Man, though, this is interesting.
The "final boss" of Forge was Sun Liling, and she represented in one sense the culmination of Ling Qi's quest to become part of the fabric and weft of the world, to stride amidst the great and powerful, not at that point for an ideological reason but because siding with Bai Meizhen, deciding not to be a hero of the chaos... all of it led to a confrontation with the Sun.
What is shaping up to be the "final boss" (albeit one we won't be facing directly) of Theads is a deeper emnity. Instead of a grudge, it is ideological. Throughout Threads Ling Qi has gone from someone whose Way is fundamentally personal, albeit with aspects of building larger ties, into someone increasingly considering choice and freedom, community and society as key parts of her understanding.
She has embraced Weilubooism, she has taken stances on how choice works, she has dug from the past radical views on freedom and indeed on the relationship between man and spirit (see Weilubooism). And she has fundamentally made herself someone willing to respect the differences that exist, to think about the ways that the powerful can crush the powerless, to see a foreign path like that of WS and see the advantages (and one noted one was not allowing Sovereigns to crush all beneath them).
Ling Qi is not even close to the end of her Way or its final form, but the heady brew she's created is at once something incredibly old and undeniably new. Something at once careful and yet in another sense community-oriented and maybe even proto/quasi-anarchist in some of its tenets. It's something that is a sharp knived challenge to old conservatism, and yet does not consign the past to be nothing. She sneaks, she dodges, she dances in freedom, but it is not only her own freedom alone she seeks.
...and then, on the other hand, we have Meng Delun, described as, "Meng Delun's charge as an elder is the guarding and preservation of forbidden secrets and the development of defenses against them. In old days he was among those who guarded the clans minds from the Hui and the perilous foreign influences that they loved. His concealment arts are without compare in his realm, his understanding of the twisting mental arts deep and steeped with personal experience. He is not a warrior, in the truest sense, but he is at his core a defender." He's also defined as someone who might know "Old Ways" that are questionably non-heretical now.
So yes, in this case there's a very interesting parallel between who they each are and what they've done.
As such, failing to (indirectly) confront them... would be a bit lame, thematically.
