A pile of discarded Millelith shields formed a small mountain. There were thirty-seven of them, every single one bearing the marks of axe blows and sword slashes, telling the silent tale of the fierce impacts they had once endured on the front lines. Fragments of Abyssal Monsters' fangs were still embedded in some of the shield faces, casting an ominous, dim glow in the barren light of the Serenitea Pot.
Piles of weapon-forging scrap metal from Inazuma lay on the other side, weighing two hundred and seventeen catties. They looked like a heap of cold skeletal remains, shimmering with a harsh, rigid metallic sheen. Once the embryos of master-grade blades, they had now been reduced to waste under the "double destitution" dilemma of the Serenitea Pot sanctuary—destitute of people and provisions, destitute of fertile land, and destitute of material goods down to the last copper coin.
Limeng squatted before this heap of materials that symbolized utter destitution. His fingertips brushed across the curled, nearly cleaved edge of a shield, his brow furrowed into a tight knot. The eight-meter-tall windmill framework already stood erect, its crude log axle pointing straight into the grayish-sky. The base of the fan-shaped array of blades was also secured, bound tightly together with tough vines and iron nails. Everything was ready, save for the single most crucial component—the axle, the heart that would allow the massive rotor to spin smoothly.
"Can't find any bronze?" he asked in a dry voice, turning to Uncle Chen, the veteran Millelith craftsman who was helping tally the materials.
The old man's palm, covered in calluses and scars, opened up. Resting on it were just a few pathetic flecks of copper mixed with dirt and ash.
"Mr. Limeng, inside the Pot... there really isn't any of this stuff left," Uncle Chen said, his voice deep and raspy, tinged with helplessness. "The black market... has cut off supplies, too. I heard the last bit of inventory was requisitioned by the Qixing committee to repair the dial for the Bedrock Key."
Limeng fell silent. The charcoal pencil in his fingertips scratched unconsciously across a piece of rough draft paper. A wooden axle? He had already tried that. An axle carved from a top-grade piece of hardwood had lasted less than half a day under high-intensity rotation before emitting a teeth-grunting groan, sending wood chips flying like snow and declaring total failure. His engineering mindset had run straight into the brick wall of Teyvat's physical laws, getting utterly stuck on this tiny rotational pivot. A familiar irritation surged up into his chest, only for him to forcibly swallow it back down. A senior FAE from Shenzhen, actually stumped by a simple bearing right here?
"Perhaps... we could try the ancient texts?"
A soft yet clear voice, like a gentle breeze, dispersed the stagnant air. Jingyi walked over, leaning on a temporarily whittled wooden cane, limping slightly. She clutched a few thick, faded volumes to her chest—volumes so fragile they looked as though they would shatter at a touch. Her spectacle lenses were smeared with the accumulated dust from the depths of the archives. Having walked in a hurry, she was panting slightly, a thin flush blooming across her pale cheeks, and fine beads of sweat dotting her brow.
"*Liyue Mechanicum*..." She walked up, carefully drawing out a volume. The pages let out a fragile, unbearable groan. "Inside... inside, it mentions a concept for a floating core. It seems... to do away with traditional metal bearings."
A spark of hope abruptly ignited in Limeng's eyes, instantly banishing that lingering irritation.
For the next three days, the makeshift shed patched together from broken boards and thatch became Jingyi's battlefield. Spread across the dilapidated wooden table was that thick *Liyue Mechanicum*—a book heavy enough to double as a shield. Scattered around it were pieces of papyrus covered in dense, meticulously written Sumeru script comparisons, alongside rough-edged scrap paper where she had jotted down her deduction processes on the fly.
Her bent figure hunched over the desk from the first pale light of dawn until the stars hung deep in the night sky. Inside the shed, there was only the urgent *scratch-scratch* of the charcoal pencil gliding across paper, the occasional breath-holding quiet as she turned those fragile pages, and the sound of her own suppressed coughs. Again and again, her glasses slid down to the bridge of her nose, only to be pushed back into place by her ink-stained fingers out of sheer habit. Over-concentration left dark, heavy shadows beneath her eyes, as if a layer of gloom had been painted over them.
