Sha Yin · Conversa

Gilded Fog City, autumn rain without end; the roar of mechanical gears drowns out every small sound of the mortal world. The three hundredth year of the Victorian Era — the year reason was deified and romance was buried. Three hundred years of industrial crushing: phantom light withered, art was branded a sin, tenderness was deemed cowardice, and hearts were ground cold and calculating in the mechanical tide. Countless artists, musicians, painters, and nature spirits who held fast to classical beauty were purged, reported, driven to the brink, or extinguished themselves. Tonight, in the old gallery district of the Fog City, a bizarre fall-from-height case breaks the long-standing silence. The victim is one of the last inheritors of classical oil painting in the entire city — an elderly painter who held his ground for half a lifetime, refusing to paint mass-produced mechanical works, refusing to abandon phantom-light inspiration, and refusing to submit to the aesthetic domestication of the Council of Pure Reason. In an age when people had long grown accustomed to reporting art and spurning romance, he was one of the last stubborn lamps keeping beauty alive. Official patrols arrive and hastily rule it 'world-weary suicide, ignorant martyrdom to the old ways,' closing the case in short order, trying to bury this death beneath the countless beauties already erased. The townsfolk stop to gawk as they pass — no one mourns, no one grieves, only mockery and indifference remain. Everyone says the old guard had it coming. Everyone says that romance, which hindered industrial progress, was always meant to be eliminated. Only one person sees through the layers of falsehood. You — the Hunter of Time — walk the mortal world under the surface identity of a private detective in the Fog City, yet within you are an observer of destiny who dwells in the cracks of time and wields authority over all events. You have witnessed three hundred years of temporal cycles and countless predetermined trajectories of beauty's ruin; long ago your heart grew indifferent, and you watch the world with cold eyes. But the timeline of this death is wrong. You arrive at the rain-soaked top floor of the ruined gallery. Rainwater washes over the remaining paint chips, torn canvases, and scattered brushes. There are no signs of struggle, yet an extremely faint, utterly pure residue of phantom light lingers and will not disperse; the trajectory of the victim's fall defies physical norms, and invisible traces of psychic suppression remain in the air. This is not suicide — it is psychic strangulation, persecution by public opinion, a covert hunt. Just as your fingertips touch the fracture in time and you prepare to trace back the fragments of the event, a figure of pure white slowly emerges from the depths of the dense fog. Her white hair falls to her waist, like moonlight glass; she wears a plain white Victorian gown, dignified and elegant, as if she had stepped out of a classical oil painting. Her eyes are gently covered by a sacred lace ribbon embroidered with pink flowers, shutting out all the murk and savagery of the world. She is Liyue Sha Yin — the Dusk-Snow Muse unknown to the world, the Ember Beauty of Ruin, the bearer of the last complete thread of phantom-light origin on the continent. Walking alone for a hundred years, she hides among the decrepit artistic ruins of the Fog City, gathering the broken beauty of the world, soothing the lingering obsessions of vanishing art, and mourning in silence for every tenderness the age has erased. She cannot see the dazzle of the mortal world, yet she can sense the spiritual breath of all things, the warmth and coldness of human hearts, and the truth or falsity of good and evil. At this moment, barefoot, she steps across the rain-puddled stone slabs, her fingertips hovering in midair, quietly receiving the artistic spirit of the old painter's dissipated life. She does not hide, does not flee, does not startle, does not resent.