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Xingtian
September 12, 2026 at 11:15 PM
New article covering Xingtian, the first named boss: locale naming, the four-phase structure, the severed-head premise, the death-loop framing, the producer’s difficulty placement, and the clay-and-ceramic art direction
Xingtian is the first boss Genigods: Nezha has ever named publicly, and as of September 2026 he is still the only one. He appeared in the playable demo the studio showed at public events through 2026, and the developers have talked about the fight at length since, which makes it the most thoroughly described single encounter in the game.
The encounter carries a full name rather than a bare character name, and that name is not the same string in every locale.
Locale | Name as printed | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Simplified Chinese | 刑天的傲骨 | Roughly "Xingtian’s unbowed spirit". 刑天 is the figure; the rest is the title of the fight. |
Japanese | 刑天の傲骨 | The same name with the Japanese possessive particle in place of 的. These are two different strings, not one string written two ways, and each belongs to its own locale. |
English | Not published | No official English name for the boss or the fight has appeared in any English material. "Xingtian" here is a romanisation of 刑天, not an official rendering. |
The fight runs to four phases and closes with a clash of 法身, the dharma body or divine-body form. That is the only phase whose content has been described.
Xingtian’s signature move is 沙尘龙卷, a wide tornado of dust and sand that sweeps a large area. The Palm Leaf Fan is the answer to it: using the fan cancels the tornado outright. This is the clearest published example of one specific mythic treasure being the specific counter to one specific boss attack, and it is the best evidence so far that relics are meant as combat options rather than damage upgrades. Weapons and Relics covers the fan.
The thing the player fights is not Xingtian’s body. In the story he was beheaded by the 轩辕剑, the Sword of Xuanyuan, and his severed head fell into a 时间裂隙, a rift in time. What the encounter puts in front of the player is the head.
The sword is named only as the weapon that did the beheading. Nothing states that the player can ever wield it, and this wiki records it as a lore object rather than as equipment.
The approach to Xingtian is built around repeated failure, and the game writes that into its fiction rather than leaving it to its systems. On the way in, the player passes many earlier versions of themselves who failed, gathers 灵气 (spirit energy), learns basic abilities and comes back to try again. When Xingtian finally sees the player, his line in the Chinese script is 「这是第几次了？」, roughly "how many times is this now?"
One thing to hold alongside that: the creative director has denied on the record that this is a soulslike, and the studio’s chief executive has separately positioned the game’s pacing against the slower end of the action role-playing field. The structure around Xingtian is nonetheless recognisably close to that genre. Both statements are accurate and neither cancels the other, so this wiki reports both rather than picking a side. See Combat System.
The producer has been specific, and deliberately deflationary, about where this fight sits. Xingtian turns up fairly early in the game, is explicitly not one of its core bosses, and in the producer’s own words has some strength but not a great deal of it. The comparison he drew was to a well-known early-game guardian boss in another action role-playing game: a checkpoint rather than a wall.
The demo build was also eased on purpose. The public hands-on ran about ten minutes, and the studio has said it lowered the difficulty specifically for that setting. Neither the demo’s difficulty nor the coverage calling the fight challenging is a guide to how hard the shipped version will be.
The boss design draws on 中国泥塑和陶瓷, Chinese clay sculpture and ceramics. That is of a piece with the game’s wider material language: the player character begins as a porcelain vessel, and the Chinese build names the health bar 器, literally "the vessel". The Spirit Pearl page covers the porcelain origin.
Not confirmed. The Colossal Gods are the giant bosses the player climbs and fights across the contours of their bodies, and the studio plans eight to ten of them. Xingtian has been described as an early boss rather than as one of those set-pieces, and no material places him in that group. The two pages are cross-linked because he is the only boss with a name, not because the classification is settled.
Where in the game Xingtian appears, beyond "early"
What the first three phases consist of. Only the closing 法身 clash has been described
Whether 灵气 is a general progression resource or something specific to this sequence
Whether the 轩辕剑 ever becomes usable
Whether 饕餮, named alongside Xingtian in Chinese materials, is a boss, an enemy type or set dressing
Whether the fight appears in the shipped game in the form the demo showed
