light as a feather, heavy as a hill ~ for the birds (annotated) ~ joy of my life

Chapter Five: Light as a Feather, Heavy as a Hill

titled “light as a feather, heavy as a hill” on several accounts:

it’s a loose translation of “鴻毛泰山”, which translates to mean “light as a swan feather, heavy as mt. tai” literally, and “what means nothing to one person means a lot to another” figuratively.
despite venti’s lighthearted banter, he’s still incredibly serious about everything going on underneath, as demonstrated by his chat with zhongli. similar applies to keqing, who takes every comment and suggestion and detail to heart as she prepares for her engagement.

there's also the similar phrase 千里寄鵝毛, “a goose feather sent from afar” is a trifling present with a weighty thought behind it, as well as 死有重於泰山，輕於鴻毛: sima qian said smth along these lines, meaning that death can have either as heavily important as mt. tai, or as lightly important as a goose feather. not all deaths are created equal, basically.

i know that sayu’s affiliation is more directly considered to be the “Shuumatsuban”, which works under the yashiro commission, but like. let’s just cut the middlemen here she works for the yashiro commission lmaoooo
“salient” was chosen in “salient sea breeze” bc at first it was just supposed to be “saline” (bc that’s more fun than just “salty”) but then i was like “is salient a word? does it have anything to do with salt?” and i looked it up and it means “prominent or noticeable” and i was like “oooo well that works too”
the font for lumine’s handwriting is Inkburrow (sharp, rather than "strong", 90% width, 17pt), though the sparkles come from 851tegakizatsu while the hearts come from catholic schoolgirls (venti’s font)
ningguang is referred to as a “little bird” waiting in a nest of jade bc of her association with phoenixes
i had originally wanted to make a sailor moon reference with the made-up jade chamber code kazuha got from beidou, “i wish to sail from the sea to the moon and stars beyond” but i couldn’t quite figure one out. oh well, i suppose.
kazuha, venti, and bu’yun make a limerick as they ascend to the jade chamber, mostly bc that’s the style i ended up scribbling out lol. been kind of wanting to write more limericks, since i remember writing one for hu tao that seems to have just gotten cut by this point…

bu’yun contributing the last line was a surprise, actually! i originally intended for it to be just venti, more or less getting the last word in, but for whatever reason i suddenly decided that bu’yun would be a fun contributor hehe.

ningguang is DEFINITELY thinking “yanfei and venti had better not get up to any shenanigans together” when venti’s pointing out the spirit of the law thing to her lol
“my heart has never failed to find fulfillments” was almost “my soul has never failed […]” but since 心 can kind of work for both mind and heart i went with heart for the alliteration
i also always keep thinking that “desire trails” are called “dream trails”… in jp they’re apparently 獣道 (beast paths), which is another word for it in english anyway (“game trails”), but i chose “desire trail” bc ummm smth smth kazuha and “a pure heart is also an empty one”, the necessity of having smth to desire in your life
“[yelan] seems to emerge from the shadows like a barrel melting into a tanuki” was originally phrased as “a tanuki crashing out of a barrel” bc ORIGINALLY, i wanted to compare her entrance to watching precipitate crash out of a solution, which… maybe i’m just chembrained™, but watching that happen never fails to fill me with awe and wonder

however, kazuha is probably not worldly to the ways of chemistry, so at first i tried to think of ways that maybe sailors might see precipitate crash out of like seawater or smth, but since both sodium and chlorine ions are usually aqueous spectator ions, they’re hard to ppt out and so i couldn’t think of any situations where that might happen at sea. o(—(
so then i opened up genshin and wandered around yashiori island a bit for inspiration, remembered that tanukis exist in-game, and decided to use them!

