Yingying is one of the first major figures you meet after leaving Qinghe for Kaifeng in Where Winds Meet. She arrives in Chapter 2: Universal Furnace during the main quest “A New Guest in Kaifeng,” and her role is to drag the young hero into Kaifeng’s web of scams, fake currencies, and class tension.
Who Yingying is in Where Winds Meet
Yingying appears in the Wheatwind Bazaar sequence just after you arrive in Kaifeng. While you are searching for the mysterious Wuque, she cuts through a local scam in front of a crowd, using your Wind Sense to expose a fake “Treasure Basin” that spits out coins from a hidden mechanism. When the Unbound Cavern thugs turn violent, a talking God of Fortune statue and a nimble “cat” trick drive them off.
The statue is not divine at all—it is Yingying’s stagecraft. She reveals herself after the gang flees, accepts your thanks, and quickly steers you toward a meal. From this point on, she is framed as a charming, quick‑witted Jianghu drifter who knows the city’s underbelly and talks freely about famous names like the Ember of East, Wuque (Wen Wuque).
Over that walk to the restaurant she fills in key plot details:
- Wuque is the “Ember of East,” the same person who tried to help Aunt Han evacuate Heaven’s Pier.
- Wuque is tied to the upcoming Heroes Assembly at Revelry Hall, where the real Gold-Making Vessel will be shown.
- Kaifeng is in the middle of a currency upheaval: the government is forcing through Copper Coins while older iron-based coins are being banned, creating shortages and poverty.
Yingying positions herself as a guide who can help you navigate that world. What follows shows she is also one of its most competent scammers.
How the inn scam with Yingying plays out
The restaurant scene in Wheatwind Bazaar is where many players get stuck on the “Wait at Inn for Yingying” objective. Narratively, it is the moment Yingying’s mask drops.
Inside the inn, you share food and backstory. Yingying presses you about your family and your last jar of Parting Tears wine from Heaven’s Pier, trying to get you to open it. The young hero refuses, treating it as the final memento of home. Then Yingying excuses herself, saying she needs the restroom, and does not return.
The game then prompts you to “wait” repeatedly—10 seconds, 30 seconds, and so on. If you continue choosing to wait, the prompts loop without progressing the quest. You have to stop waiting and challenge what is happening.
How to clear “Wait at Inn for Yingying”
Step 1: Stand up from the table and walk to the front of the inn. Speak to the shop owner or waiter at the counter. They will tell you that Yingying already came back, claimed to feel unwell, and said you would pay the entire bill.
Step 2: When prompted in dialogue, deflect the demand for payment. Point the staff toward Yingying as the one who promised to pay. This sets a flag that lets you stop the endless waiting loop.
Step 3: Try to leave through the back of the inn. The quest text still says to wait, and a pop‑up will initially block you from exiting. Use the option that says you will “go find the waiter” or similar; this tells the game you are taking action rather than remaining seated.
Step 4: Exit the inn to the street and talk to the waiter outside. Here, you negotiate how to settle the bill. This conversation triggers a brief Gift of Gab (sometimes called Gift of Jab/Grab) mini‑game where you argue your way out of paying with cash.
Step 5: Win the Gift of Gab exchange. Once you succeed, the waiter accepts a different arrangement based on Yingying’s instructions, which moves the quest into its next phase—pawning your Parting Tears and starting the grain trading scheme.
What happens to Parting Tears and why it matters
After you confront the waiter, you learn Yingying left a yellow brocade bag and a letter. The letter tells you to pawn your jar of Parting Tears wine to pay the bill. The implication is simple: you have already been emotionally maneuvered into giving up your last link to Heaven’s Pier.
Once you agree, the waiter keeps the wine as collateral. A later letter from Yingying pushes you into the grain-buying scheme so you can “earn back” the money to redeem the wine. This is how the inn scam leads directly into the economic plot of Chapter 2:
- You buy grain cheaply from traveling merchants.
- You run into Old Jin, an old would‑be scammer from Chapter 1, who now tries to blackmail you for a cut of the profits.
- You sell grain on to a “Dao Lord’s follower” who turns out to be the girl Little Fu.
