WHAT IS A FERANMUT? SUI PROXIES EXPLAINED

If you finished Version 1.4 and still could not explain what a Feranmut is, you are in extremely good company. A Feranmut is a gargantuan, near-immortal entity native to Terra whose power comes from the land rather than from Originium Arts. A Proxy is the humanoid avatar one of them projects so it can deal with the world at human scale. Everything the community has been shouting about for the last two weeks follows from those two sentences.

The problem is that Endfield delivers this lore almost entirely through the Nexus Files, which are optional, text-heavy, and easy to blow past on your way to the next Rift. The game then builds a major story beat on top of it and assumes the terminology landed. For anyone who never touched the original Arknights, it did not.

This is a primer for exactly that player. No prior Arknights required, no reading order to complete first. We will define the terms, walk the Sui family tree in order, explain why a thirteenth Proxy is a big deal, and close with a step-by-step of what Si actually does in 1.4. We also fix several errors that keep circulating in community threads, including one about the sibling numbering that almost everyone gets wrong.

TL;DR - Key Points

• Feranmut and Proxy are not the same thing. The Feranmut is the entity. The Proxy is a downscaled avatar it projects, holding only part of its power.
• Feranmuts are immune to Originium. No Oripathy, no Arts dependency. Their power sits entirely outside the system every other race in the setting operates under.
• Sui was the last Feranmut sealed during the Great Hunt. It betrayed its own kind to side with humanity, then humanity turned on it anyway.
• Twelve Proxies broke off from the sealed Sui and slowly gained individual identities, personalities, and specialist crafts. Eleven of the twelve have appeared in Arknights.
• The siblings refuse to reunite because a full reunion means Sui wakes up and they cease to exist as individuals. That is the tragedy driving the entire arc.
• Si is the 13th Proxy, born from Sui’s body, currently on Talos-II and working with the Hongshan Academy of Sciences. Her domain is ink and scrolls.
• Si’s power is baked into Wuling’s infrastructure. The Feranmut Hearts suppressing the blight exist because of her, which is why she is not an optional side character.
• She was first referenced in 1.2, not 1.4. The Nexus Files named a thirteenth Proxy before she ever did anything on screen.

What a Feranmut Actually Is

Start with scale, because scale is the whole point. Feranmuts are not humanoid deities with big spell numbers. Some of them are the size of mountain ranges. Sami, the northern region, is not merely home to a Feranmut called Sami. The region is the Feranmut. Kjeragandr’s body accounts for much of Kjerag’s mountainous terrain. When a Feranmut dies, its body becomes geography: mountains, rivers, valleys.

Their powers are tied to topography and age. They terraform. They influence weather. Several can bend causality or rewrite conditions of reality in ways the setting never fully systematises, because they predate the systems. Some can generate self-contained ecosystems inside their own bodies, effectively living arks.

Two facts matter most for understanding Endfield:

• They are biologically immortal but not invulnerable. They can be killed, and more importantly they can be shattered into fragments. That distinction is load-bearing later.
• They are completely immune to Originium, including Oripathy. Originium is the axis the entire original game turns on: its economy, its disease, its magic system, its politics. Feranmuts sit outside all of it.

Worship followed naturally. Some Feranmuts accepted it, some ignored it, some tried to protect the mortals who prayed to them, and at least one exploited them. They are treated as gods without the setting ever confirming that they are.

What a Proxy Is, and Why It Matters

Here is the concept most explanations skip past, and it is the one that makes the Sui story tragic rather than just epic.

A being the size of a mountain cannot hold a conversation with a person, or walk into a city, or learn what a family is. So a hibernating Feranmut projects a Proxy: a humanoid avatar that can move through the world at human scale. The Proxy inherits a portion of the parent’s power, which is why Proxies still look godlike to anyone standing next to one.

But a Proxy is contingent. Two rules define it:

1. A Proxy vanishes when the original Feranmut fully revives. It is not killed. It is reabsorbed, because it was never a separate being in the first place.
2. Everything a Proxy created vanishes with it. Its constructs, its spaces, its works.

Now apply that to twelve people who spent centuries developing distinct personalities, hobbies, careers, grudges, and love for each other. Their continued existence depends on their own parent staying asleep. Every one of them knows it.

That is not a power-scaling premise. That is a premise about identity, and it is why these characters land as hard as they do.

