i will forever find it funny how renheng deniers will look you dead in the eye and go āthe beloved was actually baihengā like itās some kind of undeniable textual cornerstone when the actual narrative is doing everything short of grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you while screaming āYINGXING, THE BELOVED WAS HIMSELF.ā
because letās look at whatās actually on the page:
dan feng spends half his screentime being emotionally, textually, spiritually, and violently hung up on yingxing specifically.
dan heng and blade both, when confronted with the name baiheng, have the emotional reaction one would expect of a blank document loading screen.
jing yuan, who somehow manages to exist in the same historical ecosystem and still never meaningfully bring her up or even reference her in a way that suggests she is the keystone of anyoneās emotional universe. which is, for a man who would burn the luofu down for one more second with dan feng, honestly impressive in its own right.
and the only person in the entire extended constellation who actually seems to yearn for baiheng and is anchored to her specifically as an emotionally loaded presence is jingliu.
also just objectively speaking, whatever remains of baiheng is not something that can be āburiedā like the beloved was. there is no intact body, and it reads less like ālaid to restā and more like āwhat even remains to inter.ā there is nothing there to bury when all that remains is her hair, and you cannot meaningfully map āthe beloved was buriedā onto a character whose death is explicitly defined by the absence of a recoverable body.
which is why, to me, the simplest internal consistency answer has always been that the ābelovedā being referred to is yingxing.
because yingxing isnāt just āsomeone blade cared about,ā yingxing is the origin point of his entire existence. the first and final death. the loop that never actually resolves because it is the wound. blade no longer has access to self-love in any stable sense, yingxing is not just a separate person but the self he cannot return to. the ābelovedā is not an external romance label but something tied to the destruction of selfhood itself.
which is where dan feng comes in as the agent of that burial. the one who seals, ends, and overwrites what yingxing was, in the most irreversible way the narrative allows.
of course, you can argue that dan feng is the beloved, because dan heng simply by existing as a reincarnation rejects and separates himself from dan feng, and is effectively āburyingā him as a person, closing that identity off. that reading is coherent.
and also, this part is less ātextual constraintā and more āpattern recognition if youāve been around the block with this company,ā it just makes more sense for it to be yingxing because hoyo does love its selfcest. itās one of their favorite narrative toys.
