Chapter Text
If there’s one silver lining in this horrifying situation of cosmic proportions, it would be that she has no memories of her death.
Seriously. Sylvian Auclair counted that as a massive, hyperventilating win. She didn't know if she had slipped on black ice outside the cold storage warehouse, suffered a catastrophic forklift incident, or just stopped breathing in her sleep. All she knew was that one moment she was a perfectly normal, comfortably anxious logistics worker whose biggest daily stress was inventory discrepancies, and the next, she was gagging on a throatful of freezing, metallic air.
"Oh my god," she tried to gasp, but the sound that left her throat was muffled, compressed, and distinctly higher than it should have been.
She panicked, throwing her hands up to clutch her neck, only for her fingers to collide with cold, hard metal. Her breath hitched. Her vision was entirely wrong. The world was split into weird, fragmented geometric shapes, viewed through a heavy, star-shaped metal visor pinned directly over her eyes. Frantic, she stumbled backward, her feet catching on a heavy hemline. She hit the ground—hard—but instead of the expected bruising thud, she felt a strange, cushioned bounce, muffled by layers of heavy fur, a thick insulated hood, and thigh-high leather boots that felt like a permanent second skin.
No, no, no, no.
Sylvian scrambled to her knees, her hands sweeping across the ground. Dirt. Jagged stone. And a deep, glowing purple grass that practically hummed with electricity. She looked down at herself. Wrapped tightly in a blue-and-white insulated bodysuit patterned with snowflakes, her hands were encased in pristine white gloves. Clutched tightly in her right grip—as if glued to her palm—was a heavy, floating, crystal-cut lantern radiating a bone-deep, supernatural frost.
A Cryo lantern.
She was a Fatui Cryo Cicin Mage.
She was a Genshin Impact mob. An elite enemy. One of those incredibly annoying, universally detested targets that players explicitly hunted down just to rip Mist Grass Pollen out of their cold, dead hands. She wasn't a cute, playable five-star hero with a tragic backstory and a fan-following; she was an obstacle. A walking loot box.
A hysterical laugh bubbled up her throat, squeaking out past her mask. “A warehouse worker,” she thought, her mind spinning at a million miles an hour. “I worked in cold storage! Is this a joke? Is the universe genuinely this literal? I manage a freezer for a living, so I get reincarnated as an ice witch?!”
A sharp, high-pitched chittering sound suddenly cut through her internal breakdown.
Sylvian shrieked, dropping the lantern. Except it didn't drop. It floated right back up to her hip, bobbing lazily in the air. Around her, bursting out from the nearby thicket, three oversized, glowing blue mutated mosquitoes zipped into the air, circling her head with aggressive familiarity.
Cryo Cicins.
"Get away! Shoo! Scram!" she yelled, waving her arms wildly. The bugs didn't scram. They chirped, diving close enough that their icy wings brushed against her hood, waiting for her commands. She was biologically hardwired to control them. She could feel a strange, freezing tether in the back of her mind linking her consciousness to theirs, a bizarre mental muscle she had absolutely no desire to flex.
Forcing herself to ignore the giant ice bugs, Sylvian dragged herself to the edge of the cliff she was stationed on and looked out. Her casual, flower-picking meta-knowledge of the game's map instantly kicked in, and her stomach dropped straight through the earth.
The sky above was a permanent, bruising shade of violet. Jagged, electro-infused mountains loomed in the distance, and the distant, rhythmic crack-boom of automated lightning echoed over the water.
Inazuma.
She wasn't just an enemy; she was stationed in a literal slaughterhouse. Inazuma was the land of endless civil war, terrifying military tribunals, rogue samurai, and environmental hazards specifically designed to drain a health bar to zero in seconds. If a wandering player didn't find her and beat her to death for character ascension materials, a rogue lightning bolt from the Sakoku Decree probably would.
"Absolutely not," Sylvian whispered, her voice cracking under the heavy mask. "Nope. Nuh-uh. I am out. I resign. I tender my two weeks' notice effective immediately."
