Woven with Malice is one of the more opaque bits of new content in Where Winds Meet. It is framed as an event quest that begins at Buddha Fort with the hint that “a young scholar might hold the key to her bloody secret.” In practice, many players arrive at the fort, find nothing, and leave wondering if anything is actually there.
The quest currently sits in an awkward space: there is a clear outline of how it should begin, but a large share of players cannot even get that first NPC to spawn. That has led to an ongoing debate about whether Woven with Malice is bugged or gated behind conditions that are still not fully understood.
How Woven with Malice is intended to start
When the event works, its opening is simple and oddly low‑key. At Buddha Fort, there should be a young scholar NPC in the area referenced by the quest text. Interacting with him does not immediately launch into a full‑blown side story. Instead, it plays out over several in‑game days.
| Step | What you do | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Talk to the scholar at Buddha Fort and pick any dialogue option. | Conversation ends with no obvious quest start; nothing major changes yet. |
| 2 | Skip or wait one full in‑game day, then speak to him again. | He reacts differently, hinting at something building in the background. |
| 3 | Skip or wait another in‑game day and return once more. | The scholar is now missing from his original spot. |
| 4 | Look for a nearby bronze contraption at Buddha Fort and interact with it. | The scholar is hiding inside; talking to him here finally flips the event into an active quest. |
That last interaction, with the scholar concealed in the bronze device, is the actual trigger for Woven with Malice to register as a running quest. Before that, it feels more like an ambient flavor than a formal activity.
The scholar not spawning at Buddha Fort
For many players, the core problem is more basic: the scholar simply never appears in Buddha Fort in the first place. The in‑game description points to the location, but the fort is empty of any quest‑relevant NPC, no matter how many times they reload or change the time of day.
Reports describe a consistent pattern:
- Players travel to Buddha Fort after reading the event description.
- The fort is populated with regular enemies or ambient NPCs, but there is no scholar.
- Progress in Qinghe or Kaifeng, defeating major bosses, or clearing nearby content does not reliably fix it.
In short, the event framework exists, but for a significant number of accounts, its entry point in the world never materialises.
What players have tried to get Woven with Malice to appear
Because there is no official checklist of prerequisites, players have been experimenting with their own. A few patterns have emerged from accounts where the scholar did appear at Buddha Fort, and Woven with Malice could be started.
| Potential factor | What players report doing | Why it might matter |
|---|---|---|
| Nearby combat content | Clearing the fort’s enemies and finishing the surrounding encampment. | Some event NPCs only spawn once a stronghold is “settled” and no longer contested. |
| Local side quest: “moth poet” | Completing a moth‑themed poet quest in a nearby village, then returning to the fort. | May be part of a small regional story chain that flags the event as available. |
| Qinghe exploration percentage | Reaching around 70% exploration in Qinghe, including Lost Chapter quests. | Higher exploration often unlocks more dynamic events and encounters. |
| Kaifeng main story progress | Advancing Kaifeng’s main quest line to around 60% completion. | Several Jianghu Legacy quests are tied loosely to global story milestones. |
| Kaifeng side stories | Finishing the Granary of Plenty story that starts outside the Granary with a mother and son. | May serve as a soft gate to later event content, including region‑spanning mysteries. |
Even with all of these done—fort cleared, local side quest complete, high exploration, and deep progress into Kaifeng—players still report cases where the scholar never spawns. That inconsistency is the main reason Woven with Malice is widely treated as either severely bugged or incomplete.
Why Woven with Malice appears unfinished
There are two layers to the frustration around this quest. The first is the missing entry NPC, which blocks any interaction at all. The second is the suspicion that even when the event fires correctly, its later steps may not yet be wired all the way through to a clean resolution.
The event text suggests a fully fledged narrative built around “her bloody secret” and a young scholar in Buddha Fort. The spawning issues, combined with the absence of any reliable way to force the quest to appear, create the sense of a feature that has been pushed into the live game before its conditions and scripting were solidified for every player state.
There is no sign of a toggle or menu option to reset Woven with Malice, nor a visible campaign entry, the way larger Fragment Chapter quests like Gleaming Abyss or Mysterious Colossus receive. If the internal flags misfire for your character, there is currently no direct remediation path from inside the game.
What you can realistically do right now
Short of a patch, the options are limited. Still, a few steps are worth trying if you want to maximise your chances of seeing the scholar at Buddha Fort, or at least rule out some of the softer gating conditions in your own playthrough.
| Action | How to try it | What it can clarify |
|---|---|---|
| Fully clear Buddha Fort | Eliminate every hostile group in and immediately around the fort; then leave the area and return after some in‑game time. | Confirms whether the event expects a “safe” fort before drawing in the scholar NPC. |
| Finish the nearby “moth poet” quest | Track down the moth‑themed poet side quest in the village close to Buddha Fort and see it through to completion. | Removes a likely regional pre‑quest from the list of things that might be blocking the spawn. |
| Advance Qinghe exploration | Push exploration in Qinghe towards or beyond 70% by doing Lost Chapter quests like The Silent Assassin, Echoes in the Shrine, Meridian Touch, Blind to the World, Afterglow, and Palace of Annals. | Aligns your world state with players who did see the scholar, and unlocks other content regardless. |
| Push Kaifeng story progress | Continue the Kaifeng main storyline until your progress bar sits around 60%, and complete storylines such as the Granary of Plenty family quest outside the granary. | Brings your account in line with those where Woven with Malice triggered, in case the event expects this story context. |
| Cycle several in‑game days | Use the in‑game time controls to skip multiple days, returning to Buddha Fort at different hours, including night. | Ensures the missing NPC is not quietly tied to a specific time window the description does not mention. |
None of these steps is guaranteed to fix the issue, but they also are not wasted effort: they open up Mystic Skills such as Meridian Touch and Meteor Flight, unlock high‑value bosses like Lucky Seventeen, and expand the Jianghu Legacy chain in ways that matter beyond this single event.
What to expect until a patch lands
For now, Woven with Malice is best treated as experimental content: intriguing when it works, but unreliable enough that it should not be the focus of a play session. If the scholar is there in your world, you can ride the slow‑burn setup—speak, wait a day, speak again, wait again, and finally find him in the bronze contraption—into what looks like a dark, character‑driven investigation.
If the scholar is not there after you have cleared the surrounding activities and advanced the broader story, the most realistic outcome is that you will need to wait on a server‑side or client update. The rest of Where Winds Meet’s Lost Chapter structure shows how these longer stories usually behave when they are complete: clearly seeded NPCs, repeatable campaign entries, and well‑documented rewards. Woven with Malice has the narrative hook to sit alongside them; it just is not reliably accessible yet.
Until that changes, the most productive path is to keep exploring Qinghe and Kaifeng, push deeper into the established Jianghu Legacy quests, and circle back to Buddha Fort from time to time. If the scholar finally appears, you will know immediately that Woven with Malice has, at last, spun up in your world.