still couldn’t use the phrase “crashing out” like i wanted to since i imagine that would give a Very Different impression with a tanuki than what i had intended lol

i was originally going to have yelan call venti “an intoxicated ghost”, since 酒鬼 [lit. wine demon/ghost] means drunkard, and it would be kind of fun to make a joke about how venti walks up to the balcony to meet the conquerer of demons as a ghost or something… i know that 鬼 doesn’t have nearly as strong of connotations as 魔, but i think it’s funny heh

anyway, the reason i switched to “a drunken concubine” is bc when digging around for words containing 醉 [intoxicated], i came across «貴妃醉酒», [gui4fei4 zui4jiu3] which is a peking opera whose title is usually translated as “drunken concubine”. from what i can gather, it was written during the qing dynasty, and it’s about yang yuhuan, an imperial concubine from the tang dynasty who was also considered a legendary chinese beauty, setting up a night of drinking with the emperor, only to get stood up. as a result, she gets drunk all by herself, feeling jealous and bitter and humiliated and all that stuff.
there’s no english wikipedia page for this opera, despite apparently being a famous opera, so i read about it here and here and found a 2022(?) performance of it here with only simplified subtitles so that’s kind of fucked but Whatever, I Guess

anyway. i watched it. surprisingly enthralling tbh. i feel like referencing this opera in this context means yelan is also implying that xiao would’ve refused to see venti if he was too drunk. which, like. it was already pointed out that xiao never would have believed in venti’s sincerity if he was too drunk, so!!

the “i kissed your son old man!!” bit comes from THIS tumblr post which was FORMATIVE to me as a xv shipper when i first got into it in june 2021
“consider [kq’s] project in qingce a few years ago—” “which one?” is intended to be a cornerstone reference. as a treat. though frankly, considering just how many times kq has been sent to qingce during events, you could ~technically~ argue otherwise. but to ME. it is a cornerstone (by chuminder) reference.
this was mentioned in earlier chapters, but just to be clear: [lucky] double seven + the lover’s festival are the same day lol
i’ve always viewed the akasha system as a sharp criticism of, like, not only the way people engage with the world in the internet age, but also of the way the chinese government controls information. the latter bit isn’t really relevant to what i’m about to commentate on/explain, but i figured i might as well mention it, since i spent a lot of the early sumeru 3.x patches thinking about it.

anyway, smth i’ve kind of learned through my years of being on the internet (and through tumblr in particular) is that digital spaces are far more ephemeral than we might like to believe. we lose access to our own data due to lost or forgotten passwords; users and websites change their urls or delete their entire presences on a whim, taking troves of information with them; and sometimes we even lose access to our own purchases due to licensing changes— all bc we did not make a local backup (and/or remove the DRM in some cases).

like. i think we’ve all had at least one experience with looking through our ao3 bookmarks and discovering that a beloved fic has been unceremoniously deleted some unknowable time ago. i was lucky enough to have a downloaded copy of one of my life-changing fics when it got randomly deleted, but that had been an extremely lucky coincidence at that time. these days i download my faves + bookmarks semi-regularly and keep a neat little archive on my computer.

but anyway, that sort of thing is pretty much what i had in mind when writing the bit where kazuha thinks about the akasha terminal. funny enough, i actually hadn’t planned for that bit until i got there, and i was like “oh, right! kazuha’s a wanderer; he’s canonically been to sumeru— he could tell these people firsthand about the efficacy of the akasha or whatever!”

the akasha-mail joke was written with this post by cor-lapis in mind (that i spent like half an hour digging up)

also they have a similar post abt there being aka-search which i also think is funny, so i’ll link it here too just for kicks

ALSO, scara’s called “hatty” rather than “hat guy” bc in cn, his nickname, 阿帽 [a-mao4], follows the same scheme as tubby [a-yuan?] and chubby of the teapot. also i just thought it was kind of cute
i wrote the bit where kazuha and venti had their little chat and snacks before chenyu vale dropped (bc yeah the writing of this chapter took forever and a day i know i know), and so originally it actually said they received violetgrass tea

i chose violetgrass bc it’s usually used to bring vigor to those taking it as medicine and also bc i like flowers
anyway, then when chenyu dropped i considered changing it to sunglo (松羅) so that we could have like an actual tea named within the game and it was the first one that came to mind. however, upon looking at the other option, single-origin yauwan tea (游韻單叢), i was like, “oh, i like the meaning of 游韻 better” since it means kind of like, a floating sound or musical note, a traveling rhythm sort of thing. very apt for kazuha and venti imo lol
anyway, my preference for romanizing cantonese is actually jyutping, which would’ve turned 游韻 into ‘jauwan’ rather than ‘yauwan’.