But you didn't just resign from the Fatui. Desertion meant the Tsaritsa’s cleanup crews would hunt you down and erase you.
Sylvian clutched her head, her mind racing through the logistics of survival. She couldn't walk into a city; the local authorities would execute her on sight. She couldn't stay here; she was a sitting duck for any protagonist passing by. If she wanted to live, she had to escape the archipelago. She had to get to the neutral, safer lands of Mondstadt or Liyue.
She looked out at the vast, roaring ocean separating her island from the rest of Teyvat. There were no boats for a rogue Fatui mage.
Slowly, her eyes drifted down to the glowing, frost-breathing lantern floating by her side. She felt the elemental power humming beneath her skin—the heavy, tanky Cryo shield she knew this mob could generate, the ability to freeze water instantly.
She was going to have to ice-bridge.
Manually. Step by agonizing, freezing step, across a literal ocean.
Sylvian swallowed the massive lump of panic in her throat, her warehouse-honed organizational skills desperately kicking in to structure her terror. Step one: Find a blind spot on the cliffs where the Shogunate's automated lightning storm won't vaporize me. Step two: Practice holding an ice bridge without passing out from exhaustion. Step three: Don't die.
Glancing warily at her three hovering, chittering Cicin companions, Sylvian took a deep, shaky breath of frosty air and turned her back on her Fatui post. It was time to get to work.
The first five hundred yards of the ocean were, without a doubt, the most harrowing five hundred yards of Sylvian’s entire existence.
“Left foot, freeze. Right foot, step. Left foot, drag. Good. Now do it again before the platform melts beneath you, Sylvian, you absolute idiot.”
The mantra repeated in her head, a frantic, rhythmic loop that barely managed to keep the screaming hysteria at bay. She was currently hovering—or rather, stumbling with a forced, unnatural lightness—about fifty feet away from the jagged, desolate cliffs of Narukami Island's northernmost blind spot.
It turns out that using Cryo energy in real life was nothing like pressing an 'E' key on a mechanical keyboard. There was no cooldown timer ticking down in the corner of her vision. Instead, channeling the frost through her heavy, crystal-cut lantern felt exactly like dragging a heavy crate across a frictionless warehouse floor—it required an immense, exhausting amount of mental leverage. Every time she pushed her consciousness into the lantern, a freezing blast would shoot outward, locking the dark, churning Inazuman waves into a fragile, geometric sheet of ice.
But the ocean was spiteful. The deep, warm currents of the archipelago fought back constantly, eating away at her makeshift path from underneath.
"Ah—! Wait, wait, wait!" Sylvian squeaked as a sudden, sickening crack echoed beneath her white leather boots.
The ice sheet split. Panicking, she threw her hands forward, her fingers splaying wildly within her white gloves. A surge of raw, biting cold erupted from her palm, desperately stitching the fracturing floe back together just a second before her foot could plunge into the dark brine.
She collapsed onto her knees, panting heavily, her breath pluming into thick, white clouds against the humid night air. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. Because she was wearing a thick, insulated bodysuit, she couldn't actually feel the ambient heat of Inazuma, but she could feel the terrifying drain on her own stamina. Her thighs ached from the constant, low-hovering posture required of a Cicin Mage, and her forearms felt numb from gripping the floating lantern's heavy metal handle.
Above her, the three Cryo Cicins circled lazily, their translucent wings humming a soft, mocking tune.
"Shut up," Sylvian hissed at them, glaring through the narrow slits of her star-shaped metal mask. "You try doing logistics for a trans-oceanic escape on foot. Go scout or something."
To her surprise, the mental tether in the back of her mind twitched. The three oversized, glowing blue mosquitoes actually obeyed, zipping outward into the gloom to form a defensive perimeter. At least her automated minions had decent pathfinding.
Taking a shaky breath, Sylvian looked back toward the island. Narukami was a dark, jagged silhouette against the bruising purple sky. Every few minutes, a blinding, violet fracture would rip through the clouds miles away—the Raiden Shogun’s automated tempest, still dutifully vaporizing anything that dared to cross the official maritime borders.
