Where Winds Meet Wandering Tales, explained

Wandering Tales in Where Winds Meet sit in a strange space between side quests and open-world puzzles. They rarely appear as clean map markers, they lean heavily on short text clues, and they often ask you to notice small environmental details rather than follow a waypoint. When they land, they feel like stories you stumbled into rather than content you checked off a list.

What Wandering Tales are in Where Winds Meet

Wandering Tales are a specific branch of side quests categorized under Exploration content. They are short narrative chains that usually:

• Start from a single NPC or object with a vague clue.
• Send you searching for one or more specific items or locations.
• Unfold over multiple “parts” or related errands in the same region.
• Award Echo Jade, regional Exploration points, Character EXP, and coins.

Unlike Encounters or clearly marked Campaign missions, Wandering Tales tend to surface in the background: a beggar with an odd request, a dog sitting beside a memorial tablet, or a line about a lost letter pinned up in a hamlet. You’re expected to read the text clue and infer where to go next rather than follow a glowing trail.

They are officially grouped under Side Quests, alongside Side Story, Campaign, World Affairs, Exploration, and Encounters. In the Qinghe region, they form a notable chunk of your Exploration and completion percentage.

List of known Qinghe Wandering Tales

The Qinghe region hosts the first batch of Wandering Tales most players will see. They’re spread across Moonveil Mountain, Verdant Wilds, Harvestfall Village, and nearby points of interest.

These quests are all grouped under Qinghe’s Wandering Tales, but several of them point you toward other content types (like Campaign dungeons or Encounters) through their clues.

How Wandering Tales usually start

Most Wandering Tales trigger from one of three things:

• Talking to a specific NPC with a distinctive label (for example, “Crazy Beggar” in Harvestfall Village).
• Interacting with a particular object that looks slightly out of place, like a memorial tablet near a dog or a damaged cart on the roadside.
• Reading a posted note or letter that mentions a lost item or personal trouble.

There is no separate “accept quest” menu. The moment you pick up the relevant clue or talk through the conversation, the tale quietly starts logging objectives in your Exploration section.

When players click “view map” on a Wandering Tale in the menu and see nothing, that’s working as designed: the game expects you to interpret the text clue instead of following a marker. The only reliable pattern is that the first clue is always active once the quest is unlocked, even if you haven’t physically walked into the starting area before.

Harvestfall Village Wandering Tales: how they play out

Harvestfall Village, on the western edge of Qinghe, carries a dense cluster of Wandering Tales: Eternal Flame, The God of Wealth Returns, The Long Road Home, Breaking from Tradition, and Child's Play. Several of these share starting points and NPCs, so it’s efficient to clear them in one visit.

The Long Road Home – Crazy Beggar’s “gun”

Step 1: Head to Harvestfall Village and look near the village center for an NPC labeled Crazy Beggar, standing on one leg. Talk to him. He explains that he wants to “fly back home” and asks you to retrieve his “gun”.

Step 2: From the beggar’s spot, walk west through the village. Under a large tree that looks like a memorial site, there is a spear stuck into the ground. This spear is the “gun” he’s referring to.

Step 3: Interact with the spear to pick it up, then return to the Crazy Beggar. Hand over the weapon when prompted. This resolves his request and completes The Long Road Home, granting Echo Jade, Qinghe Exploration points, Character EXP, and coins.

The joke is straightforward—there are no firearms in the setting—but the quest leans on you reading the situation and recognizing that a beggar talking about flying home has buried his weapon in a ceremonial spot, not in some bandit camp three mountains away.

How Eternal Flame, The God of Wealth Returns, Breaking from Tradition, and Child's Play behave

Other Harvestfall Village Wandering Tales follow a similar pattern of “talk to someone in the village square, then retrieve a nearby object”:

• Eternal Flame revolves around village traditions and likely points you to a symbolic object in or near the settlement.
• The God of Wealth Returns and Breaking from Tradition both engage with local customs and the tension between old ways and new behaviors.
• Child's Play involves children in the village and small items like toys, shadow puppets, or trinkets left on benches.

The structure is consistent: each tale anchors itself in a single NPC conversation in Harvestfall proper, then fans out just far enough to make you walk the village’s perimeter and notice its environmental storytelling—memorials, small shrines, benches, or improvised grave sites—before sending you back with a physical object.

Fine Steed Hamlet Wandering Tales: chained errands around a single hub

Fine Steed Hamlet is another early hub with a self-contained arc of five Wandering Tales that all orbit the hamlet’s life and a cluster of connected NPCs.

The broad flow looks like this:

• Part 1 involves feeding a small horse with a vegetable (a fresh radish) to trigger it to move, then following it to an item hidden at its destination.
• Parts 2, 3, and 4 are interlinked and revolve around three items hidden inside the same residence: a letter, a box, and a vial. Different NPCs want different pieces of that stash.
• Part 5 sends you out to Mercy Heart Monastery, where you slip past guards to get a special item from an NPC inside a room, then bring it back to a girl in the hamlet.

