Anqiria Draconia
EN中文

Exploring Truth in the World of Dragons: The Four 'Schools' and Wisdom in the Game

Published on 2026-05-08

In this dragon game with its unusually deep text, the player takes on the role of a young dragon, swimming through the dim waterways of an underwater labyrinth and visiting the caves of four different "schools," each presided over by a different "Instructor." Every school is internally coherent and dangerously seductive; every departure is a refusal.

What makes the game especially interesting is that these four schools — Knowledge, Wealth, Faith, and Emptiness — map almost perfectly onto several classic positions in the human history of Theories of truth. And the closing speech of the immense creature guarding the "Gate of Graduation" reads like a sober footnote to modern thought:

All lessons, all Truths, are like the Great Blue, possessing an apparent surface but also harboring vast and secret depths… To acknowledge the Truth carried by others, but to also see their weaknesses… to see all sides of the Gem of Truth and not fall in love with merely one of its facets — that is wisdom.

This is, almost word for word, a poeticized version of Michael Lynch's argument in Truth as One and Many for pluralist theories of truth: truth may be a functional property that manifests in different ways (correspondence, coherence, pragmatism…) in different domains. With that as our entry point, let us take philosophy as an oar and dive into this sea of consciousness.

1. The School of Knowledge (Pedantus): Correspondence Theory

The Instructor of the School of Knowledge, Pedantus, is unequivocal:

Young one, you have received my blessing, and arrived at the Gate of Graduation. You have learned the importance of Number and Fact from my School of Knowledge. In time, Facts shall be the key to newfound Powers and Ways. Only those who know every detail can hope to understand the All.

His students constantly echo this blind optimism about "knowledge":

Do we not know much more than others, and is not Knowledge the root of Wisdom? One Sun, it shall be useful, surely.

This is the oldest and most intuitive position in the literature: the correspondence theory of truth. From Aristotle's "to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true," to Thomas Aquinas's Veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei ("Truth is the conformity of the intellect and things"), correspondence theorists hold that truth is the precise correspondence between thought (or statement) and the way things actually are. Pedantus's students try to approach this correspondence by ceaselessly accumulating "facts" and "numbers."

The game's response to this is brutally ironic. If you accept Pedantus's invitation and stay in his cave to "absorb knowledge," your body grows with every cycle of teaching and feeding, until the very chamber that was supposed to protect you crushes you:

Your final hope is that some of the Facts which you gathered and disseminated to your Students might one day make a difference, but such a hope is slim. Even they are trapped in the labyrinth which holds the Schools. Thus you perish without ever having applied the Facts which you professed, and are suffocated by the chamber which was meant to keep you safe from the world.

That is exactly the predicament the correspondence theory has wrestled with in modern philosophy. Kant pointed out long ago that to judge whether "cognition agrees with its object," I must already cognize the object — so what I am really comparing is my cognition with my cognition, a logical circle (a diallelon). Tarski showed that no natural language can consistently contain its own truth predicate. Gödel's incompleteness theorems showed that even within a rigorous formal system, there exist propositions that are true but not provable. The moment information is severed from application and from a wider perspective, it stops being a key to power and becomes a prison of thought. That is the philosophical sting of Pedantus's fate.

2. The School of Wealth (Pecunius): Consensus Theory and Baudrillard's Simulacra

The Instructor of the School of Wealth, Pecunius, makes no attempt to soften an unsettling social truth:

Many assume that certain objects have instrinsic value; that is, that certain things are simply more precious than others by nature. But this is not so! All that is required is that others agree that an object has value, and once that is established, quantity, not quality, is the key. I made it scarce, and therefore valuable!

This is, almost as a textbook example, a statement of the consensus theory of truth: truth (or value) is what some specified group has agreed, or would agree, upon. Habermas's version puts it as "what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation." It is also a vivid case of social constructivism: value is not a reflection of some transcendent reality but is shaped by power and convention (Foucault's "regimes of truth" lurk here in the background).

But the game pushes further. Pecunius's strategy is not merely "convince everyone that sand has value," it is to first manufacture scarcity — by hoarding, and by the "Monitors" that make lateral movement dangerous — and only then let the consensus snap into place around an item that, on its own, has no markings whatsoever. This is almost exactly Jean Baudrillard's simulacrum:

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

The most telling moment is what happens when the player turns Pecunius's own logic against him and threatens to destroy him in exchange for a blessing. He suddenly invokes "ethics" and "morality" — categories he had, only minutes before, dismissed as "nonexistent falsehoods spread by the poor." When a socially-constructed truth runs into its own limits, it instantly appeals to a truth-system it has just publicly disavowed. That is the deepest internal contradiction of consensus theory laid bare in a single beat of dialogue.

3. The School of Faith (Coelacanth): Coherence Theory

Keeper One opens with absolutes:

The basic principles of the School of Faith are simple and elegant. According to the Unquestioningly Correct Tradition, which has never been and never will be wrong, there is a relatively simple set of principles by which all beings must live.

