All Beauty Fades is a Wandering Tale in Where Winds Meet tied to Murong Yuan, the wooden eagle, and a surprisingly stubborn encounter trigger. It sits at the end of a small chain that runs through Jinming Pool, The Eagle’s Shadow, and the Soaring Eagle encounter, and it also reuses an item that is very easy to miss.
All Beauty Fades prerequisites
Before All Beauty Fades can appear, several conditions need to be met across Kaifeng:
- Complete the Jinming Pool campaign quest. This main story quest unlocks the related Wandering Tale and gives you access to the Quintadent Warship.
- Finish the Wandering Tale “The Eagle’s Shadow”. This tale is part of Murong Yuan’s storyline and is the unlock condition for the Soaring Eagle encounter.
- Clear the Soaring Eagle encounter at Jade Mirror Pond. This Kaifeng encounter continues Murong Yuan’s story and gives you a critical quest item used later in All Beauty Fades.
All Beauty Fades is also treated internally like other time-gated encounters and tales. Expect to wait at least some in-game or real-world time after finishing Soaring Eagle before the follow-up Wandering Tale is able to spawn.
How Soaring Eagle connects to All Beauty Fades
Soaring Eagle is the bridge between The Eagle’s Shadow and All Beauty Fades, and it revolves around Zhenzhen, her family, and Murong Yuan’s wooden eagle design.
Step 1: Go to Jade Mirror Pond in Kaifeng and talk to Zhenzhen by the water. She asks for Murong Yuan’s blueprints for a wooden eagle. Hand over the Wooden Eagle Diagram, which you pick up during the Jinming Pool campaign aboard the Quintadent Warship in the secret chamber unlocked by the painting puzzle.
Step 2: After giving her the diagram, visit Zhenzhen’s home at Masterwood Hamlet at Xu hour. Change the time from the in-game time menu before heading there, then follow her to the family camp, sit down, and share a meal with her and Blacksmith Li.
Step 3: When Zhenzhen runs off upset during the conversation about Murong Yuan, chase her and listen until she finishes telling her story. This locks in her version of events and pushes the quest forward.
Step 4: Learn more about Murong Yuan by speaking with Uncle Li in Masterwood Hamlet, then with the Old Shipwright he points you toward. From there, you are sent to the Martial Temple south of Kaifeng to talk to General Shi about Murong Yuan’s reputation and why she changed.
Step 5: Return to Masterwood Hamlet and approach the Abandoned Shrine. Standing close reveals a hidden passage. Drop down carefully, using platforms to avoid fall damage, and inspect the Badly Burned Letter on the nearby box.
Step 6: You are drawn into a dreamlike sequence showing Murong Yuan’s past. Walk through the vision until you are returned to the real world, then turn away from the cliff edge and fight the government soldiers that appear. After the battle, speak with Li Shoujie and give him the Badly Burned Letter.
Step 7: In the same underground room, loot the table to obtain the Explosive Device Plans. This item is not used in Soaring Eagle itself; it is the key item later delivered to Tang Ji’an during All Beauty Fades.
Step 8: Go back to Zhenzhen’s camp and discuss everything you learned about Murong Yuan. Zhenzhen promises to return the wooden eagle blueprints after a few days.
Step 9: Set the time to the day after tomorrow and return to Jade Mirror Pond. Meet Zhenzhen again, receive the blueprints back, and see the completed wooden eagle. When Soaring Eagle ends, you should have both Murong Yuan’s story context and the Explosive Device Plans ready for All Beauty Fades.
Explosive Device Plans and Tang Ji’an
The Explosive Device Plans you pick up in the Soaring Eagle underground passage feed forward into All Beauty Fades. During the later Wandering Tale, you deliver these plans to Tang Ji’an, a fisherman involved in a crate and treasure setup linked to Murong Yuan’s inventions.
Without those plans in your inventory, the questline cannot complete. If All Beauty Fades has started, but you are blocked when speaking to Tang Ji’an, check your bag for the Explosive Device Plans. If they are missing, re-run the steps in the Soaring Eagle underground section and confirm that the table has been looted.
All Beauty Fades: structure and major beats
Once the prerequisites are satisfied and the internal timer has rolled over, All Beauty Fades becomes available as a Wandering Tale in Kaifeng. It is closely tied to Jade Mirror Pond, Masterwood Hamlet, and the Imperium Garden area, and it can feel longer than most one-off encounters.
