An official operating within the Mirage Pavilion's jurisdiction
Official Xia is a government official stationed in the territory under Mirage Pavilion's control. Encountered by the protagonist during the Ganye Temple chapters, she becomes a critical choice point where the player must decide her fate.
Appears in Side Story Ch17 (Ganye Temple)
Official Xia is a minor character with an outsized body count attached to her name. A government official stationed in territory under the Mirage Pavilion’s control, she crosses the protagonist’s path in Side Chapter 17: Ganye Temple, No Escape of Road to Empress II — at the worst possible moment, when the protagonist is disposing of Liu Xi’s body and building a new identity from scratch. The encounter with Official Xia is one of the Side Story’s defining choice points: two of the three ways to handle her are Bad Endings, and the surviving option turns her into an unwilling ally through blackmail. For players, she is the Ganye Temple arc’s sharpest lesson that survival sometimes demands morally ugly compromises.
Official Xia holds government office, but not within the imperial palace’s familiar hierarchy. Her posting lies in territory governed by the Mirage Pavilion’s shadow jurisdiction — a region where the intelligence network’s authority outweighs the throne’s, and where an official’s real employer is ambiguous by design. She is, in effect, a civil servant of the empire working under the quiet supervision of the Pavilion.
That dual allegiance explains both her competence and her danger. An official in Pavilion territory survives by noticing things, and what she notices at Ganye Temple is the protagonist standing over fresh evidence of a death. Her institutional role makes her a genuine threat — not because she is powerful personally, but because one report from her can bring the whole network’s attention down on a fugitive.
Official Xia is typed ESTP with the favor attribute Cunning, and her brief screen time is consistent with both. ESTPs are pragmatic, action-oriented, and quick to adapt — when she stumbles onto a crime scene, she does not freeze or flee; she engages. That decisiveness is what makes the encounter so dangerous: there is no talking your way around a woman who acts first and files reports second.
Her Cunning attribute frames the resolution. The option that works — forcing her to keep your secret — succeeds because it speaks to self-interest rather than sympathy or fear alone. The chapter’s own consequence text notes the result plainly: “blackmail is brutal but effective; Xia becomes your unwilling ally.” An ESTP understands leverage instantly, and Official Xia’s compliance afterward reads less like submission than like a pragmatic recalculation of which side of the secret is safer.
Official Xia’s confirmed appearance is concentrated in Side Chapter 17, the opening arc of the Side Story route triggered by accepting Liu Xi’s terms in the Prologue. The sequence unfolds in two beats. First, “Danger Approaches”: Official Xia discovers the scene, and the player must respond — running away triggers BE 11, while the safe answer is to pretend to be Liu Xi, bluffing through the encounter under the dead woman’s identity.
Then comes her dedicated choice point, “Deal with Official Xia.” The three options are a study in the game’s moral geometry. Pushing her into the well is BE 13 — violence draws too much attention. Confessing your identity and asking her to elope is BE 12 — honesty is fatal when you are a murder suspect. Only forcing her to keep the secret is safe, converting a witness into an unwilling asset. The official walkthrough coverage of the Ganye Temple arc repeats the same verdict: do not run, do not confess, make her keep the secret.
Her shadow extends past the chapter’s end. The well where this confrontation happens is a flagged location in the game’s branching logic — what the protagonist leaves there in Chapter 17 determines which continuation branch appears in the Dangerous Reunion chapters, making the Xia encounter part of a longer chain of consequences than its single scene suggests.
Official Xia’s two documented relationships frame her entire dramatic function. With Wu Yuanzhao, the relationship begins as pure hazard — a stranger who walks into the wrong courtyard at the wrong hour — and resolves, on the surviving path, into coerced alignment: she knows the protagonist’s most dangerous secret and is bound to silence by her own self-preservation. With the Mirage Pavilion Master, the tie is jurisdictional rather than personal: she operates within the Pavilion’s territory, which means her official actions unfold under the gaze of the empire’s most feared intelligence network. She belongs to no court faction; her faction is geography, and her loyalty is to staying alive inside it.
Official Xia has no affinity meter and no route; she is a binary survival check with lasting echoes. Tips consistent with the chapter data: first, when she discovers you, choose “Pretend to be Liu Xi” — both flight and silence are documented Bad Endings. Second, at the handling choice, always force her to keep your secret; players report the blackmail path is the only non-lethal option, and it pays off by removing a witness without adding a corpse. Third, remember the well: the item you leave at that location feeds the Gaoyang’s Interception branch split in Side Chapters 19-20, so treat the Xia scene as an inventory decision as much as a dialogue one. Finally, do not romanticize the encounter — the elopement option exists specifically to punish players who confuse a visual novel’s genre instincts with this game’s rules. In the world of the Mirage Pavilion, a spared enemy bound by leverage is worth more than a forgiven one.