MI FU STORY: A FISTFUL OF REFLECTIONS

Heads up: this is a complete, spoiler-everything breakdown of Mi Fu’s lore and her Version 1.3 story event, “A Fistful of Reflections.” If you haven’t played it yet and want to go in blind, bookmark this and come back. For everyone else — let’s get into it.

When Arknights: Endfield first dropped players into Wuling, one character kept stealing scenes without ever being playable: the stern, greatsword-hauling Captain of the Wuling Watch who punches harder than she talks. Fans spent two whole versions begging for her. With Version 1.3, “Sketches of Lost Heirlooms,” Hypergryph finally handed her over — and tied her release to one of the most personal story events the game has shipped so far.

This is the full picture: who Mi Fu is, where she comes from, the masters she’s forced to fight, the gut-punch twist at the center of her quest, and why the community is still arguing about her halfway through the patch cycle. For the wider patch context, our 1.3 “Sketches of Lost Heirlooms” content overview maps every event, banner, and Arsenal Issue around it.

TL;DR — Key Points

• Mi Fu is the Phase 1 centerpiece of Version 1.3 — a 6★ Physical Guard who wields the Amaranthine Tassel greatsword but lands most of her damage through gauntlet-driven Crush hits.
• Her story event “A Fistful of Reflections” unlocks after Chapter II Process VI (“Kindred Souls Who Share a Vision”) and reframes the entire Wuling arc.
• She is the heir of Qingbo Martial Arts — a tradition the Stockade brands her a traitor for carrying out of the valley.
• The event is structured as a gauntlet of duels against her former masters — a Crane, a Bull, and the Grandmaster of Qingbo.
• The whole crisis is staged. Zhuang Fangyi’s “kidnapping” is a self-sacrifice plan to install Mi Fu as Wuling’s next leader, and the Endministrator was in on it.
• The climax is a Mi Fu vs. Zhuang Fangyi duel that plays out entirely in a cinematic — a choice reviewers love visually but criticize mechanically.
• Her race is officially Sarkaz, not Kylin, despite a design that reads Kylin to almost everyone — the patch’s biggest unresolved lore debate.
• The event is the emotional close of the Wuling questline, finally answering why Mi Fu ever left Qingbo for the city.

Who Is Mi Fu? The Quick Version

Mi Fu (Chinese: 弭弗; Japanese: ミ・フ) is the Captain of the Wuling Watch, the security force of Wuling City under the Hongshan Academy of Sciences. In gameplay terms, she’s a 6★ Physical Guard who wields a greatsword — the Amaranthine Tassel — but delivers most of her punishment through bone-cracking gauntlet strikes. Her whole combat identity is built around stacking and then violently cashing in Vulnerability for huge Crush damage, while buffing a mono-Physical team with Physical Susceptibility.

A few fast facts:

In the city she’s a bit of a local legend: a repeat winner of Wuling’s “Vanguard Stars” award and ranked second on the civilian combat-power leaderboard. To her colleagues she’s “the strictest instructor and the most caring superior” — a hero to kids, a nightmare for troublemakers, and the bane of anything that tries to invade the city. She’s also a softie about food, haunting the sweet rice cake stall on Fangxing Avenue (though she’s rarely actually caught eating). And she’s quietly proud of the nickname her bloodied enemies gave her: “Hexeress.”

Mi Fu’s Backstory: From the Qingbo Stockade to the Wuling Watch

To understand Mi Fu, you have to start at the Qingbo Stockade — because everything that defines her, including the conflict at the heart of her story event, traces back to the place she left.

The Qingbo Stockade is a small, century-old, independent riverside community on the outskirts of Wuling, tucked into Jingyu Valley. According to in-game lore, folk historians believe it was founded during the Humiliation War, when settlers who’d lost faith in the future of the Civilization Band struck out and carved a sanctuary around a sacred water source, the Ancestral Spring, in the middle of a Blight-flooded landscape. The earliest Stockaders survived by being direct, scrappy, and ferociously self-reliant — and that survivalist grit hardened into a martial tradition: Qingbo Martial Arts.

Mi Fu was born there. She trained in Qingbo Martial Arts from childhood, and by every account became its most gifted student. Then Wuling came calling — specifically, Viceroy Zhuang Fangyi, who brought a young Mi Fu into the city by luring her with two strings of sugar-oil rice cakes. (It’s a small, almost comic detail, but it tells you everything: Mi Fu has always been a fighter with a sweet tooth and a soft heart.) From that day on, Mi Fu stayed at Zhuang’s side, calling her “my lord.”