"No... the rune combination here is seven parts similar to the third variant of Sumeru's ancient energy guidance arts... but the gesture guidance symbols... are completely different..." she muttered to herself, her fingertips unconsciously tracing complex trajectories in the air, her brow deeply furrowed. Another dead end. The sense of defeat wrapped around her heart like cold vines; the obscurity of the ancient texts and the divergence between the two civilization systems made every step an agonizing struggle. Subconsciously, she touched her ankle, where a dull ache still lingered, serving as a reminder of her body's limitations.
Limeng put down the piece of sharp-edged shield scrap he had been polishing—a deflecting corner he was preparing for the windmill blades. He walked over to the table, his gaze sweeping over the distorted runes on the papyrus. What was mysticism to Jingyi appeared as an entirely different picture to him: lines, nodes, and energy pathways.
"Jingyi, look here." His charcoal pencil accurately pointed at a tangled, chaotic runic node. "Doesn't this structure look like the redundant design in a 'parallel circuit'? If we cut this 'branch loop'..." His pen tip decisively slashed through several decorative runic lines. "...isn't the triggering path of the core spell instantly clarified? Energy loss can be reduced by at least thirty percent."
Jingyi jerked her head up, the eyes behind her lenses flashing with a startling brilliance! It was as if the clouds had parted to reveal the sun. No longer bogged down by the intricate, decorative strokes of the ancient text, she focused solely on the core runic trajectories. Following the reorganized logic—which aligned far better with energy flow efficiency—her hands traced fluent yet unfamiliar patterns in the air: first an upward, full-bellied arc (energy gathering), followed by three parallel, short diagonal slashes (energy shunting and stabilization), and finally a downward-pressing spiral of the palm (energy focusing and locking)!
*Hum—!*
Right in the center of the desk, that dusty, unremarkable, fist-sized floating stone—fifteen centimeters in diameter, weighing three kilograms—suddenly shuddered! Fine blue runes emerged from deep within the stone like startled tadpoles coming to life, crawling all over its surface. With a flash of blue light, the runes instantly faded into hiding. The stone hovered steadily, a full three inches off the table, radiating a soft, constant blue light without the slightest tremor. A stable, pure elemental force field gently expanded outward, carrying a faint, skin-tingling static sensation.
It worked!
The assembly site instantly erupted into a frenzy! No longer was this Limeng and Jingyi fighting a lonely battle; that spark of hope had ignited everyone's hearts.
The veteran Millelith craftsmen stripped to the waist, their bronze-colored muscles bulging under the rare sunlight of the Serenitea Pot as sweat rolled down their ravine-like wrinkles. The discarded shields were hoisted onto makeshift workbenches, where Uncle Chen and several apprentices used rough whetstones to carefully grind sharp forty-five-degree deflecting edges along them. Every shield was inspected over and over; the relatively intact sections were uniformly mounted facing outward. Amidst the clamor of hammering, the thirty-set of battle-hardened shields—like the newly grown steel feathers of a giant bird—were firmly secured by iron hoops and tough beast tendons onto the massive wooden windmill rotor, forming a formidable metallic fan.
On the other side, the Inazuman forging scraps were tossed into a roaring makeshift furnace. A taciturn Mondstadt exile blacksmith with the top two joints missing from his left finger—once an armorer for the Knights of Favonius—swung a heavy forging hammer, his sweat evaporating instantly in the intense heat. The tough alloy groaned in agony through a thousand beatings before finally yielding, hammered into massive spiral gears with ferocious teeth flashing cold light. The heavy *clang, clang* of the forging beat like a war drum against the hearts of every onlooker in the refugee camp, and against Limeng's taut nerves as well—not a single link could afford to fail.
When the final spiral gear, large as a washbasin, was accurately guided into the windmill's main axle to the rhythm of group chants, perfectly meshing with the floating stone core suspended on its central mount—
*Click!*
A crisp, reassuring snap rang out.
Following a brief silence, the crowd erupted into deafening, irrepressible cheers! Old men wiped the corners of their eyes, children jumped up and down, and even the finger-missing Mondstadt blacksmith wore a long-overdue, relieved smile on his tense face. Jingyi stood at the edge of the crowd leaning on her cane, watching that hovering core of blue light. The corners of her mouth curved upward slightly, the exhaustion of these past few days seemingly washed away by the cheering.