The God of Avarice encounter in Where Winds Meet looks like a standard late‑game setpiece: a towering idol of wealth, waves of golden attacks, multiple phases, and a long cutscene payoff. Underneath the spectacle, it is one of the clearest statements the game makes about greed, state power, and what money actually is.
Who the God of Avarice is in Where Winds Meet
The fight opens with a simple line that sets the tone: “They all bow to me. Why do you not?” The boss presents itself as a god of wealth who believes obedience is a natural consequence of power and riches. Your character pushes back: “You’re only human, not a god. Why should I bow to you?”
That exchange frames the God of Avarice as a personification of human greed and authority dressed up as divinity. It is closer to a corrupt official or magnate who has elevated himself to godlike status than a true supernatural deity. The title echoes long‑standing figures such as Mammon, a traditional symbol of wealth and avarice treated as a demon of greed in Christian and medieval literature.
Visually and mechanically, the boss is rooted in money imagery: molten gold, piles of treasure, and attacks that reference prosperity and punishment in the same breath. The arena is effectively a treasury turned battlefield.
How the God of Avarice boss fight works
The encounter runs through several distinct phases, escalating from a conventional melee fight into something stranger and more chaotic.
Phase one: The “prosperity” opener. The boss announces “Gathering of riches. Sway of gold. Prosperity be yours” and begins with sweeping, heat‑themed attacks. These are telegraphed but punishing, and much of the commentary around the fight leans on the repeated shout of “Heat. HEAT.” as the arena fills with damage zones.
Phase two and three: Molten gold and punishment. As the health bar drops, the God of Avarice leans into its role as a punisher of greed: “The god of wealth shall punish” and “In molten gold, nothing ends” are called out as high‑damage patterns trigger. These phases emphasize survival and positioning around explosions and surges in the arena.
Phase four: The fallen form. After the idol‑like body collapses, a “fallen” manifestation emerges, shifting the fight into a more surreal direction. Players describe this as bordering on “alien invasion” imagery, with projectiles and strange shapes replacing some of the earlier, more grounded attacks. Healing items are refreshed going into this stage, reinforcing that it is a separate, climactic phase.
Alongside the core mechanics, the fight includes an extra layer of interaction around gold piles. In the Abyss version of the encounter, you can grab gold during the battle, but taking too much has a direct penalty: players report that “get too greedy and you essentially get stunned briefly like a couple of seconds.” Others note that the total haul can be high on early runs and then vanish on later attempts, indicating some form of cap on how many bonuses you can safely extract.
Greed is therefore not just a story theme; it is coded into the rules of the arena. The more you scramble for wealth mid‑fight, the more vulnerable you become.
What the gold piles and stun effect are doing thematically
The gold piles scattered around the God of Avarice encounter offer a reward that is immediately useful but tactically dangerous. Grab a few and you walk away richer. Overreach and the game locks your character in place, leaving you open to the boss’s next attack.
This is a direct mechanical metaphor for the broader arc of the fight: unchecked avarice promises momentary gain but increases the risk of ruin. The design encourages restraint instead of mindless looting, which is unusual in a genre where scooping up everything shiny is usually optimal play.
That logic aligns with the way the boss’s dialogue frames its own authority. It treats the suffering of the common folk as a “small sacrifice” in service of a supposedly greater cause. Risk and pain are exported downward; rewards and safety sit with those at the top. The stun effect on greedy players inverts that pattern for a moment, making personal greed costly in a very literal way.
The cutscene: Tong coins, “small sacrifices,” and the people’s voice
When the final phase ends, the fight hands over to a long story sequence. The tone switches from shouted attack names to a political argument.
One official insists that confiscating Tong coins is a necessary “small sacrifice for greater gain ahead” and that justice will “reign over injustice.” The opposing voice refuses that framing, pointing out that “the common folk, born without a voice, die without a sound” and that even when “their bodies pile up,” they become mere “footnotes in the annals of history.”
Two positions emerge clearly:
- Utilitarian statecraft. The first speaker is willing to impose losses on ordinary people in the name of macro‑level stability. Individual pain is a leaf; the “forest” of the realm matters more.
- Chivalric advocacy. The second insists that each “leaf” matters and that faceless statistics hide real suffering. The line “When the world falls, my blade speaks for them” explicitly aligns the player’s role with defending those who have no formal power.
This is not a simple rejection of government, though. A later section has children asking whether government intervention will make things worse for the heroes. The response is confident: “The government definitely stands with the people.” The question is not whether institutions exist, but what they do with the trust they are given.
