I rewatched Qianye’s story cutscenes and noticed something that made me look at her mirror-realm forms differently.

In the real world, Qianye has a relatively slender build. But after she sends the protagonist into the mirror realm, her appearance changes dramatically. Her shoulders, arms, and upper body become noticeably more muscular, her outfit changes, and then the white-haired Qianye appears alongside her.

When the mirror realm collapses, however, the protagonist appears to wake up, and Qianye is back to her original slender appearance.

So I started wondering:

What if the muscular Qianye isn't a physical transformation at all, but an idealized version of herself inside her own mental/spiritual world?

My theory is that Qianye once admired the idea of becoming a righteous, powerful martial warrior, but her natural strengths took her down a very different path. Instead of physical strength, she was blessed with exceptional beauty and supernatural abilities, eventually becoming the ruthless person we meet in the story.

In that interpretation, the two Qianyes in the mirror realm could represent different aspects of her psyche.

Black Qianye is the person she wishes she could be: physically powerful, confident, fearless, and capable of overwhelming her opponents through sheer martial strength. She smiles, enjoys the fight, and openly challenges the protagonist to kill her.

White Qianye, meanwhile, could represent everything Black Qianye rejects or suppresses: pain, resentment, jealousy, insecurity, and perhaps even self-hatred. Her body is covered in cracks, and something I found particularly interesting is that, as far as I could see in the cutscene, White Qianye never smiles. Her expression is consistently much more bitter and troubled than Black Qianye's.

This could also give another meaning to Qianye mocking the protagonist for carrying a blade despite her apparent weakness. Maybe it isn't just contempt. Perhaps there's some jealousy underneath it: the protagonist is young and inexperienced, yet she gets to walk the path of a wandering martial hero that Qianye herself could never truly become.

Taking the theory even further, perhaps White Qianye is the part of her that bears the pain and psychological burden that Black Qianye refuses to acknowledge. The cracks covering White Qianye's body could symbolize that accumulated suffering.

Obviously, a lot of this is speculation. We still know very little about Qianye, and the game may eventually give us a completely different explanation.

But the contrast between her real-world body, Black Qianye's unusually powerful physique, and White Qianye's cracked body and unhappy expression feels very deliberate to me.

What do you think? Is the mirror realm showing us Qianye's actual supernatural forms, or are we literally fighting different parts of her mind?

Theory: Could Qianye’s muscular form in the mirror realm represent her ideal self?