Thread: Patch 4.4 (Prelude in Violet) Speculation Thread! (Possible spoilers [NO LEAKS])

I was distracted by how in the Seven Hells they're going to explain Elezenos and stumbled upon something (I think) that might be a nice answer.

We know the Echo allows for body hopping post death; but there's no reason why Zenos should actively utilise this ability. Furthermore, I find it unlikely he even KNEW of such an ability. After all, he learned of the Echo and its powers from van Baelsar's reports, and the Scions themselves didn't end up with the knowledge until after his "death," all the way in 2.2.

Zenos' reincarnation just makes no sense to me. It's sort of a poetic/karmic thing in denying him his last wish (death by his own hand, in his greatest ecstasy), but it doesn't mesh nicely with what we know. How do you accidentally soulhop into another body? I was rewatching cutscenes on youtube and the like during this maintenance to freshen up and try to find some clue in the final cutscenes of 4.0 and ....

I had forgotten, entirely, by this point in time he had been using a Kojin treasure as his weapon of choice, the Ame-no-Habakiri. We know pretty much nothing about this sword, but it's got a name, the Kojin think it's special/is kami, and it seemed to greatly amplify his fighting abilities in Yanxia when we fought him alongside Yugiri. Those little bits and bobs got me thinking that maybe, perhaps, the sword acted as a sort of vessel for his soul--we already know of a sword that functions similarly, and hell it's Othardian too. Zantetsuken.

So Zenos' artificial Echo, the Resonant, keeps his soul from being immediately shredded into constituent parts and the Ame-no-Habakiri drinks/stores it away. Then, in the clean up of the Menagerie or something, some random Resistance picks up the sword, swings it about, and bam possession. We can glean from his end text in 4.3 he hadn't exactly planned this turn of events--so him consciously seeking to reincarnate seems unlikely. Furthermore, like I said above, whenever someone used the Echo to reincarnate themselves; Nabriales, the Sahagin Priest, the Warriors of Darkness, all of them knew what to do and what was happening. If someone with the Echo could "accidentally" jump into a [dead] body... wouldn't history be littered with cases like this? Wouldn't a lot more Warriors of Light have survived the Seventh Umbral Era? There's a factor in Zenos' transmigration that's missing for sure, and I think the sword is a good fit.

It seemed, to me at least, have some sort of importance in the Stormblood MSQ but it quickly got covered up by everything else. Lingering shots, random increases in fighting ability, cool fancy red-black particle effects (which I actually thought might tie Zenos to getting Ascian help when I saw it in the Stormblood launch trailer! lol), the sword seemed to be so important and so woefully overlooked and underdeveloped.