Here’s the wound that never fully healed: by leaving for Wuling, Mi Fu didn’t just relocate — she defected to the city the Stockade had feuded with for generations, the Hongshan-backed power whose arrival ended Qingbo’s isolation. To the Stockade, that made her a traitor. The game leans into the tragedy of this directly: she is “labeled a ‘traitor’ by Qingbo Stockade” yet “remains the true successor of Qingbo Martial Arts.” She is, at once, the heir who abandoned them and the only one carrying the tradition forward.

That contradiction is the engine of her entire character. She is upright, disciplined, and rigidly loyal to Wuling’s laws — the “core executor” of the Watch — while privately carrying the weight of where she came from. The wider Wuling backdrop she operates inside is covered in our Wuling lore deep dive. And she’s defined, in her own words, by two relationships she values above all: rivals and friends. As her official profile puts it, the former gets her blood pumping; the latter drives her to throw every punch without regard for her own life.

The People Who Made Her: Zhuang Fangyi and Tangtang

Two characters anchor Mi Fu emotionally, and both pay off hard in her story event.

Zhuang Fangyi is the Viceroy of Wuling — and, privately, the woman who plucked Mi Fu out of Qingbo with a handful of pastries. Mi Fu’s loyalty to her is total. She’s the only one who knows Zhuang actually prefers the title “Tianshi” over “Viceroy.” Their bond reads as mostly professional on the surface but runs much deeper underneath, which is exactly why the events of “A Fistful of Reflections” hit so hard.

Tangtang is the other half of Mi Fu’s heart. The Supreme Chief of the Qingbo Stockade and a 6★ Cryo Caster, Tangtang is Mi Fu’s childhood friend turned rival. The two clash constantly — Tangtang’s brand of small-time crime keeps her squarely in the Watch’s crosshairs — and yet, across the Wuling main story, Mi Fu never once lands a finishing blow on her. Perlica picks up on it immediately: Mi Fu has no real intention of taking Tangtang down. Tangtang, for her part, still treats Mi Fu’s defection as a betrayal, calls her “Mimi,” and the Stockaders broadly know the Captain as the “Mad Woman.” Logistics staff reportedly have a standing warning: keep Tangtang away from Mi Fu, or something’s getting broken.

That’s the dynamic the player has watched simmer for two versions. Version 1.3 finally turns up the heat.

”A Fistful of Reflections”: The Full Story, Beat by Beat

Mi Fu’s dedicated narrative event — the operator story subtitled “Mi Fu: Hexeress” — unlocks after you clear Chapter II Process VI: “Kindred Souls Who Share a Vision.” It picks up after the calm that settled over Wuling following the 1.2 finale, and from the first scene something is off.

The setup. Mi Fu messages the Endministrator through Baker, asking to meet at the Main Pillar Office as soon as possible. When you arrive, she’s standing by Zhuang Fangyi’s desk — and, in a detail the official event description flags as unusual, “the Watchguard Captain is not her usual calm self and actually looks a little worried.” For a character this composed, that’s a klaxon.

The inciting incident. Mi Fu reveals the reason: Zhuang Fangyi has vanished. The only clue is a letter from the Qingbo Stockade, and it’s tied directly to Mi Fu’s own past. The letter carries a challenge that doubles as the Stockade’s creed — our fists know no regret, to live or die is the river’s way — the same line echoed in her combo skill “Fists of No Regrets” and her banner name. Convinced Zhuang has been taken, Mi Fu and the Endministrator set out to get her back.

Into the valley. The pair head for Straggler’s Cove in Jingyu Valley. As you push deeper, the game shifts into Immersion Mode, locking your party to just Mi Fu and the Endministrator (both capped at Level 60) — a deliberate framing choice that keeps the story intimate and two-handed. Almost immediately, Stockaders ambush you, kicking off a hands-on tutorial for Mi Fu’s kit. One quietly important mechanic: for every battle in this questline, the controlled Operator’s Final Strike automatically applies 4 Vulnerability stacks to the target, so the game is teaching you her Crush payoff loop while the plot unfolds.

The slow reveal. Between fights, Mi Fu takes the Endministrator to her old training grounds and finally opens up — her Qingbo origins, why she left for Wuling, the real shape of her devotion to Zhuang Fangyi. The journey winds through the new Wuxia-flavored region, broken up by sparring sessions between Mi Fu and the Endmin that reviewers singled out as a genuine highlight. It plays, as one outlet put it, like a classic kung-fu story dropped into a sci-fi shell.

