Keqing: Would You Like to Join the Millelith, Mo Fan?

Liyue, west of Mt. Tianheng.

After accepting a commission from the Adventurers' Guild, Mo Fan came to the mountains of Liyue to gather Qingxin.

Although the reward for gathering Violetgrass was greater, the task was, if not a hundred times harder than gathering Qingxin, at least a million times harder!

Of course, even so, Mo Fan was capable of gathering Violetgrass.

But Mo Fan had always been most averse to tasks where the difficulty was out of proportion to the reward.

After all, he had already worked like a beast of burden for a full hundred lifetimes. Now, of course, it was time to slack off and enjoy life.

With that in mind, Mo Fan gathered Qingxin among Liyue's mountain ravines with much the same attitude as someone out on a picnic.

All he had to do was make sure he gathered enough Qingxin before evening, then take it to the Adventurers' Guild to turn in the commission.

Yet perhaps he was born to toil, or perhaps the hand of fate had intervened by force.

Mo Fan was only halfway through gathering the Qingxin, still in high spirits, when the sounds of a fierce battle came from the distance.

A girl with purple twin tails was holding a longsword, fighting a host of fearsome monsters.

The girl was quite skilled, but an astonishing number of monsters kept sweeping in from all around her.

Even the girl's stamina would clearly reach its limit. She grew increasingly exhausted under the monsters' assault, and had even suffered wounds.

Faced with such a situation, no matter how hardhearted Mo Fan was, he couldn't simply turn a blind eye.

With no other choice, he drew the longsword at his waist and rushed out at once.

In the ruins of Dunyu Ruins.

Keqing was fighting a host of powerful monsters.

As the Yuheng of the Liyue Qixing, she had suddenly received word yesterday that large numbers of monsters were roaming outside Mt. Tianheng.

Although she didn't know what had caused the monsters to appear, Keqing accepted the investigation commission without hesitation and came to where they had been sighted.

Then she regretted coming alone.

The number of monsters in the ruins was beyond anything she had imagined. Even with the power of a Vision, she struggled to fend off so many enemies.

On top of that, the terrain of the ruins was complicated, and she was completely unfamiliar with the surroundings, so in the end she had instead managed to corner herself in a dead end.

If she had brought a unit of Millelith, even the smallest one, she could definitely have wiped out the attacking monsters with ease with her teammates' support.

But with only herself to rely on, even Keqing, the Yuheng, found herself hopelessly outnumbered, and soon suffered numerous wounds.

Just as the girl was feeling frustrated and desperate, a man suddenly charged out of the shadows.

"Smack!"

Mo Fan's arrival drew the attention of quite a few monsters.

These fearsome creatures attacked nearly everything around them indiscriminately, so naturally they immediately set their sights on him.

Among them was even a powerful Geovishap. After absorbing elemental energy from the Ley Lines, its body had grown enormously swollen, and it could even spit out energy spheres containing a mix of different elements.

That was why Keqing had been suppressed and even forced into a predicament.

But facing a mere Geovishap, Mo Fan didn't panic in the slightest. He easily dodged its breath with a single leap, then swung his longsword in a stunning move, tearing through the Geovishap's tough skin in the blink of an eye.

"What!?"

Keqing looked astonished when she saw Mo Fan's move.

She had just fought that Geovishap herself and knew very well how formidable its defenses were.

Even a well-trained Millelith soldier would have difficulty piercing a Geovishap's defenses.

But Mo Fan had done it.

And he had easily torn through the Geovishap's flesh with a Dull Blade that had never been sharpened.

"Squelch!"

The longsword in Mo Fan's hand danced like falling snow as he struck countless times in an instant, utterly defeating the Geovishap with ease.

"Looks like my swordsmanship hasn't gotten rusty."

Mo Fan smiled after killing the Geovishap.

His swordsmanship had not been inherited from any particular school. He had developed its techniques over a hundred cycles of reincarnation, constantly blending different styles of swordsmanship and exploring and training by every means he could think of.

For that reason, his swordsmanship included both the bold, sweeping movements of Mondstadt's Favonius swordsmanship and the subtle techniques of Liyue's swordsmanship, as well as the one-strike kills of Inazuma's various sword schools...

By now, his swordsmanship had reached a level where the formless surpassed the formed, and no move surpassed a move.

He couldn't quite hurt people by flicking flowers and leaves like in a martial arts novel, but he could fight without relying on any weapon at all. Even with a wooden stick, he could unleash sword qi powerful enough to pierce through any opponent.

"!!!"

After Mo Fan defeated the Geovishap, the monster army seemed to realize he was a tough opponent.

With no leader left, they quickly lost all organization and began fleeing in every direction.

Seeing this, Mo Fan had intended to leave without getting involved in any more trouble.

But Keqing, the Yuheng, clearly couldn't let him go just like that.

"Wait! Hold on!"

The girl rushed over at once, disregarding even her wounds to block Mo Fan's path.

"Is something the matter?"

Mo Fan pretended to know nothing and looked at her in confusion. Now that she was closer, he finally recognized her.

She was Keqing, the Yuheng of the Liyue Qixing.

Come to think of it, he had had some connection with her in his past reincarnations...

Mo Fan thought back on the past.

Keqing, meanwhile, looked at Mo Fan with suspicion and surprise, even astonishment, and slowly said, "I'm Keqing, the Yuheng of the Liyue Qixing. May I ask who you are?"

"Mo Fan, an adventurer who just arrived in Liyue."

"An adventurer? No wonder I haven't seen you before."

Keqing nodded, without doubting Mo Fan's identity. "Thanks to your help just now, Mo Fan, with your strength, you must be one of the Adventurers' Guild's aces, a top-class A-rank or even S-rank adventurer."

"No, no, I'm just an ordinary D-rank adventurer."

"What?! D-rank?!"

Keqing found Mo Fan's adventurer rank unbelievable. She couldn't believe that someone so powerful was only D-rank.

Confused as she was, she also felt this was an excellent opportunity to recruit him.

After all, the Liyue Millelith were short of strong people like him.

And the Millelith's benefits were definitely far better than those of a D-rank adventurer.

Keqing confidently made her offer. "Mo Fan, would you like to join Liyue's Millelith? As the Yuheng, I can make you a Millelith centurion directly."

"No need. I'm not interested in joining the army."

"What?"

Keqing was dumbfounded by how utterly unmoved Mo Fan was. She hadn't expected him to reject her so directly.

Most importantly, to keep the girl from pestering him further, Mo Fan turned around and left the scene.

Because of Dunyu Ruins' complicated terrain, Keqing couldn't catch up with him at all, and he completely lost her in the blink of an eye.

"Who on earth is that guy?!"

For a moment, Keqing felt deeply curious about Mo Fan, but she couldn't find him at all and could only give up.