Honkai: Nexus Anima Lore Guide: The Sundering & Planes

Honkai: Nexus Anima is built on a broken world. Long ago, a catastrophe called the Sundering shattered the Nexus Threads that held everything together, toppling the old order of Sovereigns and leaving the layered Planes in the hands of new rulers called Novarchs. At the center of it all sits the World-Ender, the threat the survivors are still hunting. If you only remember one thing, remember this: the same concepts that structure the story (Light, Dark, Love, Hate) are the exact Aspects your Anima carry into battle. Learn the lore and you have already half-learned the Aspect system.

Note: the game is in closed beta (the Evolution Test, starting July 9 2026), and its lore is still being revealed. The summary below reflects what has surfaced so far and may be expanded or revised before launch. Community-sourced totals are flagged as unconfirmed where they appear.

Key takeaways

• The Sundering broke the Nexus Threads that bound the world, ending the Sovereigns’ unified rule and creating the fractured present day.
• The world is 81 Planes, layered concept-realms, each tied to an Aspect and governed today by a Novarch.
• Sovereigns are the old order; Novarchs are the current rulers. Many Novarchs were Sovereigns before the Sundering, so the titles mark eras as much as roles.
• The World-Ender caused the Sundering. Kumyo Kyo, the 4th Sovereign, sealed it and vanished; the Phoenixbreaker Novarchs still hunt it.
• The paired concepts the Sovereigns ruled are the same 21 Aspects your Anima fight with, which is why lore and team-building share one vocabulary.
• You start as an ordinary Eidos in Iia, a town in the Plane of Reality, not as any of these rulers.
• Much of the deep lore comes from Zero, a shadowy figure who talks to you early on and who claims your past self is the one who broke the world.

Who is Zero, and why does he know all this?

Most of the backstory below reaches the player through one character. Zero appears as a shadowy figure who is described as present yet otherworldly, like a projection pushed through the walls of the Plane. He shifts between looking solid and looking ethereal, and he speaks about the Old World as somebody who was there.

Zero is not his name. He says plainly that it is a label chosen so you can understand and accept him, and that he goes by different names in different Planes. He describes himself in riddles: the circle, the beginning and the end, the number nothing divides by, the default value of every variable.

He is not hostile, and he did not plan the meeting. He puts it down to the Nexus willing it. That matters for reading the rest of this guide, because it means the lore arrives filtered through one cryptic narrator rather than an omniscient one, and he is candid that he has not visited every Plane himself.

Zero appears as a grey-haired figure in a fedora and long coat, here warning that Planes such as Chaos, Evil, and Death should not be entered lightly.

What Zero says about you

The uncomfortable part of Zero’s account is who he says the player used to be. He lists titles from a previous life: Worldbender, reconstructor of realms, sundering incarnate. In his telling, your past self destroyed a single perfect universe and remade it as 81 Planes.

He leaves the identity question open on purpose, framing it as your decision whether to claim that past or discard it. He also notes that only three beings know your real name, and he is not one of them. Whether the game means this literally or as an unreliable narrator’s provocation is not yet resolved.

The Sundering: the event that broke the world

The Sundering is the catastrophe every faction is reacting to. It broke the Nexus Threads, the connections binding the world, and ended the era in which the Sovereigns ruled a unified order.

What the Old World was

Before it, there was one universe rather than eighty-one Planes. Zero describes it as a single complete world where everyone shared the same sky and the same air, and where the magic people wielded was called Aspects. It was far more crowded than the present: dragons, humans, fae, and orcs all lived alongside each other, under the rule of the 39 Sovereigns.

People now call it a Golden Era, which Zero finds a little rich. His observation is that nobody living in it thought so at the time, and that humans reliably scorn what they have until they lose it.

The Sundering was not a partial collapse. In Zero’s account the Old World was annihilated first and reborn second, coming back as 81 independent Planes cut off from one another. The answers the player is looking for were shattered along with it, and the pieces are now scattered across the Planes. Sir Champion is said to hold one of them.

Think of it as the setting’s dividing line. Almost every character and location is defined by which side of it they belong to. The rise of the Novarchs, the hunt for the World-Ender, the factions scattered across the Planes: all of it is downstream of that single fracture.

