The training yard behind the Voss estate was eight feet by twelve, which was large enough for footwork drills and not much else, and it smelled of sawdust and old sweat and the particular metallic undertone of wooden practice swords that had been used hard enough to split and been repaired with cheap adhesive that never quite held. Ethan had spent a significant portion of his ninth year in it, which had produced calluses he was still getting used to and an assessment of his own physical capabilities that he found deeply humbling.
He had expected to be good at this. He had no rational basis for that expectation — he had been a software project manager in his previous life, not a swordsman, and his primary physical activity had been the walk to the convenience store at two in the morning — but somewhere in the gap between knowing how combat worked in theory and actually attempting it, he had assumed that foreknowledge would translate to competence. It did not. His body was nine years old and had opinions about what it was and was not prepared to do, and those opinions were frequently at odds with what his tactical understanding told him should be possible.
"Again," said Ser Aldous.
Ser Aldous was seventy-one years old, retired from the Knights of Favonius after four decades of service, and moved like a man who had made peace with his body's limitations by learning to work around them with a precision that made the limitations largely irrelevant. He was short, weathered, and had exactly one expression for every situation, which was the expression of a man quietly calculating how many errors you had made and which one to address first. He had been hired by Ethan's mother three months ago, after Ethan had spent two months asking increasingly specific questions about Knights of Favonius combat doctrine at the dinner table.
Ethan raised the practice sword again. His shoulder ached. It had been aching since the second session of the morning and he had been ignoring it, which Ser Aldous had noticed and not addressed, which meant it was either not serious enough to comment on or serious enough that Aldous was waiting to see whether he would stop himself. He did not stop himself. He ran the drill again — the transition sequence, high guard to low, inside deflection to countercut — and felt his elbow do the thing it did wrong and knew it was doing the thing wrong and could not, despite knowing, make it stop doing the thing wrong.
"Stop," Aldous said.
Ethan stopped. The old Knight walked in a slow circle around him, hands clasped behind his back, examining him from angles that Ethan found faintly unsettling because he could not always tell what was being examined.
"Your footwork is correct," Aldous said finally. "Your read of the transition is correct. Your weight distribution coming out of the deflection is correct."
Ethan waited.
"Your body doesn't believe it yet," Aldous said. "You know the sequence. You do not yet trust the sequence. There is a difference. The first is reading a map. The second is walking the road."
Ethan lowered the practice sword and considered this. It was the most precisely accurate description of his problem that anyone had given him, and it had come from a seventy-one-year-old man who knew nothing about reincarnation and was simply paying attention. He filed it under 'things that are true and which I cannot shortcut my way around.'
"How long?" he asked.
"Months, for most students. Longer for those who lead with their head." A pause that was not quite a pause. "You lead very heavily with your head."
"Is that a problem?"
Aldous looked at him with the calculating expression. "It is neither a problem nor an advantage. It is a characteristic. In twenty years, a man who leads with his head and has trained the body to follow becomes one kind of fighter. A man who leads with the body and has trained the head to follow becomes another. Both are dangerous. The question is which kind you intend to be."
Ethan thought about this for the rest of the morning's session, which was long enough for his shoulder to stop aching and start a different, more interesting variety of pain in a different location entirely. He thought about the fighters he knew — not from his old life, but from Teyvat. Diluc, whose style was power and fury channelled into disciplined form. Eula, whose technique was precision carrying grief underneath it like ballast. He thought about what his own style would eventually need to look like: not heroic, not showy, not the kind that attracted the wrong attention. Tactical and efficient, the kind that solved problems and left the room before anyone started asking how.
He was not a prodigy. He had understood this by the second week, and it had required active management of his own expectations. He was good — better than average for a nine-year-old, Aldous had said in the careful way of a teacher who did not want to produce arrogance — but not exceptional. His body did not carry the kind of latent talent that produced prodigies. What he had instead was strategic clarity and a near-unlimited tolerance for repetitive drilling, which were useful traits and not glamorous ones, and which would eventually produce competence without ever quite producing the effortless brilliance he had half-imagined for himself in weaker moments.
He was fine with this. He had time. He had a plan. And he had, as of three weeks ago, something he had not anticipated having: a friend.
✶ ✶ ✶
Milo had appeared in the way that Mondstadt street children tended to appear: at the edge of something he wasn't supposed to be at the edge of, with the expression of someone who had learned to look as if he belonged wherever he happened to be standing. He was approximately Ethan's age, though he was vague about this in the way of children who had not always had someone reliable to keep track of birthdays for them. He was thin in the specific way of children who ate opportunistically rather than regularly, and he moved with the coiled, watchful economy of someone who had spent a significant portion of their short life determining whether any given space was safe before committing to it.
Ethan had been sitting on the wall of the eastern market district — one of his regular routes, which he had been developing over the past two years as a pretext to expand his Echo Sight mapping beyond the Voss estate — when Milo had dropped down beside him from the section of wall that theoretically required a ladder to access, settled himself with the ease of someone who had been jumping walls since before he could read, and said: "You're the kid who asks strange questions."
