Analysis and Final Thoughts
This was a nicely balanced issue, offering a fair split between the historical and Modern Day portions. It is always nice to see echoes between the two narratives, and this was clearly evident here with the relationships shown for both Lisa and Jun. Once again, the oft suggested potential for Shao Jun’s abilities to bleed through Lisa Yang - or indeed for her memories to directly overwrite her - are teased to us. With the way that Lisa is heavily using the Animus you can imagine that it will simply be a matter of time before we see this play out in the comic.

Incidentally, speaking of Lisa, the recent release of the French version of the manga added more confusion to the romanized version of her name. In our original translations of her name we had two potential versions for her: Risa Kou, Lisa Yang (or any combination of the four). As mentioned in our review for chapter one of the manga, we asked Ubisoft in November 2019 confirmation for the character’s name, which brought us to Lisa Yang... until the release of volume 1 of the manga in French, where the character is called Lisa Huang. As usual, we will monitor the situation to see if her name is finally confirmed as such.

Back to the manga, the exploration of Jun's childhood with Qijie was interesting, as it touched on some Chinese cultural practices of the time, and was also actually new lore to the franchise.

As for the Chinese cultural practices, the manga does shine an interesting light on the practices of binding women’s chest and feet as a way to gain the Emperor’s favour, with some characters judging Jun for not abiding by such practices, while Qijie does, and eventually becomes Empress, but at the cost of crippling her feet and not being able to ever leave the Imperial Palace.

As for the lore part, the memory with young Jun and Qijie is defined by Kagami as “Shao Jun’s memory that I couldn’t go beyond”. It’s interesting to note that Kagami was able to reach it, but not go past it, with her previous subject during her time at the Abstergo facility in Madrid. That subject was obviously Lin, one of the modern day Assassins and descendant of Shao Jun from the Assassin’s Creed movie, who is even shown in two panels of the manga, one of which along with Callum Lynch.

More specifically, the memory itself, which Kagami witnessed in Madrid, is a re-telling with more details of Lin’s memory from the Assassin’s Creed Movie novelization. For instance, both stories mention the comparison, made by Qijie, of the butterfly and the rabbit - with the butterfly being an example for Qijie herself, as she was in a cage (the Imperial Palace) and the rabbit representing Jun, as she was free.

The movie novelization also mentioned Jun and Qijie / Zhang sneaking out of the concubine quarters and exploring at night, but did not make any reference to by far the biggest revelation of this part of the story in the manga, specifically that Jun had explored a tunnel with “shining walls”. The artwork itself clearly shows this to be Isu architecture, which finally gives us some potential answers on the long discussed theme of what exact “treasure” that Kagami and the Templars are actually after within the manga’s narrative. This discovery of course means that the Beijing Imperial Palace sits atop an Isu site, most likely a temple or vault. We actually knew there was some kind of Isu significance at this location since we had seen it highlighted in the Siwa Vault in Assassin's Creed Origins, as we mentioned in a previous article. It would be easy to make lots of theories at this point, but the very fact that we now know Shao Jun has had direct exposure to additional Isu technology is very intriguing.



We previously mentioned that the necklace that she wears has been very prominent in the artwork, and indeed was significant enough that UbiWorkshop even made a dedicated replica a few years back. Could this too be a narrative echo? For example, what if the necklace is in fact a key to the Beijing Isu site? It would be similar to how Connor passed on the Grand Temple key to Desmond in Assassin's Creed III. It therefore would make more sense as to why Abstergo are now rapidly trying to research Shao Jun's story once more, especially if they have recently come across the Beijing Isu site in the Modern Day. However, if the site location has remained a mystery ever since the time of Shao Jun, then Lisa Yang certainly now holds the key for its discovery as well as its reopening, and a major victory for whomever finds it first – be they Assassin or Templar.

On a final note, we were positively surprised to see a new point of view on the Bleeding Effect – namely that too many times in the Assassin’s Creed franchise Abstergo and the Templars have created and enhanced their own enemies by putting them in an Animus. Many of those completely lost their mind and self, but those who didn’t (primarily the main characters of the games and transmedia) turned out to be some of the worst enemies to the Templar cause in the modern day. We’re obviously talking about Desmond Miles, Clay Kaczmarek, but also Callum Lynch and the other subjects that were part of the 2016 rebellion in the Madrid facility.

It’s nice to see that finally this was addressed and Abstergo seems to be getting more cautious about the matter. At least that’s according to Dr. Kagami’s elderly superior, whom we surmised in the review of chapter 5 to be Ellen Kaye, the chairwoman from the Assassin’s Creed Movie. As an Easter Egg, the high ranking Templar even thinks (but doesn’t mention) of two examples of Assassins that were involved in such a situation: one is Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, whose abilities were passed on through the Animus, the other is Galina Voronina, who, according to Assassin’s Creed Initiates, learnt to fight from her ancestors.

Will, thus, Lisa be the next in line to undergo this process? Only time (and future chapters) will tell.