Midway through Chapter VII: Act IV “A Rekviem for the Underworld,” Genshin Impact 7.1 drops the Snezhnaya action entirely and switches to an illustrated storybook sequence set in Khaenri’ah. Two young scholars, Eftirvit and Hroptatyr, sit under a tree and talk about celestial physics. By the end of the flashback, one of them is standing at a grave in the rain and the other is walking away with an umbrella.
Quick answer: Hroptatyr found a Crimson Moon method to extend Professor Mimameith’s life, then abandoned it after the ritual over his grimoire failed. That refusal, and what he hid, is what broke him and Eftirvit apart.
Everything below describes story beats from Act IV, including the outcome of the flashback.
Who Eftirvit and Hroptatyr are in Khaenri’ah
Both men belong to the Universitas Magistrorum, the scholarly institution of Khaenri’ah under the Eclipse Dynasty. In the flashback they are still students, wearing their house colors — Eftirvit in white and blue robes with a star brooch, Hroptatyr in lavender and white with a solar emblem. Their dialogue under the tree covers Azosite extraction, catching shooting stars, defying gravity, and whether the essence of Celestia could be summoned at all.
| Scholar | Later standing | Name meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Hroptatyr | President of the Universitas Magistrorum, Chief Royal Mage “The Wise” | A name of Odin, “sage” |
| Eftirvit (also “Vit”) | Vice-President, passed over for the presidency | Old Norse for “afterthought” |
The naming is doing deliberate work. Hroptatyr’s title, The Wise, sits opposite a name that reads as foolishness — roughly the Prometheus and Epimetheus split. Rhinedottir later says the Universitas would not stop fawning over Hroptatyr, and that Eftirvit envied him for the office he never got. The flashback shows where that resentment starts, long before either man had a title.
When the flashback plays in Act IV
Act IV opens in Snezhnaya, not Khaenri’ah. A Mora coin is flipped across a restaurant table, the scuffle that follows is broken up, and the Traveler is eventually brought before the Tsaritsa in the grand hall.
From there the act moves into an arena fight against a winged automaton, with Vesna pulling power from the room’s energy orbs to force the machine down.
The Tsaritsa steps onto the arena floor herself and freezes the automaton with an ice phoenix, and Rhinedottir — titled Ruler of Life — arrives to reclaim her power core.
Only after that does the art style change. The Khaenri’ah sequence is drawn as flat illustrated panels with subtitled dialogue, and it runs uninterrupted from the tree conversation to the funeral before the act returns to the present day.
Professor Mimameith’s illness and the Abyss project
The pair visit their teacher, Professor Mimameith, who is elderly and confined to a wheelchair. She tells them she hopes to live long enough to see what they achieve.
Afterwards, the two scholars talk about what is actually wrong with her. Her physical decline is not ordinary age — it is damage from her earlier work on His Majesty’s Abyss research project, and it cannot be treated. That detail matters, because it frames everything that follows as a problem caused by forbidden research and, in their minds, solvable only by more of it.
The Crimson Moon grimoire and the failed ritual
Hroptatyr is the one who brings the idea. He arrives with a research grimoire and proposes a method drawn from the power of the Crimson Moon that could extend the professor’s lifespan. It is presented as his own independent work, not a Universitas assignment, and Eftirvit is brought in as the second pair of hands.
The attempt fails in front of them. Hroptatyr channels the Crimson Moon magic over the open book, the sigil holds for a moment, then shatters. He immediately declares the underlying theory fatally flawed and closes the subject. What the sequence never shows is whether that judgment is honest, and the flashback is built so you notice the gap.
The Crimson Moon is not an abstract concept in Khaenri’ah. It names the dynasty that ruled before the Eclipse Dynasty, the era when a crimson moon hung over the kingdom and alchemy was at its height.
The rift between the two scholars, and the funeral
Eftirvit does not accept the verdict. He confronts Hroptatyr for quitting and, more pointedly, for hiding what the failed ritual actually revealed. Hroptatyr says nothing useful in return and walks off carrying the tome. The friendship does not recover.
The flashback closes at Professor Mimameith’s grave. Eftirvit stands in the rain, and Hroptatyr passes behind him under an umbrella, remarks that it is raining, and keeps walking. Two beats define the split, and both belong to Hroptatyr — the research he abandoned, and the grief he declined to share.
- Hroptatyr proposes the Crimson Moon method and supplies the grimoire.
- The ritual sigil shatters and he calls the theory fatally flawed.
- Eftirvit accuses him of concealing the truth rather than failing at it.
- Mimameith dies; Hroptatyr walks past the grave without stopping.
How the flashback connects to Ronova and the Five Sinners
In his youth, Hroptatyr pursued knowledge beyond all limits and sought a way to prevent death; those ambitions would ultimately become his condemnation. He eventually held the offices of President of the Universitas Magistrorum and Chief Royal Mage, earned exceptional favor from Khaenri’ah’s Four Pillars, and seized one-sixth of the world-shaking power absorbed by the Traveler’s sibling during the assault on King Irmin’s castle. That deed placed him among the Five Sinners of Khaenri’ah, and when the cataclysm arrived, he remained inactive alongside the other four.
Later in the same act, the Crimson Moon storyline connects directly to Ronova. She is the Crimson Moon’s entity and the Ruler of Death, and five hundred years ago she placed Khaenri’ah under the Curse of Immortality. Therefore, when Pierro appears beside Lumine and Dainsleif carrying the untested Eye of the Fatui, he is explicitly acting on that five-hundred-year-old memory.
Read in that order, the storybook sequence is less a side story than a thesis statement. A method for cheating death existed in Khaenri’ah, a scholar found it, and he walked away from it and from the person it was meant to save — while the being who owned that power spent centuries never once feeling what death is like.
