Chapter Text
Just on the outskirts of Liyue Harbor, far enough that only the faint shouts of vendors were audible, the air stirred with the bustle of boats, the road occasionally rumbling with passing carts. Wheels turned over the gravel, horses puttered past. The air was fresh as the sun shifted high in the sky. It tasted of the ocean, salty, humid and warm.
It should have been far enough from the crowds of people and bustling streets, more than enough range for Xiao to keep his karma in check and limit the toxic influence of his adeptal energy. Nevertheless, Xiao felt a sense of unease rise in his chest, a stir to finish his task quickly and put as much distance between him and the Harbor as possible.
There would be few reasons Xiao would deem important enough for him to wait as he did, even stalling in the shade of the tree where he stood. Yet his blood thrummed with a sneaking suspicion he felt compelled to verify.
In contrast, the figure he watched stood overlooking the sparkling sea, hands clasped behind his back. His shoulders were lax. He made no movement to suggest he had any worries to attend to, any duties that could move him to leave this moment.
Closing his eyes with a slow breath, Xiao dropped to the ground behind him. Even as he made no effort to conceal his arrival, his landing barely stirred the dirt. In all likelihood, the man had noticed him long ago, and Xiao had no reason to hide his presence. The figure hardly turned in response, but Xiao felt their attention nonetheless.
Xiao was not one to let the silence draw out. With a short sigh, he asked the question he had made his journey for.
"It's you, isn't it?" Xiao said plainly. "Rex Lapis."
Their idle movement, the drum of their fingers stopped, yet they made no other movement to suggest they heard. After a long moment, Zhongli’s head turned back, a small smile on his face.
"I thought you would find out. It was only a matter of time." Zhongli’s face was calm, but the ocean air had seemed to still. Xiao felt a weight like the atmosphere pressing upon him.
“You’re alive.” Xiao’s response came automatically, breathlessly. “I wasn’t sure if I could trust the words of mortals… and the Exuvia…”
Even as a mortal, Zhongli had a ceaseless gaze with familiar amber eyes. Xiao quickly lowered his eyes, wondering how he could have the gall to linger with his head held high.
“It was you, but it was not the first form you had taken.” Xiao swallowed, looking further to the ground. “And I thought… it might not be the last.”
Xiao had wondered why Rex Lapis might hide the truth of his death. If he had not wanted to be found, even by his fellow adepti, was Xiao right to seek him out? He had pondered the decision for a long time. But Xiao's impulse was ultimately one he had failed to ignore, and he was to face the consequences, whatever they might be.
"The Gnosis." Zhongli’s words were slow, measured. "It is in the Fatui's hands now, an exchange in my final contract as Rex Lapis." He paused, but there was no uncertainty in his tone. "The god you served no longer exists."
“I served you before you gained the Gnosis.” Xiao responded, his voice feeling distant. “And its loss," He dropped to a kneel on the ground. "Will not dissuade me from continuing that role.”
“There will be no need for that.” Zhongli chuckled, but there was little humor in it. “Although it was something I imagined for a long time…” Zhongli’s gaze turned to the Harbor. “The time has finally come to pass. There will be no need for us to tend to it as closely as when we built its foundations.”
A smile crept to Zhongli’s face. "The Liyue of the present has grown beyond the one of centuries past. Now… it is a nation of humans.”
Xiao’s sight followed Zhongli’s. However, the same view of the Harbor filled him with nothing but gnawing unrest. The longer he watched, scanning over the painted walls, colorful, but nothing more than paper in the face of disaster. He eyed their idle chatter. Millileth who held spears like toys, who’d likely struggle to even dispatch an overgrown settlement of hilichurls. Seemingly unaware that on the line of disaster, they’d be the first thrown like meat to the chaos, nothing like the decoration they provided to Liyue’s open streets.
Xiao forgot himself. With a sneer, his response held nothing back. “I’m sure they enjoy their idle games. But with such fleeting lives… they have no true picture of how quick the tide may turn.” He sighed. “Even without your Gnosis, there is nothing that assures their fate as well as the guidance of a god. They’d be fools to think otherwise.”
“Is that so…?” Zhongli’s shoulders shook with a quiet laugh. “I admit I had my doubts. But somehow… they’ve overturned them time and time again.”
Xiao nodded hesitantly, feeling as though he had lost the thread of the conversation.
“I admire your concern Xiao… But I feel confident now to leave my duties in their hands. To those who wish to see the nation into the future. The era of gods has come and passed. That contract that held you… is fulfilled and meaningless.”
Xiao’s breath caught as his head snapped up from the ground.
