A BOOK Revealed the Truth of the Gnosis YEARS ago (Genshin Impact 4.2 Lore, Theory, & Speculation)

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Spoilers for the 4.2 Archon Quest and the Narzissenkreuz World Quest.

After the 4.2 update, Legend of the Shattered Halberd hits very differently. Maybe Traveler is more like Fischl than we thought. What does this book tell us about Descenders? Who are the 2nd and 3rd Descender? What does King Irmin, the King of Khaenri’ah, have to do with any of this?

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00:00 Introduction
00:39 The Shattered Halberd
04:20 The Descender’s Fragments
09:21 The First Descender
13:00 King Irmin
16:00 Closing Thoughts (BONUS 3rd Descender reveal)

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✨ The Holy Blade https://youtu.be/3xJ1Fqm6do0?si=PIZT1vPZN6_lpmM-

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✨ HOYO-Mix: Love is in the Air; Traum durch die Dammerung; Wandering Clouds; Quo Vadis; Sinking into Oblivion; Pathway to Hidden Isles; Voyage of the Black Crystal
✨ “Se Pone Caliente” by the U.S. Commercial Product Safety Commission (public domain)

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#genshinimpact #hoyocreators #genshinimpact #genshin #原神

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44 thoughts on “A BOOK Revealed the Truth of the Gnosis YEARS ago (Genshin Impact 4.2 Lore, Theory, & Speculation)”

  3. Never did I compare capitano with alphonse elric but that thought will never leave my mind until natlan thanks to you.
    What if somebody will unite the 7 gnoses using alchemy to bring capitano's body back as an equivalent exchange with… idk. A leg? Shall we watch out for future character with a metal arm and a metal leg? Idk man I just love FMAB and genshin.

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  4. It's all adding up in my mind, let me cook a bit 😂
    (I'm gonna call descender as D cuz oh boi I've mentioned this word so many times)

    When the first and second D took over Teyvat by defeating the 7 dragon sovereigns they were left with basically only weak dragons to rule, they need a population or civilization of sorts to make their newly conquered world functional.
    This is where the 3rd D comes in.

    D is someone who has a strong will to change the fate of the world (possibly by changing the way the world functions and laying out new "laws" cuz lol Teyvat has it's own "laws").

    The 3rd D was made or summoned by the God King i.e the heavenly principles making them the "1st Divine Halberd".

    3rd D makes a mechanism for the newfound world and uses it to connect all the 9 realms(7 nations+ light realm enka+ void realm abyss).
    If we assume King Irmin as 3rd D then it means he creates Irminsul (axis mundi) to connect all 9 realms thus the link to his name.

    3rd D eventually descends into madness by overusing his powers(or maybe he got cursed idk lol) and thus Celestia decides to eliminate him and separate his remains into 7 parts or "gnoses" (thus gnoses are remains of the 3rd D as well as shattered halberds). Celestia hands over the 7 gnoses to the victors of archon war.

    The 3rd D knows the true nature of this world (cuz he basically gave the "laws" ie irminsul) and thus creates (or summons) the last 2 peices of himself(making them shattered halberds as well) to collect all his remnants to save the world from the mistake he did by making irminsul(which probably is a perpetual samsara simulator??).
    So 7 gnoses(made by celestia)+2 shattered halberds(made by 3rd D himself) make a total of 9 shattered halberds !!!
    This is also consistent with some halberds being sentient (sibling+traveler).

    The last halberds(traveler+sibling) are indeed divine (cuz they are halberds) and thus no one really knows their true name AND the traveler happens to have enough "will" to change the fate of the world and thus gets classified as the 4th D.

    Lmao I'm sorry for any inconsistencies which you may have noticed but there's just too much to unfold. 😂

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  5. The Gnosis being made off of the body of the third descender, instantly made me think that he was killed. But with what happened to Focalors/Furina, i began to rethink that, since it's cannon now that you can separate someone's power/divinity without killing/destroying them completely. What if after having his powers usurped to make the Gnosis, he now just walks through Teyvat as a husk of his former self (until Pierro found him), a shell cladded in armor wandering and searching for revenge. I mean, he is referred to as "the strongest human" which could imply something more, or maybe i'm just crazy but as an official member of the tinfoil hat brigade, i must partake in the crack consumption. But if it's not him i would say maybe it's Nibelung, because if there is anyone with a "will to rival a entire world" it sure would be the extremely pissed off king of dragons. Another thing that makes me think that the third might still be alive somewhere, is because of the heart beat we hear when we attune to the very first Statue of the Seven, in Mondstadt at the beginning of the game.

