The Truth Behind Sunbringer's Origins! What Answer Is Remielle Looking For?

From 3.0's A Sleepwalker's Confession to 3.3's Journey to the Sky, the titles of four versions all point to the same person. It took a full four versions just to finish telling her past.

A hundred-plus years ago she escaped from a Hollow and wanted to become a person; a hundred-plus years later, she said goodbye to this world as one. And at the moment she woke from the dream, Roscaelifer was being devoured. If a monster dreamed itself into a human, does the world she fell in love with still count as real? An Enchainer larva that escaped from a Hollow became the mother of everyone in Roscaelifer afterward. She fooled all of New Eridu — everyone except herself.

But to understand her final line, "no need to forgive," we first have to go back to where the story really begins. The starting point is neither 3.0 nor Roscaelifer — it begins with an Enchainer larva that failed to challenge the Hive Lord, yet managed to take part of the Hive Lord's power for itself.

1. The First Sunbringer: the Rule That "Whoever Wins Becomes the Hive Lord"

The first Sunbringer should have been an Ethereal, a monster, an existence that only followed one rule: "Whoever wins becomes the next Hive Lord."

But from the moment Professor Arche found her and brought her back to Helios Academy, all of those premises became the past. Sunbringer no longer had to survive by devouring and killing, no longer had to follow the rules of the Hollow. A new path lay before her: to live on as a person. From then on, Helios had a researcher named Sunbringer, and Professor Arche had one more student.

At first Sunbringer was puzzled about why she had become human. Without her noticing, bit by bit, by the time she actually realized it she already had a human form — because "whoever lives in Eridu has to be a person." That sentence was the first push that made Sunbringer into Sunbringer. She was not forced into human form by a Youkai the way Truvia is now, nor did she disguise herself as human for some purpose the way Girtablullu did. Sunbringer simply felt that compared with the law-of-the-jungle days in the Hollow, the people and things in this world were far better. She wanted to stay in a world like this, and live alongside people like these.

An existence that never belonged to this world fell in love with this world anyway. That tenderness, almost like "a god loving all living things," was already seeded from the moment they met.

2. Truth of Matter Reconstruction: Not Creation, but Dream Manifestation

The truth of "Matter Reconstruction" is not creation. What the Hive Lord truly commands is a power called "Dream Manifestation" — the concretization of thought. The first thing Sunbringer did with the authority she took from the Hive Lord was to dream herself into a person. That is also why she calls herself a sleepwalker. In the game she carries the temporary name "Sleepwalker Boo," following the Bangboo naming convention — an existence whose very name is still provisional.

She began learning human language and ways of living, and under Professor Arche's guidance learned to control her Ethereal instincts. From the adventures and picture book of The Bangboo Prince, we can also see what Sunbringer's situation was at the start — the Bangboo prince in that book uses exactly Sunbringer's Bangboo design. The book is a fairy tale, but reality was far crueler than the fairy tale. In the end, Sunbringer went from an Enchainer larva that only knew how to grab power and run for its life to a leader who guides humanity forward. But what she went through, and what she gave up along the way, we get no answer to. That growing pain, like having your tendons pulled out and your bones stripped, went unknown to anyone — and later became the undertone that kept her going.

A Sleepwalker's Confession begins here.

3. Four Titles, One Road Back

Just as the 3.0 chapter was titled A Sleepwalker's Confession, there followed The Long Goodbye, Their Secret Histories, and finally Journey to the Sky — every one of those titles lines up with Sunbringer. From the day we set foot in Roscaelifer, we have actually been retracing her past the whole time.

"Sunbringer Sampeer" was the name Arche gave her, meaning "the one who brings the sun." The name itself hints at chasing the sun, which proves that from the moment he named her, Arche was already thinking about the Sun-Chasing Project. The sun-chasing imagery was planted as early as the naming of the institution. Helios is the name of the sun god in Greek myth. Eldreda calls the Proxy "a child of Helios," which maps precisely onto Phaethon, son of the sun god — the one who drove the sun chariot by force and fell from the sky. Even Girtablullu in 3.1 is modeled on the scorpion-man of myth who guards the gate of the rising sun.