and i do love jyutping as my cantonese transcription method of choice, but i don’t think most people know that /j/ in IPA represents what we in america would call the ‘yuh’ sound and thus fail to make that connection when reading ‘jauwan’
while i’m on this soap box tho i do spell 嘉明 as ‘gaaming’ rather than ‘gaming’

kazuha pulling an inkstone from the folds of his clothes has historical precedent. see: the limited time inkstone exhibit at the northern national palace museum in taipei, taiwan.

jk you can see the exhibit online too
anyway i also just wanted to say that inkstone people back in the day were just like modern fountain pen enjoyers for REAL. the discourse must have been insane wish i was there
(they had the meat stone on loan to the southern npm while i was visiting… cruel >:C)

kazuha was originally supposed to write a love letter to heizou back in inazuma, and i did write a couple haikus w/kazuhei in mind, but in the end, i decided i don’t know enough abt how kzh would work and scrapped that detail
specifically called inazuma kazuha’s archipelago origins rather than homeland bc i mean. he’s a wanderer now. he goes where the wind blows. his home is anywhere he cares to make it.
the "nice, mechanical pen" that venti uses is supposed to just be a regular fountain pen. would these be “fontaine pens” in teyvat? like i know that “fontaine” translates out to “fountain” but it’s not like we call fountain pens french pens in real life. although if we did i’d be calling them fontch pens here because i am Committed To My Bits.

anyway. he stole it from zhongli, who probably received it as a nice gift from a fontch diplomat at some point before he retired.
you may have also noticed by this point in the notes that i. am a fountain pen enjoyer.
this is true, but it’s mostly a side effect of having calligraphy as a hobby.

this is also why i particularly mentioned kazuha cleaning off his brush mere moments after he uses it, when it becomes clear that he might soon become engaged in prolonged conversation instead of actively using it.
this is bc the ink used in 毛筆, proper brush pens, will usually be an ink where the color comes from pigmented particles rather than dyes. a couple examples here include sumi ink, india ink, and acrylic inks.

they are also usually waterproof when dry! i actually don’t know about sumi ink in this case, since i believe its pigmentation comes from charcoal, but my india and acrylic inks are waterproof.

the major difference btwn particle and dye inks is that you generally CANNOT use particle inks in fountain pens (which differ from dip pens by nature of having ink reservoirs inside their bodies) because they will clog the feed, destroying it and rendering it useless if you happen to be using a waterproof ink.

fun fact about venti folding his letter to lumine into an arrow is that i learned how to do that from like, this book of schoolgirl secrets, in the chapter for passing notes and ciphers around
thank you to my friend navi for doing a cold read of kazuha’s poem for me waaaaaaaay back in september 2023 and subsequently granting me permission to just use his cold read interps in this fic lol
kq mentioning that she found old white iron strips for firework production draws from the fact that i used to “work” in a school chem stock room which hadn’t been cleaned in years, and while cleaning out a drawer one day, i found magnesium strips produced several years before i had been born

i miss hanging out in that stock room. i miss it a lot.

the quote she remembers and attributes to venti is one i first saw in this tumblr post
chongyun n shenhe receiving 25% more mora is a joke abt shenhe’s exploration passive being extra expedition drops
- considering chongyun’s passive, there was also supposed to be a joke abt their fights ending 25% more quickly too, but it seems i wasn’t quite able to fit that one in
- similarly, yanfei leading kq to violetgrass rather than cor lapis is a joke abt her passive as well
chongyun working part-time for baizhu was put in specifically bc star thinks the idea is really fun lol
“The Yuheng’s heart is an open secret” is sort of a reference, sort of a cue taken from tianming, by tzitzimeme

according to the notes on tianming, the author based “even the passerbys on the street can tell what’s on the Yuheng’s mind” off the saying 『司馬昭之心，路人皆知』 [even the passerbys on the street know what’s on sima zhao’s mind], which communicates the idea that someone’s intentions are very obvious, with the connotations being that their intentions are evil.

