Name : Xun Zhen Lin : 荀禎林 : Xún Zhēn Lín
Age : 34
Birthday : November 2nd
Gender : Male
Nationality : Chinese
Category : Staff / NPC
Appearance Description : Xun Zhen Lin stands at five feet and ten inches tall. He has black hair and gold-colored eyes but really, the first thing that people notice about him are his large, golden wings that tend to shine very brightly in light. They are as tall as he is and from time to time, he has to trim down the end feathers so that they don't trail on the ground. The main problem with them is that the "golden" part of this description is pretty literal. Though they are perfectly functional, his wings are constantly being taken over by scale-like growths of pure gold, starting from the bottom up. The scales are a sort of disease which spreads quickly, itches perpetually, and also are heavy. This is why he often neglects to use them. The state of his left wing is significantly worse than his right, with the gold having spread all the way up to bust height. He's better about scrapping it off his right wing so that's only up to his shins. In the places where the gold hasn't spread to yet, his wings can be recognized as those of a nightingale.
Another thing that tends to happen is that little gemstones tend to spring up like bad rashes whenever Xun Zhen Li isn't careful. These are all completely real and sometimes, he makes money off of selling them. It's an all around gross business, though, because it's the equivalent of scratching off a scab and having people throw money at you for it. Also, these very pretty and very expensive lesions are trying to kill him but that's a different story altogether.
Other than that, he is unusually pale from lack of sunlight and also noticeably strong because when you live most of your life carrying your weight in gold everywhere on your back, there is no way you can turn out weak. Most of his body is wrapped bandages, including his hands and half of his face because his skin is covered with burns. Usually, only one of his eyes is showing, the left one.
He has a beautiful voice, however, one which is viewed in this way by all species. Individuals may vary in opinion.
Personality Description : Xun is an oddity because for somebody who normally sticks to himself, he is so full of life and the love of it. People often are left wondering what kind of horrible thing could have possibly happened to make it so that he felt so compelled to live every day as if it were his last. He is quick to assume that he is in the wrong for everything and can be sensitive and accommodating to the point of being overbearing. He is paranoid about his actions, always, and therefore can be blinded to what others are doing.
No matter what Xun does, he will never feel like it's enough. He's stubborn in that regard and doesn't realize that disbelieving people's genuinely meant compliments do him no favors. He is one of those people who is actually not kind by nature, nor particularly caring, but he tries. He tries so hard that it's clear exactly what he is and he knows this and hates it. At the core of his personality is intense pessimism and fear of others. He hides it but every so often it shows. The person most hurt by it is usually himself.
He throws himself into everything he does but these moments can be momentary. He will take on a hundred tasks at once without seeing why he can't and when the frustration of having to deal with it inevitably rises up, he simply drops it all and walks away. He really wants to have a breakdown in those sorts of situations but if he did, then what?
Main Power : Imperial Nightingale - The easiest way to sum up Xun Zhen Lin's powers is through a fairy tale. (Which actually exists, I did not write this. You can find the Wikipedia page here.) An emperor found a nightingale with the most beautiful song in the world. He brought it back to his palace but sometime later was gifted with a mechanical nightingale made of precious metal and jewels which could sing pre-set songs. Eventually, the real nightingale went away because the emperor was a complete bastard who got distracted by the shiny. Then the mechanical bird died. The emperor became deadly ill and nightingale came back to sing Death away. Xun Zhen Lin is pretty much a combination of the real and the fake birds, because you know what? The person who runs the reincarnation cycle actually purposely did this.
Death Has No Jurisdiction Here
To everybody who is some incarnation of death or otherwise derives their power from that category, Xun Zhen Lin can temporarily stop their powers by singing. Or talking. Talking is less effective but he can keep at it for much longer. Basically, what it does is that it takes their attention away from whatever it was that they were focusing on and turns it right on what he's saying instead. So if they were about to spirit somebody to the afterlife, for example, they would suddenly start to think something along the lines of Oh, wait, look at that dumb guy over there! He's saying something! This is very interesting, let me just listen for a while.
