Deep in the Tsaritsa’s palace, the conversation about the Gnoses takes a darker turn. When the Traveler pushes back and asks whether Snezhnaya’s methods need to be this extreme, Anastasya answers with a threat that has been hanging over her nation the whole time. Snezhnaya is not just cold and poor. It is marked.
Quick answer: A Nail of Retribution is a celestial pillar the Heavenly Principles cast down on civilizations that exceed the limits set for them. Snezhnaya’s forbidden technology keeps one permanently aimed at it.
What a Nail of Retribution is in Genshin Impact
The Nails of Retribution are the same objects players have been walking past since Version 1.2, better known as Celestial Nails. They look like enormous broken pillars, stone on the outside with a blue crystalline core exposed at the shattered end and a celestial motif carved at the top. They are not decorative ruins. Each one carries enough power to distort the Ley Lines of the region it sits in.
Their purpose has always been dual. Legends describe the heavens dropping them to purify the Abyssal corruption left behind after the Funerary Year, and Nahida has noted they can stabilize powers that should not exist in Teyvat at all, such as forbidden knowledge. But the Heavenly Principles also used them as weapons of execution against any civilization that reached for too much power, wiping some out entirely. Hyperborea was one of the places that suffered for it.
What a nail leaves behind is easy to spot. Impact craters, permanently rewritten weather, and ecosystems that never recovered.
| Site | What the nail left behind |
|---|---|
| Dragonspine (Skyfrost Nail) | Buried Sal Vindagnyr, shattered its Irminsul tree, froze the mountain |
| The Chasm | Destroyed Lang-Gan; the impact formed the canyon itself |
| Tsurumi Island | Permanent fog cover |
| Desert of Hadramaveth / Mt. Damavand | Raging sandstorms and a crater at the mountain’s center |
That is the precedent Anastasya is working from. Nails of Retribution are not a hypothetical punishment. Teyvat’s map is covered in the places where they already landed.
Why Snezhnaya lives under a Nail of Retribution
The explanation starts with geography rather than ambition. Snezhnaya sits in land that barely supports human life, and survival there required constant invention. To feed, heat, and defend its people, the nation pushed both its civilian and its military technology past the ceiling the Heavenly Principles tolerate.
The consequence is permanent. Snezhnaya has never been forgiven for crossing that line, so it lives with a Nail of Retribution poised to fall on it, capable of erasing the country the way earlier nails erased Sal Vindagnyr and Lang-Gan. Three things follow from that, in Anastasya’s telling:
- The harshness of the land forced the technological overreach in the first place.
- The overreach broke boundaries the Heavenly Principles set, not laws Snezhnaya agreed to.
- The threat of annihilation from the sky is constant, not a one-off warning.
Snezhnaya has not been struck. The nail is a standing sentence waiting to be carried out, which is exactly what makes it useful leverage in the conversation.
How the nail justifies the Tsaritsa’s methods
The threat is the answer to the Traveler’s objection. Anastasya is not collecting Gnoses out of greed for divine rank. She argues that no Archon, operating inside the authority Celestia handed out, can stop a nail from falling. The only way to remove the threat is to outgrow the system that issued it, which means acquiring power beyond an Archon’s normal ceiling so she can confront the Heavenly Principles and the four Shades of Life, Death, Time, and Space directly.
She then walks the Traveler and Paimon through a hidden door that opens inside the snowflake emblem on the chamber wall, leading to the inner sanctuary where the rest of her plan is kept. The nail overhead is the pressure that makes all of it non-negotiable for her.
The Celestial Nails are already stirring after Ronova’s death
The threat stopped being background lore once Celestia’s Ruler of Death fell. Ronova’s final cutscene shows her stepping out of a portal beside an enormous celestial pillar, red feathers scattering around her, reckoning with her own end.
She who controls death… cannot know the experience of dying.
She then forms a purple and gold orb in her claws, calling on the Eitr that Hyperborea hid in the depths of the Shadow Realm, and drives it into the side of the pillar. Fractures spread across the structure and pieces break away as she describes what she is doing as her parting gift to the world.
The reaction spreads across Teyvat. The nail cast down over Snezhnaya begins glowing and emitting sound, which is what the Traveler and Paimon discuss with Alyosha out in the snow. Elsewhere, Albedo stays at the transformed Skyfrost Nail floating above Dragonspine to study what it is doing to the ecosystem, Xiao watches The Chasm on Rex Lapis’ orders while the Millelith and adepti investigate, Yae Miko senses the ominous celestial power after drawing a fortune of Great Misfortune, Dehya and Candace organize desert patrols around the pillar of light, and Mavuika readies the Natlan tribes.
Where the Nail of Retribution comes up in Version 7.1
Anastasya’s explanation lands during the Archon Quest chapter Light and Shadow, Intertwined, in the palace audience scene with Danica present. The threat comes up shortly before the objective switches to “Follow the Tsaritsa” and she opens the hidden door in the wall.
You will know you have cleared the whole sequence when control returns on a balcony overlooking Snezhnaya’s snowy capital, the achievement The Seven pops, and the next objective reads “Go to the Armory Palace.” At that point the nail has gone from a piece of ancient ruin lore to the reason the Fatui exist.