The gauntlet. Then the duels begin in earnest. Mi Fu is forced into a series of “revenge battles” against her former masters — the elders of Qingbo Martial Arts who trained her before she walked away. She fights through them despite open regret for some of the bouts she has to wage. (We’ll dig into exactly who these masters are in the next section, because they’re the part the event most wants you to feel.)

And then the floor drops out.

Mi Fu’s Former Masters, Explained

The “revenge battle against her former masters” isn’t a fan interpretation — it’s the exact framing Hypergryph used in the official Version 1.3 announcement. The master-duels are the structural spine of the entire event. So who are they?

To answer that, you have to understand the family that raised them. The Qingbo Stockade isn’t a school with hired instructors — it’s a clan. It “answers directly to Tangtang and her family,” and everyone Tangtang considers family shares those same privileges. That means Mi Fu’s masters aren’t corporate trainers; they’re the martial elders of a tight-knit clan, the mentors who poured Qingbo Martial Arts into her before Zhuang Fangyi led her out of the valley with two strings of sugar-oil rice cakes.

That clan context is what makes the duels land. When the masters force Mi Fu to fight, they aren’t sparring with a stranger — they’re testing the heir who left, the prodigy who took everything they taught her and carried it into the city they’ve resented for a hundred years. And Mi Fu, in turn, is swinging at the people who taught her every technique she’s throwing. Each block, each counter, each punch is a move one of them drilled into her. That’s where the regret threaded through these fights comes from. The Stockade may brand her the “Mad Woman” and the “traitor,” but the game is careful to remind you she “remains the true successor of Qingbo Martial Arts.” The masters fighting her are, in a real sense, fighting their own legacy. For more on the Stockade itself as a power base, see Tangtang’s 6★ analysis.

There’s a mechanical elegance to it, too. These master-duels double as Mi Fu’s combat tutorial: because every battle in the questline guarantees 4 Vulnerability stacks on the Final Strike, you’re learning her Crush-payoff rhythm against the very people who built her fighting style. Form and story are doing the same work — you master Qingbo Martial Arts by beating the masters of Qingbo Martial Arts.

The Three Masters You Fight

The gauntlet is built around three opponents, each a distinct style of Qingbo Martial Arts — and each a different test for Mi Fu.

The Crane. The first and most evasive of the trio. The Crane master fights light and high, all darting footwork, long reaching strikes, and graceful repositioning — the kind of opponent who punishes you for over-committing. Where Mi Fu is brute force and forward pressure, the Crane is patience and angles, forcing her to actually chase a fight rather than simply walk through it. It’s the duel that re-teaches her humility before the harder ones land.

The Bull. The Crane’s opposite number: heavy, immovable, all raw power and bracing stances. The Bull master meets Mi Fu’s strength head-on, trading blow for blow and daring her to out-muscle a wall. This is the bout where her Crush payoff loop matters most — you can’t finesse your way past the Bull, you have to break him, which is exactly the lesson her kit is built to teach.

The Grandmaster. The capstone. The last and most complete of her former masters, the Grandmaster is the one who carries the full weight of what Mi Fu walked away from — the master’s master, the living embodiment of the tradition she’s branded a traitor for leaving. This is the fight with the most regret baked into it, the one where beating her teacher means proving she truly is the heir to a legacy even as she severs herself from it.

One honest caveat on names. The three masters are real, scripted duel opponents, and you can tell them apart by their combat motifs — the Crane, the Bull, and the Grandmaster. But as of the 1.3 launch window, proper individual names for them aren’t documented in any English-language source — official materials, the major guide sites, and the community wiki all refer to them collectively as “her former masters” or “former mentors.” So it’s safe to describe them by their style and motif (as above), but if you want to attach a specific personal name to any of them, pull it from the in-game duel name cards in a full playthrough and label it as player-sourced. Don’t trust a site that confidently hands you a full roster of names with no in-game screens to back it up — that’s almost certainly invented.

The Twist Nobody Saw Coming

Here’s the rug-pull: the disappearance was staged.

Zhuang Fangyi’s vanishing and the threatening Qingbo letter were never a kidnapping. They were a coordinated setup — Zhuang’s own plan, run in concert with the Qingbo Stockade. And the goal behind it is the genuinely shocking part: Zhuang was attempting to sacrifice herself and hand control of Wuling to Mi Fu. The entire ordeal — the letter, the duels, the gauntlet of masters — was engineered to forge Mi Fu into Wuling’s next leader.

