When Age of Heroes was released Liu Fei was introduced as one of the new fully voiced Companions you could obtain via a chain of quests. If you go through just the very intoduction quest line you will find the following quest dialog (sorry for spoilers if you haven’t done this but this is over a year old now so get over it).
(this is a dialog option for the player)
(this is a dialog option for the player)
Now, you may be asking yourself, what exactly is the problem with this dialog? It would appear to set up a decent story as to why Liu Fei is in the Exiles Land and why he is not simply trapped within the Exiled Lands but his fate is actually far worse than that! And it set you up nicely with a quest to obtain some items (I left that part out but it’s basic materials from the Sorcery line, nothing special) to free him from his imprisonment within the Yothga plant. Well, that kind of exactly is the problem itself.
The Yothga plant originates in the story The Scarlet Citadel, written by Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan). Conan, at this point in time King of Aquilona, rides out with 5,000 Calvary expecting the King of Ophir, an ally of his, to support him against the King of Koth, a mutual enemy. However the King of Ophir had betrayed him and instead allied with the King of Koth and they had a force of “thirty thousand knights, archers and spearmen”. Needless to say the Aquilonians did not win the battle and Conan was taken captive.
Behind the two kings is the Wizard Tsotha-lanti. Now, after being tossed into the pit underneath the citadel where Tsotha-lanti reigned in Koth Conan stumbles into a room. In that room this is what Conan finds:
“He was braced for the sight of anything, yet what he saw was what he had least expected. He was looking into a broad cell, and a space of this was caged off with closely set bars extending from floor to ceiling, set firmly in the stone. Within these bars lay a figure, which, as he approached, he saw was either a man, or the exact likeness of a man, twined and bound about with the tendrils of a thick vine which seemed to grow through the solid stone of the floor. It was covered with strangely pointed leaves and crimson blossoms—not the satiny red of natural petals, but a livid, unnatural crimson, like a perversity of flower- life. Its clinging, pliant branches wound about the man’s naked body and limbs, seeming to caress his shrinking flesh with lustful avid kisses. One great blossom hovered exactly over his mouth. A low bestial moaning drooled from the loose lips; the head rolled as if in unbearable agony, and the eyes looked full at Conan. But there was no light of intelligence in them; they were blank, glassy, the eyes of an idiot.
Now the great crimson blossom dipped and pressed its petals over the writhing lips. The limbs of the wretch twisted in anguish; the tendrils of the plant quivered as if in ecstasy, vibrating their full snaky lengths. Waves of changing hues surged over them; their color grew deeper, more venomous.
Conan did not understand what he saw, but he knew that he looked on Horror of some kind. Man or demon, the suffering of the captive touched Conan’s wayward and impulsive heart. He sought for entrance and found a grille-like door in the bars, fastened with a heavy lock, for which he found a key among the keys he carried, and entered. Instantly the petals of the livid blossoms spread like the hood of a cobra, the tendrils reared menacingly and the whole plant shook and swayed toward him. Here was no blind growth of natural vegetation. Conan sensed a malignant intelligence; the plant could see him, and he felt its hate emanate from it in almost tangible waves. Stepping warily nearer, he marked the root-stem, a repulsively supple stalk thicker than his thigh, and even as the long tendrils arched toward him with a rattle of leaves and hiss, he swung his sword and cut through the stem with a single stroke.
Instantly the wretch in its clutches was thrown violently aside as the great vine lashed and knotted like a beheaded serpent, rolling into a huge irregular ball. The tendrils thrashed and writhed, the leaves shook and rattled like castanets, and the petals opened and closed convulsively; then the whole length straightened out limply, the vivid colors paled and dimmed, a reeking white liquid oozed from the severed stump.
