In the blink of an eye, five hundred years slipped away.
Eve snapped awake from her long slumber.
She stretched her limbs, though her bodily functions had yet to fully recover from centuries of dormancy.
Once feeling returned to her toes, Eve slowly stepped out from the heart of the sacred tree.
Her delicate, porcelain-white feet pressed against the earth, and spring followed in her wake.
Every single step she took caused vibrant blossoms to burst into bloom beneath her soles.
She raised her hands and inspected them.
“My divine power is less than ten percent of what it used to be.
I need to find the Traveler as soon as possible.”
“By my reckoning, the time is nearly upon us,” Eve murmured softly to herself.
Yet, this was Sumeru.
Traveling all the way to Mondstadt from here would be quite a trek.
Just as Eve was deep in thought, a sudden, agonizing stabbing pain wrung her heart.
The excruciating, tearing pain brought her crashing to her knees.
“Damn it!
The backlash from Irminsul is still this violent?!”
Beads of sweat the size of soybeans broke out across her forehead.
The heavy droplets slid down her fair skin and pattered against the dirt.
It hurt—unimaginably, agonizingly painful.
She could feel her remaining divine power draining away at a terrifying speed.
“No, maintaining this human form is placing far too much strain on me right now!” A look of intense discomfort twisted her exquisite features.
Eve instantly brainstormed an alternative.
A flash of green light illuminated the clearing, and the peerless goddess vanished entirely, replaced by a round, bouncy creature.
A Dendro Slime.
The most common and weakest elemental life-form on the continent.
This was Eve’s fallback avatar.
Since the corruption within Irminsul remained unresolved, the backlash continued to batter her soul.
And because Eve’s divine power was fundamentally tied to Irminsul, her reserves were pitifully constrained at the moment.
She had to conserve every shred of divine energy she had left.
The slime form she had adopted could minimize her divine power consumption while still allowing her basic mobility.
However, the Dendro Slime incarnation Eve had shifted into looked rather different from an ordinary specimen.
The three leaf-shoots atop her head were stark white.
She looked precisely like an albino Dendro Slime.
This was likely a side effect of her natural white hair color, but she had no bandwidth to worry about aesthetics right now.
Once she settled into her slime morphology, the agonizing pain gradually subsided.
“It seems the backlash from Irminsul operates on cycles,” Eve muttered to herself.
Even so, she had no way of predicting when the next wave would strike.
Thus, her top priority remained finding the Traveler.
Though she had stabilized, her divine power was still slowly bleeding away.
Fortunately, the rate of loss was manageable—nothing compared to the torrential drain she had experienced earlier.
She bounced her way over to the edge of a nearby pond.
Catching her reflection in the tranquil water, Eve inspected her new appearance.
*Hmm, a perfectly normal Dendro Slime.*
*Except for the fact that my leaves are a bit pale.
Shouldn’t draw too much attention.*
Once she tracked down the Traveler, she would need to figure out a natural way to infiltrate their party.
After all, Eve had zero intention of revealing her true identity right off the bat.
And this cute little slime disguise made that objective wonderfully simple.
*After all, who could possibly turn away an adorable, white-tufted Dendro Slime?*
Emerging from the hollow of the tree, Eve oriented herself.
She was currently somewhere near the border between Sumeru and Liyue, placing her fairly close to Liyue’s Chasm.
As the former God of Wisdom, Eve possessed comprehensive knowledge of Teyvat’s geography.
She swiftly mapped out the optimal route toward Mondstadt.
Without wasting a second, Eve began hopping along the path, journeying northward in her bouncy slime body.
Her destination: the cliffs of Stormbearer Point in Mondstadt.
After a lengthy and eventful journey, Eve finally crossed the border into Mondstadt territory.
Along the way, she had run into no shortage of aggressive monsters.
But she was the former sovereign of Sumeru, the God of Wisdom, Greater Lord Rukkhadevata.