The kicker? The Endministrator was in on it the whole time. The player’s own character knew the plan and “torpedoed” it — foiling Zhuang’s self-sacrifice attempt from the inside. When Mi Fu realizes the Endmin knew all along and said nothing while she tore herself up fighting her own masters, she’s furious enough to do the only thing Mi Fu ever really does when overwhelmed by emotion: she punches the Endministrator square in the face. (It’s become one of the most-clipped moments of the patch.)

The story crescendos into a Mi Fu vs. Zhuang Fangyi duel — the emotional fallout of the whole scheme made physical. In the aftermath, Mi Fu is angry enough at Zhuang’s “stunt” that she flatly rejects a peace-offering free lunch, which, for a character this food-motivated, is the loudest way the writers could possibly signal how betrayed she feels.

But — and this matters — it’s interpersonal hurt, not a true rupture. Mi Fu vents, she rages, she throws the punch. And then she stays. Her arc reaffirms her loyalty to Zhuang, to Wuling, and to the endless pursuit of rivals worth fighting — the exact motivation that eventually carries her to Endfield Industries and into your roster.

How the Story Lands: Reception & the Cinematic-Duel Problem

Critically, “A Fistful of Reflections” landed well where it counts most — character and combat. Reviewers praised the update for telling a tight, personal story while still expanding the world, with the writing repeatedly called the standout. The Endmin–Mi Fu sparring sequences in particular got flowers for selling the bond between the two.

The criticism centers on two things, both tied to that big twist.

First, the twist itself. For some players, revealing that the whole crisis was staged retroactively deflates the tension the update spent hours building — the dramatic weight of the kidnapping and the master-duels gets undercut once you learn nobody was ever really in danger.

Second, and more pointedly, the climax is a cinematic. The marquee Mi Fu vs. Zhuang Fangyi clash — the emotional payoff the entire event has been driving toward — plays out entirely in a cutscene rather than as a fight you control. Reviewers called the cinematic gorgeous while noting it robs players of the agency you’d expect a video game to hand you at exactly that moment. After a questline that’s been actively teaching you Mi Fu’s kit through every master-duel, being benched for the final bout stings.

Still, the consensus is that Mi Fu’s debut is a strong one — a character a huge chunk of the playerbase had ranked as the NPC they most wanted to play, finally getting a story worthy of the hype.

The Sarkaz vs. Kylin Lore War

We can’t talk about Mi Fu without the controversy that swallowed her reveal whole.

Look at her design — branching, antler-like horns, a soft pink-white-and-blue palette, a Qilin-coded beast motif in her art — and basically everyone assumed she was a Kylin (Endfield’s equivalent of the Qilin race, the lineage of original-Arknights characters like Leizi). Then Hypergryph’s official profile listed her race as Sarkaz, and the fandom, as one community write-up put it, didn’t just raise an eyebrow — it raised a full-blown lore civil war.

Three main camps formed:

1. It’s a database error. The simplest explanation — somebody fat-fingered the metadata.
2. It’s a real, unusual lineage. A mixed or hybrid Sarkaz heritage unique to Talos-II, where centuries of isolation could’ve produced lineages that don’t look like the Sarkaz of the original game.
3. It’s deliberate disguise or misdirection. A plot thread waiting to be paid off.

The strongest argument against the “typo” theory is that in-game NPCs reportedly refer to Mi Fu as Sarkaz in scripted dialogue — which is a lot harder to write off as a spreadsheet slip. Fans have also picked apart her tail (matching neither classic Kylin nor typical Sarkaz designs) and floated folklore inspirations like the Pixiu or Tianlu. As of now, the race tag is confirmed (it’s on the official profile), but the explanation for it remains unresolved — squarely fan-theory territory until the story addresses it head-on. For the full subrace-by-subrace breakdown of why her tail breaks every established Sarkaz template, see our Mi Fu Sarkaz race controversy lore analysis.

Where Mi Fu Fits in Version 1.3

Mi Fu is the Phase 1 centerpiece of Version 1.3, “Sketches of Lost Heirlooms,” which went live June 5, 2026. Her banner (Fists of No Regrets), her story event, and her signature gear all anchor the first half of the patch. A login event also hands out free pulls on her banner.

The wider update is a meaty one:

• A new region, Sword Vault Dale — a Wuxia-flavored ruin of broken walls and floating cliffs, uncovered after the Blight Tides receded, tied to the Hongshan Swordmancers and the legendary “Chi Xiao Swordmancy,” explored alongside Chen Qianyu.
• Contingency Contract — the beloved customizable hardcore endgame mode from the original Arknights, making its Endfield debut.
• Two new 6★ Operators — Mi Fu in Phase 1, and Camille in Phase 2, the game’s first male 6★, a vampire Sarkaz “Blood Hunter” from Seš’qa with his own grim investigation event, Danse Macabre.
• A pile of events — A Fistful of Reflections, Danse Macabre, the Sword Vault Dale exploration, Carly’s Fairytale of Wuling, and more, plus a wave of quality-of-life upgrades.

