The two elemental spheres in Lan's hands winked out of existence as she, with a visible, profound reluctance, allowed Xianyun to carefully remove the gauntlets. She stared at her own, ordinary hands, then at the two miraculous devices now resting on the table, a look of deep, wistful longing in her eyes. She had touched the sky, and now she was once again bound to the earth.
After a moment of respectful silence, Ningguang dismissed her with a single, sharp nod and a quiet, loaded instruction. "Lan, what you have seen today is a state secret of the highest possible order. Your silence is not a request; it is a contract with the Liyue Qixing. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Lady Ningguang," Lan replied, her voice full of a new, solemn reverence. "Implicitly." She gave a final, awestruck glance at Ren before bowing and taking her leave, a woman who had entered the Jade Chamber as a simple adventurer and left as the first witness to a new age.
With her departure, the profound, almost spiritual awe in the room was replaced by a heavy, pragmatic tension. The question was no longer 'is it possible?'; the question was 'what do we do now?'.
"This technology," Keqing began, her voice a low, intense murmur as she stared at the gauntlets, "it changes everything. The Fatui's Delusions… they are now a crude, barbaric relic. This is superior in every conceivable way."
"The military applications alone are… staggering," Xianyun added, her mind already running through the tactical possibilities. "An army of mortals, each capable of wielding an element, without the prerequisite of a Vision… it would be an unstoppable force."
"But should it be a military technology?" Ganyu interjected, her gentle heart grappling with the immense, terrifying potential of her brother's creation. "Ren created it as a safe alternative, to help people, not to create new armies."
The debate had begun. How was this world-shattering power to be used? How should it be distributed?
"If we make it public," Keqing argued, her pragmatic mind seeing the dangers, "we cannot control it. The blueprints would be stolen. Every nation, every band of Treasure Hoarders, would be trying to replicate it. It would lead to an age of unprecedented chaos and warfare."
"But to keep it a secret, to hoard it for ourselves?" Ningguang countered, her amber eyes gleaming with a complex, strategic light. "That is also a choice. A choice to make Liyue the sole, undisputed power in all of Teyvat. The responsibilities, and the dangers, of being such a power are… immense."
They talked of contracts, of patents, of exclusive manufacturing rights, of the potential for licensing the technology to allied nations. The room was filled with the heavy, complex language of power and control.
Through it all, Ren remained completely, pointedly silent. He sat in his small chair, listening, his face a mask of quiet, unreadable contemplation. His part was done. He had created the tool. It was up to the leaders of this world to decide how to wield it.
His own thoughts, however, were a turbulent, chaotic sea. He was thinking of the future he knew was coming. He was thinking of Inazuma.
The Vision Hunt Decree.
He thought of the Raiden Shogun, the Electro Archon, in her quest for an unchanging, eternal state, seizing the Visions of her people, believing that the ambitions that earned them were a threat to her eternity. He thought of the desperate, powerless people whose dreams and life's ambitions had been stripped away along with their Visions.
And now, he had created this. A technology that could, in an instant, render the entire Vision Hunt Decree meaningless. A way for the people of Inazuma to reclaim a form of the power that had been stolen from them, a power that was not a gift from a god, but a product of mortal ingenuity.
The thought was a dangerous, revolutionary spark. To introduce this technology to Inazuma would be a direct, open challenge to the authority of an Archon. It would be an act of rebellion, an act that could plunge the already-isolated nation into a full-blown war.
But to withhold it… to know he had a way to help those suffering people and to do nothing… that felt like a different kind of betrayal.
He looked at the powerful, brilliant women arguing around him, debating the fate of his invention in terms of Liyue's security and prosperity. They were thinking like rulers, like guardians of their own nation. But Ren, the outlander, the boy who had seen other worlds and other stories, was thinking bigger.
He was beginning to realize that the tool he had created was not just a weapon against the Fatui. It was a question, a profound, world-altering question posed to the very gods themselves.