the historical context behind why it communicates obvious evil is bc the original quotation was made by emperor cao mao, who not long later died in an attempted coup against sima zhao

so what i did is that i did what i always like to do with translating and localizing cn, playing with its meanings for my own needs while also bearing the original intent in mind, and basically like.

so 心 does mean both ‘mind’ and ‘heart’ in the same way that, in english, we can say ‘in my heart, i know such-and-such’ or whatever. the symbolic link between the mind and the heart
and then 路人皆知 is itself an idiom meaning ‘open secret’ or ‘well-known to all’

so yes. i did pretty much just translate it in such a way that you could make coy romantic jokes out of it if you wanted LOL

希 [xī], of 希望 [xīwàng] and generally meaning smth like hope or rare, is an associative compound, deriving its meaning from the little stories it tells with its radicals.

in this case, xī is made up of 爻 [yáo] on top and 巾 [jīn] (or 㐅 [wŭ] on the top and 布 [bù] on the bottom, depending on what dictionary you look at)
either way, the idea is the same: you have stitching atop fabric. i’m pretty sure it’s meant to be evocative of needlework, or embroidery, hence the line about venti “embroidering [the stories of the memories] into the very leather of a dragon’s hide for the hope of being understood”

there was a line cut from the zhongven sad old man time where venti referenced the meat-shaped stone, which is exactly what it sounds like.

and i wish i hadn’t had to cut it which is why i’m mentioning it here lol

“akin to grazing one’s fingertips over a glittering surface and coming away with an unnatural sparkle to one’s skin” this might sound kind of crazy to you guys. but i wrote this line thinking about how you’re not supposed to touch the insulation inside of houses directly bc it’s (sometimes) made out of glass.

but anyway, so basically the idea going on there is that you brush your bare hand over the glass wool and come away with all these fine, little irritants embedded into your hand bc TO MY UNDERSTANDING, basically what happens is that touching it is enough to fragment the glass enough to hurt

smth smth xiao believing he could never possibly be clean (of his sins and karmic debts) → leading him to believe he is unworthy of being with venti. this is kind of an established thing already, but i honestly don’t believe that venti would even care if xiao was dirty or imperfect, meaning that the problem here is that xiao believes it should at least matter to venti enough that he, with his strong sense of fairness, will also use it as a reason to deny himself a rlshp with venti.

n ofc this has got to be painful for venti as well, since it’s like. to venti there’s like nothing that should be stopping their rlshp, but xiao is literally incapable of processing the fact that venti’s love is unconditional.

“an old friend will soon have swallows nesting in their eaves” / “i don’t think xiao and i will be getting married”

swallows are commonly associated with marriage and happy couples; to have a swallow nesting on a house means someone there will get married soon
thought a lot about how zhongli should phrase this and settled on “an old friend” rather than calling venti by his name directly bc, like.

so in the time since the last update, i’ve been able to observe the opinions of people whom’st do not like the hc of zhongli and xiao having a father-son type rlshp, which was very fascinating to me bc to ME of course their rlshp parallels that of father and son. see my scribblings on it!
but anyway, i get the impression that people don’t like it bc it ends up infantilizing xiao or simplifying his rlshp with/to zhongli to like “uwu loving parent and child” (which is an insane take to me bc just bc their rlshp parallels that of father and son in my mind does NOT mean they can get out of the messy trauma and power dynamics going on there), and either prefer zhongli and xiao to be old friends (i’m imagining in a different sense than the way zhongli and venti are old friends) or engaged in some kind of pearlrose stevenuniverse situationship.
anyway what i’m trying to say here is that i chose “an old friend” here to lend weight to the interpretation that zhongli is referring to xiao getting married, ostensibly bc he has a much more Known place of residence.