If you came to the patch for the new region or for Camille, Mi Fu’s event is still the emotional core — it’s the piece that finally closes the book on the Wuling questline by explaining, at last, why she ever left Qingbo in the first place. If you’ve already pulled her, our Mi Fu team-building breakdown covers who to pair her with and who to bench.

What Would Change This Reading

A handful of unresolved threads could reshape how this event reads in hindsight, so worth keeping on the watch list as the patch cycle plays out:

• Named masters. If Hypergryph adds full names or character archives for the three duel opponents in a later patch, the “Crane / Bull / Grandmaster” shorthand may get replaced — update accordingly.
• The Sarkaz reveal. If the race tag is canonized with an in-story explanation, the staged-kidnapping plot may turn out to be the first of several Mi Fu reveals, not the last.
• Zhuang Fangyi’s succession plan. Whether Zhuang actually steps back, or stays Viceroy after the Endmin’s intervention, will set the trajectory for the next Wuling arc.
• Tangtang’s role. The Stockade clearly coordinated with Zhuang on this. How willingly is the next question — and it’s the question Tangtang’s eventual playable kit is best positioned to answer.

Final Read

“A Fistful of Reflections” is, at its core, a story about a daughter the valley couldn’t keep and the city couldn’t fully claim — a fighter who carries two homes inside her and gets dragged into a fake war by both. The twist isn’t really about whether Zhuang Fangyi was ever in danger; it’s about whether Mi Fu can still be the heir of Qingbo Martial Arts after beating the masters of Qingbo Martial Arts, and whether she can still be Zhuang’s right hand after being lied to by her. The event’s answer is yes, on both counts — but only after the punch lands.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Mi Fu worth pulling for story players? If you’ve enjoyed the Wuling arc, she’s close to essential — she’s a central figure with deep ties to both Zhuang Fangyi and Tangtang, and her event is the payoff to threads you’ve followed for two versions.

Is Mi Fu good in combat? Yes. She’s a strong Physical hyper-DPS with a self-contained, high-burst kit built around consuming Vulnerability for Crush damage. She leans on a dedicated Vulnerability-applier (Chen Qianyu pairs especially well) and overlaps somewhat with other Physical carries like the Endministrator and Da Pan, so she shines most in a built-out Physical team.

Do I need to finish the main story to play her event? You need to clear Chapter II Process VI, “Kindred Souls Who Share a Vision.” You do not need to have completed the previous version’s content to start “Sketches of Lost Heirlooms.”

Who are Mi Fu’s former masters? They’re the martial elders of the Qingbo Stockade — the clan that raised her and taught her Qingbo Martial Arts before she left for Wuling. You fight three of them in her event, each built around a distinct style: the Crane (evasive and graceful), the Bull (heavy and immovable), and the Grandmaster (the capstone duel). They aren’t given proper individual names in any English-language source as of the 1.3 launch window, so treat any specific names you see online as unconfirmed unless they’re sourced from in-game screens.

Why does Mi Fu punch the Endministrator? Because the Endmin secretly knew Zhuang Fangyi’s disappearance was a staged self-sacrifice plan — and let Mi Fu agonize through the whole ordeal anyway. The punch is her reaction to that betrayal of trust.

Is Mi Fu actually a Sarkaz? Her official profile says yes, and NPCs reportedly call her Sarkaz in dialogue, even though her design reads as Kylin to most players. The why hasn’t been explained in-story yet, which is exactly why the fandom won’t stop arguing about it.

What happens to Zhuang Fangyi after the event? She survives — the Endministrator’s intervention foils her self-sacrifice plan. Mi Fu is still angry enough about the “stunt” to refuse a peace-offering lunch, but the underlying loyalty between the two holds. She remains Viceroy of Wuling.

Does the event change how Tangtang sees Mi Fu? Not directly. Tangtang’s involvement in the scheme reads more like clan obligation than reconciliation. The “traitor” framing remains in the air, and the childhood-friend-turned-rival dynamic is exactly where it was before the patch — still simmering, still waiting for its own dedicated event.

Played through “A Fistful of Reflections” and read the master-duels differently? The community’s still piecing together the finer details — especially those unnamed masters — so this is a story worth comparing notes on as the patch cycle moves into Phase 2.