This is only if they can hear him, though. He can't move too far away from them and he can't force them to follow him around. It also only keeps for as long as he's going at it and doesn't prevent anybody from taking a rock and smashing it over his head to get him to shut up. But since it concentrates people's attention on himself, it is no help to him at all. He has maybe six seconds to think of something to say before the effect automatically fails.
Memory of a Thousand Lifetimes
Xun Zhen Lin can remember every life he's lived, with particular emphasis on what he did wrong. Everything else is kind of fuzzy. Though he'll be able to recall that in whatever lifetime, he might have been good at playing the piano, he would still have to relearn how to do so in this one. If he met somebody in a previous lifetime and for whatever reason, they're still around, he'll have some faint idea of it. If they were really significant, he would remember them more clearly but most people who were are dead now. Really, what this memory is good for is letting him remember that most of his previous lives were spent murdering thousands of people in cold-blood. It can be awkward, though, when he remembers the act but not the person he did it against.
Soulless Existence
Xun Zhen Lin does not have a soul. Well, okay. He does. It's somewhere. Just not here. Think of it this way, a few life times ago, he broke too many rules and now it's been confiscated. This affects him in no way except for the fact that he can't bargain with demons and- wait. That's a good thing. He isn't affected by magic that targets the soul, for obvious reasons. He also does not feel any kind of presence on the divine spectrum -no gods, no angels, no demons- and also is immune to that sort of magic unless he's being targeted at once by multiple types of divinity at the same time. For example, if an angel and a demon teamed up. Or if a minor Greek deity paired up with a Japanese kami. This all applies to practitioners of this sort of magic, too. But if just one of those decides to make it personal and bean him over the head with a tire iron, well. Good thing there's a hospital nearby.
Unnatural Mechanism
As said above, Xun Zhen Lin has the wings of a nightingale, which are currently being overtaken by what looks like somebody's awful My First Bedazzle Project. Somebody thought this would be funny. Well, they were kind of on the mark in that. He hasn't actually used them to fly since he was a child and probably can't use them for much more than very, very slow hovering for short distances. Maybe a few feet.
Also for some reason, to put it in completely modern terms, lightning is super effective against him. If he gets hit by more than plain old static electricity, he's down.
Heaven's Judgment : Trial by Fire - If there is a fire within a one hundred meter radius, Xun Zhen Lin is automatically set on fire. No exceptions. At all. He has no fire immunity. The fire is painful. Since this is Manta Carlos, he should be on fire pretty much all the time. They're not usually intense fires unless there's a giant raging forest fire nearby. Because of this, he cannot be killed by any fire at all but he can still be horribly maimed by them and is usually in the process of being horribly maimed by them. Also these he will keep burning as long as there are fires within a hundred meters. There is no way to douse him besides putting out the other fires. The closer he is to a fire, the more it hurts. It seems to be at a mark of every ten twenty meters though.
When he burns, his fires are invisible to the naked eye but any person with even a drop of supernatural blood would be able to see then. The degree of clarity depends on how much blood they have and which race. More divine beings and elementals, for example, will see this very clearly. People with clarity related powers will see this, too, and those whose powers border on this category might be able to smell him burning.
There are, however, two benefits to this because Heaven can be strangely merciful in disturbing ways. For one, If anybody tries to purposely set Xun Zhen Lin on fire by taking it to his actual body, they will first get a nagging feeling that maybe that's not a great course of action to take. Depending on how involved with divinity that this person is, they might feel this nagging feeling more strongly, like somebody yelling in their ear Yeah, don't do this, man. If the person continues anyways, they will instead find themselves set on fire tenfold. This is basically a magical equivalent of the Mark of Cain. They can be doused in normal ways. But look, since they're on fire, that means he still feels it. Because it's still fire. He simply hurts at normal levels while the other person is in terrible and awful agony. Moral of the story: do not set Xun Zhen Lin on fire. Just shoot him in the head.