The interesting part is how the middle tales reuse the same set of items in different narrative contexts. One NPC sweeps the floor and complains when you barge in; another needs proof or a diary; the same house contains all three relevant objects. The quest structure rewards you for thoroughly searching interiors once rather than making separate trips for each tale.

Time of day matters here, too. For the horse in part 1, you may need to advance time if the foal isn’t present by the trough. The hamlet’s NPCs also shift positions between day and night, which is why starting parts from a known landmark and then adjusting time is more reliable than chasing a moving marker.

Bodhi Sea Wandering Tales: tied to a dungeon and a boss

Bodhi Sea introduces Wandering Tales that are tightly coupled to a dungeon-like Campaign chapter. Some of them literally cannot be finished until you clear the area’s “Lost Chapter” content.

The Lost Chapter in Bodhi Sea asks you to:

Step 1: Reach three separate drums scattered through the zone and play each one. These drums serve as keys.

Step 2: Return to the main drummer NPC. Interacting with him after activating all drums transports you to a boss arena.

Step 3: Defeat the boss. The fight is notable for its pacing and visual design, but mechanically it’s a standard major encounter. When the boss dies, it drops a dagger-like key item.

That dagger is then handed in for the Heart of Iron Wandering Tale. Other Bodhi Sea tales in the same cluster include:

• Road to Redemption, which is resolved by finding a specific note and giving it back to its owner.
• The Good Deed, which starts from a monk in trouble near an enemy camp and lets you decide whether to give a retrieved item to the monk or to a child named Karma.
• Emerging Talent, which begins in Harvestfall Village and has you recover a strange box from a damaged cart, then meet the same NPC again at night near a grave before a final handoff near the general goods vendor.
• Lost Quotes, which tasks you with collecting quotes from multiple locations and includes a use of the Celestial Seas theft skill to obtain a key from an NPC and enter a cave for the final piece.

These tales blur the line between region and dungeon: one of them is formally labeled as a Wandering Tale set in Bodhi Sea, but parts of it play out back in Harvestfall Village, and several hinge on having cleared the boss first. It’s a good example of how the game treats Wandering Tales as connective tissue between its big set-pieces and quieter spaces.

Kaifeng and late-game Wandering Tales: when clues stop being friendly

Once players leave Qinghe for Kaifeng, Wandering Tales generally become more opaque. Clues reference tiny landmarks, unexplained NPCs, or items tucked into wells and ruined houses. Examples that regularly trip people up include:

• A tomb-themed tale in the Imperial Artesian Court, where a quest item lies in a well, with no obvious way to extract it.
• Multi-part chains, such as “South Gate Avenue”, where you are told to find a named NPC on “a boat”, but the harbor is packed with similar vessels and nothing is marked.
• Clues that point to one zone name but actually resolve in another (for instance, a Bodhi Sea Wandering Tale whose fourth part quietly takes place in Harvestfall Village).

This is deliberate. In early Qinghe, hints tend to be literal and point to local landmarks you already passed. In Kaifeng, the same structure is kept but the radius is much wider and translations can be loose. It’s not unusual to pick up a required item days earlier while looting a bandit camp, then only realize later that it was the missing piece for a Wandering Tale clue about “a fire starter somewhere on this mountain”.

The tradeoff is that finishing every Wandering Tale in a region such as Qinghe is a genuine achievement. Players who chase 100 percent completion often report spending dozens of hours following faint textual trails, cross-checking odd items in their bags, and revisiting places like Bodhi Sea or Harvestfall to close out the last few locked entries in their Tales lists.

How Wandering Tales tie into exploration rewards

Finishing Wandering Tales isn’t just about narrative closure. Each one feeds directly into the game’s progression systems:

• Echo Jade is the main currency reward, used across multiple vendors and systems.
• Qinghe Exploration (and equivalent region-specific points elsewhere) move your regional completion bar, which can unlock additional rewards and achievements.
• Character EXP and coins provide baseline leveling and purchasing power.
• In at least one case, a Wandering Tale awards a Dragon Crest Token – Wind, which is a rarer progression item.

Because of that, Wandering Tales are a practical way to round out a region before moving the story forward. A single chain like A Toast to Heroes or Great Hero's Trial awards enough EXP and Echo Jade to meaningfully shift your power curve while also nudging you into combat or traversal challenges you might otherwise ignore.

For completionists, they’re mandatory. Qinghe’s Exploration guide and completion achievements explicitly count Wandering Tales alongside Encounters, oddities, and boundary stones. Finishing every tale in a zone is how you close the last few percentage points on the map screen.

Wandering Tales ask for more patience and attention to prose than the rest of Where Winds Meet, but they’re where the game hides many of its most grounded stories: a beggar who buried his spear, a monk whose good deed can go two ways, a craftsman who funds his cat by selling hammers and half-truths. If the main quests are about empires and sects, these are about the people living in their shadow—and the little mysteries you only find if you are willing to follow the wind off the beaten path.