The moment consciousness awakened, her retina met with a small explosion.
The light source was too generous; she immediately shut her eyes to preserve her already dazed mind.
With vision closed, other perceptions spread out like spilled mercury—temperature, air flow, the texture of the surface beneath her, and even the drifting trajectory of distant dust were all clearly reflected in her heart.
A silent kind of seeing.
Novel, but not unacceptable.
She sat up.
Beneath her was a cold, smooth stone slab—more precisely, the base of some sort of giant throne.
Her bare feet touched the ground, and a chill crawled up from the soles of her feet.
Looking around, it was an extremely magnificent yet undeniably decaying hall.
The towering dome was painted with blurred murals, white stone pillars supported the endless emptiness, and the style was a blend of classical solemnity.
Everywhere was still dust and the peeling traces of time.
“Where is this?”
The question surfaced naturally.
Followed by: “Who am I?”
Two segments of memory arrived unbidden, colliding hastily.
One belonged to an ordinary college student, whose end was frozen in the piercing light of a late-night phone screen—dying suddenly on the eve of a new version of allogene.
The other segment was merely a name: Columbina…
Columbina?
She lowered her head, and the mirror-smooth ground reflected her silhouette: a petite build, black hair with deep ginger-red highlights, a white six-winged headpiece at the back of her head, her face covered by a signature white mesh, a white and blue robe trailing to the ground, bare feet, with illusory water droplets and crescent moon halos appearing beneath her soles.
Silence.
“Masaka…”
She let out this classic exclamation.
She immediately accepted reality.
Transmigration, a common trope; becoming a favorite game character, even the Fatui Harbinger Damselette Columbina, seemed…
not a bad deal.
Only the thought of her younger sister in the real world caused a soft spot in her heart to be gently pinched.
That little girl, who also loved games, was probably staring blankly at a grayed-out friend list right now.
“Forget it.”
She shook her head, her voice creating a pleasant echo in the empty hall, ethereal and unlike a human voice.
She herself was momentarily charmed by the tone, then quickly composed herself.
“Calm down, be rational.”
She stepped forward to explore.
The soles of her feet were ice-cold, and her steps were unrealistically light.
The hall was so large it was exhausting; besides dust and silence, there was nothing.
She shouted a few times, but only echoes kept her company.
Eventually, she began to jog, then ran at full speed—effortlessly, as if this body had no weight or physical limits.
Running out of the hall doors, the sight made her brake abruptly.
A pitch-black sky, no stars or clouds, only the deep black of a vacuum.
Directly ahead, a planet woven with blue-green and white textures suspended in the darkness—quiet, glorious, and full of overwhelming pressure.
Columbina looked up, her mouth slightly agape.
“Why…
didn’t I fall down?”
She tilted her head, asking her first unscientific but heartfelt question.
The planet was beautiful, its silhouette different from Earth’s, but its magnificence was similar.
An absurd yet logical guess floated to her mind.
She tried to bend her knees and gave a light hop.
Her body floated up like a feather, rising, rising, easily jumping several stories high before slowly descending.
Moon gravity experience: ten out of ten.
“…”
She lay down on the cold surface, staring at the pitch-black sky, digesting the information.
Sound cannot travel in a vacuum; all she could “hear” was the buzzing of her own thoughts.
Breathing?
She tentatively held her breath, then relaxed—no feeling of suffocation, and her body temperature was normal.
This body clearly had no need for such mundane things as an atmosphere.
Alright, transmigration location: the Moon (suspected).
Identity: Fatui Harbinger Damselette Columbina (confirmed).
Distant planet: Provisionally named Teyvat (optimistic estimate).
Mindset: From shock to bewilderment, then to a strange sense of excitement—after all, this is Teyvat, even if the angle is a bit special.
She rolled over and got up, beginning to use hops for travel, moving across this desolate surface in a clumsy yet novel way.
After a distance, she looked back at where she came from.
The full view of the hall finally revealed itself.
Towering, pale, and dilapidated.
And at the highest point of the palace stood a massive stone statue.
Who was the statue?
A young girl wearing ornaments, her face covered with a veil, her robes fluttering, gracefully…
extending her right hand, making a gesture that transcended cosmic civilizations—the middle finger.