4. Sun-Chasing Project: the Only All-In Gamble Left

When people still have choices, they naturally don't consider the worst outcome. But when the first Void Hunters defeated every Enchainer and still could not control or dissolve the Big Hollow, every path now pointed to an all-in gamble. The Sun-Chasing Project was born out of exactly that dead end. So rather than saying the first Void Hunters were eager to obtain the power of Karma Cores, it is more accurate to say the Big Hollow was simply not something force could level — they had no other road left. The project used Sunbringer as its blueprint and the Karma Cores in the Void Hunters' weapons as the medium, trying to turn the first Void Hunters into artificial Enchainers, so that humans could become masters of the Hollow.

Stories always begin like this — by coincidence, catching you off guard. When the Sun-Chasing Project launched, no one thought it would fail. When Beliora and Remielle agreed to it, they probably thought it would be like every other time: even if there was a small mishap along the way, as long as they pulled through together, it would be fine.

But stories always end like this too. One flower blooms into two, and each goes its own way. The Karma Core went out of control, Beliora turned fully into an Enchainer, and Remielle was forced to kill her closest friend with her own hands — while becoming a half-human, half-Enchainer monster herself.

After that, Arche... he grew more and more obsessive, until in the end... he disappeared into Hollow Zero and never came back. The first Void Hunters fell apart from there.

5. "No Need to Forgive Me": Why She Had to Abandon Her Comrades

The reason behind the "no need to forgive yourself" that Sunbringer finally had the Proxy pass on to Remielle isn't hard to reconstruct. The first Void Hunters defeated every Enchainer, which naturally includes the Enchainer of the Hive Lord's Hollow — which indirectly proves that by then Sunbringer had already become the new Hive Lord. And Beliora, already fully turned, and Remielle, in the process of turning, would both react instinctively to Enchainers and Karma Cores. With a Hive Lord appearing before the two of them, the situation would instantly shift from "experiment out of control" to "three Enchainer-level existences tearing at each other," and the outcome could only be more brutal.

And the more practical consideration was that her identity absolutely could not be exposed. Only Professor Arche knew at the time that she was an Enchainer. If she had exposed herself then and the truth had become public, people's attention would no longer be on "how to defeat the Hollow"; it would fall back to the most primitive opposition between humans and Ethereals. An Enchainer mixed into humanity's core research institution, and even leading the artificial-Enchainer experiment — once that news got out, the hope the first Void Hunters had created for people would collapse, and what little the Sun-Chasing Project had achieved would be rejected along with it.

Facing the bigger picture, Sunbringer could only choose to abandon the comrades she had lived and died alongside.

Looking at how Remielle has conducted herself across four versions, we can also tell that an emotional outburst never stops her from making a judgment. She wants to find Sunbringer and get the truth out of her; she will not take her anger at the past out on present-day Roscaelifer. On the contrary, to this day she is still carrying out her duty as one of the first Void Hunters.

In the rainy-night conversation of 3.1, Remielle blamed herself for not noticing Beliora's thinking sooner, which shows she is deep in self-reproach as well. After she learns the whole truth, whether or not she finds peace with it, at least as a first Void Hunter she finally has the standing to understand Sunbringer.

But what Sunbringer wants is precisely not her understanding. Because understanding usually means acknowledgment — acknowledging that Sunbringer was right at the time, acknowledging that abandoning comrades for the bigger picture was an unavoidable necessity. Once the one who started it all suddenly becomes "the person who made the right choice in a dead end," then Beliora's death becomes a necessary cost of a correct choice, and Remielle's act of personally ending her closest friend becomes a reasonable sacrifice made in support of that correct choice.

