Phantom Blade Zero Factions: The Six Powers of the Phantom World

The Phantom World's story lines all run through six powers. Knowing who wants what turns the campaign's twists from noise into chess — here is the full board.

1. The Order — Soul's former home, now his hunter

The Phantom World's most terrifying assassination guild, known simply as "The Order." Joining means erasing your past. Power runs from the Lord (Mu Tianmiao at the story's start) down through seven Envoys — Mu Tianmiao, Void, An Chan, the Seventh, Soul, Zuo Shang and Xiaosi — then human agents, and finally the Ghost Officers: heart-modified, twisted killing machines. When Lord Mu is murdered and Soul framed, the entire Order becomes the game's most persistent enemy.

2. Dark Demon Fortress — the old underworld throne

A crime dynasty that predated The Order in the east by a century. Its founding ancestor, an outsider, fused his bloodline with the region's killing intent to create the Demon-line martial arts. The family fell into decline in the same era as the Long Family's collapse — and official lore hints Soul carries a hidden blood tie to its surviving line.

3. The Long Family — the fallen right hand

Once the righteous half of the jianghu's balance against the Fortress. Its last head, Long Tairan, died mysteriously inside The Order a decade before the story — an unsolved case that still poisons everything. The Family's signature golden sword qi lives on in Zuo Shang, whose fate is bound to theirs; watch this thread late in the campaign.

4. The Xuan Family — where every conspiracy starts

A court scholar, Xuan Mo, fled the palace with sixty-six stolen volumes of the Heavenly Book, and his descendants have been hunted by the Long Family ever since. Descendant Xuan Ji built a killing-intent generator from the stolen knowledge and, allying with the Golden Swordsman, ignited the Tianling Massacre that shattered the martial world. Survivors Xuan Yu and Xuan Yu(fish) still work every side against the others.

5. The Council of Eleven and Mirage — the puppet masters

Eleven masters survived the Tianling Massacre by remaking themselves with Heavenly Book knowledge. Their creed: chaos is the ladder. They manufacture strange faces (the masked abominations) and engineer the jianghu's wars from behind the scenes. Mirage, their floating airship co-managed with the Golden Swordsman, hosts the experiments — ruled in public by a puppet "Lord of Mirage."

6. Shadow — the outside infection

A bloodthirsty assassin order flowing in from the western regions: sect castoffs, fugitives, killers without a code. Its chief Leng Tu runs deep-cover operations hunting Soul, and its assassins ambush the player repeatedly through the campaign.

How to hold all this straight

Track three questions as you play: who benefits from the Lord's death, what the Heavenly Book volumes are for, and why the Long and Demon bloodlines matter to Soul. The protagonist's story and trailer analysis pages connect the rest.