“That same question that had bothered me for so long- I’m sure it lingers in your heart as well.”
Zhongli stepped forward, reaching out his hand to where Xiao kneeled on the ground.
"Xiao… it's time for you to be free as well." Zhongli said, and somehow, his smile had been turned downward to him.
Xiao had frozen, staring as if he was unsure that he had actually found Rex Lapis after all. But he quickly composed himself, realizing the disrespect of ignoring the former god’s offer.
After a pause, Xiao took his extended hand. An action that felt contemptuous, yet the greater disrespect would have laid in rejecting such charity. Perhaps the former archon had been tired of his qualms and doubts. Xiao silenced himself, feeling the same as whenever Rex Lapis had laid out an order for him.
Xiao was not the one to make decisions, or raise arguments. He accepted the archon’s decrees, and performed them as his due. Xiao followed this arrangement, no matter how changed it might be with the god’s altered form.
Seeming satisfied, Zhongli admired the Harbor one last time, and left him at the cliffside, a peaceable smile gracing his features.
But his words carried with a finality that Xiao had always known the immovable archon to have. Xiao left the harbor, returning to the balcony of Wangshu Inn against the backdrop of the beating sun.
The presence of hilichurls alongside him was barely a note within his notice. After all, with his experience, tearing through them hardly required a moment of thought on his part.
By the time he arrived at the overlook, the sun was low in the sky. Around him, the familiar landscape spread under his purview. Xiao stepped forward, his gloved hand tense around the railing.
The realization felt similar to that shock, the words of that unfamiliar face arriving before him with the news of his god’s death. It was a scenario that Xiao had never predicted he would find himself in. He had always thought that his task would kill him long before he would have the chance to witness the demise of his own god. And perhaps when he had first seen Rex Lapis strike down his old master without the barest hint of struggle, Xiao had come to view the archon as untouchable, in a way.
And so on, even after they had sealed Osial, he had continued, ultimately carrying on the same duties as if nothing had changed. But perhaps… he had never fully believed…
Such suspicions had seemed frivolous, but impossible for Xiao to ignore. Yet Xiao had no room for suspicions now. Rex Lapis was dead, and what could Xiao say - or think - against it? Rex Lapis’s Liyue was a flourishing success, and there was no need or place for either of them within it.
Zhongli wasn’t Rex Lapis. Rex Lapis had died months ago with the words of the traveler, and Xiao had been a fool to ever think otherwise. And with his death, the familiar task that Xiao had devoted his life and death to following was an obsolete contract that meant nothing at all.
Xiao leaned against the railing, never taking his eyes off the quiet fields that he had protected for so long. The sun peeked under the horizon, bathing the landscape in yellow light undercut by dark silhouette, highlighting the cliffsides into sharp relief. Despite it all, Xiao felt the same stir in the shadows, eruptions of malice yet to be quelled by his spear. Even in his own chest, he felt his karmic debts swell and scrape, as if emboldened by the setting sun.
His eyes traced the path he would take, the seams where the corruption was currently most potent. At some point, his weapon had found his way into his hands again, and he couldn’t bring himself to let it go.
Tilting his head, Xiao rose with his spear, all the while Zhongli’s words and smile echoed in his mind.
He had failed to abandon his task when he believed in the death of Rex Lapis. And even now, the same god’s words failed to dissuade him.
His opponents, simple hilichurls, lawachurls, camps settled near the festering graves.
The voice of Zhongli rang in his mind through the battle, a memory that failed to fade with the shouts of his enemies, the pain of the arrows that streaked through his skin. He began to wonder how much of the seeping corruption streaming from the hilichurls came from him, and quickened his attacks, gritting his teeth with the thought.
The task was routine, a never ending battle he had been careful to avoid neglecting. But with some of the hilichurls, the effects of prolonged exposure still made itself evident through the way it warped their figures and twisted their limbs into sharp, gangly shadows.
Xiao donned his mask, and the resulting uproar finally cut through the looping memories of Zhongli's final request.
He never slowed as his karmic bonds tore through his chest, as their screaming voices carved through his thoughts. Uncontrolled, wild gales followed the path of his spear, slicing deep shadowed gashes through the air. As he cut down corrupted hilichurls, their towers cracked against the ground as his brutal strikes cleaved them through.
His opponents stumbled in the gathering storm that surrounded him. His fingers dug into the shaft of his spear as pain made his vision blur. The mask felt like a brand against his face. With every movement, his muscles seared like cords of fire.
When nothing remained, he fell to his knees, and the tempest turned on him.
