The joy the people felt from their victorious rebellion faded faster than any of them had expected.
The tyrant had left the royal city.
They had gained the freedom they had wanted.
Now what?
Staring at the empty throne, most of the people of Mondstadt fell into a daze.
Now that they had freedom, what were they supposed to do with it?
The answer, it turned out, was that they did not know.
Because before, when the tyrant was still there, he had arranged everything for them. As long as they followed his guidance, their lives ran in orderly fashion. Food. Shelter. Warmth. All of it simply provided.
Now that the ruler was gone, shouldn't they be celebrating?
Among those who had joined the protests against Decarabian, there had always been people who had simply been swept along by the slogans, law-abiding in their daily lives, roused by talk of freedom without any real picture of what freedom meant in practice.
Those people now felt the full weight of that emptiness.
Finally, one of them asked quietly: "Will His Majesty... come back?"
[Ding. Timeline alteration: 6%]
"What did you just say? Are you asking for that tyrant to return and oppress us again?"
The leaders at the front rounded on him immediately.
The man shut his mouth and did not speak again.
Sensing the pressure bearing down on the crowd, someone stepped forward and called out loudly, trying to lift the mood.
"What's wrong with everyone? Cheer up! We rose up against a god and won our freedom! Think about what that means!"
"Before, we were trapped inside these walls. We couldn't see the sky. We couldn't see birds. Now the wind barrier is gone. The outside world is right there. Let us go and embrace it! Let us go and—ah. Atchoo!"
He sneezed.
He was about to continue.
But he noticed that the faces looking at him had, somewhere in the last few seconds, gone from anxious to genuinely frightened.
He felt something cold touch the top of his head.
He reached up and found a snowflake the size of his palm sitting in his hair.
He stared at it.
"Oh. This is... snow?"
---
"The wind and snow outside. They're coming in."
"What do we do?"
"It's getting colder. I can feel it getting colder."
The wind and snow pushing through the unprotected city sent the people into immediate panic. They had lived in warmth and comfort for so long that they had forgotten, in a very practical sense, how cold actually felt.
Cries and wailing broke out across the square.
The leaders pushed forward, trying to restore order.
"Everyone, stay calm! There is nothing to be afraid of!"
"The cold outside was never as bad as the tyrant told us. It was always exaggerated to keep us frightened and obedient."
One of them tried to sound confident: "Our ancestors survived in those conditions before the royal city existed. We carry that same blood. Poet, back me up on this."
The youth with the harp looked at the crowd, his expression troubled.
[Ding. Timeline alteration: 15%]
He said nothing. He simply plucked the strings and played something soft and warm, trying to soothe the fear spreading through the people around him.
Slap. Thud.
Before he finished the first verse, someone knocked the harp out of his hands and onto the ground.
"Play? Now? What is there to play about right now?"
Another person shoved forward and pointed a finger at him.
"This is your fault. If you hadn't filled everyone's heads with songs about birds and sky and open horizons, none of us would have lost our minds and gone along with this."
"That's right. Before, even with the tyrant above us, at least we had food and warmth. Now that he's gone, who's going to feed us?"
"He's just frightening us. His Majesty is probably going to come back." Someone tried to comfort themselves by saying it out loud.
"Yes, yes, the walls are still standing even without the barrier. They'll block most of it. Let's all go inside and wait."
At that point, no one was talking about freedom anymore. No one was talking about embracing the outside world.
These people, who had spent their entire lives sheltered within the royal city, had shouted slogans and pushed and demanded until they got what they said they wanted. Now that the cold reality was touching their skin, they turned and ran from it.
We are not like our ancestors. We have the royal city walls. The wind and snow can't really hurt us, right?
That particular optimism did not survive half a day.
The wind and snow had already pushed into every corner of the city. And then came the discovery that made the panic complete: the bricks and tiles of their houses, which had been woven from Decarabian's dreams, were crumbling.
Slowly, piece by piece, the walls that had kept the cold out were developing holes.
"No. No, stop. Don't go."
A woman pressed her hands against the crumbling bricks, clutching at them as though she could hold them together through sheer desperation.
She had completely forgotten that she was the same person who had once said, with great satisfaction, that the very thought of living inside a king's dreams disgusted her.