She had managed to find a gap in the perimeter where the lightning didn't immediately strike, but she wasn't out of the woods yet. If she moved too fast, she’d lose control of her Cryo output and drown. If she moved too slow, the sheer exhaustion of maintaining the ice would claim her anyway.
"Okay. Logistics," she whispered to herself, forcing her warehouse-trained brain to break down the problem. "When a shipment is overwhelming, you break it into shifts. You take micro-breaks. I can't build a continuous bridge all the way to Liyue in one go. I need an anchor."
She looked down at the ice beneath her. It was already thinning, the edges turning to slush.
Gritting her teeth, Sylvian stood up, raising her lantern high. She didn't just need a temporary stepping stone; she needed something sustainable. Gathering the freezing energy humming beneath her skin, she focused all her intent on a single point directly in front of her.
"Thicken. Do not just freeze the surface—build a foundation."
With a low, resonant thrum, the lantern flashed a brilliant, blinding blue. A massive, jagged spire of solid ice erupted from the waves, locking itself deep into the shallow reef below and blooming outward into a thick, sturdy platform nearly ten feet wide.
Sylvian fell back onto the ice block, gasping, but a manic, triumphant grin spread across her hidden face. It worked. It took a massive chunk of her energy, but this thick chunk of ice would take at least twenty minutes to melt under the ambient temperature.
She had just built her first rest stop.
"One mile at a time," she muttered, curling up on the frozen platform and pulling her heavy, fur-lined hood tightly around her face. "Just... twenty thousand more of these, and I'm home free."
The silence out on the open water was a different kind of terrifying. Back in the warehouse, "quiet" usually meant the compressors had cycled off, or it was the dead hour between 3:00 AM and 4:00 AM when the delivery trucks hadn't yet arrived. It was a comfortable, structured silence.
Here, sitting cross-legged on a rapidly dissolving chunk of supernatural ice, the silence was vast, deep, and thick with the smell of ozone and salt.
Sylvian stared down at her white-gloved hands, watching the faint, frosty mist rise from her palms. Her mind kept looping back to the one detail that should have been driving her insane, but was instead acting as a bizarre, numbing anesthesia: she had absolutely no idea how she died.
She remembered logging out of Genshin Impact around midnight because she was tired of getting chased by Ruin Guards in Liyue. She remembered setting her alarm for 5:30 AM. She remembered the distinct smell of her cardboard coffee cup and the generic, neon-lit breakroom of the cold storage facility.
Then, nothing. A complete, unreadable blank space in her inventory of memories.
"Did I slip on the loading dock?" she wondered, tapping her metal mask with a gloved finger. A dull, hollow clink echoed back. "Did a pallet of frozen poultry collapse on me? Did my heart just decide to clock out early?"
A dark, cynical laugh escaped her lips, sounding unnervingly melodic past the voice-muffling fabric of her hood. If she had died a horrific, painful death, the universe had at least been kind enough to hit the delete key on the footage. But the lack of an ending made this entire situation feel less like a reincarnation and more like she had simply been misplaced—like a piece of mislabeled freight shipped to the wrong continent.
Except, a warehouse worker didn't possess a biological instinct to summon mutated, ice-breathing bugs.
A soft chirp drew her attention. One of her Cryo Cicins landed heavily on the edge of her ice platform, its translucent, crystalline wings shivering against the humid air. Up close, it didn't look like a video game sprite anymore; it was an actual creature, its exoskeleton a deep, shimmering sapphire, its single, glowing eye fixed entirely on her.
Instead of screaming, Sylvian found herself sighing.
"I used to complain about the warehouse inventory being off by two boxes of frozen peas," she whispered to the bug. "Now my entire existence is an inventory error."
She reached out, a strange, instinctual pull in her chest guiding her hand. The Cicin didn't bite. It leaned its freezing, fuzzy head against her white glove, humming like a tiny, sub-zero engine. It was weirdly comforting. It was the only thing out here that didn't want to kill her, execute her for desertion, or farm her for character ascension materials.
