running to surround the entire Trial Court operation from the back of the entrance. Almost instantly, papers, handmade protest boards and flags were raised into the air, blooming amongst the crowd like white flowers dripping with red ink.

WE are AGAINST the VIOLENCE of the TRIAL COURT!

NO TO THE MINDLESS KILLING BY THE JUDGE INQUISITOR

We must not repeat the tragedy of Judgement Day!

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR BROKEN FAMILIES!!

Introduce a new system of testing!

We cannot trust the eyes of people who are able to kill easily!

“Stop killing without reason!” The crowd chanted, as loud as their lungs could possibly let them. “Stop killing without reason!”

The military stationed around the entrance immediately rushed to silence the crowd and push them away from the proceedings, but the sheer number of protestors overwhelmed the number of soldiers that were stationed on site.

Venti could see Xiao pause for a second and glance at the angry crowd behind, but instead of stopping he continued, shooting the woman in front of him in the head.

If Venti remembered correctly, this was the eleventh person he had shot down in a row.

The next person that was going to be judged by Xiao seemed to be frozen to the spot, his eyes flitting from the protesting crowd to Xiao and back again. After a moment of contemplation, he gritted his teeth, and plopped down onto the floor, refusing to step forward. “I’m not going!”

That show of protest from a normal citizen riled up the protestors even more, the volume of their shouts and chants rising higher and higher. Inspired by the man’s bravery and anger, the rest of the people in the queue started sitting down, refusing to move.

Xiao simply stared at the spectacle, expression unwavering. All he did was slowly and calmly reload his gun, then addressed the soldiers standing off at the side. “Bring him up.”

Just as he finished his sentence, a row of militant cars emerged from the forest, lining up along the wall. A troop of soldiers led by Superintendent Schubert filed out of the cars, following their leader all the way up to the front of the entrance.

“Colonel Xiao, what is going on here?” He asked, eyeing all the citizens in protest. With the arrival of more troops, the protestors have already gone quiet out of fear.

“Refusal to cooperate.”

Schubert raised an eyebrow. “Did you overdo it on the killing?”

“No.” That word was said like a simple fact.

Schubert shook his head, but turned to face the crowd. “The Trial Court is assisting us due to the emergency at hand,” he announced loudly. “To avoid infection of the entire district and the entire base, please cooperate with the Trial Court and go through with trial procedures as required.”

But instead of getting answered with compliance or with more protests, his announcement was met with a gasp. Schubert did not realise what was happening until he felt something cold touch the side of his head.

Reflexively, he backed away, yelling. “Colonel Xiao! What are you doing?”

The clamour of boots could be heard as Schubert’s unit rushed in to surround Xiao, their guns all raised to his head.

“I have not touched a single insect today,” Schubert furrowed his eyebrows at the Judge Inquisitor.

“And still, you have been infected,” Xiao replied calmly, not putting down his gun despite the many barrels that were pointed at him.

“I’m aware that the Trial Court would like to overtake the military in many matters, however this is not the way to do it,” Schubert said in an enraged whisper, but it was loud enough for many around them to hear. “During emergencies like this, there is a limit to abusing your power.”

Xiao stared him dead in the eyes, and just shook his head. He did not put his hand down.

“Stop the Judge Inquisitor!” A lone, brave voice shouted out of the blue.

Somehow, Schubert’s words seemed to relight the fire of anger in the protestors, and one by one they picked up the new chant, this time shouting louder than before.

“Stop the Judge Inquisitor!”

“Stop the Judge Inquisitor!”

The voices crashed against Xiao wave after wave, yet he still stood his ground, unmoving. Venti could see his finger move towards the trigger, and could almost foresee it pressing down onto it—

Out of the blue, a loud alarm blasted through the chaos of everything, cutting midway through the citizen’s protest. Everyone turned to see yet another vehicle race out of the forest and arrive at the entrance, and this time instead of the military it was two men that stumbled out into the scene.

Venti squinted. Both of them looked rather familiar, one of them sporting a thick blonde braid while the other an ash-blonde ponytail. It should be… Aether and Albedo! Venti didn’t know that they knew each other.

“Wait!” Aether shouted, loud enough so everyone could hear him clearly. “We are from the Lighthouse and the Knights of Favonius, I’m Honorary Knight Aether and this is Dr. Albedo from the research centre. An hour ago, he had successfully created the first, fast testing system for infection. A test that only requires five minutes of waiting.”

Albedo stepped up to Schubert’s side. “If you would allow me to take your blood, Superintendent Schubert.”

Of course, the superintendent happily let him take a sample of his blood, all the while eyeing Xiao. Xiao had already put his gun down to wait, but he still seemed as composed as ever under the heavy gaze of everyone surrounding him.

Venti knew they were all just waiting for that one announcement. That Schubert was safe and that Xiao was wrong.

“This is going to be revolutionary! We’re about to change history!” Someone in the crowd whispered excitedly.