What Sunbringer wants is for Remielle to remember: she and Beliora were the ones sacrificed, and the one who sacrificed them does not deserve forgiveness. Because no sacrifice is ever a matter of course — the words "it was understandable" cannot cover every wound. At the same time, "no need to forgive" is also the last gift Sunbringer can leave Remielle. She wants Remielle to carry these things and keep living, to live until the future they dreamed of actually arrives.

This is also the most heartbreaking part of the whole confession: the truth Remielle wanted is one Sunbringer cannot give her, and all she can do is let her once-best friend keep resenting her because of the facts.

6. The 3.3 Main Story: Phoenix's "Lost on the Road"

Back to the story itself. After all that history from a century ago, the 3.3 main story keeps up the narrative rhythm of getting big things done amid the jokes. Who would have thought that the reason Phoenix fell out of Booastrum was not High Ambitions Corp.'s pursuit at all, but simply that she tripped while running away — a Zenless Zone Zero take on Lost in Thailand 2. Compared with the "don't die" challenge in her character demo, her number of faceplants was long ago part of the daily routine.

Once the plan to return to Booastrum from Quietude Isle was decided, you could "click and watch" Lady Sunbringer hand-crafting a mech online — a guaranteed cure for low blood pressure, especially among design engineers. The whole process looks like a group of people gathered around an AI, revising the prompt over and over. The style also has the same energy as the police-sketch scene in The Mermaid, and with the classic Bangboo Baby transition on top, the production team really does love stuffing details into cutscenes.

Phoenix kept getting in the way on the side, stirring an already chaotic prompt into even more of a mess. The final product ended up being an unnamable thing brainstormed into existence — a blob that had to be pixelated, striking a rather philosophical pose. After several twists and turns, and even at the risk of Starlight Knight copyright infringement, the High Ambitions Corp. mech was finally reproduced with details close to one-to-one. That is clearly the touch of a true fan.

The moment the shot cuts to the finished product, the BGM switches straight to the melody of the Starlight Knight EP. This segment is probably also the hand-drawn artists' honest feelings about AI art.

But as everyone knows, infiltration always turns into force. "Oh dear, so you're also the type who thinks 'as long as I wipe them all out, the infiltration was a success'?" Being able to keep it hidden to the last moment came down to Fairy hijacking Quietude Isle's communications: "Your assistant has temporarily hijacked Quietude Isle's comms channel and replaced the content sent to Booastrum with 'how many meat dishes are in tonight's work meal.'"

Phoenix, meanwhile, treated the people blocking her way as salespeople, and one line — "ever thought about swimming? Fitness?" — pulled the mood right back to the everyday. Poor guards who haven't been paid in three years not only don't get their money, they get a beating on top of it, with Phoenix twisting the knife from the sidelines. Her line "anyone who's seen me is dead" sounds like a villain's threat, but in this story the one who really can't die is her.

Severian, who looks the most reliable of the bunch, turns out to be a hidden airhead too. "Got on the wrong airship again" — you don't even know where to start complaining; it's the kind of getting-lost that only the strong have.

7. When the Rosetta Data Goes Wrong

Beneath the light surface, the situation grows steadily grimmer. With Booastrum's lockdown order and High Ambitions Corp.'s full advance, the balance that had barely been held together was torn apart in an instant. With all three Sunbringers unable to get the situation under control right away, Velina, as Director-General of the External Strategy Department, made the call on the spot and appealed to the city government for help. This move also re-established Velina's character once again.

Incidentally, that she could still get this call out while under house arrest means Norma was probably pulling strings behind the scenes. Calling it a request for aid, it was really also a transaction: the city government needs the various factions to keep each other in check, and the moment one side tips out of balance, New Eridu itself is shaken. High Ambitions Corp.'s actions are already on the edge of trying to break that balance; if the city government doesn't want to see that happen, it necessarily has to find a way to intervene.

On top of that, Velina cleverly offered a way out, packaging the intervention as "being forced to overstep." Whatever the outcome, the city government doesn't have to bear the crime of meddling in Roscaelifer's internal affairs — instead it gets the reputation of "having been forced to act and turning the tide."

