"You hit me? You actually dared to hit me?" Zhongyue clutched her head and stared at Lora in shock.
Even Apep's eyes widened from the side, let alone Paimon and Nahida.
The older dragon instinctively edged away from Lora.
Lora planted her hands on her hips. "Who else would I hit if not you? If you hadn't said that, would Apep have chased you down? Look at the mess around us. If you don't fix Sumeru's land properly, I'll tell Zhongli to hand you over as collateral until the debt is paid."
"Hey, hey, hey! You're going to use me as collateral over a few patches of land? What kind of heartless monster are you?" Zhongyue protested.
"Then hurry up and get to work!"
The little dragon pouted, muttering things like "cruel" under her breath as she started repairing the ground that she and Apep had destroyed. Partway through, however, she realized something was wrong.
"Why am I the only one working? What about her?" Zhongyue pointed at Apep and demanded.
Seeing that finger turn toward her, Apep quietly shifted one step to the side.
Lora looked at her. "You too. Together."
"Why should I—"
"Get to work! I'm the one who brought you out here, so you have to listen to me!"
Apep: "..."
And so, the two dragons repaired the land they had just ruined together.
Zhongyue walked over to Apep and whispered, "Hey, Dendro Dragon, how about we team up and mess with her?"
"I... may not be a match for her." Apep glanced back at Lora, then whispered back.
Zhongyue clicked her tongue and shook her head. "Wrong way to think about it. Who said we have to fight her? In Liyue, there's a saying: the best battles are won with strategy. With our brains, can't we come up with some way to get back at her?"
"My intelligence goes without saying. As for yours..." Apep looked her up and down. "That is hard to say."
Zhongyue: "..."
Just then, Lora quietly leaned in behind them and said, "So you're discussing how to get back at me?"
"Holy crap!" Zhongyue yelped and shot several meters forward, then turned back to stare at her in shock. "How did you suddenly get behind me? Why don't you make any sound when you walk?"
"You were feeling guilty and scared all by yourself, weren't you?"
Lora smiled at her. "Just a reminder. The one standing in front of you right now is the best-informed person in Teyvat. If there's something I want to know, you can't hide it from me. So yes, I heard everything you just said."
Zhongyue looked a little awkward. "Nonsense! I was just talking nonsense. Don't take it seriously!"
"It's fine. I'll just go to your shop in Fontaine later and walk off with eighty or a hundred boxes of tanghulu." Lora waved a hand, looking as though she had not taken those words to heart at all.
Zhongyue's mouth twitched. "Eighty or a hundred boxes? Do you know how much that is? My entire Fontaine shop doesn't even have that much in stock!"
"Then there's no helping it. You'll just have to make them like your life depends on it." Lora's expression was extremely kind.
After saying that, she walked back toward Sophia.
Watching Lora chat and laugh with the newly returned god, Apep patted Zhongyue on the shoulder and said, "Ah... young dragons have no depth at all. Unlike me, she has never once caught me with anything she could use against me."
Zhongyue shrugged off her claw and said, "That's only because Lora hasn't started messing with you yet. Once she does, you'll understand how dangerous she is. The adepti in Liyue already have post-Lantern-Rite trauma."
"But this time, I am going to Lantern Rite to help her set someone else up," Apep said. "No, more precisely, I am going to help her set up a dragon."
Zhongyue fell silent.
She looked at Lora, who was still smiling and talking with Sophia, and suddenly shuddered.
If she had not run into Apep here and mentally prepared herself first, then meeting her at Lantern Rite might really have scared her half to death.
So evil.
Way too evil!
Was this the God of Justice?
Once the land had been flattened and repaired, everyone set off for Liyue.
Surprisingly, the chattiest people along the way were not Paimon, but Sophia and Lora.
Watching the two talk as if they had endless things to say, Paimon quietly said to Lumine, "Lumine, I noticed Lora and Sophia seem like they could talk forever. Were they always this close?"
"Did you forget who they are?" Lumine said. "One is Hydro, and the other is Dendro. How could they not get along?"
Paimon suddenly understood. "Oh! Right!"
"Idiot," Zhongyue said, looking down on her.
"You fat dragon, what did you just say?" Paimon turned to her and shouted angrily.
Zhongyue clicked her tongue. "I wonder who ate more than half of the tanghulu I was carrying. I thought someone had stolen it."
"That's because you made it too tasty!" Paimon muttered.
Zhongyue's expression turned wonderfully complicated. "So now it's my fault that it tastes good?"
On the way from Sumeru City to Liyue, the group passed through Avidya Forest. Tighnari had already been pressed into service by the Akademiya, and Faruzan had not even spared Collei. The idea was simple: grab anyone who could be grabbed and put them all to work.
Humans worked while gods slacked off.
Everyone had a bright future!
Wonderful!
The group arrived at The Chasm. With Lantern Rite approaching, the miners there had all stopped work and gone home for the holiday.
At that moment, Zhongyue looked at the enormous mining site, her expression still carrying a trace of pain.
"These are all my rocks!" she shouted. "Damn those Liyue people! What do they even need so many rocks for?"
"You curse them so fiercely, but back when you were suffering from erosion, you only got angry after they had nearly hollowed out the bottom of The Chasm. You really do love the people of Liyue to death," Lora teased from behind her.
"What else can I do? They're my own people." Zhongyue spread her hands.
Sophia stood beside Lora and looked toward another part of The Chasm. She frowned and said, "Lora, there's someone over there."
Hearing that, Lora followed her gaze but saw no one.
Then Sophia continued, "She ran. Very quickly. I heard the voices of the plants. She seems to be a Liyue adeptus."
"A Liyue adeptus?" Lora frowned.
An adeptus lurking here?
And running the moment she saw them...
It could not be Xianyun, could it?
Xiao would not do something like that. He would usually just stand there and wait for death.
"Male or female?" Lora asked.
"Female," Sophia replied.
Fine.
Then it was probably Xianyun.