The clock ticked away to the end of five minutes ever so slowly, and as the second hand approached what could be Schubert or Xiao’s doom, breaths collected as they were held by the crowd in anticipation.

5.

4.

3.

2.

1—

Beep—!

The test device flashed red, and an ominous alarm filled the air, its wails of warning echoing off the walls of the district loud enough to prove its point.

The excitement that rode the crowd just a few seconds ago instantly died down as all eyes stared at the test device and at Schubert in horror.

Bang.

Before Xiao could even act, one of the soldiers had already shot Schubert dead.

“I suppose that you two will take it from here,” Xiao said quietly to both Aether and Albedo, ignoring the rest of the gaping protestors.

After a nod of acknowledgement from Aether, Xiao turned around and left the trial grounds, making his way through the activists that blocked the entrance. The crowd slowly parted for him, each and everyone of their faces holding a mixed expression of shock and fear.

Venti felt none of that — he knew that Xiao would be right about Schubert being infected, after all, he had proven it to him when he had confronted him about Cyrus a long time ago. But he stood there anyway, frozen to the spot, watching as he retreated into the crowd, going further and further away from him.

Somehow, it reminded him of that day when Xiao left him behind at the Trial Court Headquarters, the way his lonely figure disappeared into the night.

It was then he felt a hand touch him. Venti looked up to see Chongyun, nodding in Xiao’s direction in encouragement.

Right. He had to hand Xiao his jacket.

Venti squeezed his way out of the crowd to follow him, stumbling onto the empty path that the parting crowd had created and chased after him. “Colonel Xiao!”

Xiao walked on, as if he did not hear his call.

“Colonel Xiao!” Venti called again when he finally got closer to him and further from the murmuring crowd.

This time, Xiao stopped, and finally turned around. “Venti? What are you doing here?” He looked surprised, which was unusual, since the colour of expression made a dent in his usually stoic face. Maybe he was more affected by the situation back there than Venti thought he was.

“Jacket,” Venti panted, trying to catch his breath. “I wanted to return your jacket.” He quickly shrugged it off and handed it to Xiao.

“You…” Xiao looked down at the jacket that was now in his hands. “You didn’t have to wait for me. You could have just left it with one of the guards.”

“Well, I was expecting more of a thank you, but thanks for the great advice.” Venti joked lightly, hoping it might alleviate the dark cloud over Xiao’s head. But after a second thought, maybe he shouldn’t have — Xiao might not appreciate it.

Xiao stared at him unblinkingly. “Thank you.” It was surprisingly sincere.

An extended pause. Then Venti coughed, “...Are you okay? Especially with everything that happened just now.”

“I’m fine,” said the person who avoided his gaze, then quickly dropped the subject. “Also, are you heading home now? I’ll send you home.”

Venti raised an eyebrow at the sudden offer. It didn’t seem like something someone with a huge status like the Judge Inquisitor would do. But as he followed his gaze, he found that Xiao was looking at the massive group of protestors, whose expressions were openly hostile.

He could practically feel the sharp hatred directed at Xiao, like a dagger held at his neck, and if it wasn’t for the threat of Xiao’s status and his granted immunity to the punishment for murder, Venti knew that the dagger would have been three inches deep into his throat a long time ago.

Those angry eyes occasionally turned towards Venti too. It seemed that they had lumped him together with the colonel for talking to him civilly. He shuddered at the feeling of their cold gazes brushing across his skin. (Or maybe it was just the cold night wind.)

Now he knew why Xiao offered to send him back home. He was kind enough to offer his protection to prevent Venti from getting jumped.

Xiao must have noticed his shiver, because he sighed and draped the jacket over Venti’s shoulder again. “Lead the way.”

Tearing his eyes away from the activists, Venti turned around and ventured deeper into the district, feeling Xiao’s presence following after him.

Usually, District 5 has always been quiet after night has taken over the sky, but with the situation at hand the district was now far from peaceful. Due to the lack of shelter to house people coming in from other districts, emergency refugee tents have been set up, surrounding the residential areas and the main plaza.

Soldiers and volunteers shuffle up and down the streets, trying their very best to help settle the citizens into their new temporary home.

As Venti walked on, he realised that this part of his district was a part that he rarely did ever explore. After all, his daily life only required him to travel to and from his residency to the train station, and the entrance that he had just entered from was completely opposite both those places.

Block 2… Block 3… Block—!

His feet stopped when they reached Block 4. It was not his block, however it seemed to remind him of something. Venti reached into his pocket and fished out his wallet, where an ID card that was not his was left in one of the tiny pockets of the wallet.

Cyrus’ ID.

Ever since the soldier passed him Cyrus’ ID, Venti had kept it on him yet he never looked at it again. He had almost forgotten about it, but now the sight of the block itself triggered his memory. His address had been District 5, Block 4, Door number 233, as said by the soldier before he left him with the ID.

Somehow in the time that Venti lived here, he never really thought about paying Cyrus’ apartment a visit.

