Abel, Kim, Lacan and Fei have the same face, and that is not a budget decision. The Contact's body defies the ordinary business of inheriting your looks from your parents and manifests the same appearance every time — a stated rule of the setting, not a reused sprite. Fei's past lives in Xenogears aren't a resemblance. They're one person.
The chain runs Abel, then Kim, then Lacan, then Fei, across ten thousand years. Each life has its own work and its own ending, and each ending hands something specific to the man who comes next. The game delivers nearly all of it at once and late, in a stretch where the story arrives mostly as narration. In order, it's far simpler than it feels.
What Fei's Past Lives Actually Are
The reincarnation is a rescue attempt. Not Fei's. The Wave Existence is a being from a higher dimension — a place where everything exists as waves — that got pulled down into four dimensions and trapped inside the Zohar, the power source at the centre of Deus. It wants to go home and it cannot get itself out. Every part of what follows exists to solve that one problem.
Abel's contact split it into three pieces. Its will was incarnated through Kadomony and became the first Elehaym. Its power was channelled through the Zohar into Abel, and that power is the reincarnation — it's what lets the Contact be reborn, life after life, until the Wave Existence is free. Its body stayed in the Zohar, which is the piece that never moves.
So the Contact isn't blessed. He's a key that keeps getting recut, and Deus intends to absorb him at the moment of its revival — the Zohar can't be switched on without the fragment Abel took.
The second piece is why the story hurts. Elehaym — the Antitype — is born in the same year as the Contact in every era, goes looking for him, and finds him. Then she dies protecting him. Abel and Elehaym. Kim and Elehaym. Lacan and Sophia. Fei and Elly.
The third piece is Miang, split from the same source as Elehaym and handed the opposite job: make humanity fit to serve as parts for Deus, and when a generation comes out wrong, end that civilisation and start again. She doesn't reincarnate. She wakes up inside a woman, and when that body dies she wakes up inside another.
Abel, and the Contact That Started It
Abel was six when it happened. The contact took place during connection tests between the Zohar and Deus, run on an orbital station and kept secret even from the military. Partway through, the Zohar reached into a higher-dimensional space for more power and synchronised with the thing living there. The Wave Existence fell through the Path of Sephirot into four dimensions and had to materialise inside the Zohar to hold itself together. It has been in there ever since.
Abel was standing in the room. Why a six-year-old was present at a top-secret weapons experiment is explained nowhere, and the setting book hints his being there wasn't an accident, then declines to say more. What he wanted was his mother. That desire passed into the Wave Existence and became what the sources call the mother's will — and that will, incarnated, is Elehaym. Elly exists because a frightened child wanted his mum.
The contact did not happen during the Eldridge's crash. It happened before the ship ever launched. Abel survived the crash because he was already the Contact — not the other way around. Reverse it and the plot's cause and effect inverts: the crash stops being the disaster that stranded a boy already carrying a god's power, and becomes the miracle that granted it.
Deus went out of control soon after and was subdued at enormous cost. Its three cores were sealed and loaded onto the colony ship Eldridge; mid-flight Deus woke, took the ship, and the captain broke the hull apart rather than let it reach Earth. Abel walked out of the wreck. He was the only one who did, and for the same reason he was worth killing later.
On the surface, Kadomony produced the mother of humanity, who made Emperor Cain and the twelve Gazel Ministry members, then produced the first Elehaym and the first Miang. Elehaym found Abel, now seven, wandering, and they became mother and child.
Ten years later people began worshipping Cain as a living god, and Abel and Elehaym went about saying the opposite — that a person chooses. Cain moved to kill him; Elehaym argued, and when that failed she put her body between them. She told Abel to live, and died in his arms. Miang watched and did nothing. What happened to Abel afterwards isn't recorded anywhere.
Kim, and the Daughter He Built
Kim was a doctor first. He was born in 6055, four thousand years after Abel and four thousand before Fei, into a civilisation called Zeboim that had solved most engineering problems and none of the important ones. Average lifespan was around thirty and much of the population couldn't have children, both from inherited genetic damage nobody could repair. In 6077 he published a paper arguing that molecular machines could rebuild damaged DNA, including a template organism built from a colony of the things. The academic body called it blasphemy, and expelled him.
Two things then happened, and the order matters. He met Elehaym, a nurse at the Federal Medical Office. And the anti-government group Ravine destroyed the capital's power station, blacking out half the city. Kim's hospital had a backup generator. Six people died anyway, one of them a girl he had open on the table. Not long after, Elehaym learned she couldn't have children.
