It was the early stage of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, everybody was in self-quarantine.
I was a second-year MFA student, wrapping up my last semester at school in New York. 

The collective unconscious of people was filled with anxiety and chaos, I was inevitably affected too. I felt lost and depressed, dead inside. I couldn't care less about finishing assignments. I didn't care for nothing. As someone with a disciplined routine and never stayed up past 11:30pm, I felt no need to keep up with routine. Everything was up in the air. My family back in China was anxious too, and preferred me to come home. The regular life was inevitably disrupted.

The only thing that gave me life at this time was playing a phone game called "Sky: Children of the Lights" with old friends in other countries. I started drawing my game avatar, with Middle-East inspired outfit (I was always intuitively interested in Persia and Silk Roads). I called the avatar (genderless) the "Wandering Prince", a prince from a fallen empire now known to no one, and wandering in Wasteland (a map in the game)