You're hunted by "The Order" from the very first moments of Phantom Blade Zero. This behemoth didn't just appear out of nowhere—it spent 40 years grinding the entire Phantom World's Wulin beneath its heel. This piece condenses The Order's chronicle for you, laying out exactly what you're up against.
Before The Order: A Century of Setup
A fragment of the "Heavenly Book" slipped into the capital through a rift in spacetime. The court developed it into six legendary texts of machinery and martial arts. The scholar Xuan Mo fled with the fragment into the desert, conquering tribes with mechanisms and founding the Xuan clan, until the Dragon family—the court's enforcers—led righteous sects to destroy them. The fragment was buried in a hidden mechanism chamber, leaving behind only a single page recording the theory of "killing intent rising and falling, flowing and transferring will"—that was the seed of every tragedy that followed: if killing intent could be perfectly generated and controlled by machines, every martial master's skill would become a joke in the face of endless killing engines.
The Order's 40 Years: From Three Members to Emperor of the Wulin
| Time | Event | What It Means for You |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | The young Mu Tianmiao and two companions found "The Order," planning to rename it later—the name stuck | The starting point was just 3 people |
| Year 5 | Mu Tianmiao slays Iron Gentleman, the world's greatest swordsman, at the Summit of Mofeng—winning fame in a single battle | Establishes their might as a deterrent |
| Year 7 | The "Ghost Envoy" technique succeeds—converting defeated masters into warriors who obey orders | The Order never lacks manpower again; the masked faces you fight on the road trace back to this |
| Year 12 | Full assault on the devil cult's Dark Demon Heavenly Fortress; the fortress falls and its master's young son is taken (the future Soul) | Soul's origin: he is the orphan of a destroyed fortress |
| Year 13 | The Tianling Peak massacre: masters of every sect slay each other; 11 survivors are converted by killing intent to prolong their lives, forming the "Council of Eleven" | The point where the Phantom World begins to fall apart—see "The Tianling Peak Massacre and the Council of Eleven" |
| Year 22 | Mu Tianmiao adopts sworn sons Soul and Zuo Shang, personally teaching them martial arts | The seed of brothers turning against each other—see "Soul and Zuo Shang" |
| Years 24–33 | Re-emerges, wiping out and absorbing underworld sects, then spends three more years crushing "Mirage" | The Order's strongest rival is destroyed |
| Year 38 | Peak era: 237 hostile sects across the land have been eradicated | No rivals remain in the Wulin |
| Year 40 | The upheaval: Soul is framed for slaying his master and flees The Order; Zuo Shang succeeds as sovereign | The 66-day manhunt for you begins at this moment |
Ghost Envoys: The True Core of This System
The Order's real strength isn't numbers—it's the "Ghost Envoy" technique: converting defeated sect masters into warriors who obey only commands. Between years 8 and 10 after its founding, The Order used it to destroy over a hundred sects and convert hundreds of Ghost Envoys. Top guards like Iron Ghost and Jade Demon are all products of this system. During conversion, some are consumed by killing intent, don masks, and lose their identities—that's the origin of the "masked faces" in Zero: they aren't born monsters; they're the Order's technological assembly line.
What It Means for You
What you face in Zero has never been "a single villainous organization"—it's a ruling machine that has run for 40 years: Ghost Envoys supply the muscle, envoys manage intelligence, and killing-intent conversion maintains the monopoly. The Order hunts you not just to clean up a traitor—it cannot let a top assassin who knows all its secrets live outside. So this flight leaves no room for negotiation—you can only fight your way through it.
👉 To see the source of The Order's technology (how killing-intent conversion corrupted the Wulin), read "The Tianling Peak Massacre and the Council of Eleven"; to see through the conspiracy that defined those 40 years, read "Soul and Zuo Shang."