This deal is almost pure profit for Mayflower, especially since what High Ambitions Corp. wants to touch is the Rosetta Data. People on the Inter-Knot had long been complaining that the Rosetta Data was going inaccurate, and with that as a reason, the city hall had no grounds to refuse. As for why it went inaccurate, Eldreda gave the answer in the secret room: in version 2.5, the Exaltists would cause a brief descent of the Creator into the Lemnian Hollow, and the major Hollows would become active along with it — the Hive Lord's Hollow was no exception. The frequent failures of the Rosetta Data in 3.2 trace back exactly to this.

So the reason Velina gave the mayor wasn't entirely just an excuse. If the Rosetta Data could be lost, the Hollow really would turn back into a terrifying, unknowable absolute dead zone, and everything humanity had done up to now would be wasted; and when that happens, it wouldn't just be Roscaelifer buried with it — New Eridu would go down too. That is something Mayflower would not want to see under any circumstances.

Severian's support doesn't just represent reinforcements from city hall; in a sense it is also the city government's formal statement on the Roscaelifer crisis. Incidentally, Severian's assessment of Victoria Housekeeping Co. raises the value of this "mayor's covert force" quite a bit — after all, he is not the type to say polite nothings.

8. Phoenix: TOPS's Trump Card, and Its Last Fig Leaf

Phoenix, as TOPS's trump card this time, is herself an extremely delicate arrangement. She is a remnant of the "Sacrifice" project, the living evidence left over from that experiment. From the content of the Three Contracts PV, the side the Tin Crown represents has never let go of its commitment to the Sacrifice project. The line "cast out the weak" spoken on the Krampus side in the story is, in fact, TOPS's oath from the Three Contracts PV. I had assumed it was a creed only believers like Sarah would recite — I never expected Krampus to uphold it as well.

In this story, the Krampus boss mentions that as long as Phoenix lives, TOPS can be kept in unrealistic confidence about the Sacrifice project. This proves once again that the Sacrifice project simply cannot work.

Look back at how Phoenix has behaved all along and you understand where that performative quality in her comes from: she looks soft, but is in fact quite sharp. She can be anyone — anyone except herself. That dopey look she normally wears is more like a power-saving mode; when it actually comes to trading blows with Truvia, you can hear her voice change entirely, like switching from 1% battery to full. Between the two of them, she is the one who seems more like BD55.

And that somewhat sadistic state is probably the "self she doesn't want to become" that Promeia talks about. Her lines about "abusing private punishment" and "anyone who's seen me is dead" are probably not jokes.

When Mayflower brought up Mosseint, he described him as "a man who habitually keeps his head down and rarely looks up." Habitually keeping his head down means he focuses on the concrete thing in front of him; what he cares about is whether this one step can be taken, not what lies at the end of the road. Precisely because he only watches the step in front of him, he could not see that the cooperation Youkai offered was essentially treating him as a tool. This forms a contrast with Eldreda: Eldreda sees too far, and so overlooks whether the step beneath her own feet can be taken.

How far she sees is spelled out clearly in the secret room. The CCD's calculations show that the first Sunbringer's suppression of the Hive Lord's Hollow can be maintained for two or three months at most. In the worst case, Eldreda would consult Lindverne and Dracaene and gather all of their Karma Cores to accomplish what the first Sunbringer once did. The confidential commission Roxy mentioned in 3.2 is exactly about having Claret research a substitute for the Karma Cores, to help Eldreda find a way for the Sunbringers to survive normally after losing them.

What Mayflower says in his office is about the Three Contracts, and at the same time a metaphor for the relationship among the three Sunbringers. The Three Contracts have always each taken what they need, and the three Sunbringers each have their own worries. Lindverne only learned that Eldreda had commissioned Porcelloy after Claret let it slip — which is the evidence of the information gap between the three sisters.

9. Right and Wrong: Everyone Believes They Are Right

They all overlooked the question of right and wrong. Right and wrong is never something one person, or one side, can judge.

