The silence in the Plane of Euthymia stretched on, vast and profound. Ren's words, a simple, devastating critique of her entire worldview, hung in the still air between the child and the god. Ei did not speak, but for the first time in centuries, the perfect, serene stillness of her inner world felt… disturbed. A ripple had been introduced into the placid, unchanging waters.
Ren, sensing this subtle shift, knew he had to press on, not with an attack, but with a gentle, compassionate unraveling of the contradictions at the heart of her philosophy.
"You want to protect your people from the pain of loss," he continued, his voice soft and empathetic. "But the eternity you have created… it is not truly for them. It is for you. You are the one who is being shielded."
Ei's amethyst eyes, which had been fixed on some distant, unseen point, now snapped to his, a flicker of something—surprise? anger?—in their depths.
"You have seen so much loss," Ren said, his voice full of a sorrowful understanding that was far beyond his years. "You lost your sister, Makoto. You lost your friends, Kitsune Saiguu, Chiyo, Sasayuri. They are all gone, taken by the erosion of time, by the chaos of the world."
He was walking on the hallowed, sacred ground of her deepest grief, speaking names that had not been uttered in her presence for centuries. But he did so not with the arrogance of a challenger, but with the gentle touch of a healer.
"But are they truly gone?" he asked softly. "Their ambitions, their dreams… do they not live on, right here, inside of you? Isn't that a form of eternity, too?"
He took another small step, closing the distance between them, his small form a beacon of earnest sincerity in her vast, lonely world. "Makoto dreamed of an Inazuma where people could pursue their own happiness. Saiguu dreamed of a haven, a safe place for the people to live and laugh. And you… you have been fighting to fulfill those dreams for five hundred years."
He looked her directly in the eye, and delivered the final, inescapable paradox. "Your fighting, your struggle to maintain this stillness… that is not eternity. Your beliefs are. The very beliefs that drive you were inherited from them. They caused a change within you."
He laid out the simple, devastating truth. "In your pursuit of an unchanging eternity, you yourself have changed more than anyone. You were once the Kagemusha, the warrior in the shadows, the one who executed the will of the Shogun. But now… now you are the Shogun. You have become a god who is desperately trying to fulfill her sister's dream of a peaceful, happy nation. That is the biggest change of all. How do you justify that?"
The question was a perfect, logical trap. Her entire philosophy was built on the premise that change was a threat, yet her very existence as the ruler of Inazuma was the result of the greatest, most painful change in her entire, immortal life.
Ei's perfect, serene composure finally, visibly, cracked. A look of profound, ancient pain, of a grief that had been suppressed for half a millennium, surfaced in her eyes.
"How…" she whispered, her voice a fragile, trembling sound, the voice of Ei, not the Raiden Shogun. "How could you possibly know these things?"
Ren had prepared for this. He had to give her a reason, a plausible explanation for his impossible knowledge, a white lie to cover the incomprehensible truth.
"Before he… passed," Ren said, his voice full of a feigned, respectful sorrow, "I was fortunate enough to speak with the Geo Archon, Rex Lapis. He spoke of the old days, of the original Seven. And I have spent much time in the company of the Liyue adepti. They are old, and they remember many things. They told me stories. Stories of a brave, beautiful goddess of thunder, and the shadow warrior who loved her and her people more than anything."
The lie was a masterpiece of plausibility. It rooted his knowledge in the shared, ancient history of the gods, making it seem not like an impossible insight, but like a secret passed from one old friend to another. It framed his knowledge not as an accusation, but as a story of her own forgotten heroism.
He had not just pointed out the flaw in her logic. He had reminded her of who she was, of the love and the loyalty that had driven her to this lonely, self-imposed prison in the first place. He was not just a critic; he was a mirror, reflecting a truth about herself that she had long since buried under a mountain of unchanging, eternal law.