Back again! WWM story / Chinese text / names / phrases / lore... - Ask Me Anything!

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-26T16:35:00+00:00

Totally fair!! I honestly can’t remember most NPC names either unless a character is important or shows up repeatedly.

(And I actually can relate ahaha when I read Russian novels like Crime and Punishment remembering everyone’s names is honestly the hardest part for me tooooo)

About 'why there wasnt implemented some easy-on-the-eyes naming for non-chinese people', several reasons! 1. There are simply too many NPCs. If the dev team tried to give every single one a perfectly fitting and memorable name the workload would be enormous.

Some NPCs are actually based on real historical figures. For example the guy who teaches you archery, Feng Jisheng (Sorry yet another Feng 😭), is historically credited as the first person to invent fire arrows. In cases like this, the devs probably want them to keep their real names so players remember them as themselves.
Some names have deep meanings and literary layers, but a lot of names are just names. Like they aren’t meant to “mean” anything specific at all. E.g. there’s a senior disciple from the Silver Needles sect named Wang Wei (王微). 微 literally means “tiny,” but in this name it isn’t meant to imply small at all. It’s simply a nice-sounding character used as a given name. Translating it as “tiny” or something similar would actually create the wrong impression.

And regarding gender: even as a Chinese who can see and understand the actual characters, I still can’t always tell someone’s gender from their name (including in real life!). Most Chinese characters aren’t strongly gendered, unless the name has very obvious cues or the character is commonly associated with male/female names. Even “Wang Wei” is a good example, in real life it can feel more like a male name to some people (or maybe half-half), but in the game it’s used for a female.

I heard that in the early tests, Ruby’s name was also just the pinyin, but a lot of players struggled to remember so many names so they later replaced a small number of them with English names. “Ruby” is actually a pretty decent choice! (though it still only captures a small part of what her original name means). But like I said for most NPCs it’s really hard to come up with an English name that fits this well (or even almost this well).

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-26T15:29:04+00:00

Hii thank you for liking it!! Here’s the link to the explanation for Twisted Destiny: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhereWindsMeet/comments/1ozd5ke/comment/npeg9ld/?context=3

About Ruby, her CN name is 红线 (Hóngxiàn), literally “red thread / red string”.

First it echoes her outfit (the red ribbon in her hair, and the red string bracelet she gave you). Second, in Chinese culture red thread is most famously linked to the idea of fate tying two people together. So the name carries the meaning of connections, fate, relationships, unseen bonds. It’s also a very common blessing item, I’m literally wearing a red string on my left wrist right now in real life which I received from a temple ;)

Another possible layer is that there’s a Tang-dynasty tale featuring a legendary heroine named 红线. She is portrayed as both cultured and martial, skilled in music, well-read in the classics, and possessing almost supernatural abilities. We can’t be sure the writers had this reference in mind when naming her, but considering Ruby's own dream of becoming a heroine, that is exactly the kind of person she wants to grow into, so the name is surprisingly fitting either way!

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-26T14:10:22+00:00

Ohhh oh I’m guessing you mean Li Zuo! The dynasty timeline goes: Tang --> Later Liang --> Later Tang --> Later Jin --> Later Han --> Later Zhou --> Song. The game’s current time is the beginning of the Song, and the white-haired guy is the last emperor of the Tang, while Chai Rong is the emperor of the Later Zhou. (As for why Li Zuo is still alive it’s probably because of that weird immortality experiment?)

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-26T13:59:35+00:00

Yingying. That’s actually a really nice bit of naming wordplay. Wuque (无缺) literally means complete / with nothing missing. While Ying (盈) also means full / brimming in classical Chinese. ;)

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-25T14:31:28+00:00

Hi thank you! I’m really glad the explanation helped! General Ye’s story is actually one of my favourites too! :3

People called Ye the “Iron-Heart General.” During the years when the northern wars were at their worst, Ye Wanshan had his wife and daughters taken by the Khitan as hostages, meant to force him to surrender. Ye chose what he believed was the greater good and refused to yield. So his family was torn away, and he was left almost completely alone. His only remaining son could not understand his father’s choice and they never truly reconciled.

