The Blood of Dawnwalker's sanzhana can bend time — and they want your teeth

IGN's month-long First coverage of The Blood of Dawnwalker keeps rolling, and the latest drop is a full playthrough of a quest called Pearly and Precious, built around a brand new creature type: the sanzhana, or pixie. The quest is short, but it's doing a lot of work introducing one of the game's more unusual ideas.

Sanzhana are moth-human hybrids with blue skin, white markings, and fuzzy abdomens — and they have an obsession with teeth. In the Pearly and Precious quest, protagonist Coen rifles through the pockets and mouths of corpses to collect molars and incisors for one of these creatures. The gameplay also shows off Coen's daytime witchcraft kit, since the quest runs during daylight hours when his vampiric powers are locked: a speed-enhancing spell and the Ravenous Flock curse, which summons a burst of spectral birds to damage nearby enemies. There's sword duelling too.

The real hook is what sanzhana offer in return. Creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz confirms they can manipulate time — a direct tie-in to The Blood of Dawnwalker's core 30-day countdown mechanic, where every action Coen takes costs time from a finite clock. "They allow you to play with the time limit," Tomaszkiewicz says, drawing on folklore traditions around pixies and time-bending. He adds that having systemic exceptions to the game's rules creates "this feeling that something unexpected might happen at every turn." Sanzhana are deliberately rare in the world, so encounters carry weight. The game's other non-human race, the uriashi — towering beast-like mountain giants with their own hidden culture — fill a more traditional fantasy role, working alongside humans in garrisons after centuries of near-extinction and self-imposed isolation. Narrative director Jakub Szamalek notes that finding the uriashi village will be "a whole adventure of its own."

Rebel Wolves is the studio behind the game — founded by former CD Projekt Red veterans, including Tomaszkiewicz, who directed The Witcher 3. IGN's First coverage runs through July 2026, with more reveals on the sanzhana's specific reward still promised later this week.