The Great Hunt: How Sui Ended Up in Pieces

Thousands of years ago in Yan, the setting’s analogue to imperial China, the True Lung emperor decided humanity should no longer live under the rule of gods. He mobilised an entire nation’s scholars and warriors against the Feranmuts. This was the Great Hunt.

Mid-conflict, Sui betrayed its own kind and sided with the humans. The stated motive was self-interest: Sui wanted to become Yan’s sole remaining god. Its own kin wounded it badly for the betrayal.

Then humanity turned on Sui too. Weakened by the very allies it had switched sides to help, Sui became the last Feranmut to be defeated and sealed. Its petrified body was interred in the Tomb of Sui, a mausoleum near Baizao so heavily secured that unlocking it reportedly draws around 70 percent of the city’s energy.

Yanese official history calls this the Ennoblement of the Gods, the moment the nation’s fate returned to mortal hands. Endfield’s own Nexus Files are notably careful here: they flag that the mythological account probably diverges from what actually happened, and that everything concerning Sui is a Yanese state secret. The game is telling you the record is unreliable.

Sui’s mind, sealed and slumbering, fell into chaos. Fragments of thought drifted out of the tomb. Those fragments took human form, and over centuries of interacting with mortals, they became people.

The Twelve Siblings, in Order

Each Proxy mastered a craft, and their powers reflect it. This ordering follows the Arknights Terra Wiki, which matters because community lists routinely garble the last few positions.

Note positions 10 and 11, because this is the single most common error in circulation. Fang is the tenth, and Fang is the sibling who has never shown up in-game. Dusk is the eleventh. Threads regularly swap them.

Two siblings have died. Jie was sacrificed in 982, and Yi later built a memorial shrine to her inside his Garden. Shu was sacrificed during the Collapsal pollution crisis. Keep both in mind, because they explain what the first Feranmut Heart was actually built for.

The whole family also lives under permanent state surveillance. The Sui Regulator assigns each Proxy a Candleholder, and annual Placation Ceremonies at Yi’s Garden of Grotesqueries suppress Sui’s leaking influence through ritual combat. Some Candleholders genuinely like their assigned sibling. Others emphatically do not.

Why the Community Cares This Much

Two Proxies matter enormously for reading Si.

Dusk paints worlds. Not pictures of worlds, worlds. She can enter her own paintings, restructure them, live inside them, and populate them with ink spirits: some shaped like creatures, some modelled on real people she has met and behaving convincingly like them. She has changed her own appearance and voice to pass as an elderly man. If Si’s ink scroll behaviour felt oddly specific and rule-bound, this is the precedent.

Jie worked with written characters. She carried a knife that could erase a character from a page, and erase what that character represented from reality. Deleting history as a combat action.

Ink, scrolls, and characters as a medium for editing reality is therefore an established family trait, not a new mechanic Endfield invented. Si inherits a recognisable lineage.

Beyond mechanics, these characters carry nine dedicated events across the original game’s Through the Ages arc, with heavy production investment: regional voice options, comics, concert appearances. When Endfield confirmed a thirteenth Proxy, veterans did not read it as a new character reveal. They read it as the door opening for the entire family.

How the Sui Plot Just Resolved

This is the piece that reframes everything, and it happened in the original game very recently, as the Through the Ages arc closed out at the 6.5th anniversary.

During Sui’s revival in year 1102, Wang defeated Sui’s ego and took its place. He then solidified the body using the Wa Stone, leaving the Feranmut incapacitated. The event was First of A Thousand Autumns, the arc’s ninth and final entry, told across three stages: Record of an Autumn’s End, Forgotten Prospect of Spring, and Unwritten Chapters of Yan.

The consequences are the interesting part. The siblings no longer face reabsorption, which means they can finally be near each other. And Sui’s avatar now resembles Wang, which is not a coincidence or a design quirk.

There is also an artificial Feranmut Heart on Terra, built by the siblings after that revival, intended to house Jie and Shu as geist vessels. The design lineage traces back to Nian, the ninth Proxy, as a contingency measure.

Get that purpose right, because community threads consistently mangle it. The Terran Feranmut Heart was a resurrection vessel for the two dead sisters. It was not a device built to manufacture Si.

Si, the Thirteenth Proxy

Si is Endfield’s own addition, and she is currently the only Proxy of Sui confirmed present on Talos-II.