But the physical reality of her situation quickly shattered her brief moment of existential dread. A sharp, wet slap echoed beneath her, and she felt the ice platform tilt dangerously.
The ocean currents were eating away at her foundation faster now that she was further from the shallows. The edges of her rest stop were turning to mush, the deep, ink-black water bubbling up over the freezing lip of her platform.
Sylvian scrambled to her feet, her joints aching from the unyielding, rigid posture of her new body. The lingering panic of her forgotten death was instantly replaced by the very real, very immediate panic of drowning in a world she barely understood.
She couldn't afford to sit here and psychoanalyze her missing memories. The logistics of the present required her full attention.
Gripping the handle of her floating lantern, she watched the deep blue crystals pulse with ready, volatile energy. She looked out across the endless stretch of dark, churning sea, where the distant, safer shores of Liyue were completely invisible beyond the horizon.
"Alright," she muttered, bracing her boots against the slick surface. "Break time is over. Back on the clock."
A completely real, human problem presented itself. Who knew trying to ice bridge makes you ravenous? Not just hungry—ravenous.
It was a primal, stomach-clawing vacuum of a hunger that hit Sylvian all at once, right as she was preparing to launch her next frozen platform. Her foot literally froze mid-air, not from her Cryo powers, but because her brain suddenly screamed at her that if she didn't consume five thousand calories within the next ten minutes, her body was going to start digesting its own muscle tissue for fuel.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she groaned, clutching her stomach. The thick, insulated fabric of her bodysuit did nothing to muffle the terrifying, angry growl that erupted from her gut. It sounded like a Geovishap Hatchling waking up from a nap.
In hindsight, the logistics of it made perfect, agonizing sense. Back at the warehouse, working a eight-hour shift in a literal freezer meant she always burned through lunches twice as fast as the office staff. Generating heat required energy. But now? She wasn't just enduring the cold; she was actively manufacturing it out of raw physical stamina, bending thermodynamics to her will to freeze moving saltwater in the middle of a tropical climate.
She was basically a biological refrigerator running on maximum overdrive, and her battery was flashing a violent, empty red.
"Food," she gasped, her vision swimming slightly behind the narrow slits of her star-shaped metal mask. "I need... a protein bar. A sandwich. A soggy, depressing breakroom burrito. Literally anything."
Frantic, she began slapping her own hips and chest, her white-gloved hands searching for pockets. Did Cicin Mages have pockets? Did they carry rations? She ripped at the seams of her heavy, fur-lined coat. Nothing. She checked the small leather pouches dangling near her thighs. Mist Grass Pollen. Insignias. Strange, glowing purple crystals that smelled faintly of ozone. None of it was edible unless she wanted to poison herself before the ocean could drown her.
Her three Cryo Cicins drifted closer, sensing her erratic spikes of panic. They chirped questioningly, bobbing up and down.
"Unless you guys are secretly made of chicken nuggets, you aren't helping," Sylvian snapped, her voice cracking with hysterical exhaustion.
She looked down at the dark, ink-black water rippling just beneath the edge of her melting ice station. There were fish down there. She could see the faint, silvery glint of Teyvat's marine life swimming safely beneath the surface, completely oblivious to the starving cosmic trespasser staring down at them.
Great. She had a massive magical lantern, infinite ice capabilities, and three airborne minions. But she had absolutely zero fishing gear, zero cooking utensils, and an overwhelming, lifelong aversion to raw seafood.
Sylvian stared at the water, then at her lantern, a dark, desperate calculation forming in her sharp, logistics-driven mind. If she couldn't fish like a normal person, she was going to have to industrialize the process.
"I just want a sandwich!" out of frustration, she yelled, infusing her voice with the power of Delusion.
She hadn't meant to do it. It was a pure, unadulterated gut reaction from a starving warehouse worker pushing past her physical limits. But the moment the raw, unfiltered authority snapped through her vocal cords, the freezing tether in the back of her mind flared like a live wire.