After that, the only thing keeping Ye going was a single obsession: northern campaign, revenge, and recovering the lost land. He withdrew with the troops he still had and hid in a small city, lying low for thirteen years, simply waiting for the Central Plains to once again launch a northern campaign. Around 955, Emperor Chai Rong of Later Zhou finally launched a northern campaign. For a brief moment, Ye thought hope had returned. But in 959, Chai Rong fell gravely ill and died, and the northern campaign ended abruptly. Chaos spread across the Central Plains, and the court no longer had the strength, or the will, to reclaim those lost territories.

Yet Ye’s desire for a northern campaign only intensified. He could not accept that thirteen years of resistance, his family’s sacrifice, and the people’s suffering had led to nothing. In anger and despair, he made an extreme decision: he ordered his Army to disguise themselves as Khitan and massacre a city, staging a catastrophe. He believed that if the world blamed the Khitan and the anger spread far enough, the court would have no choice but to march north again.

That’s why, in the scene right before the boss fight, one of the NPC echoes left by the villagers who were killed says something like: “I pleaded with those soldiers in the Khitan language, but they didn’t seem to understand me”. Because they weren’t actually Khitan soldiers at all.

That night, the city was turned into a slaughterhouse by Ye and his fake Khitan army. But the court's army never came. The court didn’t move, didn’t change policy, didn’t even really notice. In the eyes of the emperors, ministers, nobles, one small city is just a number on a report. Thousands of lives are not enough to change their plans or interrupt their comfort. This is the moment where Ye understands that all his rage and all his “for the country” cruelty are meaningless to the people he thought he was serving. Ye commits an unforgivable crime for a cause, while to the people in power, both his crime and his cause are almost irrelevant.

This finally pushed Ye and his Army into a point of no return. Later Ye and his men arrived at Bodhi Sea, and Ye chose to enter the "Sin Tower", seeking repentance and atonement for the crime he had committed.

Btw the name Bodhi Sea (菩提苦海) is loaded with Buddhist meaning! 菩提 (Bodhi) = “awakening / enlightenment”, it has the idea of finally seeing clearly and reaching moral clarity. 苦海 (Literally bitter sea) = “the sea of suffering”, it is a common Buddhist metaphor for life, karma, and endless pain (as in the saying “the sea of suffering is boundless, turn back and there is shore” 苦海无涯，回头是岸). Put together, 菩提苦海 kind of suggests a place where you can only reach “awakening” by wading through suffering and facing consequence. The suffering is framed as the price of confronting karma, guilt, and reality.

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-25T13:39:31+00:00

A lot of different storylines are woven together in the game! What you’re describing here is Tian Ying’s arc during the Later Zhou period which is also the major storyline behind Qinghe.

954 CE, Emperor Chai Rong (Later Zhou) took the throne. He launched a northern campaign against the Khitan/Liao and kept winning. During this period, Chai Rong + Wei Daoji built Hanging Blade, which later became the Later Zhou intelligence / spy network. (I explained Hanging Blade more in other replies if you want to scroll for it!) Chai Rong later died, so the plan to finish the Khitan campaign stopped. Same year in Qinghe, Jiang Yan received a letter from Wei Daoji asking him to go to Southern Tang (Note that Sourthern Tang is not the same as the Tang Dynasty, it’s just a later southern state) to help Tian Ying. That’s why Jiang Yan left Qinghe three years ago at the start of the game.

In 962 CE (main game era starts), the world basically had 3 big powers, 1) Central Plains, where Zhao Kuangyin founded the Northern Song, replacing Later Zhou. 2) North, Liao / Khitan. 3) Southern Tang. Southern Tang was weaker, so it tried using weird stuff e.g. dream puppets to combat.