Conan stared, spellbound; then a sound brought him round, sword lifted. The freed man was on his feet, surveying him. Conan gaped in wonder. No longer were the eyes in the worn face expressionless. Dark and meditative, they were alive with intelligence, and the expression of imbecility had dropped from the face like a mask. The head was narrow and well-formed, with a high splendid forehead. The whole build of the man was aristocratic, evident no less in his tall slender frame than in his small trim feet and hands. His first words were strange and startling.
“What year is this?” he asked, speaking Kothic.
“Today is the tenth day of the month Yuluk, of the year of the Gazelle,” answered Conan.
“Yagkoolan Ishtar!” murmured the stranger. “Ten years!” He drew a hand across his brow, shaking his head as if to clear his brain of cobwebs. “All is dim yet. After a ten-year emptiness, the mind can not be expected to begin functioning clearly at once. Who are you?”
“Conan, once of Cimmeria. Now king of Aquilonia.”
The other’s eyes showed surprize. “Indeed? And Namedides?”
“I strangled him on his throne the night I took the royal city,” answered Conan.
A certain naivete in the king’s reply twitched the stranger’s lips. “Pardon, your majesty. I should have thanked you for the service you have done me. I am like a man woken suddenly from sleep deeper than death and shot with nightmares of agony more fierce than hell, but I understand that you delivered me. Tell me—why did you cut the stem of the plant Yothga instead of tearing it up by the roots?”
“Because I learned long ago to avoid touching with my flesh that which I do not understand,” answered the Cimmerian.
“Well for you,” said the stranger. “Had you been able to tear it up, you might have found things clinging to the roots against which not even your sword would prevail. Yothga’s roots are set in hell.”
“But who are you?” demanded Conan.
“Men called me Pelias.”
“What!” cried the king. “Pelias the sorcerer, Tsotha-lanti’s rival, who vanished from the earth ten years ago?”
“Not entirely from the earth,” answered Pelias with a wry smile. "Tsotha preferred to keep me alive, in shackles more grim than rusted iron. He pent me in here with this devil-flower whose seeds drifted down through the black cosmos from Yag the Accursed, and found fertile field only in the maggot- writhing corruption that seethes on the floors of hell.
“I could not remember my sorcery and the words and symbols of my power, with that cursed thing gripping me and drinking my soul with its loathsome caresses. It sucked the contents of my mind day and night, leaving my brain as empty as a broken wine-jug. Ten years! Ishtar preserve us!”
So, as we can see from this text from The Scarlet Citadel the Ygotha plant has been in Koth for a minimum of 10 years. Not only that but it was under the control of the wizard Tsotha-lanti. So was Ygotha a demon or a plant? Well, it was clearly a plant, but not only that it was a plant which came from a completely different planet.
“He pent me in here with this devil-flower whose seeds drifted down through the black cosmos from Yag the Accursed, and found fertile field only in the maggot- writhing corruption that seethes on the floors of hell.”
So the seed of Ygotha drifted down from space from Yag, which is a different planet. Now, how do we know that Yag is a different planet? We are told so by Yag-Kosha in The Tower of the Elephant.
“'I am very old, oh man of the waste countries; long and long ago I came to this planet with others of my world, from the green planet Yag, which circles for ever in the outer fringe of this universe. “
So now that we know that Yag is another planet which has plant life as well as sentient beings, but what of Yag himself? He isn’t human, that is certain. In fact he has been around since before the Hyborian Age and lived through the Cataclysm which ended the Thurian Age. Heck, he is even older than the Thurian Age itself. Though Yag-Kosha was not the only of his race to have come to the Earth he is the only one still living, though he does not live to the ending of the story.