The brick crumbled anyway, leaving another gap for the wind to push through.
The woman sat down on the floor among the debris and wept.
[Ding. Timeline alteration: 16%]
---
By the next day, things had not stabilized. They had gotten worse.
Beyond the cold, hunger had become urgent.
Mondstadt sat on frozen land unsuitable for farming. Every morning, the solitary king had stood atop his tower and distributed food to his subjects, produced through his divine power. In his understanding, the people kneeling below him were expressing their love and gratitude. He had never realized they simply could not stand upright against the winds that surrounded him.
The people of Mondstadt had once called this humiliating. A slave owner feeding his slaves.
Now, with empty stomachs, they stood in the square and stared up at the empty throne, hoping with everything they had that the king would appear on it and give them something to eat.
[Ding. Timeline alteration: 18%]
He did not appear.
It was only at this point, hollow with hunger and cold, that these people began to understand something they should have understood long before.
The peaceful life they had assumed was simply the natural state of things had not come from nowhere. It had been built and maintained by the solitary king's power. The food. The warmth. The walls that kept the blizzard at bay. All of it had been him.
But understanding came too late to change anything.
[Ding. Timeline alteration: 20%]
---
On the third day, people began to die.
The man who had vowed to overthrow tyranny and step into a free world froze to death in his own home, surrounded by the wind and snow he had once claimed to be longing for. Whether the expression on his face in the end was one of understanding or regret, no one could say.
The young man who had cursed under his breath every time he accepted the food the solitary king provided was found frozen solid, his body positioned as though he had been kneeling toward the throne, as if begging for one more meal.
The rebellion leader who had stood before crowds and declared that the wind and snow outside were nothing but a tyrant's exaggeration lay under every blanket she owned, her lips purple, her eyes empty, waiting for an end she could no longer prevent.
[Ding. Timeline alteration: 63%]
---
The royal city, once peaceful and ordered, was buried under ice and snow.
These people had been raised in a greenhouse their entire lives and had lost the capacity to survive outside it. They had forgotten, or perhaps never truly known, that they did not live in a peaceful world by default. They had simply been fortunate enough to be sheltered by a powerful god who loved humanity, and that shelter had allowed them to live as though the world outside did not exist.
The easier something is to obtain, the less it is valued. The less it is valued, the less it is understood. And the less it is understood, the more readily it is thrown away.
They had thrown it away for the sake of a freedom they had not known how to use.
In the square, the young poet sat on a drift of snow, lifting hands that had gone numb and stiff and pressing them against the strings of his harp.
No sound came. The strings were frozen solid.
He sat there with sorrow and regret moving across his face in slow waves.
If I had not taken my shallow understanding of freedom and woven it into songs and spread it to everyone around me, they would not have ended up here.
His Majesty was not imprisoning us. He was protecting us in the only way he knew how.
Why did I not understand that until now?
He attempted one final, silent movement of his fingers across the strings.
Then the snow covered him, and his harp, and he was gone.
[Ding. Timeline alteration: 83%]
---
Out on the frozen wasteland, the Gunnhildr clan's march had slowed to almost nothing.
The faces that had once been lit with resolve were now blank. Their eyes had gone empty somewhere along the way, after too many days of watching people they loved disappear into the snow one by one.
There had been no time for proper farewells. No time for mourning. Only the necessity of moving forward, and then, eventually, the inability to do even that.
Those still standing were the strongest the clan had. And even they were reaching their limit.
There was no oasis out here. There was no warm land just beyond the next ridge. There was only the merciless wind and the unbroken cold and the growing knowledge that they had been wrong about what lay outside those walls.
Gunnhildr thought, with a grief that had no edge to it: Perhaps I was the one who was wrong. Perhaps His Majesty was right.
His daughter lifted her face to the wind and spoke through her tears: "Father, I've prayed five times now. I can feel the spirits of the thousand winds responding to me every time. They seem full of compassion for us. But why won't they appear?"
Gunnhildr felt the wind around them shift and sighed: "Perhaps they are afraid of something too."
In the end, no aid came.
The Gunnhildr clan was buried in the snow of the frozen wasteland.