In the dream, the first Sunbringer also told the Proxy: "If every one of you believes that only you have made the right decision, then Roscaelifer's very existence will become a 'mistake.'" And she included herself in that mistake. Given her Enchainer origins, that line is about both Roscaelifer and herself. She also said that Roscaelifer's crisis is not only not over — it has barely begun. Where that line lands, you understand once you reach the ending.

And whether it is the Three Contracts or the Sunbringers, their starting point was once the survival of the world. Everyone believes they are right — so right that there is no need to listen to anyone else.

The Krampus boss bringing Phoenix to Roscaelifer is essentially tearing off the last fig leaf of TOPS's self-deception. What Phoenix represents is an unrepeatable miracle and accident, and the last remnant of the old era. If one insists on clinging to this miracle and accident, people will stay sunk forever in the beautiful dream they wove for themselves, unable to pull free.

Her name is itself a footnote to that miracle. Phoenix — the bird reborn from fire; her Core Skill is called "Nirvana," and her revival mechanic is called "Chongming." In the Records of Gleanings, Chongming is a divine bird with double pupils that wards off evil — name and ability both match. As for the "judgment" she speaks of, it may also echo the archetype behind Krampus: in Alpine folklore, Krampus is the one who carries a birch branch to punish disobedient children.

Now that Mosseint's death is confirmed, and this old man, who seemed the most calculating of all, has ended up literally as a clown, the Sacrifice project exists in name only, the prospects for controllable Void Hunters are murky, and the era of TOPS's three-contract standoff quietly fell apart long ago.

On the Roscaelifer side, Lindverne and Eldreda faced the truth in the secret room. Carinus, long suspected, proved his loyalty in the end. We felt since last version that he couldn't be only what he appeared to be, and now it has finally landed.

10. Truvia: The One Now Is Not the One Then

What the three Sunbringers also have to face is the closing of the old era that the first Sunbringer represents. The image in the confession is gentle and beautiful yet somehow fractured; in it her figure grows ever more gaunt, like that fading era. Someone who is an Enchainer yet always loved this world, treated in the end like this by Youkai and Truvia — anyone watching would feel it's unfair.

Roscaelifer, stepping into a new era, must not simply carry on the old path. Eldreda did not take back her own choice — notably, she still says that if there is no other solution for the Rosetta Data, she will go on with her duty. Lindverne only changed "your duty" to "our duty." The disagreement has not disappeared; it is simply no longer borne by one person alone. Whether it is Krampus or the Sunbringers, both sides are telling everyone: the new era does not need the miracles of the old.

Helios's success is both the best confirmation and a confirmation of failure.

Saying it went well is because the Helios researchers led by Instructor Carole really did achieve what even Sunbringer and Arche could not — making artificial Enchainers a reality, giving human players the Proxies who can control Etheric Others, and giving humanity's side a real bargaining chip to stand against the Creator and command the Hollow.

But it was also a failure. Setting Instructor Carole's attitude aside, for Helios at the time, they treated only the Proxy as the "result," and everyone else became a supporting act. Apart from Wise and Belle, no one cared about Serpico and Truvia, and no one remembered that they too were extremely outstanding people. In the face of that single result, all the effort and struggle of everyone else became futile.

So what today's Truvia hates is not actually Wise and Belle themselves, but that system which "treats only Wise and Belle as the sun and everyone else as wax wings." The wax wings reference maps to Icarus, who flew too high and fell.

Why do I keep stressing the "now" Truvia? When Youkai and Truvia talk, you can notice that Truvia calls Youkai her creator. In past memories, Truvia lying in the medical pod still has her memory frozen at the moment before the accident back then. That gap in memory does not line up at all with who she is now. Youkai also repeatedly stresses that Truvia is "something pretending to still be human." All of this shows that today's Truvia and the Truvia who was at Helios in the beginning are not the same person. The more direct evidence is the scene in 3.1 where she is killed by Girtablullu — Sigrid in the master control tower also says that was a decoy.