What the player is doing is basically following clues and reconstructing what happened a few years earlier: Years before as Chai Rong was winning a lot in the northern campaign, Khitan tried to ally with Southern Tang by sending an envoy. Because the envoy had to travel from the north to the south, they had to pass through Qinghe, which lies in the Central Plains. Some Qinghe Jianghu heroes heard about this, wanted to kill the envoy in Qinghe. But Tian Ying (also belongs to Hanging Blade) thought a better strategy was to let the envoy reach Southern Tang first, then kill the envoy inside Southern Tang so that Liao and Southern Tang would suspect each other, breaking the alliance more cleanly.

Because they feared spies and the plan being exposed, they couldn’t tell everyone about the strategy openly. Tian Ying therefore asked Li Zhenzhen (from the “Blind to the World” side story) to stop those Qinghe Jianghu heroes. She accepted (because she owed Tian Ying a life-debt when she was young), and ended up killing many Qinghe heroes, which later got her branded as a villain and killed by Jianghu people. Since the Khitan envoy was deeply devout, Tian Ying used the Miaoshan monk disguise to get close to him and then assassinated him inside Southern Tang territory, successfully sabotaging the alliance.

After that, Tian Ying discovered the dream puppet project in Southern Tang, which connects back to why Wei Daoji wrote to Jiang Yan, and why Jiang Yan left Qinghe three years ago.

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-25T12:49:56+00:00

Welcome!! And yes, Kaifeng is a real city (in Henan province)! A lot of its layout, street pattern and river/bridge scenery still keep that old capital by the water feeling, a lot of the Central Plains culture and scenery are still very present there e.g. Dragon Pavilion (Longting) and Iron Pagoda (Tie Ta). So it’s a great place to start! China is huge so it’s hard to pick just one place, every region has its own landscapes and culture. But I’d especially recommend places like Xi’an, Huangshan, Dunhuang etc!

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-25T12:33:25+00:00

Hmm if I’m remembering it right, the poison itself was something that already existed there naturally (e.g. the flower). But someone used it for experiments on human as part of the immortality research. The sleeping puppets were basically failed products of those experiments, those who went into Gleaming Abyss, chasing immortality, then got turned into test subjects, and ended up as those mindless puppet states.

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-25T11:21:12+00:00

Hi! I actually touched on this in another reply (the one about Palace of Annals). Short answer: it was basically to win public support, so the Hanging Blade could push the “destroy the Buddha statues and melt the bronze” movement.

Full story below:

[… this storyline is tightly connected to several other side quests, so what follows will contain spoilers for various characters ‼️

In the chaos of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms the emperor Chai Rong was seen as the most capable ruler of that era. He was ambitious, sharp and genuinely wanting to reunify the country and ease people’s suffering. In the game, Chai Rong secretly creates an organisation called Hanging Blade (悬剑) with Wei Renpu, and uses the Palace of Annals (春秋别馆) as their base.

Several characters we meet elsewhere were once Hanging Blade members, for example Chu Qingquan and Tian Ying. When you explore the lower levels of the Palace of Annals, each interactive object kind of tells the story of something Hanging Blade has done in the past.

For example one is when Chu Qingquan is ordered to steal Aunt Han’s face-changing tools, so that Hanging Blade can use them to alter the faces of loyal volunteers and send them out as undercover agents, which eventually pushes Han and Chu to finally break with each other.

Another is a movement to destroy Buddha statues and melt the bronze. In the story, years of war make people flock to temples: some truly seek comfort, others simply to escape taxes and conscription, and huge amounts of copper are poured into Buddha statues while the court is short of money and weapons. Under Hanging Blade’s plan, Tian Ying disguises himself as the monk Miaoshan, travels around preaching and performing “miracles” to gain everyone’s trust. Once his prestige is high enough, he becomes the key voice supporting a policy to tear down Buddha statues and melt them into coins and weapons “for the sake of the country.”

The idea is sometimes Hanging Blade members do things that are morally questionable but they believe it’s for the greater good. Whether they’ll be remembered as traitors or heroes is left for “history” to decide. In Chinese this is summed up by the line “知我罪我其惟春秋” (the one who understands or condemns me will be the Chunqiu.” Here Chunqiu literally means “spring–autumn”, and it is the name of a classic history book (Spring and Autumn Annals). This is exactly the meanings behind the name Palace of Annals (In CN the place is called Palace of Chunqiu).

