Phantom Blade Zero · Character
Xuan Li
Xuan Li is the Order’s Grand Scholar, last of the Xuan clan, which studied the Celestial Tome for generations. You meet him only in memory, in Xuan Li’s Memory Flower on Mount Soulrend, explaining the Lóng and the Blight to Zuo Shang.
- FactionThe Order
Who is Xuan Li?
Xuan Li’s family studied the Celestial Tome, the book whose surviving fragment once drew masters from every corner of the Wulin to Soulrend Cliff. In Pangzhen, when Soul asks Myst about a strange stone, she says the Order’s Grand Scholar, Xuan Li, would know far more than she does.
You meet him only in his Memory Flower on Mount Soulrend, talking with Zuo Shang. Conversations with Zuo Shang, the flower says, always give him new ideas, as if he had been invited to watch a game with the Lóng against the Blight laid out before his eyes.
What he explains is the deepest lore in the game. By the Celestial Tome, the Blight is a force of destruction from beyond the stars that turns everything it touches into part of itself, so that every fragment is the whole. Perhaps, he guesses, beings from beyond the stars made something in this world to hold it back, and the ancients, not knowing what it was, called it “Lóng”.
Who Xuan Li is to the others
Brother
Xuan Yu joined the Eleven, and that brought the Order down on the whole Xuan clan.
“It was unavoidable... I trust you understand. Your brother Xuan Yu should never have joined the Eleven.”
In-game dialogue
1 more ties the story reveals later
Spared him
Zuo Shang wiped out Xuan Yu and the whole clan, and Xuan Li thanks him for his life. In the Order he answers Zuo Shang’s questions: how Meng Hua of the Eleven fused with the Blight in the Discordance and became the Lady of the Veil, and whether a puppet, its mind projected from a person, could touch the Blight and escape. Then Zuo Shang asks something he has never heard asked: could a single will command the Blight?
“You wiped out my brother... and the entire Xuan clan. Yet somehow, I was spared. For that, I thank Shadow Edict Zuo.”
In-game dialogue
Keep reading
Frequently asked questions
What is the Celestial Tome?
The book the Xuan clan studied for generations. A surviving fragment of it is what drew the Wulin’s masters to Soulrend Cliff.
What does Xuan Li say the Lóng is?
Perhaps something beings from beyond the stars made in this world to hold back the Blight, which the ancients simply called “Lóng”.
What happens to Xuan Li?
The game does not say. You meet him only in his Memory Flower.
Sources for this page 1
- Phantom Blade Zero Official Phantom Blade Zero launch build: the game’s own dialogue, documents, bestiary, quest log and loading screens, read 3 November 2026. Quotes are the game’s English text, unchanged.