From player runs and the related encounter chain, All Beauty Fades looks roughly like this:
- Opening at Jade Mirror Pond. The quest picks up again around Zhenzhen’s family camp and the shrine/pond area, tying back to Murong Yuan’s wooden eagle.
- Travel to South Imperium Garden. You are sent toward a domed structure south of Imperium Garden, where an NPC asks for help using the wooden eagle to reach a chest tied to his dream of flight.
- Return to Jade Mirror Pond for the final exchange. After assisting him and waiting out another day’s delay, you bring the Explosive Device Plans to Tang Ji’an. This unlocks his treasure and closes the Wandering Tale.
The emotional core stays focused on Murong Yuan’s legacy, the gap between grand plans and what survives them, and how the people left behind deal with that absence. The title “All Beauty Fades” underlines that tension: Murong Yuan’s mechanical art is gone, but her designs, the wooden eagle, and the people who remember her keep some of it alive.
How to trigger Wandering Tale encounters reliably
All Beauty Fades and its related encounters sit on the more finicky end of Where Winds Meet’s event system. Several common friction points show up repeatedly and are worth checking before assuming the quest is bugged.
Step 1: Check your Encounter cap. Open your journal and look at the Encounter tab. If you already have three active encounters, no new encounters can trigger. Finish or let one expire, then return to the trigger location and move through it again.
Step 2: Clear older encounters, not just drop below the cap. Some players only saw Beauty-related encounters appear after completing every pending encounter in their log. If you are stuck at two and the tale still does not appear, try fully clearing your list.
Step 3: Respect time gates. Several connected pieces rely on specific in-game hours (such as Xu hour) or daily resets and even real-world day delays. When an objective says to come back “tomorrow” or “the day after tomorrow,” use the in-game time control, then leave the area and return to reload it. For the RNG-prone eagle encounters, many players had success switching time, teleporting to another region, then flying back in.
Step 4: Approach from outside the trigger zone. For event crowds that refuse to spawn, walking or gliding into the exact trigger area from outside often matters. For example, some players only triggered related encounters when they walked through a specific red gate near bamboo or through a gate on the left side of an open area, rather than loading directly inside via teleport.
Step 5: Consider hard reloads and daily limits. Encounter triggers can be subject to a daily limit. If nothing fires after multiple passes and your log is clean, exit to the main menu or desktop, come back after a few hours or the next day, then approach the area again using a fresh teleport and glide-in path.
Where the goose, Beauty and Blade, and monk hair fit in
All Beauty Fades sits inside a wider web of odd requirements in Qinghe and Kaifeng, which is why it is often mentioned alongside completely separate encounters like Beauty and Blade and side objectives that unlock cosmetic items.
One of the most notorious of these is Beauty and Blade, a Qinghe encounter that rewards the Alms Pilgrim cosmetics and is frequently pursued by players who want a monk-style hairstyle. To make that encounter appear, you need to:
- Kill a goose using Tai Chi, often by throwing it into water to unlock the Goose Buster achievement, which only triggers on a hostile goose.
- Conquer the Bloomveil Monastery outpost at least once, either by open combat or via the Scholar option if you have the Scholar profession.
- Then return to Blissful Retreat, ideally by teleporting to Evercare Clinic and walking north toward the small plank bridge and waterfall.
On top of that, the same encounter-cap, daily-limit, and approach-direction quirks seen around Murong Yuan’s chain show up again. Some players only triggered Beauty and Blade when they walked through a specific red gate by the bamboo grove in Blissful Retreat. Others needed to clear every active encounter, change the in-game time, or simply log out and return the next real-world day before the crowd of NPCs spawned.
That cluster of overlapping conditions is why players often talk about All Beauty Fades, Soaring Eagle, and Beauty and Blade in the same breath: they are all long-tail events with hidden prerequisites, real-time delays, and RNG in how and when they pop, and they all sit close to highly sought cosmetics and story payoffs.
Once All Beauty Fades is finally active, the quest itself is straightforward. The real work is in respecting the chain that leads into it: finishing Jinming Pool, completing The Eagle’s Shadow and Soaring Eagle, picking up the Explosive Device Plans, and giving the encounter system enough room — and time — to breathe. Take care of those pieces and the Wandering Tale stops being a mystery and becomes another quiet, bittersweet chapter in Murong Yuan’s story.