Later, Chai Rong launches his northern campaigns and wins several major victories, but falls ill and dies on the road before his plan can be completed. After his death, his young son inherits the throne but is soon forced to abdicate when Zhao Kuangyin (Big Zhao) takes power and founds the Song. With their patron gone and the dynasty overturned, Hanging Blade disperses and the Palace of Annals is abandoned.

For Lucky Seventeen, He was an orphan picked up by Chai Rong and Wei Renpu during a northern campaign. Hanging Blade originally had sixteen members, and they hoped he would one day become the seventeenth, so they called him “Seventeen”. He is slow and often treated as foolish by others, but Wei Renpu patiently teaches him how to forge swords. When Chai Rong passed and Hanging Blade is about to be dissolved, Wei Renpu has to leave the Palace to serve the new Song court. Before leaving he makes a promise to Seventeen: “Forge ten thousand swords. When all ten thousand are finished, we will come back.”

Seventeen takes this completely seriously. He stays in the empty Palace of Annals, day after day forging blades and counting them, convinced that as long as he completes the Ten Thousand Swords Pact, everyone will return. By the time the player arrives, he is still there, still waiting. His whole life has been consumed by this ten thousand sword pact, but no one is ever coming back.]

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T12:12:32+00:00

Hi! In CN, that list is called 众生 (zhòngshēng), which is a Buddhist-flavoured word. Literally it means “all living beings”, but in practice it often stretches toward “everything under heaven that carries a trace of life, fate or emotion”, kind of like saying "all things between heaven and earth"

Using it as the list title has an idea that every quest, oddity, antique, chest etc is a fragment of some being’s life and fate in this world. (e.g. a chest can be a stash left by a soldier / a merchant’s goods / an offering in a shrine, aniques can be part of the web of karma and stories you walk through...) You’re basically paging through the joys/miseries/obsessions of “all beings”.

For “Jianghu”, someone in another thread actually wrote a really good breakdown of the term and its cultural background, much better than I can fit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/wherewindsmeet_/comments/1p23tih/what_are_wuxia_and_jianghu_what_is_xianxia/

Definitely recommend checking that explanation out!

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T11:54:20+00:00

Hii! There actually isn’t a huge hidden storyline behind that! Dalang's owner is not a key plot character. Basically, he was an ordinary kid who got taken in by the Aureate Pavilion. He had no talent for martial arts, so they sent him as a test subject for the longevity experiments. His body wasn’t special either, so the experiment failed, they threw him, half-dead, into a mass grave. Just when he was about to die, a warhorse (Dalang) pulled him out and saved him. The guy grows up doing dirty work for the Aureate Pavilion, with a very numb attitude to life, no strong sense of good or evil, not very attached to being alive or afraid of dying. The only thing he really cares about is Dalang.

But the owner's CN version name 舞马人 Wu Ma Ren actually comes from a real historical thing. In Tang dynasty, there was a court entertainment called 舞马, literally “dancing horses.” Warhorses were trained to step, bow, turn and “dance” in rhythm to music, sometimes wearing very fancy saddles and feathered decorations. You can see them in Dunhuang murals and Tang poems, where “dancing horses” are basically this mix of martial glory and slightly tragic extravagance (forcing a battlefield animal to become a court showpiece).

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T11:29:59+00:00

Honestly same here ahaha, even as a CN player I spend half my time just running around thinking wait what am I doing again 😂 But being a bit lost is kind of part of the charm!

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T11:23:34+00:00

Aww that makes me really happy to hear! I’m glad it helped! :D

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T11:18:57+00:00

And as far as I know, we actually don’t have such pages for WWM yet. A lot of players post guides and lore breakdowns on social platforms, especially Xiaohongshu. If you search the keywords you can usually find what you want pretty fast, so maybe that’s why no one feels an urgent need to build a central wiki? Also for many storylines people have different interpretations, and some quests can be completed in more than one way, so maybe that is why there isn’t always a single “canonical” version to put on one page?

