Lore · 10 min

Linko Lore in NTE: Xiaozhen the Ghost, Her Backstory and Her Secret Message

Linko hears the frequency of everything around her, and almost nobody hears hers. Her story in order, read off her in-game profile and Raddish’s lore video.

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Beware the Raddish

Lore video and footage by Raddish, written up by ntebuild.com

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By ntebuild.com·Published September 25, 2026

Video by Beware the Raddish

Xiaozhen is the little ghost who lives in the portable TV on Linko’s back: Linko found her in an anomalous realm full of broken TVs, became her official guarantor, and joined ETD-6 because of her. That one decision sits in the middle of Linko lore in NTE, and it only makes sense once you know the girl who made it.

Linko has no massacre in her past and no dead mentor. She grew up loved, woke her Esper Abilities at seven, and spent the years after learning that she could hear everyone while almost nobody could hear her. Raddish’s 17-minute lore video walks through all of it, reading straight from the seven tabs of Linko’s in-game Profile screen, and ends on the reason his thumbnail says “secret message”. This write-up follows the same story, quotes the profile where the screen shows it, checks every name against the game data behind our Linko build page, and adds the part a lore video only touches: where each piece of her backstory shows up in her kit.

Who Is Xiaozhen, the Ghost in Linko’s TV?

The Ghostly Encounter tab of Linko’s profile tells it. In middle school, a faint frequency drew her into an office building and an anomalous realm filled with broken TVs. She switched on a battered screen and a small ghost popped out, demanding that Linko become her servant for disturbing her rest. Raised on her father’s horror films, Linko was not scared at all. She scooped the ghost up like a stray cat and named her Xiaozhen, since she lived in a TV.

The name is a joke on Sadako from The Ring, and Raddish points out how neatly the game flips it: instead of a nightmare crawling out of the screen, Xiaozhen is an easily flustered ghost carried around in a box. She had a history of her own before Linko. She had defended office workers from a dangerous Esper criminal and nearly faded away doing it, then retreated into the last intact TV.

When Linko carried her out of the building, the Bureau was waiting. The profile describes “a grim-faced young man” whom the uniformed personnel treated with deference, and one line from him:

“The Celaeno Compound is interested in that ghost.” Linko did not know what the Compound was, but her instincts told her it could not mean anything good for Xiaozhen, so she held on and called the ghost her friend. According to Raddish, the ETD captain stepped in and secured an exemption: Linko became Xiaozhen’s official guarantor and joined ETD-6 as its youngest operative. The two have been a unit since, and the TV on her back is where Xiaozhen rides.

Who Is Linko in NTE?

Linko is the youngest operative of ETD-6, and her character panel sums her up in one line: “A girl who can detect the ‘frequencies’ of all things, perceiving the world like no one else.” The same panel lists her attribute, birthday, faction and ability.

Her worldview explains everything else. The Intel tab of her profile opens with it: people, anomalies and objects all share “a drive to be perceived”, like birds flashing their feathers, flowers giving off aromas and whales singing into the deep. Linko’s Esper ability tunes into those signals. It picks up emotion and intent rather than words, “like... a ‘frequency,’ only tuned differently.”

The Bureau never managed to measure it. Standard devices found nothing and no theory fit, yet everyone near her felt a brief resonance, as if their mind had synced with an invisible broadcast. Raddish’s favourite detail is how she uses it: during her evaluation she picked up an evaluator’s hidden burnout and asked him, in the most innocent voice, whether work was rough and why he did not just jump ship. Even her squad work runs on it. Her captain hands her a target’s aliases and favourite music, and she turns her dial until she picks up their frequency somewhere in the city. The only other ETD-6 member in our character data is Chaos.

Why Is Linko Lonely If Her Family Loved Her?

Unlike most of Hethereau’s Espers, Linko grew up in a home full of affection. The Hethereau Love Story tab opens with her scaring the Bureau’s archivist “half to death”: she announced that both her parents were Espers, when the records said they were ordinary people.

She meant that her “Dad’s Esper Ability is sitting perfectly still through more than a dozen movies in a row” and her “Mom’s Esper Ability is walking more than a dozen street blocks without stopping.” Her mother was an urban exploration blogger obsessed with paranormal legends, her father a shut-in film nerd who studied supernatural cinema. They met while investigating the same haunted spot on the same day, got trapped in a real anomalous realm, bickered, then escaped together. Linko inherited both hobbies: horror films before she was out of baby bottles, city walks as soon as she could stand.

