《燕云十六声》｜黎蓁蓁
《Where Winds Meet》｜Li Zhenzhen
Story background
In Where Winds Meet, Li Zhenzhen （黎蓁蓁）was not born a legend, but a blind girl who spent her early life enduring humiliation and violence. She was treated as a burden, abused, and eventually sold into a ghost marriage. At the moment when she had nearly surrendered herself to death, a young boy appeared and placed a small sword in her hand, telling her that she was not born to be trampled by others. That moment became the turning point of her life.
From then on, Li Zhenzhen learned to survive through the sword. Out of darkness and suffering, she gradually transformed from a discarded blind girl into a feared figure of the jianghu. Because she moved like a rumor through shadow and silence, people began to call her the “Moon Goddess.” The title carried reverence, but also distance: behind the legend was still a woman who had never truly known peace.
Years later, she encountered Tian Ying again—the same boy who had once saved her. By then, Tian Ying（田英） had become an assassin entangled in the political turmoil of a fractured age. He sought Li Zhenzhen’s help in protecting a Khitan envoy as part of a larger plan to sabotage a possible alliance between the Khitans and the Southern Tang. To others, this was a dangerous political mission; to Li Zhenzhen, it was also an answer to a debt of gratitude and to a private feeling she had carried for years. She agreed almost without hesitation.
That decision, however, placed her against the world around her. Hunted, condemned, and trapped before she could reunite with Tian Ying, Li Zhenzhen met her end alone. Before dying, she changed into an elaborate green bridal robe and placed a crown upon her head, choosing to face death in the same symbolic form through which her fate had once begun. When the player encounters the “Moon Goddess,” she is already dead, lying among the moon flowers she had carefully tended in her hidden cave. Her story is therefore not simply one of martial legend, but of suffering, gratitude, unspoken love, and irreversible fate.
Notes：
The Khitans ：It were a nomadic people from the northern grasslands of China who established powerful regimes throughout history. During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, Khitan influence expanded into the Central Plains, and their political and military actions significantly impacted neighboring regimes.
The Southern Tang (937–975) ：It was one of the most important regimes in southern China during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. In this turbulent era, various regimes competed, formed alliances, or clashed. The game's story unfolds against this complex political backdrop, with alliances and conflicts between different forces becoming crucial drivers of the narrative.
Concept
This series is not a direct reproduction of the game image, but a reinterpretation built upon its narrative. In Where Winds Meet, the player first encounters Li Zhenzhen （黎蓁蓁）after her death: dressed in bridal clothing, lying alone among flowers in a hidden cave. This project shifts the moment of representation to just before that ending—to the liminal state in which she is still alive, yet already standing at the threshold of death. What the images attempt to recover is therefore not a missing plot detail, but an emotional moment that the game leaves largely unseen.
The project was conceived by Xia Qiji, while I participated in the photographic realization and visual construction. The set was developed in reference to the cave scene from the game: rocks, water, moon imagery, flowers, and a dark enclosed atmosphere were rebuilt in the studio to echo the original spatial language. The costume and headpiece also retain the essential visual identity of the character. Unlike the game, however, the images do not present her as a completed death, but as a body in her final, suspended moment—still breathing, still conscious, still carrying what remains unsaid. In this way, she is no longer only a mystery for the player to investigate, but a person who has suffered, waited, and once held onto hope.
What matters most to me in this project is not fidelity alone, but the effort to preserve the character’s complexity. Li Zhenzhen is both the legendary “Moon Goddess” and the blind girl who endured humiliation; both a feared swordswoman and someone driven by gratitude, memory, and unspoken affection. Through photography, I wanted to move her away from the fixed image of a tragic ending and return to her a sense of presence, fragility, and emotional weight.
