The Dragon’s Heritage ending is Sekiro’s most mechanically demanding — requiring the collection of three specific Dragon’s Tears items from the Fountainhead Palace area, combined with a Lotus of the Palace and the tears from the Divine Dragon boss fight. The combination is never explained or indicated by any NPC.
What the ending achieves: Wolf becomes the Immortal Severance Dragon, removing the immortality curse from the world. Kuro dies peacefully. The Sculptor is freed. The ending is specifically about sacrifice without survival — Wolf gives up his life and his continuation to solve the problem of immortality properly.
The Dragon’s Heritage ending is the only conclusion where Wolf does not come back. Every other ending either continues the cycle, transforms Wolf into something else, or leaves the curse intact. The Heritage ending is finite and irreversible.
Hirata Estate — a location visited in flashback during the game’s opening — is revisited in the late game through a different entry point and reveals a second version of the estate’s history that contradicts the first. The second visit is triggered by an item that appears only after specific questlines are completed. Players who did not know to look return to a location they have already cleared, find it populated differently, and encounter a boss whose existence contradicts what was believed to have happened there. Sekiro’s questlines are designed to make the world factually inconsistent until all information is gathered.
The detail work the devs put into areas most players never visit is what separates great games from good ones.
I’ve put 200 hours into this game and never caught this. The developers really reward the obsessive players.