"—want a sandwich!—"
"—sandwich!—"
"—rich!—"
Sylvian froze, her jaw dropping beneath her heavy metal mask. She stared, utterly bewildered, when the Cicins can talk?! And mimicked what she said?! It wasn't human speech—it was a chorus of tiny, high-pitched, echoing screeches that perfectly copied her frantic cadence, vibrating right inside her skull.
Before she could even process the psychological horror of her magical mutant mosquitoes echoing her modern-day lunch cravings, the three bugs suddenly snapped to attention. Their single, glowing eyes flashed a vicious, synchronized blue. And to her morbid amazement, began to dive bomb into the ice-black waters that made her panic.
"Wait, no! Come back!" Sylvian shrieked, lunging toward the edge of her melting ice platform.
It was pathetic of her—honestly, it was deeply embarrassing given that she had been screaming at them to scram just an hour ago—but her Cicins have grown on her. They were her only coworkers in this frozen nightmare. Watching them plunge headfirst into the terrifying, pitch-black abyss of the Inazuman ocean sent a jolt of pure, protective adrenaline through her empty stomach.
She leaned over the edge, bracing her white-gloved hands on the slick ice, fully expecting to see three drowned sapphire bugs floating on the surface.
Instead, she stared dumbly as the three Cicins she is definitely naming later all came out of the ocean holding fishes that are slowly ceasing its struggles due to the extreme cold they're emitting.
Thud. Splat. Flop.
Three fat, flash-frozen Inazuman bass landed right at her boots. They weren't even flopping; the sheer, sub-zero aura radiating off the Cicins had turned the fish into solid, frost-covered blocks of protein within seconds. It was the medieval, magical equivalent of a commercial deep-freezer unit.
The three insects hovered back into a neat semi-circle, vibrating their translucent wings proudly. One of them let out a low, crackling “—wich!—” sound, tilting its fuzzy head as if asking for a performance review.
Sylvian looked at the frozen fish, then at the proud, oversized mosquitoes, and finally down at her glowing lantern. Her logistics-driven brain, temporarily paralyzed by the absurdity, slowly chugged back to life.
"Okay," she whispered, her voice trembling with a mix of awe and lingering hysteria. "Okay, first of all... you guys are getting a promotion. Second of all... how the hell am I supposed to cook these without Fire-Cicin Mages around?"
And it happened again?
Sylvian barely had time to process her lack of a frying pan before the weird, psychic link in the back of her mind flared like a short-circuiting electrical panel. The Cicins echoed, "Fire, fire, fire. Match? Flaming wood? Burner. Return to land. Searching bandit camps."
She recoiled, her boots sliding slightly on the slick ice. "Woah, woah, hold your horses! Stop!"
The bugs immediately went silent, hovering in a rigid, bobbing triangle, their wings giving off a nervous, high-pitched hum.
Sylvian clutched her star-shaped metal visor, her mind reeling. It wasn’t just that they were talking—they were analyzing. They were pulling keywords straight out of her panicking, modern-day human brain and trying to translate them into Teyvat-friendly solutions. Match? Flaming wood? Burner? They were trying to help her build a literal campfire, but their automated, programming-driven conclusion was the absolute worst-case scenario: Return to land. Searching bandit camps.
"No! Absolutely no bandit camps!" Sylvian yelled, her voice muffled by her hood. "Do you want me to get turned into a pile of Mist Grass Pollen by a bunch of rogue samurai? Because that is exactly how I get turned into upgrade materials!"
The left Cicin tilted its sapphire head, its wings vibrating out a faint, crackling, “—bandit camps... danger... exit simulation...—”
"Yes, danger! Total danger!" Sylvian threw her white-gloved hands in the air. "We are staying right here on our rapidly melting, sub-zero logistics platform."