Xun Zhen Lin also can scry in fires, provided he can get over the fact that it's very painful to be close enough to one like that. If he can get over, though, he can use the fires to show him images that they were present for. So if the fire was burning while a robbery happened, he can look into it and see a perfect recording of the event. The only problems are that once a fire is out, it's out for good. Fires also don't like retaining things for long so he has an hour of clarity at most and passed that are just scraps and blurs. It should be noted that the image will only be as big as the fire is and that even if he can see it at a distance, it's the same as seeing anything else from a distance. You need to get up right next to it to really tell.
Hell's Retribution : Curse of Avarice - If at any point, his wings become fully covered in gold, it will spread to the rest of his body and turn Xun Zhen Lin into a completely stationary statue. He can still be set on fire. And will also be sentient. And unbreakable. Forever. Unlike the Trial by Fire, there is no benefit to this because this was from demons. Why would they give anybody a break?
Birth Place / Hometown : Xuchang, Henan Province, China
Occupation : Admissions Office Clerk
Father : Ha!
Mother : Lonely
Sibling(s) : Forever
Biography : A long, long time ago, there was an angel. It was a Virtue, known sometimes as Virtue Gamboge, because its name could not be spoken on Earth. It did not fall when Lucifer did and stayed loyal and steadfastly faithful to the Lord for its life. It was, in other words, a completely boring figure because it was not meant to change.
Similarly but not as long as go, there was a man who was born, for whatever reason, being free of both sin and virtue. Based off of this, it could be misunderstood that he was a bland cutout who did absolutely nothing and lived an equally bland life of no importance. This would be the wrong conclusion because the man knew what he had been born as and purposely exploited it. He was, in this way, untouchable by Heaven because being free of sin, he could not be judged, and also untouchable by Hell because being free of virtue, there was nothing to take away.
Unfortunately for the people around him, this meant he got away with anything and everything, at least when it came to non-physical affairs. Even though the man had no magic of his own, mystics found it useful to employ his unique skills to do things that they could not. Meaning things like human sacrifice, stealing from minor gods, and the such. Unable to accumulate both spiritual "good" and "evil," he was able to do such things without consequence because his soul was something that was so locked away that it was likely it could not be touched by anybody besides God Himself. He grew in power, amassed followers, and, as most people did when they were mad with power, became such a nuisance that it was impossible for higher beings to not take formal notice.
People do not speak his name. Both sides of divinity challenged him. Demons left out of frustration from having none of their deals fulfilled -there was no way to collect his soul but also there was no way to take back what they had given. Angels found it more of a struggle because he was good at pretending they had his attention, only to throw it all away when it really mattered and laugh in their faces.
Virtue Gamboge, never one to venture far from Heaven, finally decided to have a go at it. Its patience was endless, since that was how it had been made, and that with its lack of contact with humans made it blind to the fact that patience could be turned against it. For years, it visited this one human and tried to turn him from his ways. It feel into the trap of thinking that it could change him when others had failed and took small successes as a sign of major change. After two odd decades, the Virtue's guard had dropped to the point where it was relatively easy for the man to ambush it and, with the aid of gloryhounding demons, actually killed it. Cursed weapons and hellfire was used.
The Virtue appeared back in Heaven, traumatized, but otherwise unharmed. It stayed in Heaven for years longer until heard that the man had met an even more horrific end and, while disturbed, assumed that was the end of the story. That would have been very simple.
The man was reborn, soul and memories fully in tact. Some way, some how, the cycle went on. Kingdoms rose and fell in the span of hours and though most people lived in blissful ignorance of this turmoil, those at the center of it held fast and remembered. It was during this time that several magical families began to emerge and establish alliances to keep a watch out for this single man who perverted all natural order. Curtis. Ishikawa. Laughingwood. Xun. There were others, too, and though not all of them were yet well known or well stabilized, this was as early as they could be traced back. If anybody remembered so far, anyways. But what was perhaps the most guarded secret, one that was so hidden that it was eventually lost to human memory, was that they were all his descendants. The demons remembered and that is why to this day, his descendants are still hunted down by them.