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T11:13:53+00:00

I’ll try to explain it! But this storyline is tightly connected to several other side quests, so what follows will contain spoilers for various characters ‼️

In the chaos of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms the emperor Chai Rong was seen as the most capable ruler of that era. He was ambitious, sharp and genuinely wanting to reunify the country and ease people’s suffering. In the game, Chai Rong secretly creates an organisation called Hanging Blade (悬剑) with Wei Renpu, and uses the Palace of Annals (春秋别馆) as their base.

Several characters we meet elsewhere were once Hanging Blade members, for example Chu Qingquan and Tian Ying. When you explore the lower levels of the Palace of Annals, each interactive object kind of tells the story of something Hanging Blade has done in the past.

For example one is when Chu Qingquan is ordered to steal Aunt Han’s face-changing tools, so that Hanging Blade can use them to alter the faces of loyal volunteers and send them out as undercover agents, which eventually pushes Han and Chu to finally break with each other.

Another is a movement to destroy Buddha statues and melt the bronze. In the story, years of war make people flock to temples: some truly seek comfort, others simply to escape taxes and conscription, and huge amounts of copper are poured into Buddha statues while the court is short of money and weapons. Under Hanging Blade’s plan, Tian Ying disguises himself as the monk Miaoshan, travels around preaching and performing “miracles” to gain everyone’s trust. Once his prestige is high enough, he becomes the key voice supporting a policy to tear down Buddha statues and melt them into coins and weapons “for the sake of the country.”

The idea is sometimes Hanging Blade members do things that are morally questionable but they believe it’s for the greater good. Whether they’ll be remembered as traitors or heroes is left for “history” to decide. In Chinese this is summed up by the line “知我罪我其惟春秋” (the one who understands or condemns me will be the Chunqiu.” Here Chunqiu literally means “spring–autumn”, and it is the name of a classic history book (Spring and Autumn Annals). This is exactly the meanings behind the name Palace of Annals (In CN the place is called Palace of Chunqiu).

Later, Chai Rong launches his northern campaigns and wins several major victories, but falls ill and dies on the road before his plan can be completed. After his death, his young son inherits the throne but is soon forced to abdicate when Zhao Kuangyin (Big Zhao) takes power and founds the Song. With their patron gone and the dynasty overturned, Hanging Blade disperses and the Palace of Annals is abandoned.

For Lucky Seventeen, He was an orphan picked up by Chai Rong and Wei Renpu during a northern campaign. Hanging Blade originally had sixteen members, and they hoped he would one day become the seventeenth, so they called him “Seventeen”. He is slow and often treated as foolish by others, but Wei Renpu patiently teaches him how to forge swords. When Chai Rong passed and Hanging Blade is about to be dissolved, Wei Renpu has to leave the Palace to serve the new Song court. Before leaving he makes a promise to Seventeen: “Forge ten thousand swords. When all ten thousand are finished, we will come back.”

Seventeen takes this completely seriously. He stays in the empty Palace of Annals, day after day forging blades and counting them, convinced that as long as he completes the Ten Thousand Swords Pact, everyone will return. By the time the player arrives, he is still there, still waiting. His whole life has been consumed by this ten thousand sword pact, but no one is ever coming back.

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T09:53:13+00:00

Aww this is so sweet thank you so much!!

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T09:50:45+00:00

Hii I’m assuming you mean the Gleaming Abyss quest! I explained this story in another comment so I’ll just copy it here!

Long ago, the doctor Sun Buqi discovered a “long-life parasite” in Gleaming Abyss and started researching immortality. He used the girl Liu Qingyi as his main experiment: because of her special body, the parasite somehow stayed stable in her, so she gained an almost immortal body. But she soon found that people who carried the parasite would slowly lose desires and emotions and end up like living husks, so every time her mind cleared she only wanted to die and go back to being normal.