Her powers woke at seven. The First Connection tab calls it “an utterly ordinary evening”: a supermarket trip, a glance at a peculiar shop down the street, and when she looked back her mother, the crowd and the noise were all gone. She had slipped into an empty anomalous realm.

After hours lost, she wished she could find her parents, and a storm of voices flooded her head: dogs, sirens, panicked thoughts and, somewhere in there, her mother calling. She followed the warmest frequency out and nullified the realm from the inside. Rescuers heard her voice from several directions at once. Syncing with that much noise left her dizzy and leaking static into nearby people and electronics, so the Bureau built her the headset Raddish’s subtitles call the Static Sifter. Its physical dial filters the noise like a radio; off duty, she uses it for white noise from anomalous realms and rock music made by anomalies. Raddish’s point stands: Linko’s loneliness is not trauma. It comes from hearing everyone.

What Happened in Linko’s Fluffy Incident?

Linko first tried to use her gift to make friends, learning what made her classmates happy. The Divergence tab ends that plan. Her friends found a small fluffy anomaly in the grass and started poking at it until it turned into bullying. Linko heard its frequency shift from hurt to anger and told them to stop. They turned on her and called her a buzzkill freak.

That night she wrote in her diary: “We all live in our own frequencies, sending signals into the universe that go unanswered.” She stopped forcing friendships and became an observer. At ten, a warm frequency led her up a huge tree, where she got stuck halfway, until a girl in a Clement Academy uniform jumped down from a higher branch and helped her down.

The girl was playing Tamachi GO, a handheld virtual pet game, and had climbed up for a Rare Tamachi: “I only caught you!” Raddish reads it as Tamagotchi crossed with Pokémon GO. She became Linko’s exploration partner, and two years later handed over her console and strategy notes. Linko kept hunting rare creatures, but none ever gave off that bright frequency again. It had been the older girl all along. The handheld still hangs at Linko’s waist on her default outfit.

How Does Linko’s Lore Shape Her Kit?

Raddish explains the physics behind her design. When two systems share a natural frequency, they exchange energy efficiently and their oscillations amplify: resonance. Her combat resource, Modulation, is the telecoms word for encoding information onto a carrier wave. The kit data behind our build page lines up with both ideas, and with Xiaozhen more than anything:

The giant green hands are the tell. Even her traversal skill, Linko Rockethead Mk I, launches her off Xiaozhen’s ghost arms. The lore says the two are a unit bound by a family bond, and her basic attacks are built exactly that way: Linko never really fights alone. The build side of that, arcs, cartridges and teams, is on the Linko build guide and the best teams page, and her current placement is on the tier list.

What Is Linko’s Secret Message?

The Appraiser is one of the few people who hears Linko without judging her. In one quest she drags them into unmasking an alien, sure that a UFO model on a DSD billboard is a disguised spacecraft, and proposes cow’s milk as bait because UFOs abduct cows. The model then speaks in an alien voice. When the Appraiser offers to bring a real cow next time, Linko is genuinely touched: nobody has called her hobby anything but weird before.

That bond pays off in her third and final side quest. She takes the Appraiser to the tallest observation deck in Hethereau to meet “a friend from outer space on a tight schedule”, a comet she has tracked for about half a year. Her speech to it is the emotional centre of the character: she admits she is probably not a popular kid, that she can feel the barriers between people, and that the comet is the first frequency with no barrier at all. “I want to be friends with you.”

She closes by turning to the player: “Thank you for appearing in my universe.” Raddish reads the whole speech as meant for the Appraiser, the comet that crossed her isolated universe and finally answered her signal. Then the secret. Before speaking, Linko invents a “cosmic language” of boops and beeps. Read as Morse code, with a boop as a dot and a beep as a dash, it decodes cleanly:

SUKI, 好き, Japanese for “I like you” or “I hold you dear”. Of her quests, the comet one is the payoff: the UFO hunt sets up the bond, and this scene cashes it in. Her banner closes on 30 September 2026, when Version 1.4 opens with Blackbird; the full 1.4 lineup is in the livestream recap. Raddish contrasts her with Zankou, whose past is far darker; Linko’s sadness is quieter, and it ends on four letters.

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