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“Oh! I’m so sorry! I didn’t know there was someone here.” Sucrose blushed as she saw the figure crouched by the entrance of Albedo’s campsite in Dragonspine.
A young man with a foreign-looking outfit and black hair with green streaks, who appeared to be shovelling something into his mouth, handful by handful.
Sucrose studied his attire more closely. “Are you perhaps from Liyue?”
The man swallowed what he was eating and stood up, turning around to face her. “Yes. Conqueror of Demons, Adeptus Xiao. You shouldn’t stand too near me. I don’t want to hurt you.”
But she just leaned closer, studying him. “Your hands are red. So are your mouth and chin. Have you…” She hesitated. “Have you been eating snow?”
“Yes, and what about it?” Xiao’s indifferent tone made Sucrose’s chest swell up with anxiety. Did she say something wrong? Was it commonplace for Liyueans to eat snow? No, that couldn’t be. Liyue’s climate was far from hot and arid enough for that behaviour to have practical applications. Then again, as others have told her many times, not everything had a practical and logical reason to exist. Eating snow must have had some important cultural connotations, she concluded.
“What are you doing?” Xiao crossed his arms. “Why are you staring at me?”
“Oh! Nothing! It’s just…” Sucrose blushed again, and looked down at the ground, before raising her head to glance around her. Snow. She saw snow. Everywhere was snow. She grabbed a handful and shoved it in her mouth.
An immediate stinging feeling greeted her, and she spat the snow out with force.
“Really, what are you doing?” Xiao gave her an incredulous look.
“Eating snow,” Sucrose replied. “But it hurts. How do I make it not hurt?”
Xiao shrugged. “I don’t really feel it anymore. Over everything else I feel, it’s…” He trailed off.
Sucrose thought for a moment. With the way Adeptus Xiao was wolfing down the snow, he must have swallowed each handful so quickly that the pain of the cold didn’t have time to register in his mouth. Sucrose wanted to test this hypothesis, so she grabbed another handful of snow, this time swallowing it as fast as she could.
Instead of the sharp pain she felt in her mouth the last time, this method of eating snow gave her a massive headache that made her hold her head in both hands, pressing on her temples with her palms to try to ease the pain. She let out a loud groan.
“How do you Liyueans do it? Eating snow?”
“Liyueans?” Xiao blinked. “What does me being from Liyue have to do with eating snow?”
Sucrose stared at him. “You mean to say, your act of eating snow isn’t a common practice in Liyue?”
“No, of course not.” Xiao shook his head. “I haven’t met anyone else who eats snow like I do, and I’ve been alive for more than two thousand years.”
Sucrose had been operating off the wrong assumption this whole time. And she would sorely pay for it.
The next day…
“Adeptus… snow… it hurts…” Sucrose moaned, her eyes clenched shut as she lay in bed, her skin hot with fever and her head pounding.
“Shh, Sucrose, it’s okay,” Albedo reassured her, his soft voice calming her down enough to take some deep breaths. “Sit up. I have soup for you.”
As embarrassed as she felt to have the Chief Alchemist of the Knights of Favonius — and her supervisor, nonetheless — spending his time taking care of her while she was sick, Sucrose was glad there was someone to help her get through the terrible cold she had gotten as a result of eating snow on Dragonspine the day before.
“T-thank you, Mr. Albedo.” She blew on the soup and took a sip. Its warmth eased a bit of the pain in her chest, but a different kind of pain started to emerge there as Albedo spoke his next words.
“What were you thinking, Sucrose?” He sighed. “Why would you ever think eating the snow on Dragonspine was a good idea?”
“The adeptus was doing it, and so I thought that meant it was a special practice in Liyue that I should study,” Sucrose sniffled.
“Adepti aren’t human, Sucrose. They do inexplicable things you wouldn’t expect regular people to be doing,” Albedo tried to explain. “Who was that adeptus again? His name was…”
“Xiao. Adeptus Xiao, Conqueror of Demons.” Sucrose paused, and thought about what Albedo said. “I wonder what the physiology of adepti is like.”
“Sucrose, no.” Albedo gave an even bigger sigh this time. “I do not at all recommend you go study that adeptus you met. From what you’ve told me, he seems very dangerous.” He looked at Sucrose, who seemed to be moping. “But if you really want, that novelist Zhenyu gave me a variety of books from Liyue. There should be one about adepti somewhere.”
Sucrose beamed, and reached her arms out to hug Albedo, before falling into a coughing fit and needing to lie down again.
“Please stay put, Sucrose. I’ll get the book for you.” Albedo shook his head as he stood up to walk away. “Adeptus Xiao… what a strange life form.”
Somewhere far away in Liyue, Xiao sneezed. “Someone must be talking about me.”