The late-game Jianghu Legacy chain in Where Winds Meet quietly rewires the story’s idea of fate. At Ethereal Mountain in the Roaring Sands, An Unnatural Omen turns abstract star lore into something painfully concrete: a single “Vermilion Star” fated to descend, three catastrophes linked to North Star orbs, and a Daoist trapped under the mountain whose mind is splintering under the weight of prophecy.
An Unnatural Omen setup: the Vermilion Star prophecy
An Unnatural Omen unlocks at Skyreach Terrace, the stepped ziggurat that crowns Ethereal Mountain in western Kaifeng’s Roaring Sands. As you approach the Skyreach Terrace boundary stone, the game prompts you to track the Jianghu Legacy quest.
Before you fight anything, the quest opens with a piece of lore that sets the stakes. The Patriarch of Lone Cloud used his last divination to foresee the Vermilion Star descending to earth a hundred years later “to face calamities.” More than a century passes. Rumors now claim that the destined person has appeared precisely here, on Skyreach Terrace. The framing is blunt: constellations turn, dynasties rise and fall, and the Dao of Heaven “cannot be altered.” Someone is going to embody that Vermilion Star omen, whether they want to or not.
The text then links that cosmic prediction to human politics. During Emperor Shizong’s persecution of Buddhism, Daoist ritual and divination picked up the spiritual slack. Nobles held Douji rites to worship the Big Dipper, chasing blessings and legitimacy. The question the quest poses is simple but sharp: if the powerful are all trying to tug at the stars, “into whose hands does destiny ultimately fall?”
North Star Orbs and hexagrams: three omens, three calamities
Once you clear the Xuanyuan Cultists on the terrace and rescue Suan Sanchun, the quest forces you below ground. Ethereal Mountain hides an elaborate Daoist mechanism built around the Bagua (Eight Trigrams) and the Northern Dipper stars. Mechanically, this takes the form of environmental puzzles and three separate treasure choices. Thematically, it is about three different ways fate can go wrong.
The core structure is built around North Star Orbs and their associated hexagrams:
| Orb / Hexagram | Configuration | Omen / Beast | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| North Star Orb: Heavenly Market | Earth–Mountain Modesty (Upper Kun, Lower Gen) | White Tiger | Greed, ambition, and the danger of hoarding “treasure.” |
| North Star Orb: Supreme Palace | Heaven–Water Conflict (Upper Qian, Lower Water) | Black (linked to martial conflict) | Authority using power and violence to resolve destiny. |
| North Star Orb: Purple Star | Upper Mountain, Lower Lake – Chaos | Vermilion Bird | The destined “Vermilion Star” facing catastrophe. |
Each orb is tied to a chamber where you “retrieve the treasure,” confront a moral dilemma, then choose whether to keep or return a Mystic Pearl. On paper, this looks like standard RPG loot-gating. In practice, the orbs form a three-part divination:
- Heavenly Market / White Tiger paints a world where cults and nobles treat fate as something you can buy and sell.
- Supreme Palace / Heaven–Water Conflict shifts the focus to rulers and war, asking what happens when Heaven’s mandate is enforced with blades instead of virtue.
- Purple Star / Vermilion Bird finally narrows the lens to a single, chaotic destiny that crashes into human lives.
Your choices with the first two pearls establish how your character responds to power and wealth. Those decisions echo later when you confront the true “purple star catastrophe” deeper in the mountain.
The Azure Dragon and the descent into the Ethereal Chamber
The most visible puzzle in An Unnatural Omen is the giant Azure Dragon statue towering over Skyreach Terrace. A North Star Bagua platform lets you rotate this stone dragon until its head faces a far-off beam of light while its tail curves toward you. This unlocks the path into the mountain.
Standing on the Yin–Yang disc beneath the dragon triggers a massive elevator. As it sinks, the bright desert sky gives way to shadowed stone corridors lit by ritual lamps, scattered notes, and old divination tools. You collect a Bagua Symbol, a Tattered Eight Trigrams diagram, and a Tattered Four Symbols Chart. These are not just flavor items; they are props in an old Daoist attempt to encode the Vermilion Star prophecy in stone, wheels, and starlight.
A two-disc Bagua wheel puzzle gates the first inner door. Aligning the rings in the correct pattern causes the central Yin–Yang disc to rotate and the door behind you to grind open. Inside, Hero’s Tomb interactables act as your bonfires, and a series of Xuanyuan cult ambushes keep pressure on you as you descend toward the Ethereal Chamber boundary stone.
By the time you light that stone, the quest has made its point: this is not a random ruin. Someone built an entire subterranean observatory for the specific purpose of watching a Purple Star and testing what it would do to the human heart.
Who is tied to the Purple Star? Jin Zhongyuan and the inner demon
The quest progression shifts gears once you reach the Ethereal Chamber itself. After more fighting with Xuanyuan Cultists—including a Xuanyuan Cult Luminarch—you find a Daoist imprisoned by the cult’s rituals. This is Jin Zhongyuan, the man who has been living under Lone Cloud’s long shadow.