From copper to paper: what money is in Where Winds Meet
The cutscene then pivots to a problem of monetary policy. The realm of Great Song is “short on coins” because there is not enough copper to mint physical currency. That scarcity drives the earlier attempt to confiscate Tong coins and tighten control.
Instead of doubling down on confiscation, an alternative is proposed: if copper can count as money, and iron can count as money, then “maybe paper can be money, too.” That line sets up a concise explanation of fiat currency inside a fantasy wuxia story.
The key concept is framed as an art called “Feeding on illusions.” The idea is simple:
- If people trust the state “to act justly,” a piece of paper labeled “Song coin” can function as money.
- The drawing on the paper cannot literally fill a stomach, but social trust can give it purchasing power.
- The real “treasure basin” is not metal in a vault; it is the confidence of the common folk.
On that basis, the government opens the treasury and uses copper coins to buy up Tong coins from the public. The narration acknowledges that “it’ll be a tough couple years for the treasury,” but treats the move as necessary to stabilize the system and legitimize the new paper currency.
The story then skips forward with a prediction: if Great Song continues to earn people’s trust, “within a hundred years, people everywhere will use paper currency,” and eventually society “won’t even need paper anymore.” In other words, once trust is strong enough, money does not have to be a metal object or even a physical note at all.
The family exchange scene: trust at the street level
The theory of “Feeding on illusions” immediately gets anchored in a small domestic moment. A mother arrives to exchange all of her savings: a mix of yuan bao and Tong coins. The clerk hesitates and asks whether she is sure about trading everything.
Her children answer for her: “The new money is good. We trade for new money for a better life.” They already talk in terms of what this shift might mean for their future, not the metal content of the coins they are handing over.
Then the conversation moves from abstraction to concrete dreams:
- The brother promised they could “buy a shop” for their mother, elevating her from hardship to the status of a shopkeeper.
- He also promised that when they “have money, we’ll eat buns every meal,” a modest but vivid image of prosperity.
- The family imagines a world with “no more wars, no massacres, no fleeing,” and “a cure for every ill.”
In that brief scene, the game shows how structural changes in money reach ordinary people. Exchanging coins for paper is not just about inflation or liquidity; it is about whether a family believes that a piece of paper can protect them from hunger and violence.
How the God of Avarice connects to broader themes of greed and Mammon
The God of Avarice fits into a long tradition of treating wealth and greed as something close to a deity. In Christian texts, “Mammon” is used for money or worldly wealth in phrases such as “You cannot serve both God and mammon,” and later writers turned Mammon into a full‑fledged demon of avarice. Medieval art and literature often depict this figure as presiding over caverns of gold and tempting people to trade their souls for riches.
Where Winds Meet updates that image through the lens of Chinese historical fantasy. Instead of a Western devil, it offers a self‑styled god of wealth whose golden body literally collapses when confronted with the cost of his policies. Instead of sermons, it delivers its argument through attack patterns, debuffs, and a bureaucracy deciding how to handle a currency crisis.
The overlap is deliberate: in both cases, worship of wealth replaces concern for human life, and the story’s heroes are defined by their refusal to bow.
Why this fight matters inside Where Winds Meet’s world
Within the wider arc of Where Winds Meet, the God of Avarice encounter is doing more than gating progression behind a difficult boss. It crystallizes several of the game’s central preoccupations:
- Power versus accountability. The boss embodies officials who treat people as expendable while invoking “justice” and the “greater good.” The cutscene challenges that logic without defaulting to simple anti‑state rhetoric.
- Trust as the foundation of systems. The “Feeding on illusions” explanation of paper money is a direct statement that institutions only function when people believe in them. That belief is fragile and must be earned.
- Individual heroism grounded in everyday lives. The closing scene with the family and their shop shows that the player’s grand victories only matter if they translate into better lives for people who will never wield a sword or sit in a treasury office.
- Mechanical storytelling. The gold‑pile stun effect and multi‑phase escalation fold the boss’s moral into the player’s hands. To win, you have to moderate your own greed and respect the danger of short‑term gain.
By the time the cutscene fades and control returns, the God of Avarice has been defeated twice: once as a spectacular boss in a pit of molten gold, and once as a political philosophy that treats human beings as acceptable collateral. The game does not shout that conclusion, but the combination of dialogue, mechanics, and small character moments makes the point clear.