This carefully self-consistent system — Five Great Laws plus over a hundred derivative laws — is the coherence theory of truth in dramatic form. Coherence holds that a proposition is true insofar as it fits into, and is mutually supported by, a complete and internally consistent system of propositions. Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, and later logical positivists like Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel all leaned, in different ways, on coherence. Its appeal is enormous — it promises psychological peace and a strong sense of community:

Following these primary Laws and the hundreds of smaller Laws which proceed from them has granted us prosperity and happiness.

But the central weakness of coherence is that internal self-consistency does not, by itself, hold a system accountable to the external world. The game lands its sharpest cut here. When you convert and grow too large for the cave, the community reassures you that your inability to fit is merely a "test of faith" by the Greatest Being. Then:

But no miracle occurs, and despite the fact that you gave up everything for its sake, and in spite of the many stories about the Greatest Being magically intervening on behalf of the Faithful in need, you are slowly crushed and starved by the restrictive cavern you chose for yourself.

It is worth distinguishing this from Kierkegaard's notion of "subjective truth." Kierkegaard insists on the truth as something inwardly appropriated by an existing individual — "truth is subjectivity" — a continual, dynamic process of becoming. The Unquestioningly Correct Tradition is the exact inverse: it asks you to renounce that inward becoming and outsource your existence to a frozen, mythologized past. Read through Heidegger, that is a wholesale betrayal of "remaining in the question."

4. The School of Emptiness (Gardeneel): Skepticism, Deflationism, and the Slide into Nihilism

The fourth Instructor, the gardeneel of the School of Emptiness, builds a seemingly airtight cage out of three negations:

The First Truth: all judgments are relative, and therefore meaningless. The Second Truth: all labels are false. The Third Truth: reality is unknowable.

It uses sorites-style chains ("if a Draak loses a tooth to some misfortune, is it no longer a Draak?") to corner you into silence, and then unsettles your grip on reality itself by suggesting that all of this might be a dream, "some kind of game for a higher being whose interests and purposes we cannot fathom."

This line of thought is in fact crowded in the history of philosophy. Pyrrho denied any criterion of truth. Nietzsche left us the famous "there are no facts, only interpretations," and described truth as "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms." Twentieth-century deflationary theories of truth push further, holding that "is true" is no genuine property at all: "'P' is true" can simply be replaced with "P."

The gardeneel's specific genius is to push these moves to their extreme and dress them up as a kind of ascetic peace — judging nothing, pursuing nothing, even forgoing food. But this path has two deep cracks the game does not name explicitly, but lets the player vote against with their actions:

  1. Self-reference. "All labels are false" is itself a label. "All judgments are meaningless" is itself a judgment. If the principle is true, it refutes itself.
  2. Life as a counterexample. If you choose to stay in the School of Emptiness, the ending reads: "Survival itself being selfish and pointless, you resolve to simply accept your ultimate fate, and perish in the darkness, satisfied that you have at last achieved Wisdom." A system in which "starving to death is fine" is fully rationalizable has slid from skepticism into outright nihilism.

Skepticism and deflationism are not, in themselves, mistaken positions. The danger is what happens when they stop functioning as an antidote to dogmatic truth-claims and become, instead, a way of life — at which point they begin to digest the very subject doing the questioning.

5. Darktooth's Wisdom: Pragmatism, Fallibilism, and Pluralism

After four temptations and four refusals, the young dragon finally surfaces in the lair of the elder, Darktooth. One by one, Darktooth names the failure modes of the four schools:

And then come the two lines that are arguably the heart of the game:

NEVER CONFUSE INTELLIGENCE FOR WISDOM. WISDOM IS NEITHER A KNOWING NOR A FINDING, BUT RATHER, A SEEKING. ANSWERS CAN BECOME CAGES. LEARN INSTEAD TO LOVE QUESTIONS.

These map almost line-for-line onto several of the most important strands of modern truth theory:

Conclusion: Fly Into the Wider Sky

Returning to the gem-of-truth metaphor: each of the four schools polishes one facet of the gem to a brilliant shine — and is then dazzled, by its own polished facet, into thinking it has seen the whole stone. Each is "clever." None is wise.

this place is not your Home. You are bound for wider horizons.

Through the journey of this young dragon, the developers deliver a remarkably restrained, but unsparing, philosophy lesson. Truth is not locked in a chest in the deepest cave — it is not in cold data, not in worldly consensus, not in blind dogma, and certainly not in nihilistic surrender.

True wisdom is, having seen through the limits of correspondence, consensus, coherence, and skepticism, still being willing to beat your wings, fall in love with the question, embrace uncertainty, and fly out into a reality that is always wider than any single school.

There, every dive and every resurfacing is, itself, one face of the truth.