“'We saw men grow from the ape and build the shining cities of Valusia, Kamelia, Commoria and their sisters. We saw them reel before the thrusts of the heathen Atlanteans and Picts and Lemurians. We saw the oceans rise and engulf Atlantis and Lemuria, and the isles of the Picts, and the shining cities of civilization. We saw the survivors of Pictdom and Atlantis build their stone-age empires, and go down to ruin, locked in bloody wars. We saw the Picts sink into abysmal savagery, the Atlanteans into apedom again. We saw new savages drift southward in conquering waves from the Arctic circle to build a new civilization, with new kingdoms called Nemedia, and Koth, and Aquilonia and their sisters. We saw your people rise under a new name from the jungles of the apes that had been Atlanteans. We saw the descendants of the Lemurians who had survived the cataclysm, rise again through savagery and ride westward as Hyrkanians. And we saw this race of devils, survivors of the ancient civilization that was before Atlantis sank, come once more into culture and power—this accursed kingdom of Zamora. “
Now you may be wondering why in The Tower of the Elephant the planet is refereed to as “the green planet Yag” and yet in The Scarlet Citadel” it is referred to as “Yag the Accursed”. That is not difficult to understand. Yag-Kosha is from Yag and therefor he has fond memories of him home, even if he has been exiled from there. Pelias on the other hand is a human from Earth who has been tortured for ten whole years by the Ygotha plant and naturally has a jaded and biased view of all things hailing from that planet as it is the only thing from Yag that he has encountered.
Now to get back to Liu Fei and the issues with the writing by the Funcom staff of writers on this Companion quest (of which I am only addressing the introductory quest). For one thing, the Ygotha plant should not be in the Exiled Lands as it is clearly shown to be in Koth. For another thing, Liu Fei claims to be trapped WITHIN the Ygotha plant, and you only see him at this point in a spectral ghostly form. However when Conan first encounters the Ygotha plant Pelias is very much in the physical realm and the Yothga plant is physically restraining him while drugging him with the nectar of its flowers. The plant was also said to be covered with leaves and crimson blossoms (basically blood red) and it was sucking the life energy directly from Pelias’s mouth. It most assuredly did not need to trick Pelias, after all if was Tsotha-lanti who used the Yothga plant specifically because it would keep Pelias alive and yet completely incapacitated while in excruciating agony. Yothga was not in control, Yothga was not attempting to “enter through a doorway to being feasting”, it had already been here because it had traversed as a seed through space and had been cultivated and grown BY TSOTHA-LANTI!
Yes it is true that the Yothga plant clearly showed a level of intelligence, to at least a small degree. Much like any carnivorous plant it was able to trap it’s prey and hold it in place while it fed, but that does not mean it was possessing an intelligence of a level that it was sentient. But it is quite simply a plant that feeds off of other living entities, not a demons that devours entire worlds or any other nonsense.
So why would sorcerers from Khitai be watching the skies for countless centuries for the “return of a demon”? Your guess is as good as anyone’s. Yag-Kosha had been worshiped as a god in the jungles of Khita. Then came Yara, from Zamora.
“'First he sat at my feet and learned wisdom. But he was not satisfied with what I taught him, for it was white magic.”
So Yag-Kosha had freely offered wisdom and even taught some magic, what he considered to be “white magic” to the local people’s of Khitai who worshiped him. But Yara had eventually tricked him into divulging a secret which lead to him being enslaved and then chained and dragged back to Zamora where he was tortured so that he may reveal even more of his secrets, specifically those pertaining to “black magic”. However, since Yag-Kosha and the rest of his people (all of whom had already died long ago) had come to the earth before even the Thurian Age thus none of the people of Khitai should have even known that they came to the Earth from outer space in the first place. And since the Yothga seed was clearly cultivated and grown in Koth that did not land in Khita either. So there is no logical reason for anyone in Khitai to possibly think that any “demon” is going to “return from the sky” for “countless centuries”. It simply does not make any sense at all.
There are very specific lines which are very much taken directly from The Scarlet Citadel which would indicate that they writers had indeed read the source material prior to writing this script. So how could they have written an introductory quest story so vastly inconsistent with the established lore?
I will end this by enclosing a photograph of the plant, and the spectral image of Liu Fei (the player is not me, it is from a wak4863 video). Please take notice of the lack of leaves and the lack of crimson blossoms. How did the artists get these clearly defined traits so very wrong?
