#the cataclysm

Chasm, 500 Years Ago

It’s pretty much confirmed that the bottom of the Chasm is where Rhinedottir/Gold’s Abyssal creations started invading Liyue from.

Ruin serpents, including Haftvad the Worm, may have been the machines that enabled this? (Ruin serpent archive description:  “If this was the case, then carving out tunnels with which the forces of this nation might access the whole continent would have been a thing of great ease”)  Bonus in that ruin serpents actually throw out oozing concretions.

The Yaksha who went into the Chasm to fight the invading Abyssal powers is definitely the electro Yaksha from the Xiao trailer.  The artifact set Vermillion Hereafter descriptions talk about a “four armed Yaksha”, and the Thundering Poise mask matches the purple mask from the Xiao trailer.

Also the beads on the artwork for the Vermillion Hereafter artifact pieces are reminiscent of Xiao’s necklace.

The electro Yaksha may have wielded Calamity Queller at the time, since the Calamity Queller’s description did mention it.  The English translation for the Thundering Poise mask description says “blade in hand”, which is pretty much the right translation for “扬刃” in the original text, however “blade” and “刃” have different connotations in their respective languages.  “Blade” can imply a sword, whereas “刃” doesn’t have as strong of a connotation.  So it’s pretty much confirmed that the electro Yaksha wielded the Calamity Queller.

The mystery here is what happened to the electro Yaksha?  Xiao’s trailer says that besides Xiao, “death came to three, while the fourth vanished without a trace”.  Was the electro Yaksha one of the three who died, or the fourth one who vanished without a trace?  So far there’s evidence for both.  The Vermillion Hereafter set suggests that the electro Yaksha died in battle, but the Yakshas:  The Guardian Adepti story trailer (aka the story from Zhongli’s perspective) suggests the electro Yaksha went crazy, similar to other beings who came into close contact with the Abyss, for example, the Oni Mikoshi Chiyo.

About the English translation here:  “succumbed” would sometimes suggest dying in English, but actually the original Chinese was “走火入魔”, which is more like “in too deep” and suggest becoming mentally unstable or going insane.  This word is often used in Wuxia and Xianxia novels to describe characters who were too deeply involved with whatever they were doing to the point of insanity.  The animation also shows the Yaksha standing on a mound of corpses with an eye glowing red.  Perhaps it’s like a Sekiro Shura ending situation:  the Yaksha killed too much and was taken over by bloodlust.  But of course it’s also possible that he died after going crazy.

The story in the Echoes of an Offering artifact set is a lot more fragmented and contains new characters, but it does seem to have a certain connection to the story in the Vermillion Hereafter set.  One of these characters is an adeptus named the “Herblord” (LMAOOOOOOO).  Actually the original Chinese is “药君”, where the character “药” is more about medicinal herbs than just...herbs.  I have seen someone on Reddit propose the translation of “Medicine Adeptus”, which definitely sounds a lot less meme-y lol.  

Another one of these new characters is a giant koi with “rainbow scales”, who eventually sunk into the depths (a word to can be used to characterize both the Chasm and the Abyss) and never came back to the surface again.  Perhaps this giant koi died in the Cataclysm?  Since the Feather of Nascent Light from Vermillion Hereafter set mentions “a fish sinking into a deep pool”.  The “bird plummeting into a forge” part could be about the electro Yaksha, since the two Yakshas whose animal forms we know about so far (Xiao and Pervases) are both birds.

Side note on the description of Feather of Nascent Light:  the end of it says “the land will forever remember”.  Here, the “land” should be understood as the ley lines.

What happened to the Herblord is unknown, but tea and tea-drinking culture from the mountain spread to Liyue Harbor, then all over Teyvat.

The domain where the artifact set comes from is located in the southwest region of Liyue.  In reality, Camellia sinensis, the tea tree (not a shrub btw; they were only kept short so people can have an easier time harvesting the leaves), did originate in and around southwestern China (Yunnan province).  Ancient wild Camellia sinensis trees still grow there to this day, some reaching 2700 years old.  The oldest tea tree in the world at 3200 years old is found in Yunnan (the “Jinxiu Tea King”/锦绣茶王 in Lincang city, Yunnan, picture below).  According to scholars, tea-drinking likely began around Yunnan, but developed into a culture when the practice reached what is present-day Sichuan (then called Shu/蜀), and spread to other areas of China from there, and eventually all over the world.