His fingers tore at his mask as solid shadows howled around him, tearing savagely into his skin. He choked as the air congealed, blocking the view of the night above. He pulled at it, grasping futilely at the storm to draw it back under his control. With his efforts, the sky appeared in transient slivers, quick to disappear under the chaos. As his karmic debts strengthened, the cries of the fragmented gods grew in their malice, the sound echoing in Xiao's skull.
As his vision blurred, dark spots flickered at the corner of his eyes. He felt his consciousness grow thin, until he suddenly started at the sensation of a cool breeze against his skin.
A faint melody filtered through the whistling wind. Even as the tempest grew louder, the notes continued to drip through, and Xiao stiffened as he recognized the tune.
Xiao held in his shuddering breaths. He drew his arms close to his chest.
He leaned against his spear as he let the voices fall away. His breaths rattled, too loud, but the song chirped along with a sweet cadence.
Slowly, the sharp, cutting twister that had gathered around Xiao softened to nothing. The night sky reappeared, twinkling with silver stars. Around him, the breeze swept around towards the figure standing before him. The grass shuffled as it turned to a light wind, shifting with the quiet notes of his song.
Xiao split the mask from his face, the once heavy shadows shattering to shards in the air before him.
He held in his gasping breaths, listening to the last notes of the familiar tune. And again, the pain of his past grew numb, familiar. With a shuddering breath, he listened to their voices, drawing them into himself. He hesitated as he looked up, already knowing the face he would see.
The bard, Barbatos, lowered the flute from his mouth. And he looked toward Xiao with warm eyes, a smile too kind to be directed to him.
Xiao felt strangely off balance, caught in the same moment of years ago. Another debt that had passed unpaid, an act of mercy he failed to understand. He hadn’t understood the god’s kindness then, and he understood it even less now. Despite his act in saving his life, Barbatos had never visited him for recompense. It was a request that Xiao wouldn’t have hesitated to answer.
He might as well have been in that same night, shocked to have returned from the brink of his death. Yet on these same moonlit fields, struggling past the corruption that had only grown and grown, Xiao knew that everything had changed in the time in between.
His presence here again was incomprehensible. Xiao had done nothing the last time, silently listening as the notes had finally quieted to an end. Yet even if Xiao had failed to understand Barbatos’ presence, gods had always had their reasons for tools like him. So even as the breath ran short in his lungs, Xiao found his voice before the archon left.
“Barbatos-” Xiao gasped, and the god looked surprised to hear him.
“You must know of Rex Lapis’ passing.”
Barbatos’ smile took on a knowing twist, with a glitter in his eyes that seemed to let on that he knew much more than that. Xiao didn’t think anyone outside of Liyue knew about Zhongli’s fate, but he wondered then if Zhongli had let his fellow archons know about his choice.
If that was… perhaps this archon too had his own reasons for helping Xiao. After all, nothing escaped the wind, and perhaps Barbatos had simply been waiting for this moment. And to Xiao, it came with sudden, inescapable clarity.
“I am a tool of his contract, but-" Xiao swallowed past the lump in his throat. "There's no purpose for me with his death.”
“If you wish to use me-" He lowered to a kneel then, eyes falling to the ground.
"You only need tell me how."
If Barbatos did not ask himself, Xiao would not be one to let his debt slip by once again.
In the moment, with his head turned to the grass, Xiao didn’t know if Barbatos wore the gleeful smile of his first master, or the stoic visage of Morax when he first bound him to his contract. Around him, the wind seemed to still, the everpresent sounds of chirping insects and distant hilichurl camps closing into the vacuum left behind.
Xiao felt cold, numb. Kneeling at the ground, he could almost hear the cruel words from when his first master had captured him. The first shadows of his billowing karma, darting in the corners of his vision from the years long ago. The endless pain, and his powerlessness against his orders. It swirled in his mind, but he sat silently, showing nothing.
His thoughts turned to Rex Lapis, face steely as his old master fell to him. His act of mercy, the anticipation for new cruelty that never seemed to come. The burden of karma that grew through the centuries with the curses of gods he had slain.
Zhongli's amber eyes peering towards him as he let the contract fall, and denied his original name. The same stoic gaze, seeming softened by a new drive.
A proof that god's could change, maybe, truly die in that way. But Xiao realized that in his own time, he had remained all the same.
So Xiao waited for Barbatos’ response, wondering what kind of demands he might make of Xiao, what expression he would wear as made use of the tool he had finally acquired.
On the ground before him, shadows shifted as the moon lifted high into the sky. The night grew bright as the silence grew long. Xiao felt the silver light of the stars shine on him, but when he finally looked up toward Barbatos, he saw nothing but the clear sky above.