Chapter Text
January 9, 6014
Smoke.
Fire.
Fetor.
Screams.
Death.
Hu Lian had spent fifteen years as the Director of Wangsheng. Oversaw countless funerals. Presided over death with steady hands and steadier voice. None of it prepared him for this.
An entire village. Erased. While he watched.
His hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Terror at the devastating power of death he'd thought familiar in his palm. Hu Lian presided over funerals. He knew death. He'd held it, shaped it, guided it with reverence. But this wasn't death. This was erasure.
Terror at how fragile human life truly was—some had died without even knowing. No time to run. No time to scream. Just... gone.
Terror that someone had done this deliberately. That somewhere, someone was powerful enough, cruel enough, to decide an entire village should simply stop existing.
"Lian'er!"
His father's voice cut through the chaos. Urgent. Strained. Hu Lian had never heard his father's voice shake before.
"Father!"
Hu Ju's eyes blazed like twin pyres, the flower-shaped pupils burning with crimson light as he addressed both his son and the assembled Millelith officers.
"No more hesitation! You take the Vision-bearing soldiers into the village. Anyone you pull out, immediately purge them of fetor. Stay away from the village shrine no matter what!"
Without waiting for acknowledgment, the elder man spun on his heel and plunged into the wall of black smoke. Hu Lian's throat constricted with the urge to call after his father, but he swallowed it down. When Hu Ju made a decision, there was no stopping him—and right now, lives mattered more than a few unspoken concerns.
The younger Director raised his torch high, eyes scanning through the roiling smoke. Wind gathered in his palm, Anemo energy coalescing as he swept aside fog and flame to carve a path forward.
"Those without Visions, remain here to aid and protect any survivors we bring out. The rest, with me!"
“Roger!!”
Fetor burned his nose, his throat, his lungs with every breath. Hu Lian knew this smell. He had cleansed it from corpses, from gravesites gone wrong. But never this concentrated. Never this alive, hungry, spreading like it had intent. Houses that had stood for generations were now skeletal remains, their wooden frames twisted into grotesque shapes by unnatural fire. The ground itself seemed tainted, each step releasing wisps of black miasma that clung to their boots.
The Millelith moved with practiced efficiency, their Visions glowing as elemental energy resisted fetor from eroding them. These weren't green recruits—each soldier had been handpicked to combat disastrous contamination of this scale. Their formation never wavered despite the hellscape surrounding them.
"Eastern sector, three units!" Hu Lian commanded, wind swirling around his form. "Western sector, two units! Establish purification zones every fifty meters!"
"Understood!" The response came in perfect unison, soldiers splitting off without hesitation. Geo Vision holders immediately began raising stone platforms clear of the tainted ground, while Hydro users prepared cleansing stations.
They found the first bodies near what had been the market square. A family of four, huddled together, their faces frozen in expressions of confusion rather than fear. They hadn't even had time to understand what was killing them.
"Purification team, here!" Hu Lian called out, already beginning the rites. His hands glowed with gentle green light as Anemo energy mixed with sacred arts. Two Pyro Vision holders flanked him, their flames burning away the lingering fetor with surgical precision.
"Director Hu!" A voice called from the eastern district. "We've got survivors trapped under a collapsed roof! Requesting immediate assistance!"
"Captain Chen, take your unit," Hu Lian ordered without looking up from his work. "Extract and evacuate. Don't let anyone including yourself breathe this air longer than necessary."
"Affirmative!"
As if in response to his words, a weak cry echoed from a collapsed building nearby. The team rushed toward it, Hu Lian's wind clearing a path through the choking smoke. There—a hand protruding from beneath fallen beams, fingers twitching weakly.
"Help me lift this!"
“Yes Sir!”
Two Geo Vision users stepped forward, stone pillars rising to brace the debris as they carefully extracted the survivor—a young boy, perhaps nine years old, his breath coming in rattled gasps.
Hu Lian immediately began channeling healing wind, but the fetor had already taken root too deeply. Black veins spider-webbed across the child's skin, pulsing with each labored heartbeat.
"M-Mister," the boy's voice was barely a whisper. "The bad man... he came from nowhere... Mom and Dad tried to run but..."
"Shh, save your strength." But even as Hu Lian poured more energy into the young child, he knew it was futile. The fetor was like nothing he'd encountered before—aggressive, almost sentient in its hunger.
The boy's eyes, wide with incomprehension, fixed on something beyond Hu Lian's shoulder. "Mom...?"
And then, nothing.
Hu Lian reached out. His fingers trembled as they touched the boy's face.
Still warm. Why was he still warm? The dead weren't supposed to feel like this—like he'd just fallen asleep, like any moment he might wake up asking for his mother. Like he was touching fevered skin except the boy wasn't breathing, would never breathe again.