What is established:

• She is the 13th and only known Proxy of Sui on Talos-II, and she was born from Sui’s body.
• She has been on Talos-II for at least ten years before the game’s present day.
• She is affiliated with the Hongshan Academy of Sciences, working closely with its researchers.
• Her domain is ink and scrolls. She commands Ink Spirits shaped like butterflies and creates scrolls that ignore normal physics, including scrolls where time runs at a different rate.
• Despite her apparent age, she is written with a distinctly childlike temperament.

What is not established is the mechanism. Nobody has confirmed how a thirteenth Proxy exists at all, given that Sui produced twelve. The most popular theory connects her to the artificial Feranmut Heart work on Terra, and the timing is at least suggestive. It remains a theory. If you see it stated as fact, that is a community reading wearing a confident tone.

She is also not yet playable. She was first teased as a future Operator in the 1.2 livestream, teased again during the 1.4 livestream’s future version preview, and is expected in Version 1.5. For a fuller breakdown of that reveal alongside the other two teased Operators, our 1.5 future Operators preview covers the confirmed-versus-speculation split.

Feranmut Hearts and Why Wuling Runs on One

This is where Si stops being lore trivia and becomes load-bearing plot.

On Talos-II, Feranmut Hearts are artificial constructs merging Hongshan Academy technology with the HAS discipline of Feranmutology. They are described as the pinnacle of that field’s technological application, and Si’s power was a key component in creating them.

Their job is blight suppression. The Hearts work in tandem across the Wuling region, and most of them sit inside the Marker Stone. They draw power from Xirancore Jade.

The Marker Stone itself is the first operational Tianshi Pillar formally deployed by HAS, and its affiliated production facilities also supply Wuling with Xiranite. That combination is why the 1.2 story treats an attack on it as an extinction-level threat to the city rather than sabotage of one facility.

So the chain runs: Si’s power enables the Feranmut Hearts, the Hearts suppress the blight, the Marker Stone houses them and produces the Xiranite the region depends on. A Feranmut Proxy is quietly holding up Wuling’s entire industrial base. Our Feranmut Proxies and Wuling hegemony analysis digs into the political consequences of a city being structurally dependent on a demigod.

When Endfield First Told You About Si

The thread consensus is “1.2”, and that is correct, though the detail is more specific than most answers give.

The earliest hard reference is the Nexus Files entry on Feranmut Sui, unlocked during the Tales of Old questline in Chapter 2. That entry states plainly that twelve Proxies once walked Terra and that a thirteenth has partnered with the Hongshan Academy of Sciences to develop Feranmut Hearts. The companion Marker Stone entry from the same chapter fills in the Tianshi Pillar and Xirancore Jade context.

On screen, she acts through a butterfly Ink Spirit inside the Marker Stone, helping Arcane and the team stop Ardashir from destroying Wuling. If you remember a butterfly and not a character, that is because you never actually met her.

One correction while we are here: “At the Wake of Spring” is Version 1.2, released April 17, 2026, with Zhuang Fangyi as its Operator. It gets misremembered as an upcoming version surprisingly often.

The Si Beats of 1.4 Homecoming

Version 1.4 closes the Wuling arc. Ten years after the Very Large Rift destroyed the Wuling Science Station, improvements to the Xiranite Nexus finally make containing the blight feasible, and the displaced population moves to reclaim the land.

The sequence, in order:

1. Arcane insists on leading the expedition despite having only just woken up from her recovery.
2. The team crosses Yinglung Pass into the North Wuling Exclusion Zone.
3. The team interrogates the captured Ardashir. He stays deliberately vague while claiming cooperation, references a “Lady” directing efforts to crack the Rifts wide open to create a path to the Ætherside, and addresses the Endministrator as his lord and master. The interrogation resolves nothing on purpose.
4. Si augments the Xiranite Nexus, supplying the final enhancement needed to seal the Very Large Rift. This is the mechanical reason the arc can end at all.
5. Arcane’s arc closes. She falls into trenches near her childhood neighbourhood and meets Pale Blightshades formed from hope rather than malice, including one resembling her younger self as Li Zhiyan, and finally processes her survivor’s guilt.
6. Si stays behind as a last line of defence should the seal fail.

If step 3 felt like it went nowhere, that was the intent. For the Ardashir side of it, including Si’s line about his body being a vessel rather than his true form, see our Nefarith and Ardashir vessel reveal breakdown.

How Arcane Got Out of the Scroll

This is the question the thread argued hardest about, so it is worth separating tiers of certainty.