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  7. Wild theory : 1st decender (heavenly principal) is dead. 2nd decender (shades) now rule but weak. 3rd decender is being resurrected by fatui/tsaritsa.
    Tsaritsa will kill 2nd decender and the dragons (good ones like Neuvilette) together with 4th decender (us – treveler) will bring peace to war between earlier decenders.

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  12. There's a really good theory out there about how Nibelung (the second who came) is the Third descender.
    Because he left Teyvat and became "something new" to then return and Battle the Primordial one.

    And Thanes knew they could not truly kill Nibelung, so they split his corpse into the seven Gnosis to keep him permanently trapped.

    But the Tsarista is collecting the seven Gnosis to revive Nibelung

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  16. Maybe the third descender is our sibling? When we got trapped at the start of the game by the sustainer she could have did that to them (separate their divinity from their physical form and put it into the 7 gnosis).
    Which would explain why there is a record of them in the tree because they no longer had their divinity and became a product of this world at that point. They travelled through this world and joined the Abyss to regain what they lost but was tricked into thinking what they were missing is their home (Khaenri'ah).

    Anyway good video!

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  18. 5:45 since i always have zhongli on the brain i got instantly reminded of zhongli's hello voice line: "And you, Traveler? What name will you be signing on this contract?" It seems like a part of a conversation… I wonder if the traveler told him their real name. (Actually what even were the terms of THAT contract? And how canon are voicelines anyway lmao)

    8:25 so i guess focalor's guillotine being a sword isn't just a sword of damocles reference :O swords are the best weapons when you need to kill god, noted

    13:00 i'd like to present an alternate idea: the thought of the king of khaenri'ah naming himself or named by others after the primordial one seems like the exact sort of gutsy sacrilegious behavior i'd expect from them tbh. maybe the guy even went on some kind of ritual (hanging under the tree like in the myths) and obtained knowledge of (or knowledge that could rival that of) the primordial one. maybe the PO operates on fairytale rules and his name can be legitimately stolen somehow, and thats what king irmin did.

    i'm gonna be rotating so many ideas in my head. thanks for the lovely vid!

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  21. You know, I had a very similar thought yesterday. "What if Irminsul, too, is the remains of a Descender? Like Irmin from the Shattered Halberd? After all, it is a "will" that can reshape an entire world, like a Descender is supposed to be. But wouldn't that mean that the other Halberds are also Descenders, not Shades like I previously thought?" But I didn't put it together with the Gnosis reveal yet.
    I'm just realizing that, way back in Fischl's GAA storyline, I actually came up with the same idea of the Halberds as Descenders(though at that point, we didn't have the term and just knew of the Primordial One and the Second Who Came) and then immediately discarded it because I was too attached to the Shades idea and I dismissed that storyline as Fischl's fan fiction.

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  23. I think often about the thing about aether being a beast that could swallow the world and fishl's line about swallowing all dreams, it's as if aether is the head of oroboros, and khanreah, the dream yet to be dreamed is oroboros tail.

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  24. I unironically think aether himself could be the third descender, like thinking back to the parable of the tree, it's said that the primordial one wanted the king gardener's tree to mend the beams in his pavillion, a bit like how celestia needed the gnosis to anchor in their authority after the second war. And we know istaroth helped the gardener "keep" his tree throu a branch, that branch or that new tree was then the traveler ending up at teyvat in the begining of our journery. This also explains why would the heavenly principals just randomly dump us somewhere when they obviously had yhe upper hand in that clash-
    It's a bit fargetched but until more is revealed about descenders imma hold onto this thought.

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  25. Wanted to note that Seelies used to live and had their palaces in what is now known as the Dark Sea, which is where Enkanomiya is supposedly located. The halls of heaven, where celestia, the three moon sister and the sun chariot used to reside, are also a thing.
    So the 7 earthly nations + 2 esotheric realms equals 9 actual places that could potentially correspond with the 9 realms in the stories.

    There's also the fact that the 7 nations could not exactly be considered realms, but the powers they were built from are. Fontaine is tied to the Primordial Sea, while Sumeru is to the Irminsul and the realm of dreams. Liyue has the adeptus realms (which pale in comparison with Rex Lapis' realm per Madam Ping's explanation) and Inazuma has the plain of Euthymia. The only one that doesn't have something like that is Mondstadt but Venti is pretty sus by himself, or it could be that the whole sky is the anemo realm (where does Venti go when he sleeps for hundreds of years?).

    There's also something curious in Neuvillette's character story's lines where he implies that the primordial elements used to be balanced and not affect each other as much before the Celestial Nails and 3rd Descender were used to stabilize the world before its collapse. It was only after this (creation of the gnosis) that the primordial elements began to devour eachother. Wheter these primordial energies are the seven elements or the light/dark pneumousia or both it's curious to note. The fact that the elemental reactions could be because of an imbalanced system made to keep the world from falling apart is CRAZY.