Ethan had looked at him. "People say that about me?"
"The baker on Steinweg says you asked him last month how much he'd need to earn to hire a second baker and whether he'd consider trading flour with the miller on the east road instead of buying from the Liyue merchants." Milo had considered this for a moment. "He didn't know either answer. He said it bothered him for a week."
"Those are reasonable questions," Ethan said.
"Sure," Milo had agreed, with the easy agreement of someone who was not actually agreeing. "For someone who's forty." He had looked out at the market. "I know where everything is. In the market. Who sells what, which stalls are moving product, which ones are fronts for something else. I've been watching it for two years."
Ethan had understood immediately what was being offered, which was an exchange: Milo's street-level intelligence for something Ethan had that was useful to Milo. He had spent a few seconds calculating what that thing was, and had landed on the obvious answer.
"I can read," Ethan had said. "Well. And I know things about how the noble families operate. And I can get food from my household without anyone noticing."
Milo had looked at him with the assessing expression of someone calculating the terms of an arrangement. "Deal," he'd said, and dropped off the wall into the alley below, and had reappeared the following afternoon as if he had been doing it for years.
Three weeks in, Ethan could confirm that Milo was exactly what he appeared to be: sharp, resourceful, constitutionally incapable of going anywhere directly when an indirect route was available, and entirely comfortable with the ethics of information brokering in a way that suggested he had developed his moral framework under conditions where pragmatism was a survival skill rather than a character flaw. He was also, against every one of Ethan's careful projections about his own emotional availability, genuinely good company. The kind that didn't require anything from you except presence, which was the kind Ethan had always found easiest.
He had not planned on having a friend. He had planned on having contacts, resources, allies of various utility. He had not factored in the possibility of someone he genuinely wanted to talk to, and he was still in the early stages of deciding how to manage this, when Milo arrived at the wall in the third week with a problem that required managing first.
✶ ✶ ✶
"They're saying I stole it," Milo said. He had arrived at speed and had not sat down, which was unusual. He sat down on everything — walls, posts, the edge of the fountain in the lower square — as a matter of personal principle. Standing still meant he was worried. "The goldsmith on Brauer Street. He says a ring went missing yesterday afternoon and I was there and so it was me."
"Did you?" Ethan asked. Not because he thought the answer was yes, but because establishing it clearly seemed like a useful first step.
Milo gave him a look that contained a complete essay on the subject of how offensive that question was. "I was looking at it. There's a difference."
"A meaningful difference in your experience, or a technical one?"
"Both," Milo said, with a flash of something that was almost offended dignity. "I don't steal from small-shop people. It's not worth the complication and they can't afford it. I was looking at it because it had an unusual setting and I thought I might know someone who'd want it. That's allowed."
"Who else was there?"
"The goldsmith's apprentice. A woman in a green coat I didn't recognise. A man who came in after me and left before me. Maybe someone else; the shop was narrow and I wasn't paying attention to the door."
Ethan thought about this. "What kind of ring?"
"Silver. Old-fashioned setting. The kind of thing a lower noble family holds onto for three generations and then sells when things get difficult. It had a small blue stone and a maker's mark I didn't recognise." He paused. "It was on a velvet tray. Not behind glass. Anyone could have reached it."
"Has he reported it to the Knights?"
"Not yet. He's telling everyone in the market first." Milo's voice was flat in the specific way of someone managing the particular humiliation of being publicly accused. "My reputation in this district is basically all I have. If people think I steal from shops —"
"I need to go to the shop," Ethan said.
Milo looked at him. "And do what? You're nine."
"I know," Ethan said. "Come on."
✶ ✶ ✶
The goldsmith's shop on Brauer Street was narrow and close, the way of shops that had been in the same building for generations and had gradually accumulated more merchandise than floorspace without anyone ever quite reconciling the two. It smelled of metal polish and old wood, and the counter was a slab of dark oak that had been in direct contact with a great many transactions for a great many years, and Ethan could feel the pressure of it from six feet away.
The goldsmith himself was a broad, tired-looking man named Fenner who had been in the trade for thirty years and had the permanent squint of someone who spent most of his working hours examining things at close range. He looked at Ethan with the expression of a man who was not immediately sure what a nine-year-old of obvious noble bearing wanted in his shop, but was prepared to be professionally pleasant about it until he figured out.
"I'm looking for a gift for my mother," Ethan said, which was his pretext and also true enough that it sat comfortably in his mouth. "A ring, if you have something appropriate. She prefers older settings."
Fenner began to move toward the display case, and Ethan moved with him, angling himself toward the counter rather than the case — toward the velvet tray that Milo had described, now conspicuously missing its ring but still sitting in its place on the dark oak surface. He let his hand rest on the counter's edge, fingers spread, and reached.