Even reduced to a slime body with severely depleted divine power, she could easily toy with those wild beasts.
It really made her realize just how much the current Anemo Archon was slacking off.
Moreover, Eve discovered a convenient quirk: by consuming monsters of the same elemental affinity, she could recover minute fractions of her lost divine power.
While the energy gained was microscopic, every little bit counted for someone in her desperate state.
Consequently, throughout her trek, Eve devoured every single Fungus, fellow Dendro Slime, and Whopperflower that crossed her path.
In addition to monsters, Eve found that snacking on wild grass seeds also replenished her energy.
Naturally, the local grass seeds didn’t escape her clutches either—she gobbled them up whenever she saw them.
Yet Eve wasn’t overly greedy; she only cleared out the resources directly along her path, never going out of her way to pillage distant patches.
After all, hunting down wild snacks was far less efficient than hitching a ride with the Traveler and scoring a Gnosis to kickstart her recovery.
Naturally, her travels also brought her across wandering merchants and adventurers.
Whenever traveling merchants spotted her, they would practically trip over themselves to take a wide detour, terrified of provoking a monster.
Merchants lived by risk mitigation, and the slightest unusual disturbance was enough to send them packing.
Adventurers, on the other hand, reacted rather differently.
Whenever that breed of people laid eyes on her, they would invariably holler:
“Holy crap, a white Dendro Slime!
Quick, quick, it’s a rare variant—catch it!”
Or alternatively:
“Holy crap, a white Dendro Slime!
Quick, it’s mutated—stab it to death!”
In short, they all wanted a piece of her.
Naturally, Eve wasn’t someone they could bully.
*Wham!* A swift right roundhouse kick, followed by *bam!*, a swift left side kick, and she taught them all a rigorous lesson.
A few of them even tried to launch sneak attacks against her—an elderly veteran of several millennia.
But Eve didn’t lower her guard; she smoothly sidestepped the ambushes.
Ever since then, a terrifying urban legend began circulating among the Adventurers’ Guild in Liyue regarding a bizarre and vicious white Dendro Slime.
During her crossing through Liyue, Eve even had a rather memorable encounter with a peculiar young girl.
The girl was a chef from Wanmin Restaurant, and the very second she laid eyes on Eve, she whipped out a polearm and chased her across the wilderness.
Dripping with drool, the girl kept shouting at the top of her lungs:
“White Dendro Slime condensate!
Stir-fried with Qingxin flowers, that has got to taste amazing!”
That encounter had given Eve a fright, causing her to bolt—or rather, bounce for her life.
The girl looked so cute and innocent, yet she was actively plotting how to cook her.
Under normal circumstances, Eve would have given her a solid thwack on the head.
But since that girl happened to be Xiangling from the game, Eve wisely chose discretion as the better part of valor and made a hasty retreat.
When she finally stepped foot onto Mondstadt’s soil, a gentle, comforting breeze brushed against her.
It was the authentic breath of freedom.
“It’s been ages since I last set foot in this drunkard’s nation.
Looks pretty much the same as I remember,” Eve reminisced with a soft chuckle.
Back during the ancient gatherings of the Seven, that good-for-nothing wind deity had tried to get her blackout drunk.
Of course, she hadn’t let him succeed.
Instead, he had tried to pass his cup to Morax, only to get promptly swatted into the horizon.
Thinking back on it, those really were amusing times.
Yet now, her old drinking buddies were gone.
Among the original Seven, only the Anemo Archon and the Geo Archon remained.
A faint wave of melancholy washed over her.
If not for her timely arrival, Greater Lord Rukkhadevata would have slowly faded away beneath the relentless wheels of history, until she was completely forgotten by the world.
“Alright, enough dwelling on the past.
Recovering my divine power is the top priority.” Eve rallied her spirits.
“I wonder, will the Traveler be Aether or Lumine…?” she muttered, bouncing along rhythmically.
She set her course straight for that legendary beach etched in her memories.