Lore of Perfect World

The lore of Perfect World comes in two tellings that do not fully agree. The game's main story (the PWI wiki's History of Perfect World) has Pan Gu create the world, wipe out his first flawed creatures with a flood and then make three new races. The Perfect Chronicles, a record of origins that the wiki marks as partly out of date, instead tell of quarrelling gods, a great disaster and a new world built for the survivors. This page gives the main story first and the Chronicles' version after it.

Before anything existed there was only the Void. Inside it a Cosmic Egg of balanced Yin and Yang formed, and from it Pan Gu, the first being, awoke. He saw in a vision a world of honor, compassion, glory and beauty and decided to shape the Void into it. The Void fought back and wounded him; from that wound he forged the first weapon, the Primal Gem, an axe-hammer, and with it he beat the Void and split it into Yin and Yang. Before it fell, the Void warned that whatever he built would one day sink back into emptiness.

Yang became the Earth and Yin the Sky, and Pan Gu held them apart for almost eighteen thousand years, raising the Pillars of Existence to keep them separated. Then his body became the world: his breath the winds, his voice the thunder, his blood the rivers, his hair the forests, his bones the ore. He broke himself into the five elements, fire, metal, wood, earth and water, and from them made the land, seas and plants. His thoughts became the beings later worshipped as gods, among them the Lords of the four Boundaries, the Goddess of the Sun and the God of the Moon.

Pan Gu's first living creatures, shaped from his shadow, had no civilization and soon began to ruin the world around them. Seeing an Imperfect World, he raised the floating city of Heaven's Tear, placed in it the few creatures still untouched by corruption, and sent a great flood of water and wind that wiped out every other living thing.

On the cleansed land he made three races able to follow Spiritual Cultivation, each carrying a part of him:

Above all Pan Gu gave them free will, and he swore never again to destroy a whole people, so the races would have to settle their own quarrels. A longer account says the Winged Elves came out of the City of the Plume and the Untamed out of the City of the Lost, while Archosaur, the Dragon City, was found empty except for two infants, a boy and a girl. See Races and Classes for the races as they are played today.

When Humans and Winged Elves found Heaven's Tear, they went to war over it. This Millennium War, said to have lasted a thousand years, began after the Massacre of Unicorn Forest, where Winged Elves are said to have killed a group of Humans, though accounts differ. The Untamed mostly kept out of it.

While the two sides fought, the creatures thought drowned in the flood came back in force. Neither fully alive nor fully dead, they were named wraiths. They seek to destroy the other races and corrupt the world, and rumor says they can possess living beings. Only this threat pushed Humans and Elves into a truce, and the races now have to stand together to protect the Perfect World.

• The Ten Generals: to unite the warring lands, the commoner Honorable Kuan led the Ten Generals against the Horde of the noble Jade-Eyed Zhao, won, and became Emperor of Pangu in Archosaur.
• The end of the Empire: after Kuan died, the last three generals, Xia, Zhong and Yi, could not agree on an heir. Each drove a sword (Skyclaw, Infinite Edge, Prismatic Shade) into the Jade Throne, split the land into their own domains and left Archosaur.
• The Wraiths' Ploy: a wraith plot leads heroes to the Chrono Wheel, a relic that sends them ten thousand years into the past to learn how the wraiths and the Millennium War began. This story came with The Lost Empire expansion (see Timeline and Expansions).
• The Age of Spirits: Genies are newborn spirits of the five elements from the Elemental World. When the war between Emperor Ching and the Yaksa tribes upset the balance of water and wood, they rose to protect Perfect World. See Genies.
• Pan Gu's Prophecy: Pan Gu foretold a time when the world would be torn apart and the seas would rise. The Earthguard, an underground people he gave the Third Eye, foresaw it and spent their lives preparing to fight beside the other races.

In the Chronicles, Pan Gu splits Yin and Yang with his axe and gives his own body to become the world. His shattered spirit becomes the gods, including the five elemental gods: Nuwa (earth), Grongon (water), Rushou (metal), Chujong (fire) and Shenmong (wood). Their quarrels end in the Sea of Blood Disaster, a world-wide flood. Shocked, the gods build a new and perfect world for chosen survivors and leave the ruined old one behind; it becomes the Primal World. The souls of the dead left there twist with hatred and become the wraiths, whom the gods later seal in the Underworld.

The Chronicles also tell where the later races came from:

• Tideborn: descendants of the Wavewalkers, given life on land and sea by the water god Grongon. They settled the Barrier Islands, and in the year 1406 their elders used a forbidden ritual against a wraith attack that pushed their islands far from the Midlands.
• Earthguard: virtuous souls trained by Radiance, the guide of the dead, to fight the wraiths after a dark meteor in the year 889 created his evil twin, Dark Radiance. Radiance gave them a third eye to focus their power.
• Nightshade: the Reapers of the Divine Child Cangyan. When the Twilight Empire invaded their realm, Cangyan gave his life to destroy the invaders, and his children sailed flying ships to Perfect World and joined them into the floating city of Dawnglory. (The Eclipse expansion story tells it differently: the Reapers were made by a son of Pan Gu and guarded the Celestial Vale.)
• Sages and Demons: mortals chosen by the gods called themselves Sages, while followers of the gods cast into the abyssal void wielded its dark power as Demons. The two have opposed each other ever since; see Sage and Demon Paths.