Emeralda is what those two facts produce when you hand them to a man who already knows how to build a person. She was finished at the end of 6082, from simulated genetic data taken from both of them — a gene-therapy template for a broken species, and a daughter for two people who couldn't have one. She is both at once, and Kim never treated them as two different things.
Miang funded it. She had already judged this generation defective as parts for Deus and was advising Zeboim's prime minister into a nuclear war, expecting the radiation to accelerate evolution in whatever survived. She found Kim's discarded paper, saw what it could do, and offered him a laboratory. The cure for the species was paid for by the woman planning to burn it down.
He worked out what she was in 6083 and moved Emeralda to a facility Ravine had prepared. Miang sent special forces. Kim reached the sealed inner chamber; Elehaym shut herself in the entryway to hold the door. While he was trying to get it open she told him to live, then triggered the lab's hazard system, killing herself and the soldiers.
Kim sealed himself in with his daughter, and what happened to him after that isn't recorded. The nuclear war took ninety percent of humanity inside a year. Emeralda stayed in that chamber for four thousand years, until Fei's party opened it.
Lacan, and the Thing He Left Behind
Lacan could paint, and that was all. Of the three lives before Fei, his matters most — not because it's the saddest, but because it's the only one the game dramatises at length, and it's where the antagonist comes from. He was born in 9475, in a frontier town near the ground where Lahan now stands. Elehaym was born the same year and a social class away.
They met once, as children, when her health collapsed and she was sent to Ashera Monastery to recover. Months later, as she left, he gave her a sketch he'd made of her. She was renamed Sophia. That is the whole of their childhood together, and it's enough to run the next seventeen years on.
They saw each other again in 9496, and the war with Solaris broke out days afterwards. He never closed the distance. She was Holy Mother by then, and he'd decided that a man whose only skill was painting had no business protecting a woman headed for a battlefield. He drew her instead, and at the end of 9499 he started her portrait.
Krelian was busy with something else that year. Melchior had a partial copy of an old research paper recovered from the Zeboim ruins and lent it to him. It was Kim's thesis. Krelian used it to build a nanoreactor, and he built it to save lives — specifically to save Sophia. Fei's second life is what puts the tools in the hands of the man his fourth life has to stop. Nobody in the game ever says this out loud.
In 9500 Shevat's elders traded her away, handing the Gazel Ministry the rebel army gathered at Nisan and Sophia with it. She flew the Excalibur into the Merkava to open a path for her people and died doing it, at twenty-five. Her last words to Lacan were about people holding each other up so they can live. Then she told him to live.
Krelian lost his faith on the spot and vanished, swearing he'd build a god with his own hands. Lacan went looking for power instead. In 9501 he broke Miang out of Shevat, took her to the Land of Bethlehem where the Zohar lay, and made contact a second time.
It didn't take. His Antitype was already dead and he was in no condition to hold himself together, and the incomplete contact produced Grahf — a persona assembled out of everything he felt about the world. Unable to reach the Zohar or Deus directly, Grahf woke the Diabolos and turned them loose. Ninety-six percent of the world's population died, in what's remembered as the Day of Collapse. His reasoning isn't madness, which is the uncomfortable part: Miang needs a human host, Elehaym needs to be born, and if humanity ends the god has nothing to return into.
Roni Fatima drove him off and the survivors rebuilt. Nine years later Lacan died alone, around thirty-five, with nobody recording it.
Here is the part that confuses everyone. Lacan's soul reincarnated — into Fei. His leftover desires stayed behind and went on living by taking one body after another. Both are true, at the same time. Grahf isn't Lacan reborn; Grahf is the residue Lacan didn't take with him.
The remaining persona, just his desires, lived on separately. — Grahf
Which makes Grahf's five centuries of body-snatching, read straight, a man keeping a promise. Sophia told him to live. He did — in whatever bodies he could get, long after there was anything left worth the name. Her unfinished portrait is still hanging in Nisan when Fei walks past it.
Lacan is the only Contact who left anything behind, and Japanese analysis has a reading for why. In the earlier eras the Contact and Elehaym were physically joined, which returned him to infancy — so there was no afterwards for Abel or Kim, which is why the record stops dead for both. Lacan held back from Sophia, on the grounds that a woman everyone needed wasn't his to keep. So his life had an afterwards. The failed contact is stated outright; why it was only possible in his era is a reading.
