Originally uploaded to Bilibili.tv
Well now, it looks like miHoYo did decide to give us a little hint about the story even in this totally filler event. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
A long time ago I looked into real world alchemy because I thought it might be related to Genshin's version. It turns out it's very hard to achieve the ultimate goal of alchemy, the Magnum Opus. So back then I proposed that Albedo, who was looking into it, would get it wrong. The four steps of the Magnum Opus are Nigredo
Albedo
or Chalk which is what Calx means. Citrinitas
and finally Rubedo.
However those last two are tricky on account of how nobody has actually achieved either of them for obvious reasons. It's very easy to burn stuff and it's very easy to create chalk. But turning that chalk into any kind of precious metal is just not gonna happen.
But it is still powerful stuff in fiction so what could be the consequences of an attempt at the Magnum Opus gone wrong?
Actually the only reason I even looked into real world alchemy was because I found something while looking at another character, Fischl. In the book Flowers for Princess Fischl there's a bunch of notes from the author and one of them was a very odd term for English speakers: Gesamtkunstwerk. Call me surprised when I looked it up and found out it's technically a word in English, an accepted loanword from its original German. (like debut from French or ninja from Japanese) It means a perfect work of art. Guess what Magnum Opus means. However in the story the Gesamtkunstwerk is a monster, something for the heroine to fight. I think that's the consequence and Albedo thought so too.
In the recent event we were given four exams to test our proficiency in potion making. These tests as explained by Sucrose were created by Albedo and it turns out he flipped the order of Citrinitas and Rubedo, considering Citrinitas as the final step. Oops.
In real world alchemy sometimes people did actually believe that Citrinitas was the final step. After all the point was to create gold and gold is yellow right? This is actually one of the pitfalls and has been used as an excuse for why nobody ever got it done. Looking into it it becomes clear that Rubedo is that final step, the perfecting of the enriched Albedo, the Citrinitas into the philosopher's stone which as all Harry Potter fans know is red. Gold itself is not quite yellow and as it turns out was considered "red" by alchemists.
This real world misunderstanding was also brought over to Genshin. Late into the Narzissenkreuz World Quest we descend from the top a tower and can interact with a very unassuming note.
Rubedo is the correct final step. But actually looking back at this it told us even more. Albedo learned all of his alchemy from his master and creator, Rhinedottir who is from Khaenri'ah. It seems the researcher long suspected that Khaenri'ahns got the formula wrong. But unlike Albedo and Rhinedottir, it's our MC that saw these notes meaning this future mistake and the threat of the Gesamtkunstwerk is still in play and short of Albedo explaining what the Magnum Opus is our MC won't know to warn him that he's got it wrong. That's something else we can gather from this event actually. They don't really know what they read back in the tower because they're not alchemists or researchers. And they probably won't know until it becomes clear that the big monster that Albedo transformed into came from his alchemy research which fixated on yellow not red.
Pretty cool we can learn this much from such a tiny inclusion into a filler event, isn't it?