“You want to go in?” Xiao noticed the pause in his footsteps and turned around to ask him.

Venti thought about it for a while, thinking that it would be quite troublesome for Xiao to follow him in and that the government might have reclaimed his house already. “It’s fine.”

“If you want to go in just go in,” the judge said as he lead the way into the block. Since he seemed willing, Venti followed.

It took him about just a few minutes to locate Cyrus’ apartment, and just a few more seconds to tap Cyrus’ ID card to the lock to gain access. Surprisingly, the door easily unlocked and let him in. It seemed that the government hadn’t reclaimed his house and his things yet.

The house looked lived in and untouched at the same time. As he scanned through the tiny apartment, Venti could see the way the furniture clung onto the last signs of Cyrus’ life.

From the thrown aside blanket from rushing out of bed in the morning, the unemptied trash, to the opened book resting on the desk, its spine aching from being held open for too long. It was all preserved with a fine layer of dust resting over all of it.

Venti touched nothing as he slowly walked inside, approaching the desk to find an Adventurer’s Guild guidebook laying at the corner of the desk. He didn’t know much about Cyrus, but he figured that he must have loved adventuring a lot to become the Head of the Adventurer’s Guild, so he delicately placed his ID card down onto the book.

He decided not to linger any longer and left the apartment, gently shutting the door behind him.

Just as he locked the door, he could feel a pair of eyes training on him. Venti looked up to see Xiao looking quietly at him, his gaze soft and gentle, almost like a snowflake that fell from the sky and grazed Venti’s cheek. It was so different from his usual cold, piercing look.

Venti tilted his head at him. A question. What is it?

Xiao retracted his gaze. “I fully believe that you are human now.”

***

The rest of the journey to Venti’s place somehow turned out to be even quieter between the two of them than before. While Venti would usually occasionally prompt a short conversation or two he now stayed quiet, the words that Xiao had just said just five minutes ago playing in his head like a broken record.

“I fully believe that you are human now.”

It seemed that Xiao had still been suspecting his identity up till that point, and he would if Venti gave him a reason to continue with his suspicion. And there was an odd feeling that came with the realisation that Xiao had finally believed that Venti was human against his instincts. Was it relief? Or was it guilt, for tricking him even though it was necessary?

Maybe a bit of both.

The silence was soon broken by the ring of Xiao’s communicator, which he quickly silenced by picking the call up.

“Hello, Colonel Xiao,” the person on the other end greeted, and Venti instantly recognised the warm voice to be Albedo’s. “We have successfully managed to implement the new system, which put many of the citizens at ease, however it is still quite slow so we might require you and the Trial Court’s presence tomorrow.”

“Alright.”

“Also, with Schubert dead, the only one who has authority over the districts is you. Everyone else is either at the Lighthouse or in the main city trying to figure things out. What are we going to do?”

“Tell the military that have been dispatched to the districts to aid in saving as many citizens as they can. I’ll contact the Trial Court for their orders.”

“Of course. I’ll tell Aether to help spread the word.”

The short conversation ended as Xiao hung up, but his communicator was soon put to use again as he placed another call to someone else in the Trial Court. His orders were clear and succinct, and by the time they reached Venti’s block, he had already finished the call, sliding the communicator back into his pocket.

Even though it was Venti’s apartment, Xiao was the one who had led the way to his unit, almost as if he was more familiar with it than Venti was. They got to the front of Venti’s door in no time, and Venti popped it open with a swipe of his ID.

“You want to come inside?” Venti offered, but an irrational feeling of nervousness rose within him, coming from the experience just two days before this. He quickly stomped it out. The doll wasn’t with him anymore.

“It’s fine. Go rest,” Xiao shook his head.

“Then where are you going?” Venti’s question was one of pure curiosity.

Xiao paused, his eyes lowering in contemplation. Then finally, “I don’t know.”

Right. With everything that’s going on right now, there was no way that Xiao would be able to go to the Liyue side on the base and return to Wangshu Inn. Most of the trial court and the military should be settling down near the district entrance, but Xiao probably wouldn’t want to stay there for now…

Even under the dim lighting that the corridor provided, Venti could still see the tiredness that hung from his eyes, no matter how he tried to conceal it.

“What if,” Venti paused, hesitating, then decided to completely go through with it. “You have nowhere to go right? You can stay with me.”

Chapter Text

In the norms of current society, anything that spilled out of one’s mouth cannot be taken back easily.

And that was how Xiao ended up staying with him for the night, which made Venti have to share his personal space with a man he was barely acquaintances with.

For the little wind sprite, it wasn’t too big of a problem, since they were currently on pretty good terms — at least, Venti would hope so, since Xiao had said it himself that he believed that he was a human — but most of his uneasiness manifested itself when he had to carry out normal human habits in front of him.

He knew how humans functioned, of course, for all he had to do was copy what Carmen did in his memories. Such habits included the brushing of teeth, and while Venti had done so regularly every day, today he was extremely meticulous and careful about it. He can’t have Xiao suspecting something was up with him just because of the way he brushed his teeth, could he?

