Chapter Text
Just how many times had you died already?
The first time you arrived in Teyvat, you were confused and scared. Completely alone, with no tools for survival, you appeared in a quiet corner in Mondstadt. You could not, for the life of you, understand how you could you fall asleep one second and wake up in a camp of hilichurls the next. Also, even though you did play Genshin Impact, you suppose no one could blame you for not being able to recognize what are supposed to be fictional monsters from a game with cartoonish graphics in real life. Especially when, again, you were supposed to wake up from your own bed as you had taken a small(read: multiple hour) nap after an exhausting day. You had even managed to injure your leg while fleeing from those furry, masked humanoids. Surprisingly to you, all they did was fuss over you and bring you to their camp to recuperate. After an hour or two of confusion and apprehension of your new situation, you had surmised that you are in the world you recognise from Genshin Impact, and decided to take a moment to familiarise yourself with what would now be your real-life surroundings.
Not much happened during those first few months of your stay in this new world. Almost every day was sunny with a light, pleasant breeze. Everywhere you went you found ripe fruits to eat and those hilichurls would bring their rather questionable tasting stew. Not that you minded, you'd rather eat whatever was prepared for you than have to hunt and prepare food for yourself. You hadn't really met any humans, only conversed with hilichurls, who could not talk your language back to you, but you were fine with that. You still weren't quite sure on how to explain yourself to the common folk, not were you very keen on committing any unaware social faux pas because you were technically not a local in any corner of this world. You were somewhat convinced the first time you'd converse with a person they would turn out to be a some sort of deity and turn you to stone for disrespecting some sacred code or something like that.
Turns out you didn't have to worry about committing some faux pas by talking to someone and saying the wrong thing. Apparently, having the face that you were born with was a faux pas in of itself. You had already seen some shrines in the wilderness depicting a deity you were not familiar with from the game, but who happened to look quite like yourself. Enough so, that the first time you saw their painting you wondered who had managed to spot you and stay still long enough to paint you in the wilderness without alerting you or your posse of creatures of 'minimal intelligence' as you recall a certain purple librarian having once remarked about your dear hilichurls. The first time you had met a human, you were called an impostor of some sort of divine eminence, probably the deity in all those shrines, you mused later, and were slain on the spot.
Oh, how you wish you had stayed dead as well. Waking up in another corner in Teyvat, you had first wondered if you had just had a horrible dream. There was no way of having died but still being alive, is there? The new scar you had on your stomach stung, and as you looked at it you remembered how you were stabbed in that exact spot. The horrible pain of the sword being thrust in your insides, crimson bleeding everywhere as you could only scream in pain until you finally passed away from bloodloss. The scorn and disgust in that, what you assume to be, commoners face as he looked at you lose your life right in front of him.
That had been your first taste of what would become your personal hell. It felt like the world itself was against you as well, as there no longer were any sunny and warm days with pleasant breezes. The only thing left for an impostor like you was ice cold rain whipping your face as you desperately tried to hide from your hunters in every corner of the world. At best, occasionally, as you were on the verge of passing out from exhaustion, you could enjoy a dark and gloomy scenery with clouds looking ready to strike down thunder any second now. Not like hiding and running had turned out to be a very effective strategies with people with extraordinary talents and strength who also happened to wield literal magic.
Waking up in a new spot, hiding desperately, being spotted by someone, being hunted, being slain, waking up again, rinse and repeat. You had stopped counting how many times you had died a long time ago, though you suppose everyone in Teyvat could be considered your murderer by now. At least, you tought, there would be no one happy should they hear this time you did not wake from the dead. You also had stopped celebrating the phenomenon a long time ago. You wanted out. You knew you weren't going to stay dead, even if the end came via your own hand. Occasionally, when you had the energy in your delirium just before your next death in an endless cycle of rebirth, you had wondered if you saw sparkles in your blood against the snow it dropped on, or marveled at how even at your deathbed, your brain would grant you some entertainment in the form of turning your blood tinted more a dark blue than the crimson it was supposed to be. The joys of dying multiple times, you thought.
The people and the world you once loved, you now despised. You hated them, with every fiber of your being that still had the energy to feel anything other than all-consuming numbness. So, you supposed as you woke up once again from another death in the hands of people you had loved and put much effort into when you were still safe behind a screen, since you were already disrespecting their most dearest deity by existing, might as well truly disrespect them and get some reactions from the audience in your next execution. The beating you had gotten when you willingly approached a group of people was almost too severe for you to tell them you only came to them to be executed while being able to pray to the great divine eminence of Teyvat. So, while a spear was pointed at your neck, you were allowed to kneel in front of a statue so hauntingly in your own image, you looked up at the statue and smiled the first smile you had in a long while after this hell cycle had started for you. You made sure you were harboring the largest ball of spit you had ever managed to gather, and promptly spat on the statue. You were still smiling as you were beheaded, the blood you did not realize that was now dark blue with shimmers like stars in the mix of spit on the feet of the statue, flowing freely from your neck as your now severed head hit the floor of the temple, and disappeared in stars as the rest of your body followed suit, to be reassembled in another rotten corner of this wretched world you were brought into.