The statue’s middle finger pointed firmly at that beautiful planet in the distance.
Columbina looked down at her right hand, which wore a white silk glove.
She imitated the statue’s movement, unpracticed in bending her thumb, index, ring, and pinky fingers, leaving only the middle finger stubbornly erect.
She turned sideways, aligning her middle finger with the statue’s middle finger and the planet.
Three points in a line.
“…”
She lowered her hand, feeling a subtle sympathy for that planet.
“Flipped off by two Columbinas in one day…
this honor…
well, it deserves an applause.”
Why was the statue like this?
She didn’t know.
Perhaps the builder had a great sense of humor, or perhaps there was a deeper meaning.
But with Columbina’s meager library of clues, thinking about this was less productive than considering more realistic problems.
She hopped back to the hall and conducted another thorough inspection.
Still empty—no food, no water, no bed, no toilet.
Finally, she returned to the massive throne base where she first woke up, climbed onto it using both hands and feet, and curled up.
The petite girl sat on the overly large “throne,” propping up her chin, her mouth beneath the veil pouting slightly.
“I’m so hungry…”
She muttered, her ethereal voice circling lonely in the hall.
Do Harbingers get hungry?
Does this body need to intake energy?
If so, what is there to eat on the Moon?
Eat stones?
Or absorb…
moonlight?
She looked up, though there was only a pitch-black void.
“Sigh—”
A long sigh drifted away in the silent Lunar Palace hall.
Perspective Shift.
The smell of steam mixed with coal ash was the unchanging keynote of this industrial city.
On the streets, gentlemen’s top hats brushed past workers’ caps, and noble ladies’ skirts carefully avoided suspicious puddles on the ground.
Amidst the diverse crowd, Sandrone was unremarkable—a petite girl wearing a faded dark dress, clutching several thick books in her arms.
She had eyes of an excessively beautiful azure blue and deep brown, slightly frizzy hair.
Unfortunately, there was little light in those eyes right now, only a thick, inescapable exhaustion and a trace of undried tears.
At eighteen years old, due to long-term malnutrition and constant toil, she looked only fourteen or fifteen.
Today had been terrible: the linked gear set model in class had collapsed before her, her tutor’s biting accusations still ringing in her ears; in the restaurant where she worked, a spilled soup tureen and the subsequent loss of her job had stamped the seal of confirmation on this wretched day.
“Can’t cry, Sandrone.”
She told herself, blinking hard to force back the new stinging sensation.
The image of her brother in a distant military camp flashed through her mind, making her straighten her thin back.
Reporting the good news but not the bad was their unspoken protection for each other.
To save a few copper coins in bus fare, she turned into a back alley she didn’t usually take.
Then, she saw “it.”
A decently dressed, even noble-looking gentleman sat leaning against a mottled brick wall.
If not for the terrifying hole in his chest that was still slowly seeping blood, and the large pool of thick, dark blood beneath him, he would have looked like a well-to-do man who had passed out drunk.
His face was ash-white, his eyes staring blankly at the narrow sky above the alley, his breath long gone.
Yet his hands tightly clutched a case—a case with smooth leather, inlaid with brass corners, its surface covered with precision gears and miniature structures, completely out of place in this filthy alley.
Sandrone’s breath hitched.
The smell of blood rushed into her nostrils.
Fear made her want to turn and run immediately, but her legs felt like they were filled with lead.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen wounds from brawls in the poor districts, but such a direct, silent death…
this was murder.
The clear realization brought a bone-chilling coldness.
“He…
help?”
The thought surfaced weakly, then immediately sank.
Bleeding like this, even a god would find it hard to save him.
Should she call the police?
And then what?
As a foreign student, get involved in a murder case?
Countless imaginings of trouble made her face even paler.
Her gaze, involuntarily, moved from the deceased’s pale face to that case.
Mechanical structures…
so exquisite, she had even seen simplified versions of some configurations on her professor’s blueprints.
An almost greedy curiosity belonging to instinct, mixed with a vague perception of value, quietly sprouted.
“None of my business…
I don’t know anything…
today has been unlucky enough…”