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The Sunblight Tide is the doomsday prophecy at the center of Rewinding Cadence. It is the catastrophe the Returner is bound to undo, and it is the reason every loop in the game is forty-two days long. The official tagline names the conflict directly: "The Recursor shall overturn the prophecy of the Sunblight Tide, but the end is already written."

The Prophecy

The prophecy is presented as a fixed point in the world's future. Without intervention, the Tide arrives, the world is consumed, and the cycle ends in failure. The story does not frame the Tide as a single villain that can be defeated by a final boss fight. It is treated as a coming event with multiple causes and contributors, and the loop structure exists so the Returner can chip away at those causes one at a time, learning across cycles which actions push the timeline closer to safety and which simply waste a run.

The Doomsday Event

Concrete imagery for the Tide in published trailers includes wide shots of devastated landscapes and corrupted skies, with the Tide reading visually as a creeping wave of destruction rather than a single explosion. Surviving the day forty-two threshold is the loop's failure state. The Returner rewinds before that moment, either deliberately or by being defeated when the cycle's clock runs out.

Naming and Translations

English-language coverage has used two names for the prophecy: Sunblight Tide and Corroding Tide. Both refer to the same in-game event; the variation comes from different translation passes of the source material. The official tagline released by the developer uses "Sunblight Tide," so this wiki uses that as the canonical English name and notes Corroding Tide as a translation alternative wherever the older term appears in older articles or fan coverage. The Simplified Chinese term used in CN material is 蚀阳潮 (shí-yáng-cháo), literally "the tide that eats the sun."

Why It Matters

Mechanically, the Tide is the hard deadline that drives the time-loop system. Narratively, it is the reason Chu grants the contract in the first place. Every other system in the game, the dice rolls, the relationships, the wanted level, the cultivation of companions, exists in conversation with this clock. As more material is published this article will be expanded to cover the cause of the Tide, the factions involved, and the cycle-by-cycle approach to delaying or breaking it.