Soft features. Round cheeks still holding childhood fat. Eight, maybe nine years old. He could've—
The vision flashed unbidden: this boy running through Liyue Harbor's streets, laughing. Playing with Tao'er at the schoolyard someday. Growing up. Getting taller, stronger, kinder. Becoming an honest merchant maybe, or a craftsman, or a scholar. Finding love. Having children of his own. Living a full life under Liyue's golden sun.
All of it gone. Erased. In one heartbeat that would never come.
Hu Lian closed the boy's eyes, his own hand shaking. He'd presided over hundreds of funerals. Knew death intimately. But untimely death—children's death—still made his chest ache with the wrongness of it. The injustice. All that potential, all those futures, stolen before they could even begin.
How many more? How many more stolen futures would he find buried in this ash?
BOOM!
Suddenly, tremendous explosion rocked the ground, crimson-black energy erupting from the direction of the village shrine. The shockwave knocked several soldiers off their feet, and for a moment, Hu Lian's heart stopped.
"Father..."
“Secret of the flame!
Blessing of Homa…!”
But then, cutting through the chaos like a blade of pure will, came Hu Ju's voice—not calling for help, but roaring an incantation in the iron tongue. The fetor in the air seemed to recoil, pulling back toward its source as if being forcibly contained.
"He's binding it," Hu Lian breathed, relief and worry warring in his chest. "Continue the search! We may not have much time before—"
Another voice, high and terrified, pierced the air from the northern section of the village.
"HELP! SOMEONE PLEASE! HE'S NOT BREATHING! BIG G! PLEASE DON'T—!"
Hu Lian's head snapped toward the sound. A survivor—and from the desperation in that cry, someone watching another die. Without hesitation, he launched himself in that direction, wind carrying him over the rubble-strewn streets.
The smoke grew thicker as he approached what had been the residential district. Here, the destruction was more selective—some houses stood untouched while others were reduced to ash, as if death itself had been choosing victims with deliberate cruelty.
"Hold on!" Hu Lian called out. "We're coming!"
The voice that answered was broken by sobs. "Please... please help him... I can't... I can't feel his heartbeat anymore..."
Hu Lian burst through the smoke with two Millelith soldiers flanking him. The scene that greeted them made his breath catch.
A boy, perhaps ten years old-about his daughter’s age, knelt in the ash-covered street, cradling another child against his chest. The one being held—Big G, the voice had called him—lay unnaturally still. No black veins marked his skin from fetor poisoning. Instead, his flesh had taken on a grayish pallor, limbs hanging boneless like a rag doll.
Hu Lian's eyes swept the immediate area, landing on what had once been a house. Now only rubble remained, wooden beams scattered like broken bones. Understanding hit him like a physical blow. The boy hadn't died from fetor—he'd been crushed when the structure collapsed.
"Big G! Goulang!" The kneeling boy shook his friend desperately. "It's me! Meng! You have to wake up! Don't die!"
"Young boy!" Hu Lian dropped to one knee beside them, keeping his voice gentle despite the urgency. "I'll save your friend. But you need to go with this Millelith soldier to safety—hurry!"
The boy named Meng didn't acknowledge him. Whether he couldn't hear through his grief or simply refused to listen to what he knew were empty reassurances, Hu Lian couldn't tell. But then Meng's expression shifted.
The tears still fell, but something in the boy's face changed. Hardened. His jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth. His small hands, white-knuckled around his friend's torn shirt, slowly loosened their grip.
"I swear..." The child's voice came out steady. Too steady. Each word deliberate, measured, sharp as broken glass. "Right here and now."
Ten years old. The boy was ten years old.
"I'll kill it! Whatever did this! I'll avenge you... avenge our parents... avenge every single person in Yuelin Village it murdered!" His eyes never left his friend's still face. "I promise you, Goulang."
The dying boy's chest rose once more—a shallow, rattling breath—then nothing.
Meng wiped his tears with mechanical precision, then stood and walked toward the waiting Millelith soldier without prompting. No more sobs. No childish wailing. Just cold, purposeful movement.
Hu Lian watched the boy go, unease coiling in his gut like a living thing. That reaction... that voice... The child couldn't be much older than ten, he realized with a jolt. Those weren't the words of a traumatized ten-year-old. Children that age might scream about revenge in their grief, might make wild promises they'd forget by morning. But that measured tone, that calculated grief—He'd heard that voice before. In adults who'd lost everything and found purpose in their hatred. In people who'd crossed lines they could never uncross.
"Should I—
"Director Hu!" The second Millelith soldier's urgent call shattered his thoughts. "The fetor concentration to the west—it's spiking dangerously!"
"Right!" Hu Lian shook off his misgivings. Whatever was wrong with that boy would have to wait. The living needed him now. "I'm on it!"
Wind gathered around him as he launched toward the new threat, leaving behind the too-composed child and his dead friend. In the chaos of rescue and purification, in the desperate race against death itself, one small boy's unusual grief would slip through the cracks of memory.
Until when it would return to haunt them all.