The objectives then spell out the structure of his trial:
- “Heavenly Market Hexagram… Omen: White Tiger” → treasure → choice → return the Mystic Pearl or not.
- “Grand Tenuity Hexagram… Black” → treasure → choice → return the Mystic Pearl or not.
- “Purple Tenuity Hexagram… Chaos: Vermilion Bird” → treasure → choice → then “Find Jin Zhongyuan,” “Defeat Jin Zhongyuan’s Inner Demon,” “Talk to Jin Zhongyuan.”
The “Purple Tenuity Hexagram” is the key line. Purple Tenuity corresponds to the imperial pole star region in traditional Chinese astronomy, a seat of sovereignty and cosmic order. Tying it directly to “Chaos: Vermilion Bird” and giving it the orb name North Star Orb: Purple Star makes the role of this chamber explicit. This is the locus of the Vermilion Star catastrophe.
The fight that follows is not against an outside boss. It is framed as a battle against Jin Zhongyuan’s Inner Demon. In other words, the “purple star catastrophe” is not merely some external disaster crashing into the world; it is the psychological breaking point of the person fate has chosen. Jin has been interpreted, groomed, or hunted as the destined Vermilion Star. Trapped by the Xuanyuan Cult and ground between different factions’ ideas of Heaven’s mandate, he finally fractures. You are forced to cut through the manifestation of that fracture before he can reclaim any agency.
Only after you defeat the inner demon do you get to speak to Jin himself and leave the mountain. The game then queues up the next Jianghu Legacy quest, The River’s Fury, which continues to explore the fallout from what he carries.
What the “purple star catastrophe” actually means
Putting the pieces together, the “purple star catastrophe” in An Unnatural Omen is not a random celestial event. It is a layered construct built out of Lone Cloud’s final divination, the Northern Dipper ritual apparatus under Ethereal Mountain, and Jin Zhongyuan’s fate.
Several points stand out:
- The Vermilion Star is a person. Lone Cloud’s prophecy says the Vermilion Star will “descend to Earth to face calamities.” The Ethereal Mountain rumor then says the destined figure has appeared on Skyreach Terrace. An Unnatural Omen’s structure ties that directly to Jin, not to the protagonist.
- The Purple Star is the mechanism of that fate. In-game, “North Star Orb: Purple Star” and “Purple Tenuity Hexagram: Chaos: Vermilion Bird” are the last, most dangerous tier of the Ethereal Chamber’s divination sequence. When you engage it, you stop testing abstract omens and start confronting a specific person’s collapse.
- The catastrophe is internal as much as external. By making you fight Jin Zhongyuan’s Inner Demon, the quest suggests the real disaster is what prophecy and competing mandates do to the human mind. Xuanyuan manipulation, imperial star lore, and Daoist fatalism meet inside one body.
- Your treasure choices frame your role. Returning or pocketing the Mystic Pearls in the Heavenly Market and Supreme Palace segments does not change who the Vermilion Star is, but it broadcasts how your character responds to the temptation to treat destiny as loot. That moral stance colors the tone of your intervention when Jin finally breaks.
This structure echoes how the main Qinghe and Kaifeng stories handle fate more broadly. In Qinghe, Tian Ying bends international politics by assassinating a Khitan envoy at the cost of innocents and allies. In Kaifeng, Jiang Yan, Aunt Han, and the Aureate Pavilion entangle the protagonist in a web of hidden identities and long bets on the Mandate of Heaven. Ethereal Mountain zooms out and reframes the question: if Heaven truly cannot be altered, how much responsibility does the “destined” person still bear for what they do with that burden?
How An Unnatural Omen links into The River’s Fury
The quest list explicitly labels An Unholy Prophecy as the previous entry and The River’s Fury as the next. The chain moves from prediction (Unholy Prophecy), to subterranean star machinery and the Purple Star trial (An Unnatural Omen), then out into the open air with The River’s Fury.
By the time you step out of Ethereal Mountain, several things are true:
- Jin Zhongyuan has survived both external persecution and an internal breakdown.
- The North Star Orbs have been activated, and their omens played out.
- The player character has taken a stance on fate’s “treasures” by returning or keeping Mystic Pearls.
The River’s Fury then examines what happens when that star-marked destiny collides with one of the most destructive forces in the setting: water. The title itself hints that Jin’s burden and the heaven–earth balance explored through the hexagrams will now be mirrored in a literal river disaster, with you again positioned between Heaven’s script and human lives.
This makes the answer to “who is destined to face the purple star catastrophe” straightforward in context. At Ethereal Mountain, the Purple Star omen hangs over Jin Zhongyuan. The catastrophe is his: first as a symbolic role drawn from Lone Cloud’s chart of the Vermilion Star, then as a direct confrontation with his own inner demon, and finally as a thread that runs into The River’s Fury and beyond.
What remains open—deliberately—is how tightly that fate is bounded. Lone Cloud’s divination claims the Dao of Heaven cannot be altered. Yet the entire Ethereal Chamber is built to test choices, and the story only moves forward because you step in and refuse to leave Jin alone with his prophecy. The sky may keep turning, but An Unnatural Omen argues that the shape of the catastrophe is still carved by the people forced to live through it.