…Could he?

The thought surfaced in his mind as Venti slowly glanced to his right where Xiao stood, who was washing his face in the sink.

He only realised that he was staring when he noticed beads of water dripping off the man’s chin, a few drops flowing down his neck.

When Xiao stood back up, Venti realised that Xiao himself hadn’t brushed his teeth yet — of course he hadn’t, he didn’t bring a toothbrush with him when he agreed to stay over at his place after all — so he proceeded to do what he thought a polite person would do.

“Do you need?” Venti asked, offering his cup and toothbrush to Xiao with an outstretched arm. He would buy new ones for him if he could, but Venti… was quite short on Mora at the moment. Sharing will have to do.

Xiao blinked, seemingly taken aback as he stared at Venti. There was something unreadable in his eyes, something Venti couldn’t quite understand. Is offering something to him wrong?

But after a few seconds. Xiao muttered a quick thanks, and took the cup, leaving the toothbrush behind.

He has calluses. Venti registered minutely after Xiao’s fingers briefly brushed against his. He hadn't quite noticed in all this chaos, but now that he did, he couldn’t help but think how fitting it was for a cold, seemingly hardened man like him. It must have come from handling guns and that polearm all day.

Xiao quickly used the cup to gargle a bit of water before exiting the bathroom. Venti shuffled after him, and watched him settle himself down at the desk, pulling his work diary out of his pocket.

Huh. Venti didn’t know that he had managed to bring it with him despite all that mess.

“You got a pen?”

Venti quickly fetched one from the shelf and handed it to him. Then he lingered beside Xiao, watching as he scribbled down a short and quick entry.

16/04/XX89

Judgement Day. The number of infecteds and deaths are unknown.

“You write really less,” Venti commented. After all, according to Carmen’s knowledge, diaries were kept to keep track of your day as well as your opinions and feelings. But Xiao’s diary had none of that. Instead it was just a mechanical report, reducing the weight of his experience into mere simple words and numbers.

What was the point of it then?

It seemed that Xiao could see what he was really thinking through his offhand comment. “It’s simply a way for me to corroborate with my reports.” He said it as if it was matter-of-fact.

“Oh.”

A pause as Xiao turned away, shutting his diary.

“Um, I’m going to change,” Venti announced. He had to continue keeping up his act of being a normal human being after all.

“Sure,” Xiao said, not turning back to face him.

So Venti did as he said, and discarded his clothes for comfortable pyjamas (it seemed Carmen has allowed himself to splurge on his nightclothes, prioritising his sleep and comfort above all), then climbed into bed. “I’m done.”

But Xiao did not immediately turn around. He seemed to be preoccupied, flipping through the things on his desk. Then he stopped, his hand hovering over the handbook that Venti had left open and forgotten to put back since the other time.

“You’re still looking for a job?”

Venti hummed. “Not really…” He paused, realising that the Free Market was probably already gone due to the elemental creatures overrunning the central area. “Okay, I guess I’d have to find a new one now.”

“You should go down to the District Hall tomorrow,” Xiao suggested. “There are a lot of newborns this year, and Lighthouse is hiring because they don’t have enough people to deal with them. You should put in an application through the District Hall.

Venti blinked. “You mean, you want me to take care of… children?”

“...You seem like you’d be good at it.”

Huh. That was something he did not expect at all. To trust him to take care of human offspring? Xiao really did truly believe that he was human now.

The slight guilt from earlier started to gnaw at the corner of his heart.

Xiao was unperturbed by Venti’s lack of response, and just stood up and turned off the light. Then he returned to the desk and laid his head on the table, evidently planning to sleep there for the rest of the night.

For a few seconds, Venti stared at his silhouette from the comfort of his bed, wondering why he would choose to sleep there.

While Venti himself had never slept in any other position other than lying down, Carmen had fallen asleep on the desk multiple times before when working on a new song — which came with painful, aching consequences the next morning, as he learnt.

And before he knew it, he opened his mouth. “Xiao?”

It was only after he called him did he realise he wasn’t keeping to the rules of respect. But all the figure before him did was turn back to squint at him, so Venti figured that he was allowed to address him that way…?

“Do you want to sleep here?” Venti patted the empty space beside him on the bed. The bed size wasn’t really meant to carry two people, but the both of them weren’t relatively big either, so they could fit.

A long pause.

Venti awkwardly retracted his hand back, thinking that maybe the suggestion wasn’t as appropriate as he had thought. But sharing is a human act of kindness, is it not?

“Well, if—”

“Thank you,” the expression of gratitude sounded rather stiff, but Xiao stood up and approached the bed, not rejecting his offer.

In the next second, Venti could feel the bed dip to the side as the other gingerly laid down next to him, Xiao’s warmth enveloping the air around him as he slotted himself beneath the blankets.