Eventually, when you return to the inn with enough money, the waiter explains that he already sold the Parting Tears to a Floral Reverie gentleman linked to Revelry Hall. You leave with coin in your pocket but permanently lose the wine. Yingying’s scam has cost you something that cannot be bought back and quietly ties your story to the elite sects in Kaifeng.
How Yingying’s letters pull you into Kaifeng’s money crisis
Yingying is not a one‑off con artist; she is a structural device that drags the hero into Kaifeng’s failing economy and class politics.
Her second letter, discovered in the grain trade segment, lays out a simple arbitrage plan: buy grain cheap from traveling merchants and sell it for more to contacts inside Kaifeng. She uses you as the front for this trade while staying invisible, and each step exposes another layer of the city:
- The scarcity of legal currency and reliance on food as a store of value.
- The presence of counterfeit or obsolete money, like Tang Coins, which cannot be used in Kaifeng.
- The way opportunists like Old Jin and the Unbound Cavern gang prey on both peasants and wandering heroes.
The bag of payment Little Fu hands over is stuffed with Tang Coins, making it effectively worthless. Enclosed is yet another note from Yingying, warning that the Jianghu is full of dangers and that you should stay away, a half‑mocking reminder that you keep walking into the traps she sketches out.
By the time you discover the coins are illegal, you are already entangled with Little Fu, Old Jin, and the local guards. That chain of cause and effect leads to several major beats: a public confrontation over counterfeit coins, a clash with Kaifeng soldiers, and your rescue by Big Zhao and the poor residents who unleash their livestock to cover your escape.
How Yingying connects you to Wuque and Revelry Hall
From the first conversation, Yingying’s information shapes your motivation in Kaifeng even as her schemes undermine you. She is the one who makes the following clear:
- Wuque, the “Ember of East,” is the person who planned Heaven’s Pier’s evacuation route to Kaifeng.
- Wuque will appear at the Heroes Assembly in Revelry Hall, unveiling the Gold-Making Vessel—an authentic, mechanically plausible counterpart to the fake Treasure Basins sold in Wheatwind Bazaar.
- The shortage of copper coin is pushing commoners into ruin, and the Gold-Making Vessel is marketed as a way to ease that crisis by literally minting money.
Later, when you learn that the Parting Tears was sold to a man from Floral Reverie, a sect seated inside Revelry Hall, the threads tighten: the wine, Yingying’s scam, Wuque, and the city’s financial experiment all intersect at that hall. Getting there requires an Assembly Ticket, which Big Zhao promises to help you obtain after he spirits you away from the guards.
Yingying herself disappears from the screen after the early Chapter 2 sequence, but the fallout from her actions forms the spine of the “New Guest in Kaifeng” chapter. By the time you reach Revelry Hall, you are no longer an anonymous refugee; you are already a player in scams, grain speculation, and political showpieces that define the region.
Why you never simply “get your money back” from Yingying
Players often ask whether they can confront Yingying later to reclaim their stolen coin and Parting Tears. The story direction makes that impossible in this chapter.
Yingying’s scams are deliberately one‑sided:
- She steals your coin purse in the Wheatwind Bazaar brawl and vanishes into the crowd.
- She abandons you at the inn with a fabricated illness and a bill, forcing you to sacrifice the Parting Tears.
- Her letters push you into deals that constantly turn out to involve bad currency or dangerous counterparts.
Each time, other characters—not Yingying—carry the consequences forward: the waitress who sells the wine, Old Jin who muscles in on your profits, Little Fu who passes Tang Coins, the Unbound Cavern gang who beat the woman that robbed you. The design choice keeps Yingying as a catalyst rather than a static NPC merchant or antagonist you resolve with a neat revenge scene.
There is no branch in “A New Guest in Kaifeng” that lets you reclaim your initial money or the wine from her personally. The real payoff for her storyline is narrative rather than monetary: she exposes you to the risks of Jianghu life in a city where information, credit, and trust are all as fragile as the coins in your purse.
Yingying’s short arc in Kaifeng leaves a long shadow. She is the first to tell you that “the Jianghu is full of dangers” and then immediately proves it by using your trust, your grief, and your last keepsake to pull you into the city’s moral gray zones. Clearing the “Wait at Inn for Yingying” step is less about finding the right prompt and more about accepting what her presence in Where Winds Meet represents: from now on, you survive not by waiting for help, but by questioning who is really paying the bill.