When a character’s story references “before the Sundering,” they are pointing back to that lost order, usually with loss, ambition, or a grudge attached. When it references “after,” you are in the present day, the world you actually play in.

That framing matters for a practical reason. As new Anima and Eidos are revealed during the beta, the fastest way to place a new name is to ask a single question: were they part of the old order, or are they navigating the wreckage of it? Almost everyone falls cleanly into one bucket or the other.

The 81 Planes and the Nexus Threads

The world is not one place but many. It is 81 Planes, layered concept-realms, each tied to a concept and its Aspect. The Nexus Threads are what once connected them, and the Sundering is what damaged those connections.

A few Planes are named directly in the roster’s stories:

Plane	What it is	Player relevance
Plane of Reality	Home of the starting town, Iia	Where your account begins
Plane of Satiation	The Plane tied to the Satiation concept	Home ground for the Novarch Hungrille
The Peak	A high Plane mastered by the 22nd Novarch	Blade’s domain

Zero’s dialogue names a good many more, and it is worth knowing that the Planes vary enormously in scale. Some are described as vast, others as cramped as a trough of dust.

Plane	Aspect	What Zero says about it
The Material Limb	Reality	The largest and least damaged by the Sundering, with nine continents
The Lotus Realm	Illusion	Nobody knows its true shape; entering it blooms a Mirage Lotus, and leaving wilts it
Pontus	Not stated	An untamed ocean where life grows without limit, and the most majestic he has seen
The Changelands	Not stated	Terrain that rewrites itself moment to moment, paths turning into brooks
Trail of Trials	Not stated	A peak above the clouds, and a trail that never ends
Hullabaloo	Not stated	Millions of voices composing a single song
Sahaloka	Not stated	Crystals that reflect the memories of countless lives
Esherfold	Not stated	A Plane where nothing you see makes sense
Snuggie Crib	Not stated	Residents sleep on soft white blankets and dream like infants

The Material Limb is the one to know, because it is where you are. Its size and its proximity to many other Aspects make it complex but sheltered from the more extreme concepts. Two of its nine continents are named: Carcassia, named for a canyon in its mountain ranges said to reach the center of the new world, from which nobody who descended has returned, and Lucile, home to the town of Ea and one of the arenas that hosts the Grand Championship.

Zero is blunt that some Planes are simply lethal. He singles out Chaos, Evil, and Death as ones you do not wander into, and warns that the Lotus Realm will trap you in illusion and make leaving very hard. He also drops a lead: two old friends are waiting in the Plains of Order and Death, and would be surprised to see you.

Each Plane falls under the domain of a ruler, and each ruler is bound to the concept that Plane embodies. That is the crucial link: a Plane is not just a map region, it is a concept made into a place. The Plane of Satiation is “satiation” as geography, the same way an Anima’s Aspect is a concept made into a creature.

Understanding that the world is a web of concept-Planes is the key to why Aspects matter as much in the lore as they do in your formations. The map and the battlefield run on the same idea.

Sovereigns vs. Novarchs: two eras of power

Two titles come up constantly, and they mark different eras.

• Sovereigns are the old ruling order from before the Sundering. Each mastered a paired set of concepts, for example Love and Hate, or Reality and Illusion. They are the fallen elite of the previous age.
• Novarchs are the current rulers of the Planes, numbered by their line (the 16th Novarch, the 22nd, the 29th, and so on).

The two orders overlap

The catch that trips up most new players is that these are not two separate casts. Many Novarchs were once Sovereigns. The Sundering knocked the old order down, and some of its survivors climbed back into power under a new title.

Parayaya ruled Love and Hate as the 14th Sovereign, then became the Novarch of Hate after the Sundering.

Parayaya is the cleanest example. She was the 14th Sovereign who mastered Love and Hate, and after the Sundering she became the 29th Novarch of Hate. Same person, two eras, and only one of her two old concepts survived into her new title. That detail, a Sovereign’s paired concepts splitting apart, hints at just how much the Sundering cost.

You can see this churn laid out across the Eidos database, where titles like “The 8th Sovereign” and “The 29th Novarch” sit side by side on the same characters.