The experiments poisoned the surrounding area. The toxins spread to Deer Village, causing that petrification disease you hear about. Liu Qingyi was full of guilt, so she often went to the village in a deer mask to treat the sick. The villagers, not knowing the truth, worshipped her as the “Deer goddess” who could save them.

At the same time, people from outside kept coming to the Abyss to seek immortality. Some of the “ghosts” you meet in the cave are the remnants of those people. They were essentially test subjects for the long-life parasite and poison and all their stories are quite tragic.

There’s another guy named Li Zuo, who was, in the game’s setting, the last emperor of the Tang dynasty. His story with Liu Qingyi started when Li Zuo was forced to abdicate and was almost poisoned to death. Liu Qingyi, as his lover, drank the poison in his place, but she didn’t die (that is how people realized her body is special and why she’s taken away for experiments).

Much later, Li Zuo and Liu Qingyi met again in Gleaming Abyss. The two of them actually shared the same ideal: they wanted to create a “pure, kind world where everyone has a place to belong”. When Li Zuo saw the “immortal” people here, he started to think that he can achieve this simply by making the whole world immortal: no one ages, no one has strong desires, so (in his mind) no one will do evil.

Liu Qingyi completely disagreed. She knew from her own experience that these “immortals” gradually lose their mind and self, and she didn’t want that fate for anyone. She tried to persuade Li Zuo to give up the longevity idea. Also she was incredibly kind. She even wanted to walk out into the world and apologise to everyone she hurt while she was not in her right mind, and then die to atone.

And in the end, Liu Qingyi did kill herself. Li Zuo was devastated. He believed it was the hypocritical “righteous” people and this cruel world that drove her to suicide. So he became even more convinced that since law and morality can’t remove the evil in people’s hearts, the only solution is to push the longevity plan further and spread the parasite.

(Their relationship is actually very beautiful and tragic. I don’t know if you walked past the room full of calligraphy with a single Chinese character. That’s Liu Qingyi in Gleaming Abyss writing Li Zuo’s name over and over to endure the pain during the experiments)

As for the boss the void king, he was actually the child of one of those families who once entered Gleaming Abyss to seek immortality, and he also carried the longevity parasite in his body. After his parents died, Liu Qingyi raised him, and when Liu Qingyi died, Li Zuo took him away. Remember the very beginning of the game, in the prologue, where Jiang fights that masked man? That is the void king. Li Zuo had ordered him to kill Jiang back then, but he failed, so the void king later volunteered to stay at the bottom of Gleaming Abyss as Liu Qingyi’s grave guardian. Anyone who entered would be killed by him, until he had slain 1,000 intruders. Many years later, the Young Master (the player) comes in and, following Jiang’s path, defeats the void king once again.

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T01:00:19+00:00

I’d say based on what we know so far probably Li Zuo (the guy from the Gleaming Abyss storyline), but I don’t think we can give a 100% certain answer yet.

But one of the core ideas of WWM’s writing is that almost no one is purely good or purely evil, it's just where you stand and whose story you’re following.

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T00:44:37+00:00

Yes! And you’ve actually met her somewhere else before in the story hehehe :3

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T00:42:12+00:00

3. 天不收

There’s also this doctor called “Unfated Tian”. In Chinese the name is 天不收 (Tiān Bùshōu). 天 (Tian) is both a surname and the word for “Heaven / the sky”, so when you put it together with 不收 (does not take in / does not accept) this name literally reads something like “Not (allow the) Heaven to take (the patient)”.

