At first glance, the wells scattered around Jade Gate Pass look abandoned. But if you climb down one, the ground keeps going. You are not inside a well. You are standing in a karez, one of the most extraordinary and brutal engineering achievements in human history.
In deserts like the Hexi Corridor, normal wells fail. Water evaporates. Sand absorbs whatever remains. Villages disappear before anything can grow. So the people who refused to leave after the An Lushan Rebellion shattered Tang protection built something entirely different. Deep beneath the desert, water flows through ancient veins of stone. General Guo Xin possessed military maps marking those hidden channels and entrusted them to the families who stayed.
A karez is not a hole dug downward. It is a system of tunnels carved horizontally across miles of buried earth, chasing underground snowmelt from distant mountains with such precision that gravity alone guides the water home. Vertical shafts dot the surface like scars, used to haul sand upward and lower air to workers who labored where sunlight never reached. There were no machines. Only shovels and faith. To keep tunnels straight, diggers placed an oil lamp behind them and followed their own shadow along the tunnel wall. As long as they dug into the shadow, the path stayed true.
The game tells this story through generations. A young couple working the tunnels shared a secret ritual: the girl would carve her name into the wall, and the boy would search for it after his shift and carve his beside hers. But her father sold her to a merchant caravan so she could grow up somewhere with water. The boy, Cheng Youjing, kept digging until the tunnel collapsed around him. He carved his name into the wall one final time, a lone inscription waiting in darkness for a companion that would never come.
His brother carried on. Then a massive sandstorm buried the entire team underground. A girl named He Jin lost her adoptive father in that disaster. Unable to bear the grief, she left the village and renamed herself "Xiao Sheng," the one left behind. But no matter how far she traveled, her hometown followed like a shadow. She returned and began digging at the buried entrance alone.
Through the protagonist's ability to enter memories, we discover what He Jin never knew: her father found the water. Trapped alongside the last surviving Cheng family member after the sandstorm sealed the entrance, they broke through to the underground river they had chased their entire lives. But no one above ever received the news.
When He Jin finally learns the truth through us, she picks up her father's old oil lamp and becomes the one who carries the project forward. That same karez would later save Burlap Sack's life.
A friend from Xinjiang who grew up near real karez explained why this scene made her cry. When workers dig a karez, the lamp is placed behind them. You always dig facing away from the light. Only when the tunnel is finished do you finally walk while facing the lamp again. So when we leave the cave carrying the light, it means the work is done. The darkness is behind you. You have earned the right to face the light again.
*Based on analysis by [WWM Girl (Goose Girl Stories)](https://www.youtube.com/@GooseGirlStories).*
