Meng Hua.

Meng Hua is who the Wulin's inhabitants call the Merciful Lady of the Blossom Veil, an idol with a cult that swells as misery spreads.

Rampant Maskwalkers, a rotting Mandate and little prospect of help from anyone leave ordinary people desperate. A goddess fills that gap, visiting dreams and promising escape. Soul sees the effects well before he meets the Lady in person: a village shrine remade as her temple, statues put up in her honor, puppets pacing the streets, and believers who read everything as a miracle.

Her influence ties together a number of the game's plot threads. The Herald performs puppet experiments to please her, illusionists on Soulrend Mountain work toward her arrival in the world, and many locations across the map are named for her.

Through most of the game, you sense her only via the devotion and wrongdoing of others. By the time Soul does reach her, she is the main story's final mandatory boss.

A member of the Eleven

A surviving fragment of the Celestial Tome once drew masters from all over the Wulin to Soulrend Cliff, long before the story. A peculiar bell drove them to madness, and mutual slaughter followed. Ten lived, along with the orphaned child of someone who died there, and the knowledge held in the fragment gave the eleven fresh life. Meng Hua, a master of the Phantom Arts, belonged to the Eleven; the nickname given to her was the evil Empress.

In that earlier life, before any title was hers, she owned the bone fan that is now called The Lady's Fan. Chaos, ice, fire and lightning run through it, and no common Wulin weapon matched it.

Conflict With Inanis

Mu Tianmiao enlisted Inanis as a Shadow Edict and singled out Meng Hua as the enemy, claiming that only a person from Inanis's own world could recognise what she truly was. Afterwards the Order took years to bring the Eleven down one at a time. Meng Hua and Inanis wiped each other out in that war, with Inanis losing her body and both minds dissolving into the Discordance.

How a Woman Became a Horror Merged With the Blight

The Blight is a force without form or shape whose only talent is devouring, and it remade Meng Hua's scattered consciousness after the war with Inanis. Xuan Li describes it as arriving from beyond the stars and pulling whatever it touches into itself. Her first aim was to wrestle with it. However, since two equally hungry beings are unable to devour themselves or each other, they eventually joined and matched perfectly.

Xuan Li states she is no longer a human being but a horror once again joined with the Blight. Myst suspects the Lady of the Veil draws her power from somewhere past the heavens. One entity now carries two drives: she craves the world in her grasp, and the Blight craves swallowing everything to make it part of itself.

Temple Built in the Ancestral Hall

Worship of the Merciful Lady started barely two or three years back. Her temple was made out of the ancestral hall in the Village of Lu, a change that village chief Lu Sanqian took badly. Red flowers were soon being given out by the Herald, and households shared a way of simmering prayer-silk in medicine. The villagers lay down to sleep, each in turn, and woke as wood. Puppets bearing swords and shields battled Maskwalkers, and the villagers cheered this as the Lady's miracle, even though it had been arranged.

Her cult extended well past a single village. At the summit of the Mountain of Imprisonment, the Lu Clan Shrine was rebuilt as her temple, and inside the Lady of the Veil's shrine Huangxing walled his own brother Moji into a statue. Mirage Estate is another place where Soul encounters her.

Vessel and Rift

What roams the Waking Realm is a vessel in the form of a puppet, not her actual body. Constructing one that could wholly contain her mind and power occupied the Herald of the Veil for more than three hundred days, and numerous villagers as well as Wulin masters lost their lives to it.

Responsibility for the other half of the scheme lies with The High Elder and his forbidden illusionists. Their goal is to open the Rift, letting her descend into the Perfect Vessel and come back to the Waking Realm, and they settled on Soulrend Cliff, where the Eleven were born. Sixty years of the passage remained, according to The High Elder, until an unborn child meant for sacrifice cut the remainder to three. Each of his four Acolytes expects the old world to end when she descends. Soul scales the cliff and wrecks the bodies of the illusionists; nobody is left far away to keep the Rift open, so it shuts.

Soulrend Cliff

After The Last Chance bell, Soul is stuck there until an ending plays. Having beaten Leng Tu, the Herald of the Veil, he continues at once to Meng Hua, last boss on the normal story route. A series of Xuan Li's Memory Flowers, whose titles include Meng Hua and Fused with the Blight, can be found while climbing the mountain. The ending after her defeat varies with the player's progress, as explained under Endings and Fate.

Mercy Used as a Tool

Her title speaks of compassion, but her methods are predatory. In dreams alone does she show herself, gentle, sad and lovely, offering comfort, direction and assurance that her power can deliver people from a hopeless era. For those unwilling to kneel, the treatment differs: their despair is nourished until suffering has taught them. Faith was never her actual aim. It is merely the means by which she reaches people once they have run out of road.

Two sides of her appear in the lines credited to her. She is able to tell her Herald "my heart grieves for you", and she can equally mock an insect that tries to bring down a tree.

The Herald's Understanding of Her

No account of her is clearer than the in-game description of her Herald. It portrays her as cold-hearted, delighted by the world's suffering, and uninterested in anything useless. Any follower who fails to please her is worthless and may be discarded at any instant. Even so, he serves her.

Craving the Waking Realm Again

She seeks possession: the Waking Realm must be under her control again. It is considered her own choice whether she devours the world gradually or unleashes a disaster that wipes it out.

Battle at Soulrend Cliff

Meng Hua, an unavoidable boss, stands close to the Soulrend Cliff bell. Reaching her means getting past The Last Chance bell and beating the Herald of the Veil beforehand. Safe counterattacks and parries are how Sha-Chi is controlled in this fight. Her base figures, per the game files, are 10,000 HP and 2,400 Sha-Chi, and both climb on harder difficulty and later playthroughs. Winning pays 10,000 Remnant Dust.

Since her fall settles which ending you get, rest at The Last Chance and save manually first. When the credits finish, loading back to that bell is possible too, so you can wrap up whatever remains after Mirage Estate and take her on again.

Her Drops

Beating her rewards you with The Lady's Fan, a main weapon wielded in both hands: it holds Arcane Sigils, then discharges them for effects that depend on the mix. Two tempering materials also drop, The Lady's Crown for that fan (a Soul Tempering item) and Herald's Lingering Threads for a Phantom Edge. In addition, the Gold trophy All Dreams Must End unlocks, as it does for each ending decided on Mount Soulrend.

Her title is borne by multiple locations. By the Outpost in Weeping Creek Valley is The Lady's Cave, and the same region holds The Lady's Rift. In the Village of Lu are The Lady Grounds, while the Mountain of Imprisonment hosts The Lady's Path and The Lady's Shrine.

What she wears is a puppet shell crowned with red-thread hair and ornate gold, every part of it crafted to delight the Lady of the Veil. The boss class listed for her is Puppet. Her followers are likewise surrounded by red thread and red flowers: Bai Chilian received silk in a dream, and flowers were handed out in the Village of Lu.

Lines credited to Meng Hua

“Lonely child… My Herald. You have done all you could, my heart grieves for you.”

Spoken to her Herald.

“An insect trying to topple a tree... Simply laughable!”

An openly scornful remark.

“You're no different. No matter what you do, you'll never return to the Waking Realm!”

A taunt concerning the Waking Realm.

“You can strike down old grudges and save the world.”

Meng Hua speaks this.

• No answer is given as to whether "Veiled Blossom" distorts her name, embellishes her legend, or sidesteps her real name.
• As its description, the game gives her trophy, All Dreams Must End, the words All Schemes Come to Nothing.
• For upgrading Phantom Edges you can use Incense Ash for the Lady, available from Quick Hand Zhang in the Crimson Forest.