What the game states. Arcane sealed herself and Ardashir inside the Ink Scroll during the Marker Stone crisis. Si then sealed Ardashir in and pulled Arcane out, communicating through her Ink Spirits. Time flows differently inside the scroll. Dialogue in 1.2 frames Arcane as exhausted from overusing her own Arts, not visibly wounded, which is why she surfaces in a hospital bed rather than an operating theatre. Version 1.4 adds that Ardashir “died” to her repeatedly inside.

What the community infers. That Ardashir may never have meaningfully retaliated, and that Arcane simply killed him over and over until her own Arts gave out, with the scroll’s time dilation stretching that into a very long fight. This reading fits the available dialogue well. It is not stated outright.

What nobody has. Arcane’s own perspective on those events. The game has not given it, and that absence is doing deliberate work. Our Arcane and Lifeng 1.4 story analysis covers her recovery in detail, and the Li Zhiyan profile collects what is confirmed about her background.

Do You Need to Play Arknights First?

No. Endfield’s plot is self-contained and defines its own terms. What changes is recognition speed, not comprehension. Sort yourself into one of three groups.

If you only play Endfield: read the Nexus Files. That is genuinely the whole answer. Every term the story leans on is defined there, and the game does a poor job signalling that this is required reading rather than flavour text. You are not missing Arknights knowledge. You are missing Endfield’s own codex.

If you bounced off Arknights years ago: you need one event, First of A Thousand Autumns, because it changed Sui’s status and is the cleanest explanation for why a thirteenth Proxy is now plausible. Everything before it is enrichment.

If you want the full family: the Through the Ages arc runs nine events in release order. Note that the wiki explicitly says these events lack fixed in-universe dates, so this is release order, not chronology.

Yi’s realm also anchors Sui’s Garden of Grotesqueries, the sixth Integrated Strategies mode, where Yi appears as a possible final boss. It is a roguelike rather than a story event, but it carries real lore weight for the run-up to the finale.

Common Mistakes and Misreadings

Corrections for the claims that keep resurfacing, including several from the thread that prompted this piece.

• “Fang is the eleventh sibling.” Fang is the tenth, the physician, and the one who has never appeared in-game. Dusk is the eleventh.
• “Si is Wang’s Proxy.” Si is a Proxy of Sui. Proxies do not have their own Proxies. She is a sibling in the same sense the other twelve are.
• “Nian, Dusk and Shu built the Feranmut Heart to create Si.” The Terran artificial Heart traces to Nian’s design and was built to house the two dead siblings, Jie and Shu, as geist vessels. It was not a birthing vessel for Si.
• “Si is the reconvener of the sibling who died.” Unsupported. Dying does not enter a Proxy into the Originium database, and Si is a distinct Proxy from either of the deceased siblings.
• “Ardashir did something to Arcane in the scroll.” She was exhausted, not visibly injured, and he may never have retaliated at all.
• “At the Wake of Spring is an upcoming version.” It is Version 1.2, April 17, 2026.
• “Feranmuts are just gods.” They are worshipped as gods by some cultures. The setting never confirms the label, and several Feranmuts are weak, dormant, or actively declining.
• “Proxies are Feranmuts.” The Proxy is the avatar. Conflating the two makes the entire Sui tragedy incoherent, because the stakes depend on the Proxy being contingent on the parent.

Watch List: What Would Change This Reading

• Si’s Operator release in 1.5. Kit design, voice lines, and profile text usually resolve more lore than story chapters do. Her files are the most likely place her origin gets confirmed.
• Any statement on how a thirteenth Proxy exists. Currently the single largest gap. Confirmation would either validate or kill the Feranmut Heart theory outright.
• Whether more siblings reach Talos-II. Post-First of A Thousand Autumns, nothing forces the family apart anymore. The Aethergate situation is the practical constraint, not reabsorption.
• The “Lady” behind Ardashir. Named in 1.4 but unidentified. If she has any Feranmut connection, the Ætherside plot and the Sui plot converge.
• Whether Fang ever appears. The one sibling with no in-game presence, in a setting where the blight keeps producing medical catastrophes for a physician to walk into.

Final Read

The reason this lore feels impenetrable is not that it is complicated. It is that Endfield front-loads the payoff and back-loads the definitions into optional reading. A butterfly saves your team, a childlike stranger upgrades the machine holding back the apocalypse, and the game trusts a codex entry to have already explained why either of those things is remarkable.