For the first few lifetimes, the Virtue merely ignored the man reborn. It had more important matters to attend to besides. Inevitably, however, the two crossed paths again, because those who are long lived often tend to do so. Conflict occurred. Soon, the man found himself lying right on his back and at the other end of the Virtue's very practical and very clearly mortal-forged sword. Before what should have been the final strike, however, the Virtue merely tilted its head to the side. And put its sword away. The man was confused but decided to take the chance to get in another swing. The Virtue threw him back onto the ground. He tried again. Same result. Not long after, he became so frustrated that he promptly gave up and left the Virtue to itself.
Within a month or so, he was dead again. This was nothing new to him. Divinity continued to hear reports of his activities for a few more lifetimes before all of the information suddenly crashed to a halt. One lifetime passed, then two. Three. For a while, there were suspicions that he was merely waiting for some kind of opportunity to do something drastic but as the decades rolled on, more began to suspect that he merely died for good. Neither Heaven nor Hell claimed to have his soul, however, so it was assumed that he either fell into purgatory or maybe one of those other quieter afterlives.
The Virtue waited. Eventually, a century or so later, he met the man again. This time, they did not fight. They said nothing at all, actually, merely keeping each other company until he finally died of old age for what might have been the first time in the entire cycle. The Virtue was very good at waiting and kept itself occupied with its duties as the man went through the beginning of another life.
They kept meeting through the different lifetimes, in different locations on different continents. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they did not. The man caused little trouble from that point on and the Virtue said nothing of his continued existence. With time, however, a sort of friendship occurred between them. The man, having already committed every sin known to humanity, had his conscience catching up with him at last. Since he was still hated, he sought a neutral ear in the one being who seemed not to care at all.
Time went on. People forgot. Some divinities forgot but not all of them did. Eventually, they found out again that the man still existed and the old demons he had cheated before decided to take revenge. They did not do this in the usual violent way, however. Instead, they sent down one of their own, a powerful trickster with a disarming air who took on innocent looking forms which tended to invoke feelings of protectiveness in others. The demon befriended the man slowly in between his meetings with the Virtue, just as patient as the angel because, in essence, it was that Virtue's counterpart.
Slowly, the man turned back to his old ways but this time, he did so under the false belief that this was different. Now he had a real reason, a legitimate reason. And if he decided that he didn't like those anymore, the demon was right there at his shoulder to whisper new ones, twist it to seem like the man simply hadn't understood fully what he had been doing before. It was all his fault, yes, but that was fine because he could redeem himself by following this other way. It was lifetimes before the Virtue caught on and when it did, the man and the demon had already torn down one of the lesser known gates to Heaven and had chucked it into a nearby mountain. Which was Mt. Etna. During the same year when it had its most violent recorded eruption. 1669 was a bad year for most people involved.
As a result of this, now everybody knew that the man was still around. His more minor descendants now banded together in this mad dash to assure everybody that no, they wanted nothing to do with him. They hadn't want to be associated with him hundreds of years ago and they definitely did not want to be now. They argued with every divine being that showed up, especially the demons who were still hunting them down after all this time. Eventually, the European branches managed to get a bargain. They pointed out that the man had committed most of his crimes in the east, not the west, thus throwing their distant Asian relatives under the chariot to save their own skins. The Ishikawa were furious. The Xuns were quietly plotting revenge. The Laughingwoods, with the Curtis at their side, angrily told their European cousins to shut the hell up because they had probably just delayed a worst retribution to come in later generations.
The Virtue showed back up a few decades later. One moment, nobody knew where it was and in the next, it was back in Heaven. What it was doing, though, nobody had any idea because almost immediately afterwards, it simply melted so well into the background that when asked for, people merely drew a blank. Behind closed doors, however, it was in constant communication with God as it started to doubt. Out of love, it was told to simply stay in Heaven until the matter was sorted out. Above all, it was not to pursue the man, nor was it to take any actions against him.
Meanwhile, down on Earth, the man and the demon were wreaking havoc on the magical community that had spawned from him. Revenge for their "betrayal," so to speak. Those who fell to them had their souls hastily collected up, to be consumed or to go towards other ventures. Very soon, however, they started targeting more people -distant bloodless relatives, close friends, mere acquaintances. The body count went up steadily every week.