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  31. the gnosis remember me of the anime no game no life, that has something similar as chess pieces that are in possesion of powerful persons and defeating them u get their chess piece and after you get them all you can challenge God for a chess game and possible become god crazy

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  32. The part about the traveler name actually makes so much sense now, as you start the game you get to name the traveler and it is the name they always use to introduce them selves, I always wondered why we can name the traveler if they already have their own name

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  33. Bruhhh. I also thought pierro is third descender because i thought the reason why tsaritsa collecting the gnosis is because she inlove with pierro and wants to get his body but the story says the third descender is confirmed dead.

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  37. I feel like I really need to delve properly into Shattered Halberd; 3.3 really opened up the floodgates when it comes to in-game reality, in-game fiction and whatever silly trick you can use to convey facts-so-that-they-dont-look-like-facts – therefore I cant help but overanalyse every piece of literature, legend, story and whatnot hoping to catch a glimpse of its true meaning. How much of it should be taken at face value, and how much actually hints at big reveals later in the road (probably as vaguely as possible — Genshin is a huge long term project, and while it’s pretty safe to say that the writers DO have the main plot points and underlying mysteries already jotted down, I think it would only be safe to leave some room to redirect the plot a lil bit here and there)? So much stuff has been suspicious since early game – the aforementioned Shattered Halberd, but also boar princess, pale princess (whose interest from the Abyss Order is surely very normal and it’s also very normal that in game you can’t find the other books but they have been found in the game files and THIS IS NORMAL THIS IS FINE) or even the lil battle pass story (lots of princes and princesses, huh)… the more we go on with the game, the more lore we learn, the more I FEEL like we only need a few more pieces to connect everything, but it’s still SO confusing (and exciting. But especially confusing).

    POINTLESS PREAMBLES ASIDE I’ve kinda always latched onto the very common interpretation that “Genshin is an Honkai spinoff” (which I still believe to be true to an extent due to some back and forth references that feel a bit Too On The Nose to be just tributes) and, while I don’t know much about Honkai the 3rd other than what friends who actively play told me, I know that the game has an “Imaginary tree” which is tldr the origin of all universes. I kinda always assumed that, if genshin and honkai take place in the same extended universe, irminsul and imaginary tree are somewhat connected (with irminsul being a branch of said tree?)… but to be honest it’s mostly a placeholder theory I kinda keep there until something more convincing comes up. While watching the video I initially wasn’t super sold on the whole “PO created the irminsul tree” idea, but at the same time if I let go of the aforementioned Imaginary Tree connection I’m here like… why Not? Why couldn’t PO have created this massive tree? After all, the imaginary tree and irminsul seem to serve similar, but different purposes – the former is more of a “origin of all universes” per say, while the latter, at least considering what we’ve learned so far, is more of an information storage – with information, without focusing on the why’s or how’s bc I wouldnt know where to start, being the literal lymph that allows this world to literally function properly. Venturing into the irminsul to seek knowledge is also apparently a preferred pastime of the big brained guys in teyvat, considering that it’s something Hexenzirkel does on the regular and it’s something sages used to do in times of crisis (?) according to the Prayers for Wisdom/Destiny/Illumination/Springtime artifacts.
    Another small digression (or maybe not): there is a connection here between PO/the war for the second throne and Irminsul that has always bothered me, and that is how white branches always pop up near celestial nails. We have white irminsul-y trees or branches in Dragonspine, the Chasm, Tsurumi and the Eternal Oasis — and we don’t really have much remaining written history talking about these nails, except for Sal Vindagnyr. If it wasn’t for it you could argue that the branches could have popped up After the nails were sent down, but we know that in Dragonspine the nail fell very close to their “large white tree of great importance”, first causing it to wither, and then, when the nail split in a number of pieces, straight up shattering the white tree.
    And if the purpose of the nails was to suppress abyssal goo from oozing out from the depths of the world, why would you also PURPOSEFULLY target the these all-important trees (which at this point are probably in some way or another ramifications of irminsul itself)? The answer honestly could be as easy as “messing up with the trees makes the ley line disorder go brrrrrrrr”, but if PO really crated humans AND Irminsul as well, I now struggle even more to reconcile the actions of an all-divine being who deeply loved and cared for their creation and only wished for their happiness and prosperity, only for them to suddenly go no-contact with humans and actively destroy their habitats and even causing mass extinction events in the process (see the Chasm and its funky fossils). But hey, gods work in mysterious ways, I guess!