Once the Proxy concept lands, the rest follows quickly. Twelve people exist only because their parent is asleep, spent centuries becoming individuals anyway, and cannot safely be in the same room. Then one of them solved it, on a different planet, in a different game. And a thirteenth turned up on Talos-II with no explanation and quietly became structural to a city’s survival.

Si is not hyped because she is a strong upcoming unit. She is hyped because she is proof the family can come here. If you take one thing away, take this: open the Nexus Files. Endfield already wrote the primer. It just forgot to tell you it was mandatory.

FAQ

What is a Feranmut in Arknights?

A Feranmut is a gargantuan, near-immortal entity native to Terra whose powers come from the land itself rather than from Originium Arts. They can live tens of thousands of years, terraform terrain, and influence weather. They are completely immune to Originium and cannot catch Oripathy, which is what separates them from every mortal race in the setting.

What is a Proxy?

A Proxy is a humanoid avatar that a hibernating Feranmut projects so it can observe and interact with the mortal world at human scale. A Proxy inherits only part of the parent Feranmut’s power. Critically, a Proxy vanishes if the original Feranmut fully revives, and anything the Proxy created vanishes with it.

Is Si a Feranmut or a Proxy?

Si is a Proxy, not a Feranmut. She is the 13th and only known Proxy of the Feranmut Sui present on Talos-II. She is a fragment-avatar of Sui, not a separate god, and she is not a Proxy of Wang or of any other sibling.

How many Sui siblings are there?

Twelve Proxies emerged from Sui after the Great Hunt on Terra. Eleven of the twelve have appeared in the original Arknights. The tenth, Fang, has never appeared in-game, which is why community lists sometimes disagree about the numbering. Si brings the total count to thirteen.

When was the 13th Proxy first mentioned in Endfield?

In the Version 1.2 story. The Nexus Files entry on Feranmut Sui, unlocked during the Tales of Old questline in Chapter 2, states that twelve Proxies once walked Terra and that a thirteenth has partnered with the Hongshan Academy of Sciences to develop Feranmut Hearts. She also acts on-screen through a butterfly Ink Spirit inside the Marker Stone.

Why is Si so hyped?

Because the Sui siblings are among the most beloved characters in the original Arknights, with nine dedicated events across the Through the Ages arc. Si is the first confirmed sign that the whole family can appear on Talos-II. Proxies also live for centuries, so there is no timeline problem preventing it.

What are Si’s powers?

Ink and scrolls. She commands Ink Spirits shaped like butterflies and creates scrolls that do not obey normal physics, including scrolls where time passes at a different rate. Her ability set sits in the same family as her elder sisters Jie, who worked with written characters and history, and Dusk, who painted entire inhabitable worlds.

How did Arcane get out of the Ink Scroll?

Si pulled her out. Si sealed Ardashir inside the scroll and rescued Arcane, communicating through her Ink Spirits. Dialogue in 1.2 frames Arcane as exhausted from overusing her own Arts rather than physically wounded, which is why she woke up in a hospital rather than an operating theatre.

Is Si playable in Arknights: Endfield?

Not yet. She was first teased as a future Operator during the Version 1.2 livestream, teased again in the Version 1.4 livestream’s future version preview segment, and is expected in Version 1.5. Until then she remains an NPC who acts through her Ink Spirits.

Do you need to play Arknights to understand Endfield?

No. Endfield’s plot is self-contained and every term it depends on is defined in the Nexus Files. Prior Arknights knowledge changes recognition rather than comprehension: you will catch why a name matters sooner, but you will not be lost without it.

Related Reading

• Feranmut proxies and the Wuling hegemony – the political and industrial consequences of Feranmut power on Talos-II.
• Sui Proxy, Longma Guard and Dream Walker lore – the mythology behind all three Operators teased at Homecoming.
• 1.5 future Operators preview – confirmed details versus speculation on Si’s kit and release.
• Nefarith’s return and Ardashir’s vessel reveal – where Si calls Ardashir’s body a vessel rather than his true form.
• Arcane and Lifeng: Patch 1.4 story – the survivor side of the Wuling arc’s conclusion.
• Foundation and Exiles on Talos-II – what Ardashir is actually hunting, and who sent him.

Note: Lore details reflect content through Version 1.4 Homecoming and the original Arknights Through the Ages arc. Community theories are labelled as such. Please refer to in-game Nexus Files for canonical text.