Xiao’s breathing was nothing that he wasn’t aware of — he was a wind sprite that could feel life around him, of course, but now that the other was lying so close to him, he could hear it softly by his ear, a gentle, soothing rhythm.

It felt so peculiar, knowing that he himself, an elemental creature, was about to lie vulnerable right beside the feared Judge Inquisitor himself for a night.

Even though Venti knew they were supposed to be sleeping now, he couldn’t help himself but start a conversation, mostly because of the question that had been wandering in his mind for quite a time.

“How did you determine that I was not an—” elemental creature? “—infected?”

Xiao, who had been decidedly looking away from him ever since he got onto the bed, glanced at him. “Are you not fully human then?”

“I’m not saying that!”

The man looked away. “You survived the mandated quarantine period. You passed Albedo’s blood test. There is no reason to believe that you are not a human.”

“Mandated quarantine period?”

“After infection, infecteds will either transform or lose their sanity within a month. We don’t quarantine people as often anymore, especially if they’ve passed the blood test, but the time frame still exists. There are no exceptions to this rule.”

Venti thought about his words for a while, then decided to ask his next question carefully. “Then… do you think there are infecteds or elemental creatures that still haven't lost their minds? Ones that can reason and think.”

Like he himself.

“Our willpower isn’t that strong,” Xiao murmured into the air. “The Abyss has already overtaken the entirety of Teyvat as we know it, leaving only the bases safe. Abyss corruption is not something anything can fight once it enters you. It is like a parasite, overrunning the ability to reason with their instinct to propagate, to spread.”

It was the longest Venti had ever heard him speak, his words carrying the heavy weight of hopelessness.

“But…” Here Venti was, mind clear and untouched by Abyss corruption. “What if your willpower is—”

“Not happening.”

“What about you? What if, you got infected instead? I’m sure you’ll—”

“I would kill myself before I even find out,” Xiao announced calmly, flipping around to turn away from him. “Now, sleep.”

It was understandable — after all, it must have at least been a good 40 hours since Xiao last slept — especially after everything that happened back at the entrance to District 5, Xiao must have been tired. So Venti abandoned this topic and let the room return to a state of silence.

It did not take too long before the both of them were claimed by sleep.

***

The only foreign thing that was left in his apartment when Venti woke up the next day was just a simple note left on his desk, seemingly torn from a page from Xiao’s work diary. The Colonel himself was already gone.

On the note it read—

I’m leaving. Call me if you need me.

Xiao

Somehow, the short letter managed to make Venti smile.

He carefully folded the piece of paper up and stuffed it in his pocket, changing out of his nightclothes so that he could head down and apply for the job that Xiao recommended as soon as possible.

After all, Xiao did say that the job that they were offering was by the Lighthouse, and if he managed to get the job, then it was one step closer to that… gnosis thingy that he was quite curious about.

With that in mind, he set off for the District Hall.

The streets were eerily empty for the daytime, the only movement being loose posters drifting along with the wind, making the bold red words of “STOP THIS MINDLESS KILLING” and “END THE TRIAL COURT” printed across them stand out all the more.

The overhead PA system interrupted the silence every now and then, repeating short, succinct announcements for the day.

“There is a 80% chance of heavy rainfall today, so please stay home as much as you can.

“For adults who are aged from 18 to 25, and are able-bodied and capable of doing work, please report to the District Hall to apply into the Lighthouse for jobs that are urgently needed. You will be compensated based on…”

When Venti finally reached the District Hall, it was like life had finally been breathed back into his life again. Unlike the streets, the hall was brimming with people, all scattered across different stations to apply for different jobs that the Lighthouse had opened up — most likely due to the attack that has happened recently.

The wind sprite took a quick look around to see if there were any that were suitable for him, but unfortunately many of them required certain qualifications that neither he or Carmen had. Even applying for the military had required a certificate that proved that one has undergone basic training before, which Venti definitely did not have.

He circled the place, and came back with less than three choices, one of them being the caretaker job that Xiao had mentioned the night before. Surprisingly, there weren’t a lot of requirements for that job.

With Xiao’s offhand recommendation and not a lot of choices, Venti found himself queuing up behind the line that led to the caretaking booth.

As the queue slowly inched forward as applicants in front dispersed one by one, Venti could feel eyes turning towards his general direction the longer he stood there. He wasn’t quite sure what warranted the attention though — maybe he was just making up things in his head because there was so many people around—

His distracted thoughts had caused him to take too big of a step forward and collide with the man with long red hair in front of him.

“Sorry,” the apology naturally came out as the other turned around to look at him. The man’s mouth was half-open, almost as if he was about to reflexively echo the same thing that Venti had said, but he stopped.

In the short second they exchanged gazes, the man’s expression had morphed from indifference to recognition, then to disgust. He then snapped his mouth shut and whipped his head back around to face the front of the queue without saying a word, ignoring Venti.

It was then Venti started putting the pieces together in his head. People around him must have recognised him from the spectacle last night, given how he had run up to Xiao, and how Xiao had thrown the jacket back around him under the scrutiny of every single protestor there.

