Murong Yuan’s story in Where Winds Meet is built around two father figures: the man who saves and raises her first, and the general who later adopts her. The game gives you fragments of this through side quests, campaign cutscenes, and item descriptions, which can make it hard to keep straight who is who.
Murong Yuan’s first father: Li Yun
Murong Yuan’s life starts with General Li Yun of Later Zhou.
As a baby, she survives the Later Tang’s Tianjin Bridge Rebellion only because of a mechanical wooden kite her mother built. Li Yun finds her in the aftermath and takes her in. He is not her biological father, but he becomes her first adoptive father in practice: he raises her, names her Yuan (from “鸢”, kite), and brings her up through the chaos of the Five Dynasties.
Li Yun later becomes a founding general of Later Zhou. When Zhao Kuangyin launches the Chenqiao Mutiny and founds the Song, Li Yun refuses to submit. Knowing he plans to rebel and that the new regime will come for him, he tries to get Yuan out before the crackdown begins.
To do that, he formally places her under the care of an ally in the army, Murong Yanzhao. That hand‑off is where the second “father” enters her life.
The adoptive father in the navy: Murong Yanzhao
Murong Yanzhao is the man most players think of when they ask about Murong Yuan’s adoptive father, because he is the one physically present in the Jinming Pool campaign.
Li Yun entrusts Yuan to Murong Yanzhao on the eve of his own rebellion against the new Song court. Yuan is still young and never told the real reason for this transfer. She only hears Li Yun say he does not want her to “suffer with him” any longer, and then she is sent away. From her point of view, she is being abandoned; from his, he is moving her to someone who can protect her.
From that point on, Murong Yanzhao is her official adoptive father inside the Song military world. His status in the navy and his later decline are what you come face‑to‑face with aboard the warship at Jinming Pool, where he appears chained and mentally broken in the hidden chamber that also houses the warship blueprints.
How her family history gets twisted
The emotional core of Murong Yuan’s arc is that she misunderstands both men for most of her life.
After she is sent away, she waits in vain for Li Yun or her younger brother Li Shoujie to return for her. No one comes back. The separation hardens into resentment, and she throws herself into mechanical study instead: restoring the wooden kite, pursuing Mohist engineering, then joining the Mo Sect once she discovers her mother’s connection to it.
Years later, a letter from Li Shoujie warps her view of both Li Yun and Murong Yanzhao. The brother, angry that their father risked everything and sent Yuan away, tells her that Li Yun died by self‑immolation and that Murong Yanzhao was credited with suppressing the rebellion. He exaggerates Murong Yanzhao’s role and downplays their father’s choice to die on his own terms.
Yuan draws a straight line that is emotionally understandable but factually skewed: in her mind, Murong Yanzhao betrays her foster father to earn favor with Zhao Kuangyin. Her first adoptive father dies; the second becomes the face of that betrayal. That belief eventually drives her to leave the Mo Sect for the Lu School, embrace weapons engineering without the restraint of “universal love” and “non‑aggression,” and to seek Murong Yanzhao in the capital with revenge on her mind.
Where the Jinming Pool campaign fits in
By the time you meet her in Kaifeng, Murong Yuan has already risen to become the technical mind behind the Song navy’s Five‑Toothed Warships. She holds the navy’s tiger tally through her position as Murong Yanzhao’s adopted daughter and uses that authority to get close to the fleet.
She captures Murong Yanzhao and imprisons him aboard the warship you later infiltrate at Jinming Pool. That decision is fueled by years of anger and misunderstanding. In her eyes, she is forcing the “traitor” to face her, surrounded by the weapon she designed.
Later revelations from Yingying and others correct her view of the past. She learns that Zhao Kuangyin’s seizure of power and political purges doomed Li Yun, and that Murong Yanzhao tried and failed to save him rather than actively betraying him. Realizing this, she shifts her hatred away from one man and toward the aggressive Song state that plans to use her warship to wage southern campaigns.
Her answer is to quietly sabotage the warship with a self‑destruct mechanism embedded in the true blueprints. That is why the confidential diagram you are sent to steal and the modified design she guards on board are so central to the Jinming Pool plot, and why she eventually confronts you directly when your actions threaten to expose her plan.
So who counts as her “adoptive father”?
In the narrow sense used inside the Jinming Pool storyline and the in‑game character notes, Murong Yuan’s adoptive father is Murong Yanzhao, the Song general chained inside the warship. He is the one who formally takes her in from Li Yun, and he is the figure the navy and court recognize as her father.
In the broader story of her life, Li Yun is the original father figure who rescues and raises her after the Tianjin Bridge Rebellion. He functions as a first adoptive father, even though later the narrative reserves the “adoptive father” title for Murong Yanzhao once she enters the Song military orbit.
Understanding that split makes the warship sequence less confusing. The man in chains is not the general who found her as a baby; he is the ally her first guardian trusted, the second father she grew to resent, and eventually the symbol of a system she decides to fight by burning her own creation at Jinming Pool.