    I’ve babbled more than enough, so I’m just gonna wrap it up with some thoughts about the connection between King Irmin and Irminsul. As you mentioned, Genshin loooooves to mishmash different elements from different existing mythologies and whatnot (it’s not THAT funny, and hey, it’s fiction, it doesn’t have to be 1:1 true to real life mythology, but the fact that Enkanomiya is some sort of Greek-Japanese Atlantis mixture reference thing never fails to make me smile if I think a bit too long about it) which makes it confusing both when you try to connect things belonging to real myths AND when you try to figure out the in-world mythos itself. What’s true however is that as we keep getting confirmation over confirmation that Teyvat is, at the end of the day, cyclical. Things repeat, the future you can read in the stars looks more and more like a past that’s already happened, and that is just happening again with different characters and different contexts. I struggle to be more specific about this and actually pinpoint some definitive examples, but some of the circumstances of Khaenriah as a whole could definitely fit within the circumstances of PO descending or even the war for the second throne (something something something having to suppress abyssal goo after second who came showed up VS having to fend off abyssal creatures once the Veil of Sin was torn away). Something about Khaenriah is deeply engrained within the “truth of this world” and the way Teyvat functions — and oh, oh I hope that the next Dain quest will bring some light to it, the time is SO ripe. And I mention him specifically, both because his alleged constellation has always bothered me (the ‘snake ring’ — the Ouroboros, mayhaps? The self-eating snake, the symbol of the cycle of destruction and creation?) and because of his title.

    Bough keeper.

    With all this speculation about King Irmin, the Irminsul and PO, what’s Dain’s duty, exactly?

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  39. About the Identity of the 3rd descender…I think you should check out the theories that Childe might be the 3rd Descender's reincarnation, bc of the ajax tale from the Ballad of Fjord, also the prince from the pale princess, his corpse was described as a "stars corpse", the death of the light prince might be a metaphor for the archons getting their powers and authority from their gnosis which is the corpse of the 3rd descender. (more details I forgot to include are in twt yall can search it its pretty detailed)

    Also, Childe has been associated or maybe even referred with stars at least 3 times so far;

    1.Liyue AQ title "A new star approaches"

    2.His BiS being the "Polar Star"

    3. Fontaine AQ "To the Stars in the Shining Depths" (who else was floating, chilling in the deep sea that time lmao)

    Also the number 3 has so many nod to Childe aside from 11; the 3rd son of the Family, he trained 3 months in the abyss even tho its just 3 days in Teyvat time, he is the 3rd banner(lol), the only weekly boss that has 3 phases so far, he has 3 names…

    This may be a reach but so far Childe hasnt touched a Gnosis…..maybe bc something may happen to him is he were to touch one bc he is the reincarnation of the 3rd? Gnosis is from the corpse of the 3rd des after all…

    Now its theorized that the Tsaritsa is planning to revive the 3rd descender using the Gnoses, maybe thats where theyre gonna use childe, the 3rd des reincarnation to battle Celestia??

    Whats super sus is that, if all of those theories come true, Childes line "I'll crush the thrones of gods beneath my heal, i'll conquer the world" makes so much sense now.

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  40. And we're back to the Shattered Halberd. lmao
    But seriously though, nice video all around to circle back on this book after revelations and new info in the 4.2 patch quests.

    I do think despite you having your brain meltdown trying to parse through the inconsistencies with comparing the fairytale story to the Descenders and the Gnoses, you're theories has merit. The thing with the fairytales within the world of Teyvat and how at least some are used as allegorical tales on past histories is how far the deviation from the the true history can be made ig. The current Thexlie(?) event I do think gives us an indication of how far the allegory in fairytales can be taken in some form since–

    (spoilers for the event)
    –we basically witness the mother turning her story with her child into a fairytale. (And interestingly enough see how such a creation seems to then affect "reality"? Not sure how literal we should take that though at this moment.) I think we can safely say at least that the allegorical fairytales are not going to be one-to-one with the actual history, and probably because these histories needs to be "hidden" for one reason or another. But as for why the inconsistencies in specific are happening…? I honestly have no clue, though your theory about Mr. Nine cobbling together a number of historic events together does hold water.

    All in all, these aspects of Genshin's story I do really love cause it's an interesting exploration of the real life process of recording histories, and more relevant in this case, the erasure of history and how people try to retain records despite such actions, though filtered through towards a high fantasy/soft scifi(?) setting of course.

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  43. Whenever anyone starts drawing any conclusions from the name similarity between Irminsul and King Irmin, I remember that in the original, they don't read anywhere close. They're 世界树 (Shìjièshù) and 伊尔明 (Yī'ěrmíng), respectively. I still struggle finding the reason why the tree is called Irminsul, though, as the best fitting translation from the original would be Yggdrasil. So maybe there's something behind it in the end but there's certainly zero name similarity for any chinese, japanese, or korean player.

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