The man, as well as some of the people in the hall, must have witnessed that he took Xiao’s side.

Venti did not regret the decision he made, because he knew that each and every person that got executed under Xiao’s hand were unfortunate but not wronged. Xiao simply did what others could not do for the safety of the human base.

Soon, the queue shortened, until only he and the man in front of him were left in the queue. Just as the man before him was about to place his identification card onto the reader, the person manning the booth held up a hand to stop him.

“Please wait,” the officer said while fishing out his communicator.

“Tell Colonel Xiao to come here as soon as possible, best if he could arrive within five minutes. We need to evacuate to The Lighthouse as soon as possible due to weather changes.”

“Evacuate?” The man in front of him repeated, crossing his arms.

The officer ignored him. “In order to protect the Lighthouse, we need him here. Please get him fast. Remember that the benefit of humanity holds greater priority than that of anything else. Over.”

With the call finished, the officer thrusted the reader in the man’s direction, gesturing to place his card and get on with it.

The man complied, and the reader read out the basic information. “Name: Diluc Ragnvindr. Age…”

Almost immediately, surprise flitted across the officer’s face, and his demeanour changed into something… less hostile. “Mr. Ragnvindr. What are you doing here?”

“What does it look like I’m doing here?” The man named Diluc sighed. “Please just get on with it.”

“Well, if I am to be honest, I think a post at the Knights or the Trial Court might suit you better—”

“No.”

A terse silence settled over the booth, Diluc facing off the officer and holding his ground. Eventually, the officer simply nodded and handed the card back to him. “Alright. Please make your way down the hall.”

After Diluc left, it was Venti’s turn to hand his ID to the officer. (More accurately, Carmen’s ID.)

“Name: Carmen Dei. Age: 21. ID: PF351440MLA.”

The officer seemed to read through Carmen’s files for a while, mostly likely confirming Carmen’s qualifications. “Okay, you may also—”

Interrupting him was the sudden sound of heavy rain pouring onto the district hall’s roof, drowning out the noises in the hall.

He shoved the ID card into Venti’s hand, ordering in an oddly intense manner. “Go now!”

At this point almost everyone in the hall was told to go down the corridor, and Venti simply followed the crowd. At the end of the corridor were double doors that led to a sheltered carpark, where many familiar military trucks were parked, packed with people and ready to go.

Military personnel were ushering people into whatever space was left, stuffing the trucks full and way over the limit. Some people complained, while others took it quietly and followed instructions. Venti simply did the latter, preferring to observe rather than react.

He was shoved into a seat that was just right beside that Diluc man that was in front of him in line just minutes ago.

All he did upon seeing Venti was simply press his lips together in a straight line and look away, but it didn’t seem like he was upset because of him anymore. If anything, he looked rather concerned about… something.

Between the almost collective frenzied state of the soldiers and Diluc’s serious expression, something was definitely up.

And it didn’t take long for Venti to realise why.

In the far, unseeable distance, Venti could sense a huge mass of breath exchange, little breaths in a huge quantity — elemental creatures — flooding towards District 5, and it wouldn’t take long before it breached the border of trees that weakly protected the area.

Suddenly, the nervous and confused chatters in the car died down. Everyone’s heads turned to the truck door, fear flickering in all their eyes.

“The Judge Inquisitor is here,” someone whispered, but loud enough for almost the whole car to hear.

When Venti finally followed suit to look at the door too, he was instantly met up with Xiao’s golden eyes, which almost startled him.

“Oh thank archons,” Chongyun, who was standing behind him, breathed a small sigh of relief. “We thought you weren’t here.”

“I… am,” Venti said slowly. Even though Xiao still looked the same as he always had — unaffected and stoic — Venti could see that he felt unsettled , probably related to that huge lump of mass rushing at them right now. “What’s going on?”

Before anyone could even answer, Xiao’s communicator came a scratchy voice, “How’s things?”

Xiao looked away to scan the truck compartment before replying. “No infecteds.”

“Copy.”

“The dispersion protector for District 5 must have worn off, right?” Diluc suddenly spoke up, directing his sentence towards Xiao despite answering Venti’s question. His gaze was critical — it was obvious that he did not like the Judge Inquisitor much.

“The rain changed the atmosphere and the dispersion protector cannot work as usual unless it is adjusted, and while it is automatically adjusted by the Dispersion Centre, it doesn’t work anymore since the Dispersion Centre is down.”

“So what is the military and the Trial Court going to do?” He spat as if it was a challenge, a challenge that he knew they wouldn’t complete satisfactorily.

“The benefit of humanity holds greater priority than that of anything else,” Xiao said, his expression betraying little emotion. “We will do what is best for all of us.”

Thud.

Thud. Thud thud thud. Thud thud thud—

Just as he finished, the sound of something pelting the walls of the parking lot grew even louder than the rain outside, making everyone freeze. Venti didn’t need to have the ability to sense the breathing of creatures to know what was making that noise.

