"Normally gods happen when humans ascend to godhood, but if you worship a rock or something then it can ascend to godhood too."

".....Okay, you know what, I am going to come back to this. Later."

This is possibly the most baffling explanation that Merrin has ever received for what is supposed to be an event that actually happens regularly in physical reality. To the point that she expects it would be less confusing if he started with the full in-depth version that includes math. Except she would be kind of surprised if he knows one. 

"Thank you for answering some of my questions. I still don't actually have fewer questions but I think - hope - they're at least better-informed ones. I should probably show you how to make oral rehydration solution, it's not actually that complicated, and then I should go check on my patient." 

"I'd like to learn how to make that! I always prepared herbs for a-jie."

The talisman gives a sense that "a-jie" means "sister, affectionate."

"--I should redo your talisman too so it doesn't wear out unexpectedly, it only lasts for 24 hours."

"Oh. Good to know. Yes, please do that." 

She gets the scale and sugar and salt, and shows him the right quantities per approximately-this-much-water. It's not as precise as what she could do if she had actually-good measurement devices but it doesn't have to be perfect, for this purpose; if they want to reinvent IV saline then they need better than this, though. 

"- Your sister is - the one who's the best doctor in the world?" she thinks to clarify. And then doesn't ask if she's now on the other side of the war. It's relevant information and probably Wen Ning would endorse her asking even if it's upsetting for him, but - Merrin is herself still feeling kind of fragile, right now, and doesn't want to go there. Yet. 

"Yes. No one but a-jie could have done the golden core transfer."

...After having learned several more facts about this world, Merrin is much less surprised that nobody objected to the golden core transfer on ethical grounds. It...sounds like Wei Wuxian agreed to it, at least sort of, and it doesn't seem obviously more dubious than whatever happened with Wen Ning's capture and the Jin supply train. 

She steels herself. "Where is she? Does - she know where you are, now?" 

"She's with the Wen clan. We... thought I would be safer as a prisoner of war, because a bunch of people could have easily figured out that I rescued zhuren and Sect Leader Jiang from the Wen. Her involvement was easier to hide."

What. 

That was not Merrin's previous understanding of whatever happened! Though it's not so much replacing a different story as filling in an area that had previously been swathed in fog.

"...I don't think that anyone's told me exactly what happened there," she manages. "I - imagine it's probably not something you would really like to talk about, more, but it seems pretty important to understand. In general, and - because I'm trying to wrap my head around this war so I can see if there's an obvious path to making it stop. And because your sister is the best doctor in the world and that means she's someone I would very much like to talk to, eventually. What...happened leading up to Wei Wuxian and Sect Leader Jiang needing to be rescued? And, um, why did you and your sister decide to help." 

"I rescued zhuren and Sect Leader Jiang because zhuren told me I was good at archery when I was fourteen," he says, as if this is a completely reasonable reason to rescue someone. 

That mostly makes sense to Merrin! Or at least she has no particular reason to point at it and declare that it doesn't make sense. 

(Merrin is, perhaps, assuming that this is standing in for 'they were friends for a while', and also assuming that no one would need very much additional reason to rescue someone just in order to prevent bad things happening to them, without needing to know them specifically as an individual.) 

"I see. Um, what - was your involvement, and what was your sister's involvement, and why was hers easier to hide?" 

"I betrayed my family, broke into where Sect Leader Jiang was being held, freed him, and smuggled both zhuren and Sect Leader Jiang to my sister, who likes me too much to turn me down when I have two of the people our family is at war with on her doorstep."

"Right. ...And, um, was this before or after the Cloud Recesses got burned? I'm just trying to put together a mental timeline of all the events that I heard happened. I'm - guessing your family wasn't at war with the Jiang Sect when you were fourteen, but I don't actually know how long this has been going on, and, um, how long conflicts like this have tended to last in the past, if it's in fact the case that something like this has happened before. I don't have any dath ilan referents for it." 

"It was after the burning of the Cloud Recesses. The war has been going on for a few years and most wars only last a couple of years? I don't think it's going to be in a stalemate for longer than another year or two."

YEARS. AAAAAAAH.

"Right." Merrin turns it over in her mind. Think of it as a logic problem, she reminds herself firmly. It can be an internal-screaming problem on her own time.

"Wen Ning, is there - some objective that the Wen sect is trying to achieve here, where if they could get it another way they'd be willing to stop the war now? ...Um, it's fine if it's not very plausible, it's easier to do problem solving if you loosen constraints like that and just thing of ideas period and then later you can worry about workability."

(Also, she is from another world that knows how to build planes, and knows the true math of why this sort of horrible equilibrium shouldn't happen and there should, instead, be something better, that everyone can agree is better. Merrin does not, herself, deeply and fully understand the explicit math. But she's been trained, very hard, to see the world from that angle.) 

"Wen Ruohan would like to be the chief cultivator for the rest of his life and then have Wen Chao or Wen Xu inherit with no serious competitors for the position."

"What is the 'chief cultivator'? Is that a....leadership position? - I'm guessing it's not just within the Wen sect or nobody else would care but, um, I didn't realize you had any kind of higher-level Governance structures, and if you do I want more information on that and why they didn't manage to stop this from happening." 

"The Chief Cultivator handles all the relationships between all the different clans-- disputes over territory and tribute and people driving monsters into other people's territory and so on. And they didn't stop it because Wen Ruohan is the Chief Cultivator, who else could he appeal to?"

".........I feel like that system has some really obvious problems." 

"We are having a war, Mistress Dath."

Merrin takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Forces her shoulders to relax. 

"...Sorry. I know that wasn't helpful. I just mean - I feel like almost anyone could have looked at that system from the outside, way before there was an actual war, and noticed that there was a -" Baseline has a single word for what she wants to say - two syllables for the generic version, three syllables for the more specific thing she means here, but on reflection given her previous experiences with it she should NOT assume that the translation magic covers that, "- a mismatch of incentives whereby the party responsible for decisions benefiting the larger group also had a separate sense-of-responsibility to a smaller group with different and potentially adversarial interests?" 

Pause. 

"....I guess maybe there wasn't at any point a party who was responsible for noticing that let alone fixing it. Does that seem right?" 

"I don't know who would be in charge of noticing that. The... Emperor...?" he says uncertainly.

Does the translation magic give her any useful connotations whatsoever about what an "Emperor" is, other than the fact that - presumably, based on context - they're another kind of Governance leader? 

The translation talisman is translating it as the word for a set of gendertropes which tend to feature minions and volcano lairs.

Merrin has concluded that she is no longer capable of experiencing the emotions of surprise or confusion about this world. She is all out. She will just try to note for later reference that she would...probably...have felt surprised and confused just then.

"- Right. I don't think anyone has mentioned the Emperor before. Can you tell me about them? ...Assume I'm a five-year-old who knows nothing about anything, there are probably a lot of aspects that you take for granted here but that won't be as obvious to me."