that said, choosing to use “old friend” here can also be seen as foreshadowing for gq engagement. and later fake marriage plot point (that is NOT a spoiler it is literally in the fic’s tags)!

so the reason that the waitress is always giving zhongli and venti hot water despite the ostensibly hot summer weather is bc traditionally, you’d be serving your guests hot water to reassure them that it’s sanitary
i wouldn’t call it a reference, but i wrote the line “there’s a sweetness soaked into his skin” like that bc i’ve had a tab for a xiaoven/kazuhei vampire au called “soak in all the sweetness on our skin” by daintydeity open for months bc i’ve been thinking of adding it to the rec list.
also, i’m sure this is obvious, but zhongli staring at the teapot w/the glaze lilies → reminded of guizhong → ends up sad from thinking abt his friends all someday leaving him or passing away before him.
“i suppose i am just going to be stuck with you buzzing around forever?” / “more or less.” was written with a bit of dialogue from the video game night in the woods in mind:
“thanks for running after me.”
“hehe. you’re stuck with me foreverrrr.”
“i can think of worse fates.”
venti shakes zhongli down for a little 1 kg and ~500k mora bc i looked up the price for 1kg of gold (~77k usd) and converted it to hong kong dollars (somewhere in the ballpark of i think ~628k? at the time) and rolled w/that lol
there’s a random hacky sack tournament happening at the base of wangshu inn bc there are ALWAYS these cliques of old asian people at the park just hacking that sack every morning and evening. i love you old asian hacky sack players.

apparently the game is called 毽球/毽子 in cn and it traditionally uses a weighted shuttlecock rather than a hacky sack, but in honor of the old asian people who are always playing it in the park (and in the interests of not alienating the readers THAT much), i elected to call it hacky sack instead

have any of you guys ever heard of the live-action mulan movie tHAT THEY DID IN 2009. not the disney one the 2009 one made in china.

i don’t expect like any of you to have seen it but anyway i did several years ago and kind of imprinted on it as inspiration for this fic i was writing back then
but anyway! it’s where the line about how “once you put on a general’s armor, your life is no longer your own” comes from :D

i should probably analyze the importance of zhongli not correcting xiao when, during their chat at wangshu inn, he calls zhongli “my lord” again, but rn i’m lazy so hopefully i will simply Remember to do this
xiao is referred to as ‘general jinpeng’ rather than ‘general alatus’ bc well. mostly bc i have beef w/genshin’s localization of liyue, but also bc i wanted to draw the attn to the cn version of that name (金鵬/jinpeng) having ‘peng’, a type of legendary bird, in it
xiao getting absolutely overwhelmed w/dandelion fluff is a bit i took from vixere, by mitsuboo, which, as i mentioned on my page abt chlm, is kind of one of the things directly responsible for my playing genshin altogether

the message on the seeds being “i love-love-love you” is just smth i say all the time bc i picked it up from flip flappers (2016)

paimon complains that lumine’s brother would’ve let her see the letter bc whereas lumine n venti would obviously be bffs, i am entirely convinced that aether’s best friend would unironically be paimon
and FINALLY, venti’s letter to lumine is based off that one princess peach letter meme that goes “dear mario: do NOT come to the castle right now”, which i first saw in the tumblr vanilla extract poll, but as far as i can tell originally comes from a r/me_irl post

alongside this Absurd amount of random here-and-there notes, i also ended up scribbling down a lot of thoughts abt zhongli's feelings regarding the xv matchmaking scheme when writing the ganyu segment, which i have ultimately decided to archive on a separate page.

the discussion question (singular bc there were So Many references this time around):

as some of you might be aware, i am Extremely Sensitive to names. as such, i put A Lot of thought into how characters refer to each other, esp. in the segments featuring zhongli n his conversations w/xiao n venti. i feel like the answer to this is fairly obvious, but i do often find myself wondering anyway: does it give any particular impression when chars each other by certain names give (such as xiao's switching btwn 'zhongli', his 'former lord', 'rex lapis', etc.), or does it just read as an excuse to not use the chars' names over n over again (qwq)?