Because I have a lot of thoughts on that current Genshin event and I’ve collected all the Echoing Conches available so far, a roughly organized timeline for your theorizing convenience–
-A ship and its people are stranded on the then-called Haar Islands. Among these people are a grandmother and her child, who came from a far-off village. They will never return.Â
-Decades pass. The granddaughter grows old. A family heirloom from their village is passed down several times(I count at least five generations.)Â
-Over this time, the people learn to adapt to this environment. However, over the generations the tide encroaches on the island more and more, swallowing up lower islands and giving the people less and less space to live. (The heirloom is left one of the lower islands while evacuating people to higher ground)Â
-An Inazuman pirate ship, possibly under command of a man named Ako Domeki, steals a samurai puppet and escapes the Shogunate. However it is shipwrecked on the Haar Islands, split completely in half, unsailable and much of its treasure lost.Â
-A father is attacked by Hillichurls, and rescued by someone. Later, despite the wariness of his mother a young boy insists on thanking ‘The General’(the Samurai puppet) and builds a small shrine to honor it.Â
-One of the pirates and a girl who grew up on the island work together, pooling their knowledge to successfully navigate out of the fog, leaving the archipelago entirely. On the outermost isle, they leave behind a mural documenting how they were rescued and brought aboard another ship.Â
-The conches in the last collection, Island Bygones, are deeply concerned with evacuating some final people off the island and the tide coming in. I think it possible that, between the last recording and the Traveller’s arrival, the islands were completely covered by the tide– possible until ‘Dodo-king’ activated the mechanisms to raise the archipelago above the water.Â
Of course, this does beg the question why such mechanisms exist, how long they’ve existed for, and who Dodo-king is to know such mechanisms exist and how to operate them when the people who lived on these islands for generations and certainly are no longer here now make no mention of them in any conches… I don’t have enough info to want to speculate any further right now.Â
Edit: I somehow completely missed the existence of the Inverted Ruins. Yeah, now that I’ve found them, between them being upside-down, older than the people who were shipwrecked there, the mechanisms, and Celestia not being visible from the Golden Apple Archipelago… It’s very suspiciously Khaenri’ah-like. (No Ruin Guards so far tho… Interesting)