The elemental insects have broken through their defenses and were invading District 5.

Xiao snatched up his communicator all the while walking to the back of the truck to lock the doors up. “We ran out of time. Take anyone you can get onto the nearest truck and evacuate, now.” Then to the driver at the front seat, “Start the truck and head to the Lighthouse!”

When they shot out of the carpark, the pelting that had sounded distant before instantly amplified twofold, insects flooding the surface of their window panes, blocking away light and the view beyond. Thousands of little bodies desperately hit themselves against the truck walls, trying to get in.

A few people in the truck screamed, while others ducked and huddled together as if their hands and their backs could protect them. Diluc however, swiveled to face Xiao instead, eyebrows knitted together in incredulity. “Is the Trial Court not going to do anything to save the people inside?”

“There is nothing we can do.”

“Surely you can dispatch a team or two to fish people out of their apartments and refuges before they get infected.”

“By the time the insects swarmed the place, everyone outside was already as good as dead. There’s no need to waste resources and more lives to save the infecteds and risk infecting those who are already safe.” The words lay cold in the heavy air.

With that, Xiao ceased to maintain eye contact with the red-haired man, turning away to speak to his communicator instead, indicating that the conversation was over. “Release it.”

As the truck drove on, the insects also seemed to give up, their little legs slipping from the window and allowing the passengers a silver of understanding of what was going on outside. It seemed that they had already driven out of District 5’s vicinity, the forest that separated the district from the rest of the base shrinking away into the distance.

Suddenly, a blinding explosion of light beyond the tops of the trees filled Venti’s vision, engulfing whatever he could see of District 5 and the elemental creatures that descended upon the district.

Instinctively, Venti turned away and closed his eyes, feeling the truck trembling beneath his feet in the seconds after.

When he opened his eyes again, a huge mushroom cloud floated above District 5 — or rather, whatever that was left of it.

All gone, just like that. Just because of the rain, some hungry insects, and a bomb to eradicate it all. An overwhelming victory and loss for humankind.

***

Silence punctuated the rest of the car trip — save the soft murmuring of prayers to gods long lost and the quiet sobbing, possibly for loved ones left behind.

Usually, Venti would not have understood them past the surface level of simply recognising what they were feeling and why they were feeling so. But now, he could feel an unfamiliar tightness in his chest, similar from the time Carmen died, yet also different. This time it made his heart anxiously thrum, and his mind race—

He was worried for Hu Tao and the storyteller.

He could only hope that the both of them had made it into one of the many trucks that were in the carpark, safe and heading in the same direction. Venti wasn’t quite sure what he would do if the people he grew close to — especially Hu Tao — left the world just like that.

“What are we doing next?” Before Venti could even realise it, he had already turned to Colonel Xiao for a quick distraction, throwing out a question with a hushed whisper.

The man didn’t reply immediately. In fact, he seemed to be locked in his thoughts, though his face revealed nothing about what he was thinking. The Xiao before him right now seemed distant, much stranger than before, even if they had shared a bed the previous night.

“You’re probably going to teach Teyvatian to the children at the Lighthouse. You have a liberal arts degree, don’t you?” He eventually answered.

How does he know…

“And what about you?”

“I’ll await Lighthouse’s instructions. Probably be dispatched to seize back territory in the base.”

“Oh.” It seemed that it wasn’t likely that Xiao would be here to stay either. The feeling in his chest grew just a little tighter. “Good luck then.”

Venti could feel Xiao’s gaze land on him for a few seconds, and when Venti managed to steal a glance in his direction, his demeanour had simmered down to something a little more familiar. “...Thank you.”

As he finished, the truck slowed to a stop, and the doors swung open to release its passengers. There was an announcement playing outside intermittently, the clear, unfeeling voice now echoing through the truck.

“For the safety of the citizens in the Lighthouse, please exit your vehicles and queue up for re-testing in an orderly manner.”

In about no time, everyone was swiftly escorted out and made to stand in a line before a set of gates that towered over them. Past those gates was the famous headquarters of the Lighthouse, a tall, pristine white building that stood erect by the sea, made to replicate the tower that the governmental body was named after.

But that wasn’t the only architecture in the vicinity. The Lighthouse was more of a village, or a town than simply the headquarters itself — there were multiple apartments and facilities that surrounded the tall “lighthouse” that made the place a little more homey, like a huge neighbourhood of sorts.

Venti supposed that it was where the military and members of the Lighthouse lived, since the area was inconvenient to access from the main city. And it was probably where Xiao lived, other than his previous residence at Wangshu Inn.

He would be lying if he said he wasn’t a slight bit curious about Xiao’s home. Would it be unused, empty and cold? Or would it reflect the little vulnerability that Xiao allows himself to show to others?

“Reach your arm out please,” a voice that approached him snapped Venti out of his thoughts, and the wind sprite shifted his gaze from the headquarters to the man standing beside him.

