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Kong Kong Zi, Master of Cantrip, is the first boss of Swords of Legends to be shown publicly, and the encounter the studio chose to headline its June 2026 gameplay trailer. The official English material calls the character a theatrical adversary whose every move is staged as a piece of Traditional Chinese Conjuring, the centuries-old tradition of close-up stage magic, and stresses that the design is drawn from living traditions and grounded in a real cultural form rather than invented from whole cloth.

The character is unusual even by the standards of the game's bestiary: it has no physical body at all. Its main form is a length of painted silk, which makes the fight a duel against a moving picture rather than against flesh.

A Body Made of Cloth

Choosing painted cloth as the boss's substance created two hard problems for the team. The first was physics: a body made of fabric behaves nothing like a rigged skeleton, and the simulation ran into repeated trouble during production. The second was feedback. A sword that lands on loose cloth does not read as a hit, and when the encounter was shown at the June 2026 showcase, the most common criticism was exactly that the strikes looked weightless.

The project lead took public responsibility for putting the fight in that showcase, and the combat team responded with detail work rather than a redesign. Sword strikes now pull faint threads out of the fabric, and cuts leave visible marks that accumulate on the body as the fight goes on. Players who tried the encounter at the July 2026 hands-on reported the difference clearly, and the studio has pointed to the fix as the reason it built that event around combat.

Design Source: The Mawangdui Silk Painting

The costume and the patterns running across the boss's body are taken from the T-shaped silk painting recovered from the Mawangdui Han tombs. That painting is divided into three registers showing the heavens, the mortal world and the world below, and its original purpose was not decorative: it served as a soul-summoning banner, intended to carry the spirit of the tomb's occupant safely upward while the body rested in the earth.

A soul-summoning banner is a pointed source for an adversary in a game whose hero is Sipan, an Arbiter of the Underworld charged with ferrying souls. The tie between the artifact's real function and The Underworld and the Judge of King Yama is deliberate rather than incidental.

Moves Drawn from Gucai Xifa

The boss's moveset comes from gucai xifa, a form of stage magic that traces back to the Southern Song period and survives today as a recognised piece of intangible cultural heritage. Rather than inventing attacks, the designers worked the tradition's standard routines directly into the encounter, so each phase of the fight reads as a trick being performed.

To get the movements right the studio worked from a traditional performance troupe and recorded the routines through motion capture, and the encounter's music is scored with the opera instruments that belong to the same tradition.

Phases

The fight escalates rather than repeating a single pattern, moving from ranged fire to teleportation and then to close-range pressure. Coverage of the June 2026 trailer described a later phase in which the main body sheds its mask and splits into duplicates, which fits the conjuring theme but has been reported only once and should be treated as provisional until the studio shows it again.

Where the Fight Sits

In the build used for the 2026 Offline Playtest, Kong Kong Zi capped a semi-open explorable stage that carried teleport points, roaming enemies, branching paths, a maze and explosive barrels, which made it the most open-ended of the slices on offer. The area the boss occupies connects to the Changsheng Ju inn where Wu Yang is fought, though the studio sealed the link for the demo so players would reach the boss faster.

The other encounters shown so far are collected under Bosses, and the toolkit the hero brings to them is set out under Combat and Divine Artifacts.