The man was having the time of his life but as the years rolled on, bloodlust evaporated as his conscience returned. The demon continued to soothe his concerns but now its words were only a temporary relief that disturbed him more and more as time went on. It too late for him to stop now, however. There was too much that he had already done. For this life, at least, maybe he could try and start to fix what he had wrought. It would never truly be enough but he had to try.
Soon afterwards, he was found by Virtue Gamboge. Before he could even try to explain anything, the angel simply decapitated him, ending that part of the cycle. He retained awareness for four seconds. In the first two, there was enough time to register his head and his body falling in different directions. In the third, he saw the look on the angel's face suddenly change to a mixture of horror and remorse. In the last second just before his death, he watched the Virtue go up in flames as it Fell.
After the man had died, the former angel went immediately back up to the gates of Heaven, though doing so was now incredibly painful. The shock and desire to repent was desperate enough for it to simply continue on. It was stopped but the power of a Virtue, even one that had fallen, was still enough for it to lose the typical guard. It did not, however, have enough power in it to escape the cherubim. But as it prepared itself for the worst, they merely led it back to where it had been before, debating with the Lord.
Many, many years of discussion later could be summarized in a few points. It had disappointed God. The fact that it wanted to repent was good but even if it did so, it would not be a Virtue again since it had disobeyed a direct order. It might not even be an angel anymore since it had already Fallen. Gamboge accepted all of this but still wanted to know what right it could do. He told it to make a choice. It thought on the issue but because of its indecision, asked for advice.
Whatever it was that was said during that time, the next anybody knew of Gamboge was that it had simply ceased to exist. A new angel was to be formed from the little grace that it had still retained. It was only a drop of what it had once had but the fact that any remained at all was important. In time, its former grace would return. But this was not that time; it would be thousands of years in the making. Thus this cycle went on.
Back with the man, the cycle of death and rebirth kept turning. Five lives after Gamboge had killed him, however, he was finally captured by an uneasy alliance between demons, angels, and various elemental spirits to mitigate the animosity. The angels unhappily argued for second chances, the demons just wanted him to rot. Eventually a deal was sealed, with Heaven and Hell essentially gambling over his soul. Each side would keep half of it, give him his dues, and let him free to reincarnation just one time.
Ten years later, a child with golden wings was born to the disgraced son of the Xun family.
Additional Information : Virtue Gamboge is currently known as Mal'akh Echo.
Age : 34
Birthday : November 2nd
Gender : Male
Nationality : Chinese
Category : Staff / NPC
Appearance Description : Xun Zhen Lin stands at five feet and ten inches tall. He has black hair and gold-colored eyes but really, the first thing that people notice about him are his large, golden wings that tend to shine very brightly in light. They are as tall as he is and from time to time, he has to trim down the end feathers so that they don't trail on the ground. The main problem with them is that the "golden" part of this description is pretty literal. Though they are perfectly functional, his wings are constantly being taken over by scale-like growths of pure gold, starting from the bottom up. The scales are a sort of disease which spreads quickly, itches perpetually, and also are heavy. This is why he often neglects to use them. The state of his left wing is significantly worse than his right, with the gold having spread all the way up to bust height. He's better about scrapping it off his right wing so that's only up to his shins. In the places where the gold hasn't spread to yet, his wings can be recognized as those of a nightingale.
Another thing that tends to happen is that little gemstones tend to spring up like bad rashes whenever Xun Zhen Li isn't careful. These are all completely real and sometimes, he makes money off of selling them. It's an all around gross business, though, because it's the equivalent of scratching off a scab and having people throw money at you for it. Also, these very pretty and very expensive lesions are trying to kill him but that's a different story altogether.
Other than that, he is unusually pale from lack of sunlight and also noticeably strong because when you live most of your life carrying your weight in gold everywhere on your back, there is no way you can turn out weak. Most of his body is wrapped bandages, including his hands and half of his face because his skin is covered with burns. Usually, only one of his eyes is showing, the left one.
He has a beautiful voice, however, one which is viewed in this way by all species. Individuals may vary in opinion.
