Huangxing, the Kunlun Renegade

In the retail game

Huangxing is the boss S-GAME has talked about most. He closed the 2024 demo as "Huangxing, the Sunken Pillar of Kunlun", came back in the August 2026 State of Play as "Huangxing, the Kunlun Renegade" (Chinese: 昆仑叛教者荒行子, "the Kunlun apostate"), and in the retail game that name bar is only his first: when its health bar empties he returns under a second one, "Huangxing, the Whirling Executioner", the name PowerPyx used for the video. Wan Jun "Coppermaul" calls out to a "Master Huangxing" as he dies in the 2025 demo, and the fight with Jade-Face outside ends on the quest prompt "Pillars of Kunlun: Confront Huangxing inside the Shrine", so he is the last of the Kunlun pillars. We keep the original page address so that older links still work.

The Flying Guillotine Phantom Edge (KeenGamer, Oct 30, 2026; item card in PowerPyx's capture at 6:12, exploration-ability card at 6:16). The silver trophy "Crossroads of Blood" is "Defeat Huangxing, the Kunlun Renegade", which fixes the retail spelling of the first name bar.

What the retail fight looks like

PowerPyx's capture (Oct 29, 2026) opens on the Mountain of Imprisonment map with the marker on The Lady's Shrine, 78% complete. From 0:05 Soul walks through a dim hall and at 0:10 into the shrine's main hall: red pillars, an altar table with candles and incense, coiled incense and lanterns hanging from the roof, red light everywhere. The name bar "Huangxing, the Kunlun Renegade" is on screen from 0:20. He is the figure of every demo, a hooded, pointed-helmeted armoured man swinging a bladed weight on a chain in wide arcs and overhead drops, fought around the pillars; from about 1:25 the red light drains out of the hall and the floor reads white, and the fight carries on in that grey light until the bar empties at 2:45.

A short cutscene follows (2:47, Huangxing standing in the hall; 2:49, a close-up), and at 2:53 a second name bar appears with a full health bar: "Huangxing, the Whirling Executioner". The hall is gone; the fight is now on a plank floor under a red sky, and Huangxing is a larger pale-robed figure whose weapon is a huge toothed blade-wheel on a chain, spun in circles around him and raised for a slam (4:06 shows the wheel at full height). He falls at about 6:00; at 6:02 the shrine returns, the altar with its seated statue at the back, the Moji dialogue plays, and at 6:12 the game asks "Equip the new Phantom Edge now?". At 6:16 the item card reads: "Flying Guillotine Exploration Ability: The Flying Guillotine can open special mechanisms placed by Huangxing even when not equipped."

Ben-Gun's full playthrough (PS5, Oct 30, 2026) reaches him at 3:30, straight after Jade-Face. Soul climbs the steps into the shrine and at 3:30:44 Huangxing speaks before the fight: "Only the dead can keep a secret." The camera circles his pointed helmet and the chained weight, and at 3:30:53 he stands before the red-lit altar, the weight hanging from its chain at his side, paper money falling through the hall; that frame is this page's banner. His first name bar is on screen from 3:30:57 to 3:34:03, and early in the fight he snaps "Moji, you're nothing but a nuisance" (3:31:08).

Between the two bars Ben-Gun's capture keeps the scene that PowerPyx's cuts short (3:34:14 to 3:34:51). Huangxing laughs, then says the three of them "spent most of our lives fighting for the Mandate" and "thought ourselves heroes", only to find it was a lie; he starts to name the source of "a power beyond reason" and breaks off screaming. The second bar runs from 3:34:57 to 3:38:48 on the plank floor under the red sky. A scripted scene around the blade-wheel ends the fight, with Soul saying "This is for all the lives you've taken..." (3:39:08). Back in the shrine, Moji speaks from the clay statue at 3:39:26 ("I didn't think... you'd be able to defeat him.") before the capture moves on to the next scene; Ben-Gun's capture shows no item card in the two minutes after the fight.

The cutscene after the fight, skipped through quickly in PowerPyx's capture, has a voice labelled Moji speak from the shrine's clay statue: "Huangxing didn't kill me... he sealed part of me... inside this clay statue", "But... Huangxing had already conspired with Zuo Shang... and they murdered my Senior Sister, Yuyin...", and, of what is imprisoned beneath the shrine, "She is a horrifying presence trapped within the Discordance... something that must never be allowed to escape...". The last line is the hint for what comes next: "Use Huangxing's Flying Guillotine... to turn the switch at the base!"

Attacks

Not on record for the retail build. No English guide published by Nov 2, 2026 lists his attacks or counters. What this site has seen: in the first phase the chained weight is swung in arcs and dropped from overhead, the move the 2024 hands-on reports below describe; in the second phase the blade-wheel is spun around him and slammed. This site does not invent tells from footage.

Before launch

The 2024 fight (PlayStation's Gamescom 2024 video, htgOZBMZV4I, 2:58 to 3:56) is set in a red-lit temple hall: rows of pillars, a shrine with candles, red lanterns, and a floor strewn with white paper. Huangxing is a tall armoured figure in a pointed helmet who swings a bladed weight on a chain in wide arcs (3:10, 3:28). At 3:42 a climb prompt appears beside a pillar, the tactic previewers describe below.

In the 2026 State of Play (csuFGspAe6s), S-GAME uses him to demonstrate Hellwalker difficulty: the difficulty menu is shown at 11:16, the fight begins at 11:19 in the same hall, and Soul dies at 11:31 and again at 11:45. The 2025 demo walkthrough shows the Ink Cut weapon dealing bonus damage to him (kwVgxmwgkfI, 4:22).

Three 2024 previews describe his weapon three ways, which tells you what it looks like: Gamereactor calls it "a sort of flying guillotine in the shape of a hollow flail, but with blades" that he tries to drop on your head "firstly as a fancy hat, but effectively to decapitate you"; Shacknews calls it "a head collector basket on a rope" and warns that a hit "ends up being a very messy haircut"; But Why Tho calls it a large ball-and-chain flail and reports being decapitated in one motion by the overhead drop. All three found the same answer: use the pillars. Gamereactor presses the climb prompt to get behind him; But Why Tho ran up the pillars and attacked from above.

Director Soulframe Liang used Huangxing to explain the hardest difficulty to PC Gamer Magazine in September 2025 (relayed by GamesRadar+ and Push Square). On normal difficulty "he has some of the Souls-like elements to him: he has fixed combos", learnable by repetition. On Hellwalker the team borrowed from fighting games: he analyses whether the situation favours him and, in a state the developers call "lucky draw", uses "the result of his last attack to determine what to do next", continuing a combo if it landed and switching if it did not.