The Raging Tides sect has the most bewildering initiation in Where Winds Meet. To join, you do not prove combat skill or demonstrate martial arts. You get catastrophically drunk, then break a fellow disciple out of prison. Their leader invented the parry system - not for combat, but to deflect the attacks of his hot-tempered wife when she got angry. He even named the technique "Easy Beating." Every rule in this sect sounds like a joke. None of them are.
[spoiler]The founding story traces back to the fall of the Anxi Protectorate. After the An Lushan Rebellion shattered the Tang frontier, the Silk Road descended into chaos. But within the Anxi Protectorate, order somehow held. For forty years, the Anxi Army governed as well as protected - minting Tang coins to keep markets functional and maintaining law in a world that had forgotten what law felt like. Tibetan forces attacked year after year until the walls cracked and the silver-haired heroes gave their final lives defending the fortress.
Inside the fortress sat the prisoners the Anxi Army had kept locked up. When the guards fell, the gates swung open. Freedom was theirs. But something unexpected happened. These criminals had spent years watching the world under Anxi protection from inside their cells. They had seen what order looked like when maintained by soldiers who genuinely believed in it. When those soldiers died protecting everything the prisoners had taken for granted, the criminals faced a question no one could have predicted they would answer.
They gathered the bodies of the fallen soldiers. They built coffins. They used iron chains to shackle the coffins to their own bodies. Then they began walking east toward Chang'an - thousands of miles away, through raider-controlled passes, the iron cutting into their flesh with every step. They carried the dead so that the men who had protected them could be buried in their homeland. They also carried hope that Chang'an would send help to restore order.
By the time they arrived, only nine still breathed. And Chang'an was in ruins, incapable of protecting the frontier. So the nine turned around. They walked back to the frontier and founded the Raging Tides - the last people anyone would trust with peace, choosing to protect what the empire could not.
That is why the initiation is a prison break. It is a ritual memory of the founding. The sect's second leader, Zhang Huaishen, spent his life protecting Hexi and doing the right thing in a wrong world, only to be betrayed and murdered. His death reshaped the sect permanently. The first leader searched for his body, and after the player helps bury a wine gourd in Zhang Huaishen's place, the old master passes away atop Wuwei mountain. From that point, three iron rules emerged: never work with the imperial court, never hoard wealth, never seek fame. If a member dies, they should die on a battlefield and never trouble others to find their bones - only ask the living to bury a wine gourd where they fell.
The drinking tradition is rooted in deep cultural philosophy. In Wuxia culture, sharing wine is a ceremony of brotherhood - a sacred contract between souls. Wine acts as a bridge between the restrained self and the true self, providing social permission to speak honestly and act boldly. When the nine survivors sat together and drank from the same jar, they were writing a vow: to share one mind, one life. The game takes this literally - leave a battle while teammates are still fighting, and the sect penalizes you.
In Daoist thought, a hero who drinks freely is one who has stopped measuring the odds, acting with pure instinct the way water finds its level without being told. Water overcomes obstacles through persistence rather than force, and the name "Raging Tides" itself points to water. The sect does not try to overpower fate; they keep moving against it until it gives way.[/spoiler]
Every strange ritual in the Raging Tides - the drinking, the prison breaks, the distrust of authority - traces back to people who had every reason to walk away and chose not to. When you join, you are not just choosing a playstyle. You are standing at the end of a very long line of people who defied the tide of fate itself.
*Based on analysis by [WWM Girl (Goose Girl Stories)](https://www.youtube.com/@GooseGirlStories).*