She looked back down at the three frozen fish. They were so thoroughly deep-frozen by her overachieving minions that they looked less like food and more like blunt weapons. She couldn't eat them raw—she had limits, even in a crisis—and she couldn't go back to the shores of Inazuma to look for a cooking pot without risking a direct encounter with a Treasure Hoarder, a Nobushi, or a Fatui patrol looking for a deserter.
But looking at the bugs, a sudden, weirdly fond realization washed over her anxiety. They were trying. In their own bizarre, slightly terrifying, telepathic way, these three giant ice-mosquitoes were looking out for her. They were a team now.
"Okay, look," Sylvian said, softening her voice and trying to dial back the raw Delusion energy so she didn't accidentally command them to go declare war on the Raiden Shogun. "We need a workaround. A zero-contact delivery method. No bandit camps. Is there... I don't know, a shipwreck? A deserted island with a cooking pot? Scan the horizon, but do not pick a fight."
The three Cicins buzzed in unison, their single eyes blinking in a synchronized blue pattern.
"—Scan... horizon... target acquired...—" one of them chirped, before all three zipped upward, pointing their frozen stingers toward a tiny, dark silhouette rising out of the ocean a few hundred yards away.
They returned a few minutes later.
Sitting back down on the sturdier center of her ice block, Sylvian took a deep breath, trying to ignore the angry, hollow rumbling of her stomach. The dark silhouette of the distant rocky outcropping wasn't moving anywhere, which meant she had a brief moment to breathe, catalog her inventory, and deal with the three highly attentive, telepathic insects currently staring at her.
"If we’re going to be a corporate unit," Sylvian muttered, leaning her chin on her white-gloved hand, "I can't keep calling you all 'you guys.' It’s bad for morale. And honestly, bad for workflow logistics."
The bugs buzzed in what sounded like vague agreement.
Now that she looked closer—really looked, instead of just screaming and flailing her arms at them—she realized they weren't identical carbon copies at all. The game's rendering engine back on Earth had clearly done them a massive disservice. Up close, their icy carapaces held distinct, individual traits.
She pointed a finger at the largest of the trio. This one was noticeably bulkier, its sapphire-blue armor plating thicker around the thorax, and its wings didn't just flap—they cut through the air with a brutal, serrated edge. It looked like it could slice a falling leaf cleanly in half.
"You," Sylvian decided, her voice echoing softly inside her mask. "You're the heavy lifter. The muscle. Your wings look like frozen sawblades, so your name is Blizzard."
The large Cicin let out a deep, resonant click from its mandibles, hovering a few inches higher. “—Blizzard—heavy... operational—” it mimicked inside her head, sounding strangely proud.
Sylvian smiled under her hood, then turned her attention to the second one. This bug was sleeker, built for speed rather than raw power. Its wings were unusually long and narrow, stretching out like frozen willow twigs, giving it a delicate, erratic flight pattern that looked incredibly nimble.
"You're the scout," Sylvian said, nodding firmly. "Long wings mean better reach. You're Branch."
Branch did a quick, elegant loop-de-loop in the air, its high-pitched chime vibrating in Sylvian's mind: “—Branch... scout... horizon clear...—”
Finally, she looked at the third and smallest Cicin, which had been hovering closest to her shoulder. This one had a peculiar geometric mutation right between its antennae—a cluster of crystalline ice that had formed into a distinct, sharp, flower-shaped forehead-icicle-like thingy. It almost looked like a frozen winter bloom pinned to its head.
"And you're the specialist," Sylvian murmured softly, reaching out to let the small creature rest its icy legs against her forearm. "With that little frost-bud on your head, you're Blossom."
Blossom nuzzled against her glove, its single eye glowing a warm, vibrant cyan. “—Blossom... special... no bandit camps...—”
"Exactly, Blossom. No bandit camps," Sylvian chuckled, a genuine warmth thawing the cold panic in her chest.
She had a frozen fish supply. She had a destination. And now, she had a crew: Blizzard, Branch, and Blossom. It wasn't exactly the standard corporate warehouse team she was used to, but as far as supernatural, dimension-hopping logistics went, she was finally starting to feel like the boss of her own survival.