The game’s signature movement skills—wind walking, or your flight-style dash, and water-walking—are not tied to a single upgrade. Instead, they are rewards for poking around the world, completing regional tasks, and following a very short questline.
If you want a more direct route to unlocking everything, plus a quick tip on one of the most powerful internal arts that complements airborne combat, then follow along below.
Step 1: Start the Wind-Walking Quest
Everything starts in Region One. Head to the pond where, for some of the opening quests, a fisherman NPC usually spawns. After speaking with him, he’ll introduce wind walking and send you into a simple mobility trial. Nothing too fancy-just the first step toward permanent flight.
Step 2: Clear the Pot-Jumping Trial
The fisherman’s trial is a small platforming course where you hop across pots using your jumps and dash. If you slip, you’re reset to the last pot, so take your time. At the end, you’ll get a small booklet, and reading it unlocks a temporary version of flight: a multi-tap dash that lifts you into the air. It looks dramatic, but it won’t protect you from fall damage everywhere just yet.
Step 3: Expand Regional Discovery for full flying capability.
For that, you need to do sufficient discovery activities within the region to make that temporary flight the real deal. Open your map and fill up the regional progression bar by doing quests, activating waypoints, clearing camps, and picking up curiosities scattered across the world.
When that milestone is reached, you get a thematic token or pendant from the region, which, when returned to the fisherman, will grant permanent flight and travel mode for that area.
A Key Detail: Flight is Region-Locked. Full flight isn’t global; each region needs to be unlocked separately. You can use the temporary multi-dash anywhere still, but without regional completion, falling from high places will hurt… a lot. Expect to repeat this process of discovery anew as one explores new zones; it’s a steady loop: explore, collect, turn in, unlock mobility.
How Travel Mode Works—and Why It Lets You Run
Water Travel Mode is a speed-building sprint that kicks in when holding the sprint key. Once peak momentum is reached, the character is able to run straight across water. To activate Travel Mode in a region, turn in the curiosities you discover there-flowers, insects, beehives, and other such items-to the vendor near the starting campfire. This gives a boost to your discovery progress, as well as providing the wind-sprint ability that lets you water-walk.
Downsides to Keep in Mind
Flight is fun, but it comes with a few quirks. Flying everywhere means you’ll glide right past many ground collectibles, which slows overall discovery progress. Each region also needs to be unlocked individually, so you’ll repeat the loop often. And the aerial slam, while powerful, lands exactly where you aim it – tight areas can get messy.
Bonus Tip: A Great Internal Art to Pair with Flight
If you want to maximize your air time, look for the high-damage slam internal art often referred to as the “hand slammer.” You’ll find it by traveling to the high waypoint in the barren wasteland, the ruins of an old temple, talking to the monk there, and completing his book-based quest chain. The reward is a heavy-hitting aerial skill that scales great with upgrade stones, and in turn, makes mid-air combat a big damage opportunity against mobs and bosses.
