Xin Xin Zhao traced the thin graphite lines on the schematic as if they were rivers guiding her home. The page had arrived in an unmarked package the night before, tucked between a stack of old engineering journals she kept for insomnia. The title at the top—Schematic Top: Project Lumen—was stamped in a font half-faded by time. Whoever had designed it had drafted a map not of circuits but of memory.
She worked as a lightwright at the cityworks, bending LEDs and lenses until murals bloomed across concrete. By day she made practical beauty; by night she chased the impossible: a way to make sunlight hum. The schematic promised just that, or at least the mathematical skeleton for coaxing resonance from pure illumination.
The drawing's center was a small node labeled "Xin," and its lines flowed outward like spokes. Each spoke ended in a tiny glyph she didn't recognize—some sharp and mechanical, some curving like calligraphy. As she ran her fingertip along a line a faint warmth pulsed under the paper, as if the ink remembered heat. The notation at the margins hinted at a language she could almost translate: vectors named for feelings, capacitors for patience, resistors quantified in regrets.
She laughed at herself and called it romantic nonsense, until the first test. She rebuilt the central node on her workbench with salvaged optics, a coil of wire she wound with fingers raw from winter, and a single crystalline diode that shimmered like a trapped tear. Powering it was reckless; power shortages were a civic offense and curiosity an expensive hobby. Yet when she applied a whisper of current the diode didn't glow so much as it answered. Shadows in the room tilted toward it as if listening. The sound that rose was not music but a language—closed syllables of color.
Neighbors came because of the sound. An old woman from two floors down claimed it smelled like rain; a boy with a loose tooth said the light showed him his future as if it were a photograph. For a week the city hummed around Xin Xin's bench. People left notes taped to her door: please, we need more light; please, my mother’s eyes; please, teach me.
Word reached the Hall of Grids, where bureaucrats measured the city in kilolumens and permits. An inspector arrived with a ledger and an expression that suggested he had never believed in wonder. He brought with him the official rubric: safety, efficiency, replicability. He tested the device with instruments and formulas, and for a long time reported only numbers. Then he paused, and the ledger folded like a confession.
"This schematic," he said—his voice softened against the hum—"isn't about light. It's about naming. Whoever drew it balanced not current but choice. Each node resolves not voltage but decision. That's why folks see memories when they look: the schematic is a map for where the heart keeps its beams." xin xin zhao schematic top
Xin Xin thought of the package and the way the node bore her name—a coincidence, perhaps, or an invitation. She traced the margins of the schematic until the ink formed letters she could read: "Top of the world, bottom of the sea—place things where they must be seen."
People began to bring the lost to her doorstep: keepsakes from disposed marriages, snapshots of children, letters burned by time. She placed them under the diode's glow and watched as the light rearranged itself to hold each item. A song from a soldier's chest played; a grandmother's laughter spilled like threaded pearls. The schematic's spokes were no longer schematic alone—they were scaffolding for remembrance.
Soon the city, which had long relegated wonder to ornamental plazas, found itself reorganizing around a new priority. Planning committees argued over where to install official "Remember Nodes." Critics called it superstition; investors called it an opportunity. For a while, the Hall of Grids tried to regulate wonder, until it realized that wonder paid in ways their ledgers had not accounted for: reduced disputes, higher productivity, an uptick in small markets selling tea and notepaper. The ledger learned new columns.
Xin Xin refused the offers that came cloaked in authority and numbers. She wanted something simpler: access to the schematic itself. The original map had been only a page; she sought the archive where more might be hidden. The inspector, who had watched the old woman from below step into a light that showed her son's face again, quietly handed Xin Xin a key. "Some things," he said, "don't need approval, they need custodians."
In the archive, she found rows of schematics—some labeled in crisp, bureaucratic type, others scrawled in the same ink as her page. Each schematic bore a name: a child, a street, an absence. They were not blueprints for machines but for attention. As she read, Xin Xin realized that the schematics had been placed across generations to repair what cities erode: memory, presence, and mercy.
She returned home and rewrote the central node. This time she inked lines for names she had collected from visitors: "Marta," "Omis," "Little Jun." The diode hummed more complexly; people who had never met found their stories layered in the same light. They wept in one another's company and learned to keep vigil for those who would be forgotten. Xin Xin Zhao traced the thin graphite lines
Months later, a storm took the city's electric grid. Street lamps guttered and the Hall of Grids issued rationing schedules. Yet in neighborhoods where Xin Xin had placed Remember Nodes, volunteers kept small fires and the glow of diode-light. People read aloud the names that had been kept. The city survived the darkness—not because of power but because it had relearned how to see one another.
Years passed. The prototype became a quiet fixture: a small plaque read simply, "Schematic Top: Remember." Engineers debated replication, poets debated metaphor. Xin Xin, whose name now traveled on the lips of those who came to place their things, kept adding spokes to the map until the edges blurred. Sometimes she would wake to discover a child's drawing tucked beneath the diode, labeled "For Xin Xin, who made our memories loud."
On the day she chose to sign her work, she folded a page of the original schematic into the seam of a new node and sealed it with a drop of resin. The inscription was tiny: "For those who misplace light—may you find what you need." She did not publish the design. She did not patent memory. She kept simply passing the schematic, hand to hand, to those whose lives had thinned and who needed to be seen.
At night, the diode's hum had become a neighborhood rhythm. It marked births and wakes, promotions and quiet reconciliations. Children grew up learning that light could be more than utility—it could be attention, repository, and vow.
When Xin Xin finally left the bench, she left behind a map that was no longer schematic in the mechanical sense. It had become a topography of care: paths where people might go when they had been drained by city life, places to drop a grief or a small joy and know it would be held. People called it the Schematic Top—half joke, half scripture—and they sent it forward, folding it between journals, slipping it into packages, placing it beneath benches in parks.
Years later, a child found that first unmarked package in a pile of cast-off books. She smoothed the paper and read the single inked node that still bore a name. The child looked up at the slanting roofline of the city and, with the steady gravity of small hands, began to trace new lines across the page. The Secondary Path (Precision):
Your blueprint starts with the Precision tree. Unlike jungle Xin, top lane requires extended trades.
Forget Lethal Tempo. Forget Conqueror. The Xin Xin schematic revolves around Hail of Blades (HoB) . Why? Because Xin Zhao’s Q (Three Talon Strike) reduces the cooldowns of his other abilities by 1 second per auto attack. HoB allows you to dump three autos in under 1.5 seconds.
The Primary Path (Domination):
The Secondary Path (Precision):
Shards:
The "Xin Xin Zhao" top schematic ignores standard bruiser builds (Goredrinker/Stridebreaker). It leans into Lethality/Crit hybrids or On-Hit survivability, depending on the game state. However, the core schematic uses the Dirk start.