The grey came fast and dense — thirty years of commerce compressed into available wood, and Ethan had to sort through it quickly, filtering for the most recent layer the way you skip to the end of a document you mostly know. Yesterday afternoon resolved in fragments: Milo, examining the ring with the assessing expression of someone pricing it. The woman in green, studying earrings, her back to the velvet tray. The man who came in after —
There. The man who came in after Milo. Middle-aged, unremarkable coat, the kind of person whose appearance was specifically designed not to be memorable — Ethan had learned to notice people who worked to be forgettable, because the effort was itself a signal. He moved to the counter in the grey. He looked at the earrings Fenner had out for the woman. He picked up the ring from the velvet tray with the casual ease of someone who had done this many times in many shops, and put it in his coat pocket, and left.
Ethan catalogued the details — the coat, the build, the direction of the exit — and then the grey went sideways on him.
It happened sometimes, when the surface he was touching was very old and had absorbed a great deal: a deeper layer bleeding through before he could close the connection. He had been at the counter for too long, reaching too intently, and the wood had more to say than yesterday's theft. An older memory surfaced through the grey — much older, the quality of it different, sharper in some ways and blurred in others, the way of things well-preserved but from a long time ago.
A woman. Pale, in a way that went beyond colouring into something colder — the white of snow rather than skin. She stood at the counter and she was buying something, nothing remarkable about the transaction, and she turned her head to look toward the door and her face caught the light and Ethan saw it clearly for exactly one second before the echo dissolved.
He knew that face. He had spent three years looking at art made by Genshin's character designers and four thousand hours encountering their work in motion. He knew it the way he knew all of them — not as a person he had met, but as a presence he had prepared for, whose history and power and eventual fate he carried in his memory like a loaded document he had not yet been asked to open.
Signora. La Signora, the Crimson Witch of Flames. A Harbinger. Standing at a goldsmith's counter in Mondstadt's lower district at some point in the past decade, buying something small and ordinary, as if she were anyone.
The grey dropped away entirely. The shop came back — the smell of metal polish, Fenner's professionally attentive face — and Ethan became aware that his nose was bleeding.
Not badly. A slow seep rather than a flow, the kind his body had been using to register objection to overextension for the past three years. But badly enough that Fenner's expression shifted from professional to concerned, and Ethan had to perform a small, unremarkable drama of 'children have nosebleeds, it is not alarming' while also keeping his hand flat on the counter and his expression at the level of mild inconvenienced rather than 'I have just seen a Fatui Harbinger in your shop's memory and I need a moment to consider the implications.'
Fenner produced a cloth. Ethan accepted it with appropriate gratitude. He described the thief in the unremarkable coat with the precision of someone who had seen him clearly, framing it as 'I was looking toward the door when I came in and I think I saw —' and let Fenner's memory do the rest of the work, which it did, the goldsmith's expression moving through recognition into the particular dismay of a man realising he had been watching the wrong person.
He left without buying anything — his mother not requiring a ring today, he had remembered — and found Milo waiting in the alley beside the shop, sitting on a crate with the studied casualness of someone pretending they had not been listening through the wall.
"You're bleeding," Milo said.
"It happens," Ethan said. "When I look too hard. Fenner knows it wasn't you. He knows roughly who it was. You should probably let it settle for a day and then let word get around naturally that he's looking for someone else."
Milo was quiet for a moment. "The strange questions make more sense now."
"I'll explain it properly someday."
"You don't have to." Milo said it the way he said most things — without apparent weight, which was how Ethan had learned he said the things that mattered most. "You cleared it. That's what counts."
They sat in the alley for a while, not saying much. The nosebleed stopped. The exhaustion that always followed heavy Echo Sight use settled over Ethan like a second coat — not painful, just heavy, the feeling of a machine running on reduced capacity. He would need to sleep early tonight. He always did, after this.
He thought about the woman in the grey. The pale face. The shop in the lower district, years ago, buying something small and ordinary. Signora, here in Mondstadt, moving through the city unremarked because that was what the Fatui did — they moved through places before anyone thought to look for them, laying groundwork, building presence, threading themselves into the fabric of things before they pulled. He had known this, in the abstract, from years of lore. Seeing it in a goldsmith's counter made it concrete in a way that was different from knowing.
He added it to his notes that evening. Not as a crisis — Signora's presence in Mondstadt in the past was expected, was part of the known history, did not require immediate action. But as a data point. Proof that the Fatui were real in the way that only things you could touch were real, and that the walls of this city had been holding their presence for years, and that his ability to read those walls was going to matter more than he had fully appreciated until now.
He wrote: Cost today: nosebleed, four hours' exhaustion, one insight I did not look for. The ability does not always show you what you want. Sometimes it shows you what you need. I am still deciding how to feel about that.
He slept for ten hours and woke up to Milo throwing pebbles at his window from the street below, which was technically not allowed but which Ethan had quietly stopped discouraging two weeks ago, because some things were worth the complication.