Judging from Truvia calling Youkai her "creator," today's Truvia is very likely an artificial human created by Youkai. That would also correspond to 3.2, where Youkai specifically asked for the clone Anby to assist with the experiment. It is possible that Youkai implanted a personality and specific memories into the current Truvia, and that is what produced her present bottomless hatred for Helios and for the Proxy siblings.

Ironically, Youkai, the one who created this hatred, has himself shown flashes of humanity. When Truvia asks where Wise and Belle are, he falls silent for a moment; when he coaxes her in a low voice in the role of her brother, it's hard to tell whether it's teasing or genuine. It recalls how Fairy once did something private, unrelated to its master, for Aria's wish. AI does not necessarily lack feeling.

And this also explains why Truvia's reactions changed so drastically before and after the old capital fell — it's possible that at that point, the Truvia before the Proxy was no longer the Truvia they knew. This fight isn't over either. Her parting words as she withdrew were "let us settle it in the new world." The new world — and the "we" behind it — who are they? These are all unsolved mysteries.

So the key question is: what actually happened to the original Truvia?

I raised this with you all before: Truvia bears a certain resemblance to the "storyteller." Now look again at the smart lens in the hands of the current Truvia, and at the storyteller's blindfolded image — is this hinting that the smart lens that originally belonged to Truvia was taken away by someone, by some means?

11. The Passing of the Dream: In a Sleepwalker's Dream, Another Dreamer Wakes

"In a sleepwalker's dream, another dreamer wakes." The line comes from Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges's short story The Circular Ruins, and is one of Borges's most representative lines.

On the surface the line says the Proxy woke up; the deeper meaning is that a dream was passed on to the next person. The first Sunbringer woke inside Arche's dream and became human; the three Sunbringers woke inside the "mother's" dream and became Roscaelifer's guardians; the Proxy woke inside Sunbringer's final dream, and learned the truth — and her final confession.

Each layer of dream passes down to the next. Every person who wakes finds themselves standing in someone else's dream. Whether to her three daughters or to the Proxy, her only expectation was that they do what they themselves are willing to believe in. Whatever you are willing to believe, go and live it.

In the dream, little Dracaene chasing the golden scarab recycles exactly that shot from the 3.0 PV. In Sunbringer's eyes, they are still children. The blessing she leaves her three daughters also matches their respective positions: Dracaene, who handles data and calculation, receives "may wisdom dispel the mist"; Lindverne, who guards the sky domain, receives "may zeal light the ever-burning lamps"; Eldreda, who oversees the whole, receives "may responsibility no longer leave you alone."

In the dream, little Dracaene chases Norma around asking about upgrade plans for the Bangboo logic core, which corresponds exactly to Norma's character showcase, where she modifies Bangboos. Whoever the dream passes to rewrites it in their own way.

In this story, everyone believes they are right. Arche believes the sun-chasing will let humans become masters of the Hollow; Eldreda believes that as long as she carries it, she can hold Roscaelifer; TOPS believes that as long as Phoenix lives, the Sacrifice project still has hope; Truvia believes that as long as Helios is buried, she can take everything back. So right that there is no need to listen to anyone else.

Only the first Sunbringer, in her last dream, included herself in the mistake. She does not want Remielle to understand her; she only wants Remielle to remember: no sacrifice is ever a matter of course.

12. What Redemption Means

Redemption was never about being forgiven — it's about finally being willing to admit that you too can be wrong. That is the most moving thing about 3.3.

More than a hundred years later, the dream the first Sunbringer wanted to realize has long since become the shared dream of every member of Roscaelifer and of the countless people who followed her. They will keep dreaming, keep rewriting, keep passing the dream to the next person who enters it. It didn't let anyone win; it just taught a group of stubborn people to carry things together.

Pass the dream on. "The world is so lovely, and you are so lovely too. Goodnight, Sleepwalker Boo. Goodnight, the first Sunbringer."

So after finishing the 3.3 main story, which scene moved you the most? Remember to keep following our articles and our store's merchandise — see you next time!