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Released for MS-DOS in July 1995, The Legend of Sword and Fairy opens like a fairly ordinary adventure. Li Xiaoyao, an innkeeper's nephew with more ambition than skill, rescues a young woman named Zhao Ling'er and sets out to help her find her missing mother. It does not stay ordinary for long. Ling'er, it turns out, is a descendant of Nuwa, the creator goddess of Chinese myth who is said to have molded the first humans from clay and later sacrificed herself mending a broken sky, and the journey the two of them undertake pulls them steadily out of the mortal world and into the world of demons, immortals and cultivating masters that has always run alongside it.
That world runs on xiuxian, the Taoist discipline of self cultivation toward immortality, and the game treats it as more than scenery. Characters are cultivators in progress, working toward a transcendence that pulls them away from ordinary mortal ties even as the story keeps deepening those ties. The tension between cultivating toward immortality and staying attached to the people you love is not a side theme. It is the engine of the plot, and it drives toward an ending widely described by players as tragic, one that has fueled three decades of discussion about what exactly happened to its two central characters and whether either of them was ever fully saved.
Nuwa herself never appears as a character in that story. She exists only as the ancestry Ling'er carries, a myth working in the background rather than a figure walking on stage, and the game is more honest for leaving her there.