[Ding. Timeline alteration: 100%]
---
Ji An exhaled sharply. "System. The timeline alteration has hit one hundred percent. You said this wouldn't affect the future."
He was fairly certain Grand Master Jean was descended from the Gunnhildr clan. If the clan had just been wiped out entirely, along with the entire population of the royal city, the future of Mondstadt as he knew it would cease to exist.
[The host need not worry. As the system has explained, time has a natural tendency to self-correct. As long as the host has not made extreme choices, the influence remains within manageable limits. The system will issue warnings at critical moments.]
Ji An stared: "Total annihilation isn't extreme? And where exactly was the warning?"
[The host may have misunderstood the system's earlier statement.]
Ji An: "Enlighten me."
[Time is genuinely very difficult to alter in any permanent sense. Even when the timeline deviates significantly, certain forces push it back toward the major direction of events. The alteration percentage has an effective ceiling. What the system referred to by extreme choices and critical warnings was a reference to the host's emotional state. The intention was simply to remind the host not to become too immersed and distress themselves unnecessarily.]
Ji An: "So your warning system is for my mental health, not for the fate of an entire civilization."
[Essentially, yes.]
"Fine," Ji An said flatly. "Let's see how time corrects itself then."
Even as he said it, the alteration value that had climbed to one hundred percent began dropping.
[Timeline alteration: 90%]
[Timeline alteration: 70%]
[Timeline alteration: 50%]
The images Ji An was viewing began to move in reverse, flashing backward like a lantern spinning the wrong direction, all the way back to the second day after the wind and snow had entered the royal city.
By that point in the original sequence of events, the people of Mondstadt were already in desperate condition, dying of cold and hunger.
No one had noticed the figure that appeared on the throne atop the high tower.
Decarabian.
He had come back.
Ji An let out a long breath. He was surprised, and yet not surprised.
The reason was not difficult to put into words.
A god who loves humanity.
Even after discovering that his subjects had never truly loved him. Even after understanding that everything he had done for them had been met with resentment and misunderstanding rather than the gratitude he had imagined.
He was like a strict but ultimately forgiving parent.
He was giving them another chance.
The fierce winds around Decarabian poured off the high tower and divided into countless threads, each one finding its way to a different citizen of the royal city, listening and observing, learning what was in each person's heart.
The king had never understood the human heart through words or observation. But he could hear their truest voices, if he chose to listen.
To those who had genuinely loved him from the beginning, the winds turned gentle, wrapping around them and bringing warmth and relief from hunger.
To those who had misunderstood him before but now understood, the winds softened and settled against them, drawing away the cold and the pain.
To those who had neither loved nor hated him, had simply been caught up in events larger than themselves, the winds eased their sharpness and pulled these people back from the edge of death.
To those who still resented him even now, still found complaints on their lips as they lay dying in the cold...
The winds gave them a small, firm push.
[Timeline alteration: 40%]
---
Out on the frozen wasteland, something changed.
Gunnhildr's daughter straightened suddenly: "Father! The spirits of the thousand winds are answering!"
This time, they did not hold back. They appeared and extended a portion of their protective power to the clan trapped in the blizzard, creating a small but real shelter around them.
Gunnhildr felt the relief settle over his people and bowed his head in gratitude.
He and his clan would survive.
And in surviving, they began to understand what the king's protection had truly meant.
[Timeline alteration: 30%]
---
Inside the royal city, Decarabian was restoring it, piece by piece, pouring his divine power back into the bricks and tiles that had crumbled when he withdrew.
The people he had saved wept with relief.
The king had returned. He had not abandoned them after all.
After everything, after seeing what the alternative truly looked like, not a single person in that square was thinking of Decarabian as a tyrant.
Then, at the edge of the city, the gates drew the attention of those nearest to them.
A barefoot huntress was walking toward the entrance from outside.
Behind her, in the vast snowstorm, a pair of massive dark blue eyes moved in the dark.
Amos looked up at the towering figure standing once again on the high tower. Her face held admiration and fury in equal measure, tangled together in a way she no longer had the energy to separate.
"Lord Andrius," she said, her voice steady. "This is the moment of the tyrant's weakness."
-------
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