current conditions of electrocatalytic water splitting mainly include acidic and basic media. [5][6][7][8] When considering the huge difficulty in producing affordable acidic oxygen evolution electrodes in water splitting, the electrocatalytic water splitting in alkaline environments has become a meaningful strategy to produce H 2 on a large scale, [9][10][11][12][13] while the commercial alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) catalyst still relies on the metallic platinum (Pt), which confronts with slow water-dissociation kinetics, poor durability, and high costs. [5,[14][15][16] Highly active and cost-effective HER electrocatalysts are urgently needed for practical water splitting in alkaline conditions, especially alkaline seawater splitting. [17][18][19][20] Among the various transition metal-based hydrogenevolving materials, [21,22] recent studies have disclosed that Ru-based materials can serve as promising alkaline HER electrocatalysts due to their platinum-like electronic structures and relatively low cost (≈1/3 the price of Pt). [23][24][25] Regarding the pursuit of ultrahigh atomic efficiency of Ru metals, substantial efforts have been devoted to synthesizing single-atom Ru catalysts. [26,27] Although single-atom catalytic sites can facilely control the Ru coordination microenvironments and, in principle, obtain 100% atom utilization, these cationic states of single-atom Ru centers can hardly satisfy the alkaline HER electrocatalysis. [28] To increase Ruthenium (Ru)-based catalysts have displayed compelling hydrogen evolution activities, which hold the promising potential to substitute platinum in alkaline H 2 -evolution. In the challenging alkaline electrolytes, the water-dissociation process involves multistep reactions, while the profound origin and intrinsic factors of diverse Ru species on water-dissociation pathways and reaction principles remain ambiguous. Here the fundamental origin of water-dissociation pathways of Ru-based catalysts in alkaline media to be from their unique electronic structures in complex coordination environments are disclosed. These theoretical results validate that the modulated electronic structures with delocalization-localization coexistence at their boundaries between the Ru nanocluster and single-atom site have a profound influence on water-dissociation pathways, which push H 2 O* migration and binding orientation during the splitting process, thus enhancing the dissociation kinetics. By creating Ru catalysts with well-defined nanocluster, single-atom site, and also complex site, the electrocatalytic data shows that both the nanocluster and single-atom play essential roles in water-dissociation, while the complex site possesses synergistically enhanced roles in alkaline electrolytes. This study discloses a new electronic structure-dependent water-dissociation pathway and reaction principle in Ru-based catalysts, thus offering new inspiration to design efficient and durable catalysts for the practical production of H 2 in alkaline electrolytes.