Volume 1

Legend has it that in the depths of the mountains of Chenyu Vale, where the
water lotuses and jade lilies thrive, when the rain falls and fog gathers in the
dawn and dusk hours, looming shadows of the past will sometimes emerge.
According to the village elders, those who dwelled in Mt. Lingmeng once
worshipped many supernatural beings, walking alongside the spirit elders of
fairies, birds, and beasts within the wild mountain. But in that earth-shaking
chaotic war a thousand years before, those gods, fairies, and former inhabitants
alike disappeared. Even so, the sentimental mountains retained the echoing
memories in the Ley Lines, and thus they sometimes repeatedly reappear at dawn
or at night, when fog and rain blanket the land. Sometimes, herb gatherers and
jade artisans will lose their way in this fog and encounter these solitary
shadows. As the village elders tell it, an encounter with the ancient fallen is
often an ill-starred omen, a sign of unexpected disaster. The Ley Lines, having
accumulated and accumulated until growing into tumors, bring forth these ancient
regrets and miseries into the present world, and that is why there is fog and
rain unceasing. And that is also why the mountain people avoid both like the
plague, to avoid becoming entangled in spirit by those ancient sorrows. Even so,
after Rex Lapis completed his great deed of pacifying the land and sea,
surveyors from Liyue Harbor would blunder into the fog and rain, disturbing
those dreams of old... But that is another tale.

Volume 2

In the days after Rex Lapis brought peace to mountain and forest, a mariner once
entered the crisscrossed streams beneath the mountain and became lost in the
damp dusk fog. On a bamboo raft, this person passed waterweeds that glowed a
faint blue and purple, passed tree and bush bedecked in falling flowers, and
followed azure avians never before seen even in dreams, before coming unto and
into the cavern of slumber. Through the jade glow and the ghostly light of
fungi, the mariner gazed with entranced eyes upon the inhabitants of old. A
veritable parade of mountain ghosts they seemed — in ancient cotton robes they
were garbed, and the hems of their clothes were adorned with jade as clear as
light playing upon the water, and with nameless fragrant plants. Lined up and
standing on the bank of a deep pool, they sang a song the mariner had never
heard before:

"How mine malice lurks lonesome in the dying light of day! How the hateful
wind bears the rain, how the deep fog veils!"
"None remain save a lone lord lamenting lost years — alas, alas! You came too
late."

Sad was the song and
quiet, tinged with seeming resentment. The mariner looked closely at the faintly
glowing figures in the cavern, and lo, one by one they removed their jades and
threw them into the pitch-black pool, as if never having noticed the presence of
a visitor at all. Descending despondency drove the mariner's paddle on the
return journey to Qiaoying Village, but not before leaving markings along the
path. It is said that Yuehai Pavilion would later send surveyors here to search
for any mysterious settlements, and some also say that the Millelith once
deployed troops into the deep mountains to search for any hideouts of illicit
nature, but all without success. When Lan Jing, the famed doctor from Yilong
Wharf, was yet a youth, he entered Mt. Lingmeng to explore the legendary,
mysterious cavern in search of ancient prescriptions, but after his return, he
would never again speak of the matter. It was only following his passing that
his family found an inkstone within his personal effects. Legend has it that it
was the color of clear waters and bright as the high heavens, and yet, with the
doctor's death, the origins of this inkstone could no longer be verified. Much
later, the descendants of this famous physician would go bankrupt due to poor
management of their merchant shipping business, and thus was this inkstone lost
amidst the morass of humanity, its whereabouts unknown thereafter.

Volume 3

Songs have long circulated in Chenyu Vale that tell of an ancient cave within
which a demon lord from a past beyond reckoning once hid. They say that she wore
a skirt of coagulated jade-blood, and leaned on the long-destroyed lunar
chariot, submerged and slumbering beneath a black, bottomless pool of water. In
these eons that memory has nigh forgotten, she was the mistress of Chenyu Vale,
who ruled the birds and beasts and adepti of wild mountain nature, who
controlled the ebb and flow of the Bishui River, who as an arbiter maintained
the natural balance between mortals and animals. But those are tales from long
ago, and though both folk indigenous and migrant tell tales of how she started a
war out of incurable obsession, before ultimately being defeated, sealed, and
plunged into deathly, dreaming slumber, the relevant historical details can now
no longer be verified. The sole piece of evidence that supports this tale is
this song of lamentation that Chenyu Vale locals once sang:

"Though I wish to gift you herbs, who shall leave it at the sandbank amidst
the waters?"
"Where now fly the godly banners? The chariot is lost in the
lightless bamboo wood."
"How terrible the Xuanwen wail, who think upon the
darkened pool."

Do the proud descendants of the mountain folk yet remember and memorialize their
lost god? The most vivid tales have been eroded by flowing time, now only
faintly visible in song, like green jade only faintly discernable beneath the
waters of a stream. So perhaps, just as a lost boatman once witnessed, one might
still hear an ancient heart beating, its jade blood pumping, echoing in those
boundless depths?