The known ruling lineups

Community sources suggest there may be roughly 39 Sovereigns and 81 Novarchs in total, though both figures are unconfirmed closed-beta estimates. What is confirmed is a handful of specific rulers whose stories are already revealed:

Figure	Sovereign era	Novarch era
Kumyo Kyo	4th Sovereign (Reality & Illusion)	Vanished after sealing the World-Ender
Parayaya	14th Sovereign (Love & Hate)	29th Novarch of Hate
Armand	8th Sovereign (Light & Dark)	17th Novarch of Darkness
Blade	(searching for the 11th Sovereign)	22nd Novarch, master of The Peak
Sir Champion	formerly a Sovereign	34th Novarch of Competition
Prabhas	not stated	16th Novarch of Light, the Sunfire Monk
Bai Mei	not stated	8th Novarch of Reality
Hungrille	not stated	Novarch of Satiation

Notice the concept pairings. Every Sovereign governed a pair of opposing concepts, which is the structural rule of the old order and the thing the Sundering broke.

The named Sovereigns and their paired concepts

Zero’s dialogue names sixteen Sovereigns directly. This comes from in-game dialogue rather than published material, so treat the list as current best knowledge rather than a final roster.

Sovereign	Paired concepts
Victus	Order and Chaos
Amstradath	Life and Death
Kafka	Strength and Weakness
Big Boss Daddy	Profit and Loss
Chingang	Good and Evil
Sir Champion	Competition and Cooperation
The Masked Hero	Courage and Cowardice
Nanamir	Reality and Illusion
Lestrange	Joy and Sorrow
Armand	Light and Dark
Troth Le Fay	Beauty and Ugliness
Parayaya	Love and Hate
Darcy	Not stated
Malheur	Not stated
Beshirda	Not stated
Apeiro	Not stated

Which of them was strongest was apparently a bar argument in the Old World too. Zero reports the popular answers as Victus and Amstradath at the top, with Kafka and Big Boss Daddy close behind, and Chingang rated highest on raw individual power alongside Victus. He also notes the debate is now academic, since the Sovereigns are gone.

The player has history with at least two. Zero says you fought both Victus and Sir Champion, and that Victus came close to killing you. What saved you was a deal struck with Amstradath, the Sovereign of Life and Death, which is the kind of detail that tends to become a plot point later.

Vanished and fading

The Sundering did not just demote the Sovereigns, it removed most of them. Zero lists Chingang, Nanamir, Kafka, and Lestrange among those who simply disappeared, and says the count of those still around is now the shorter list.

The survivors are on a timer of their own. Zero describes their command of the Aspects as dwindling like a candle in the wind: the gates of the Aspects have not shut on them completely, but he treats that as a matter of time rather than an open question.

Three Sovereigns were especially close to the player. Zero names Darcy, Malheur, and Parayaya, says they were at your side constantly, and says they paid dearly for it. The game marks this as something the player feels rather than remembers, a sense of having hurt or betrayed all three.

Novarchs: the false kings

Zero is not complimentary about the current order. He calls the Novarchs the false kings who replaced the Sovereigns, allows that all eighty-one shine differently, and says plainly that not all of them deserve the Aspect powers they hold.

He also flags the arithmetic problem: 39 Sovereigns became 81 Novarchs, and the numbers do not divide cleanly. He calls the connection subtle and does not explain it, though the player half recalls that their previous self knew the answer. Some Sovereigns converted directly during the Sundering, Victus, Armand, Troth Le Fay, Sir Champion, The Masked Hero, and Parayaya among them, and each kept only one half of their old pairing. Victus ruled Order and Chaos, and now rules Order alone.

A group of Novarchs has since sworn to find the Reconstructor of Realms, meaning you. Zero’s warning is that their intentions split: some mean to destroy you, some mean to help, and which is which may depend on choices you have not made yet.

Reading the numbered lines

The numbers attached to each title are worth a moment. A “29th Novarch” is the 29th holder of that particular Novarch line, not the 29th Novarch overall, which is why you see the 8th, 16th, 22nd, and 34th all active in the present day. The same logic applies to Sovereign numbering.

