In the vast but closed universe of Star Dome Railway, Xiadie is a character that is ignored by many people and persistently excavated by a small group of people. Her design is not noisy, not eye-catching, and even seems redundant at first glance. But like most hidden powers in the world, her existence, in certain situations, may just reveal the most essential paradox of the game mechanism: what you are pursuing is power itself, or the illusion of pursuing power?

As a character with the fate of “memory”, Xiadie’s combat positioning tends to control and continuously weaken. She is good at applying the “etching” state, causing delayed quantum damage to the enemy, and detonating these states under certain conditions to achieve group suppression. In today’s combat environment that increasingly emphasizes “quick battles and quick decisions”, her slow rhythm, harsh startup conditions, and high requirements for lineup matching often put her on the edge of low usage, low discussion, and even forgotten.

But let’s ask: Who determines her “edge”? Is it the data? Is it the environment? Is it the player’s anxiety? Or is it the game developers’ acquiescence to the logic of “efficient combat”?

Every time I use Xiadie, I am shocked by her vague presence. She hardly steals the limelight, does not create high bursts, and does not easily give you refreshing instant feedback. She is more like a bystander in the battle. When everyone is busy with output, treatment, and shields, she quietly lays down etchings, applies quantum anomalies, and waits for opportunities to detonate – everything is done behind the scenes. So, when the damage number finally jumps out of the screen, you will suddenly realize that it was her who did it, and you didn’t notice when she did it before.

This is her value, but also her misfortune.

Because most people are pursuing clear and immediate positive and negative feedback. In this game environment, light cone entries, relic amplification, constellation bonus, and energy recovery cycle are all presented in a quantitative way, while Xiadie’s influence is often a delayed feedback – you need to calculate the number of times she etches the stack, maintain a specific rhythm, and build a team framework for her that can accommodate her mechanism. These complexities can be reflected as “depth” in the battles with strong enemies, but they appear “inefficient” in the daily dungeons and the process of brushing.

So we abandoned her and chose those characters who could defeat the enemy with one blow, simplifying the battle to the question of “speed pass or not”.
So what did we lose?
We lost respect for strategy, understanding of rhythm, and acceptance of the internal design logic of the characters. All we have left is: numerical priority.

But Xiadie still exists in the game. She has not been deleted or remade. She is like the remains of some original game concept, buried under this increasingly commercial, fast-paced, and heavy-operation system. She reminds us that Star Dome Railway once wanted to make a game with “depth and thinking space”. Rather than a system that quantifies everything by brushing, stacking time, and burst output.

If you put Xiadie into the team, you will find that you have to build the battle logic around her: you must figure out how to lay out etching, how to cooperate with breaking to hit quantum weaknesses, how to use her talent mechanism to delay enemy actions and cooperate with other control characters to achieve “chain soft control”. She is not a single-point blasting tool, but a set of fuses in the system. She needs to be ignited by others, and will eventually illuminate the whole place – but are you willing to wait until that moment?

Why are we unwilling to wait? Because our lives are too fast. Our reality is too anxious, too efficiency-oriented, and too afraid of failure, so that we only want to pursue the optimal solution even in games. We brush the relic device to increase the critical strike, we team up to “maximize the damage of automatic combat”, and we even try to complete the daily tasks within five minutes. We are not playing games at all, but chasing a certain illusion: If I am strong enough, I can solve the problem; if I am fast enough, I can get rid of the feeling of powerlessness.

Xiadie is obviously not for this illusion. Her design implies a respect for “time”, tolerance for “change”, and a non-instant understanding of “influence”. She teaches us another way of survival: take it slow, don’t rush, and you can reach victory in a long run.

Lu Xun said in “That’s All”: “It has always been like this, is it right?”

I want to use this sentence to those players who have always ignored Xiadie.
What you pursue is pleasure, efficiency, ranking, and panel, but are these really “right”?
And Xiadie is the fork in the road that you have passed by countless times but never really examined.

She is not weak, she is just different from the logic you are used to.