“Ah, it’s you again,” Albedo looked pleasantly surprised as he took hold of Venti’s arm and took a blood sample for the testing. It seemed that procedures had really immediately been changed after the five-minute test kit worked. “You’re the guy that Xiao brought in for testing the last time.”

“It’s nice to see you again,” Venti grinned.

“You surprised the entire research centre, you know,” Albedo said. “No one would have thought the Judge Inquisitor would ever bring someone in for testing. For him to weigh the results against his instincts and to choose between them, well…”

“He believes that I’m human now.” A fact, among the many lies that concealed his true identity.

The doctor smiled, retracting his hand now that he was done drawing Venti’s blood. “Then I’m glad that his doubts have cleared up.”

“I’m sure he has his reasons for suspecting me though,” Venti muttered quietly. Xiao was never at fault for throwing suspicion onto him. After all, he had been right.

Albedo looked rather astonished by that. “This is the first time I’m hearing someone stand up for him.”

“Really?” Venti was slightly taken aback. Was the Xiao in everyone else’s eyes… that unredeemable?

For some reason, Xiao was this distant, terrifying and cold character to most people, and to some he was even viewed as a cruel person. And while some part of that was true, and Venti was indeed scared of him at the start, he has come to realise… he’s not as bad as people like to make him out to be.

The ‘judgements’ he enacted upon people were often swift and painless, and it was done within reason. Underneath that icy exterior was a soft gentleness that he barely ever expressed, yet despite it all, it was still there.

Venti still remembered the first time he witnessed that gentleness, when he wiped the blood off his cheek back in the train. Those yellow eyes staring right back at him, almost like a quiet apology…

Maybe the burden of others’ opinions was why he seemed so distant from everyone, even with the people he was relatively close to, like Albedo. It was as if the title “Judge Inquisitor” came with not only the burden of having taken countless lives, but also with suffocating isolation.

Venti wondered if that was what Xiao wanted, or if he was simply suffering in silence all along. Or was it both?

“Really,” Albedo echoed, but he did not delve into further explanation as he had gotten distracted by the bandage wrapped around Venti’s arm. “You got hurt?”

“Just a scratch,” Venti shrugged.

“You should change it soon,” he advised. “But I have to say, your wrapping skills are pretty good.”

“Nah, it wasn’t me. Xiao did it.”

“Ah, Xiao did… what?” The expression that popped onto Albedo’s face next was simply one of incredulity, his mouth falling open the same time as his eyebrows shot up. Then, mere seconds later, he looked oddly impressed. “I see.”

“Is it really surprising?” Venti had to ask.

“Well,” Albedo let out a small sigh. “It’s rare for him to get close to anyone, let alone willingly wrap a bandage for someone.

“Alright, I’m done. Just wait a bit for your test results, okay?” After helping Venti with his wound, Albedo moved down the line to where Diluc was standing. “Oh, Mr. Ragnvindr. It’s a surprise to meet you here.”

Venti turned around slightly at that. The officer had recognised him by his name the last time too. It seemed that this red-haired man was quite the famous person in Mond-Li.

“Dr. Albedo,” Dliuc greeted the doctor in kind. Then he reached out his arm to let Albedo take blood from his hand.

They were silent for a few seconds, with Albedo focusing on the process and Dliuc calmly staring off somewhere else, until Albedo spoke up. “Are you not going to ask about Kaeya?”

“There’s nothing I need to know about him.” Diluc’s reply was immediate. “But there is something I need to know about the Trial Court. Now that most of the base has fallen, and that there is a new way of testing infecteds, is the Trial Court finally going to be eradicated?”

Someone other than Venti apparently has been listening in too, because the man behind Diluc piped up, “Yeah! Is it going to be eradicated? They’ve killed so many people, but they never ever tell us how they distinguish who’s infected or not! When will they ever tell us?”

Albedo turned to the man behind Diluc. “Why do you want to know? Did your family fall into the hands of the Trial Court?”

“My mother did,” the man said quietly. “She had gotten murdered by the Judge Inquisitor. Never once did she leave the car when she was outside the base, so how could she have gotten infected? And she was behaving normally too!”

“You’d never know, infected insects might have crawled into the vehicle,” Albedo reasoned. “Elemental infection works unlike any virus we know — it changes your DNA structure the moment it enters your body, immediately distorting every single feature that makes us human. Our face, our ability to think, everything, and only the Trial Court is able to identify those minute changes.

“The members of the Trial Court have to undergo intensive training to spot these differences, and are only allowed to officially become one after graduating with an eighty percent success rate of spotting these differences.”

“Eighty percent?” The man stumbled a step back. “That… that means my mother could have been the twenty…”

“Unfortunately, no. Why do you think Xiao could become the Judge Inquisitor?” Albedo shook his head.

“He graduated with a hundred percent success rate.”

But he didn’t seem to be saying this to the man. He seemed to be directing his words at Diluc instead, who had all but turned away.