In practice, this means a low number does not mean a character is old and a high one does not mean they are new. The number tells you position in a line of succession, and the era prefix (Sovereign versus Novarch) tells you whether that line sits before or after the Sundering. When a character holds both, like Parayaya or Armand, the pairing is the whole story: it shows you exactly how far they fell and how they climbed back.

The World-Ender and the Phoenixbreakers

The World-Ender is the antagonist tied to the Sundering, the force the surviving powers want stopped. Two threads define the current hunt.

First, Kumyo Kyo, the 4th Sovereign, sealed the World-Ender and then vanished. That is why both the seal and the search for Kumyo Kyo hang over the present-day story. The threat is contained, not destroyed, and the person who contained it is missing.

Second, the Phoenixbreaker Novarchs are the faction still actively seeking the World-Ender. Blade, the 22nd Novarch and master of The Peak, is searching for the missing 11th Sovereign as part of that effort. Parayaya joined the Phoenixbreakers after the World-Ender personally betrayed her, which gives the hunt a personal edge on top of the world-saving one.

The Phoenixbreakers are the closest thing the setting has to a protagonist faction: former Sovereigns and current Novarchs united by a shared enemy, not a shared past.

This is the through-line most of the confirmed Eidos plug into. They are either former Sovereigns, current Novarchs, Phoenixbreakers, or ordinary people caught up in the aftermath, such as the town staff you meet early on. When you meet a new character in the Eidos guide, placing them on this map is usually enough to understand their motive.

Aspects: where lore meets the battlefield

Here is the payoff for players. The paired concepts the Sovereigns ruled, Light and Dark, Love and Hate, Reality and Illusion, are the same Aspects your Anima carry into an auto-chess formation.

In the present day, ordinary Eidos bond with Anima across the fractured Planes.

The setting and the strategy layer share one vocabulary. An Anima’s Aspect is its slice of the world’s conceptual fabric, and stacking a shared Aspect on your team is, in-fiction, aligning your formation with a single strand of that fabric. There are 21 Aspects on the current catchable roster, and they map directly onto the concepts the Sovereigns and Novarchs are named for.

That connection is not just flavor. When you decide to build a mono-Hate or mono-Light team, you are choosing the same concept a Sovereign once ruled. For the mechanical half (how many matching Anima trigger the synergy bonus and how it scales), see the Aspect synergy guide and try a draft in the team builder.

The corrupted side of Aspects

Aspects are not purely a menu of buffs. Two darker concepts show up in the lore: Aspect contamination and obliviasis, forms of corruption that afflict Anima.

They drive real character work. Kiana, a Planestrider, handles contaminated Anima, and Otto is researching a cure for obliviasis. These threads hint that the conceptual fabric can rot, and that keeping Anima healthy is part of the world’s ongoing struggle, not a solved problem.

For players, the takeaway is simple: Aspects are a living, sometimes dangerous part of the world, so expect corruption-themed content and characters to keep appearing as the beta expands.

How the lore connects to what you actually do

You do not play as a Sovereign or a Novarch. You start as an ordinary Eidos in Iia, a town in the Plane of Reality, bonding with Anima and building formations. The grand history is the backdrop your small story unfolds against.

That framing is worth keeping straight, because it explains the game’s structure:

1. You bond Anima carrying the Aspects the old rulers were named for (see the Anima dex).
2. You build formations around those Aspects, which is the strategy layer the lore quietly sets up.
3. You meet the rulers as story characters and roster Eidos, not as bosses you replace.

If you want to go deeper on the people, the Eidos guide and bond guide cover the roster and relationship systems. If you would rather get straight to playing, the beginner progression guide and reroll guide get you moving without any lore homework.

Bottom line

The Sundering broke the Nexus Threads, ended the Sovereigns’ era, and left the Novarchs ruling 81 concept-Planes while everyone hunts the World-Ender that Kumyo Kyo once sealed. The Aspects your Anima fight with are the same concepts that structure the whole setting, which is why the lore is worth a look even if you are here purely for the auto-chess.

You do not need any of it to play well, so treat this as context, not homework. Meet the players in the Eidos guide, see how Aspects drive teams in the Aspect synergy guide, and check the tier list when you are ready to turn all this into a winning formation.