Fei, and the Life That Breaks It
Fei was born in 9981. Elehaym Van Houten was born the same year, in Solaris, to a family he wouldn't meet for eighteen years. The pattern doesn't miss.
Miang woke inside Karen Wong when Fei was small and used the position to force his Contact powers open, running spiritual fusion experiments on her own son. To survive them Fei built a second personality to take the pain, and that personality is Id. Ten months in, Miang called Grahf, and in the fight that followed Fei's power came out of him in one uncontrolled discharge. Karen surfaced inside her own body just long enough to put herself between the blast and her son.
She died doing it. That's four for four.
Grahf collected the boy and trained him for a decade. Three years before the game opens Khan found them, took his son back and sealed Id away; Grahf's own body was finished, so he took Khan's instead. With nobody left at the front, a third personality was assembled from nothing, carrying no memory of the previous fifteen years. That's the Fei the player controls, and the dreams he has all game are past-life memories — Id showing them to him on purpose, because a distressed Fei is easier to displace.
When the three of them integrate, Fei inherits everything the coward and Id were holding, which includes Abel, Kim and Lacan. He meets the Wave Existence, Weltall-2 becomes Xenogears, and Grahf lets the Zohar absorb him to buy time — he and Khan die together, and Fei stops calling him Grahf and calls him father.
Not every consequence of that inheritance is cosmic. Kim's memories waking up inside Fei are what let Emeralda's body finish growing into its adult form. A man dead four thousand years finishes raising his daughter. The game files this as an optional side event.
| Life | When | What he built | How it ended | What carried forward |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abel | 10,000 years before | Nothing — he was a child | Cain killed him; Elehaym died shielding him | The power, and the ability to be reborn |
| Kim | 4,000 years before | Emeralda, and the thesis behind her | Sealed himself in; fate unrecorded | A buried paper that revived nanotechnology |
| Lacan | 500 years before | An unfinished portrait | Died alone; his rage survived as Grahf | Grahf, and the training Grahf gave his next body |
| Fei | Present day | Nothing yet | He refuses the ending | Nothing. That's the point. |
Then Elly does what Elly does. With Deus destroyed and its release about to take the planet with it, she starts moving the thing away so nobody else has to pay for it. Every previous incarnation ended on this beat: she steps in front of it, and he watches.
Fei goes after her. Not to win the fight — the fight is over — but so she doesn't do it again. That's the whole break. Three Contacts accepted the terms. The fourth refused them.
The game hands you all of this in about ninety minutes near the end, mostly as narration, after eighty hours of barely mentioning it. If you'd rather walk around inside a past life than be told about one afterwards, slow down at the Zeboim ruins beneath the sea — Kim's era is the only one the game lets you spend real time in.
Once the Contact's line is straight, the other half comes into focus. Elehaym runs a parallel structure with its own rules — born on schedule, drawn to him without knowing why, dying on cue — and setting her four lives against his is where the game's argument about free will sits.
Krelian is the third door. He watched the whole pattern from outside it, understood it, and decided the answer was to build a better god. He's wrong, and Fei is the proof: a cycle a person can refuse was never a law. But I'd read his case before deciding against it, because it's the best-argued thing in the game — and what it gets isn't a rebuttal so much as a counter-example.
Common Questions
How many past lives does Fei have?
Three are shown — Abel, Kim and Lacan. The careful answer is that the sources call Kim the first known reincarnation and Lacan the second known, and that precision is doing real work. There are four thousand years between Abel and Kim, and the record notes at least two occasions where Miang wiped humanity and restarted it inside the gaps. Three is what the game shows you. It isn't what the setting book claims.
Is Grahf one of Fei's past lives?
No. Lacan is the past life; Grahf is what Lacan left behind. When Lacan died his soul carried the Contact's destiny forward and was reborn as Fei, while his remaining persona — his desires, without the man attached — survived separately by possessing one body after another. Both happened, to the same person, at the same moment.
Why do Abel, Kim, Lacan and Fei look identical?
Because the Contact's body doesn't follow the normal rule. The setting material states it directly: against the ordinary business of inheriting your appearance from your parents, the Contact manifests the same appearance every time. There's a second reason on top of it — the past-life scenes are shown through Fei's own perception, which is why Lacan turns up wearing Fei's clothes.
Is Elly reincarnated the same way Fei is?
Yes, to a different specification. She's the Antitype: where the Contact carries the Wave Existence's power, she carries its will. She's born in the same year as the Contact in every era and she goes looking for him. Elehaym, Elehaym, Sophia, Elly. In each of the first three, she dies protecting him.