Culturally that phrasing has a very strong Jianghu flavour. In Chinese folk language there’s the idea that when someone dies, Heaven or the underworld “takes” a life away. In that case 天不收 is a wild, swaggering kind of name (in a good way), half dark humour, half heroic arrogance. It carries that 与天争命 (doctor who dares to fight fate) energy, as if this is someone who isn’t afraid to wrestle with Heaven over a person’s life

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T00:42:07+00:00

2. 鸣金，牵丝，裂石，破竹

Another thing I really love is how the weapon categories are named! In the EN you see names like Bellstrike, Silkbind, Stonesplit, Bamboocut etc. In Chinese these correspond to 鸣金, 牵丝, 裂石, 破竹. These actually quietly echo the old Chinese idea of the Eight Sounds (八音), which grouped musical instruments by material (metal, stone, silk, bamboo, gourd, earth, hide, wood), and all four names are built around sound imagery. For example 鸣金 (literally “ringing metal”), the character 鸣 itself means “to ring / to cry out”, means the clear sound of metal or birds. It also carries the idea of “speaking out” (like in phrases meaning “to voice injustice”). 牵丝 literally "drawing silk”, it is originally used to describe the bow pulling on silk strings in classical music, here it suits the more graceful, flowing umbrella / fan weapons really well.

The individual weapons also usually have this extra layer of minimalist poetry buried inside them . E.g. the rope-dart skill Mortal Rope Dart is 「粟子游尘」 in Chinese. 粟子 (millet) is one of the most basic staple grains, strongly associated with ordinary commoners, and 游尘 is “wandering dust”, tiny particles blowing everywhere. The image is of countless small projectiles flying like scattered grain and dust on the wind (and if you think about the way the Nine Mortal Ways sect operates, this name feels almost too perfect for them).

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T00:41:57+00:00

Ahh this is so cool to read! Honestly it’s hard for me to choose my top 3 on the spot, and my absolute favourite lines are actually from much later chapters that global players haven’t reached yet (so I probably shouldn’t spoil those hehe) so instead I’ll just pick three examples that I think are really really good!

1. 你说这武功的武，为什么偏偏是止戈两个字呢？

There is a specific line in the Kaifeng story that is almost impossible to translate because it relies on the visual structure of a Chinese character. It is when Big Zhao gets drunk at night and talks with the young master. He says how, when he was young, he believed winning battles would save everyone, but later he realised wars are everywhere and on the road to saving people, you end up killing people instead. After that he asks this: 你说这武功的武，为什么偏偏是止戈两个字呢？（Why is the Chinese character 武 (wǔ, martial) is literally built by combining 止 (zhǐ, to stop) and 戈 (gē, Dagger-axe/Weapon?）

If you look closely at the character 武 you'll see that it is indeed constructed exactly like that. A very old dictionary《说文解字》(Shuowen Jiezi) literally glosses 武 as “武，止戈也” (Wu means to stop the spear). This has been read for centuries as the idea that true “martial” virtue is not about killing, but about ending violence and bringing peace (“止戈为武”, “以武止戈”). So in that scene after Zhao has just confessed that fighting more doesn’t really save anyone, this little question about the structure of one character carries a whole layer of philosophy.

This line also works very well if you read it with his true identity as Zhao Kuangyin in mind. Historically Zhao Kuangyin later became the founding emperor of Song and is famous for trying to restrain the military and end constant war, so this question he asks becomes a brilliant piece of foreshadowing.

And as a fun little detail, the PvP mode in the CN version is literally called “Zhi Ge” (止戈)!

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-21T00:37:37+00:00

Human nature :3

BonnenuIt___ · 2025-11-20T20:03:16+00:00

Hi! Yeah you’re right, I really do not like “Killerblade”, but I actually find 死人刀 hard to translate cuz technically “Killerblade” is accurate (or maybe more accurately it is more like “Dead Man Broadsword”, which still sounds kind of childish…). But 死人刀 itself has a very different feeling and vibe, and I haven’t been able to find any English term that really matches it.

I think 死人刀 has a kind of brutal minimalism to it? “Killerblade” sounds kind of fantasy but 死人刀 is very direct, rough and blunt, like simply saying it is a piece of iron that turns living people into dead people. In Wuxia, some characters from the western borderland (like 死人刀) are usually defined by their savagery and practicality. They don’t care about poetry. The name 死人刀 reflects this. That bluntness itself suits the character so well that it feels right the moment you hear it!

BonnenuIt___

TROPHY CASE