Personality Description : Xun is an oddity because for somebody who normally sticks to himself, he is so full of life and the love of it. People often are left wondering what kind of horrible thing could have possibly happened to make it so that he felt so compelled to live every day as if it were his last. He is quick to assume that he is in the wrong for everything and can be sensitive and accommodating to the point of being overbearing. He is paranoid about his actions, always, and therefore can be blinded to what others are doing.
No matter what Xun does, he will never feel like it's enough. He's stubborn in that regard and doesn't realize that disbelieving people's genuinely meant compliments do him no favors. He is one of those people who is actually not kind by nature, nor particularly caring, but he tries. He tries so hard that it's clear exactly what he is and he knows this and hates it. At the core of his personality is intense pessimism and fear of others. He hides it but every so often it shows. The person most hurt by it is usually himself.
He throws himself into everything he does but these moments can be momentary. He will take on a hundred tasks at once without seeing why he can't and when the frustration of having to deal with it inevitably rises up, he simply drops it all and walks away. He really wants to have a breakdown in those sorts of situations but if he did, then what?
Main Power : Imperial Nightingale - The easiest way to sum up Xun Zhen Lin's powers is through a fairy tale. (Which actually exists, I did not write this. You can find the Wikipedia page here.) An emperor found a nightingale with the most beautiful song in the world. He brought it back to his palace but sometime later was gifted with a mechanical nightingale made of precious metal and jewels which could sing pre-set songs. Eventually, the real nightingale went away because the emperor was a complete bastard who got distracted by the shiny. Then the mechanical bird died. The emperor became deadly ill and nightingale came back to sing Death away. Xun Zhen Lin is pretty much a combination of the real and the fake birds, because you know what? The person who runs the reincarnation cycle actually purposely did this.
Death Has No Jurisdiction Here
To everybody who is some incarnation of death or otherwise derives their power from that category, Xun Zhen Lin can temporarily stop their powers by singing. Or talking. Talking is less effective but he can keep at it for much longer. Basically, what it does is that it takes their attention away from whatever it was that they were focusing on and turns it right on what he's saying instead. So if they were about to spirit somebody to the afterlife, for example, they would suddenly start to think something along the lines of Oh, wait, look at that dumb guy over there! He's saying something! This is very interesting, let me just listen for a while.
This is only if they can hear him, though. He can't move too far away from them and he can't force them to follow him around. It also only keeps for as long as he's going at it and doesn't prevent anybody from taking a rock and smashing it over his head to get him to shut up. But since it concentrates people's attention on himself, it is no help to him at all. He has maybe six seconds to think of something to say before the effect automatically fails.
Memory of a Thousand Lifetimes
Xun Zhen Lin can remember every life he's lived, with particular emphasis on what he did wrong. Everything else is kind of fuzzy. Though he'll be able to recall that in whatever lifetime, he might have been good at playing the piano, he would still have to relearn how to do so in this one. If he met somebody in a previous lifetime and for whatever reason, they're still around, he'll have some faint idea of it. If they were really significant, he would remember them more clearly but most people who were are dead now. Really, what this memory is good for is letting him remember that most of his previous lives were spent murdering thousands of people in cold-blood. It can be awkward, though, when he remembers the act but not the person he did it against.
Soulless Existence
Xun Zhen Lin does not have a soul. Well, okay. He does. It's somewhere. Just not here. Think of it this way, a few life times ago, he broke too many rules and now it's been confiscated. This affects him in no way except for the fact that he can't bargain with demons and- wait. That's a good thing. He isn't affected by magic that targets the soul, for obvious reasons. He also does not feel any kind of presence on the divine spectrum -no gods, no angels, no demons- and also is immune to that sort of magic unless he's being targeted at once by multiple types of divinity at the same time. For example, if an angel and a demon teamed up. Or if a minor Greek deity paired up with a Japanese kami. This all applies to practitioners of this sort of magic, too. But if just one of those decides to make it personal and bean him over the head with a tire iron, well. Good thing there's a hospital nearby.
Unnatural Mechanism
As said above, Xun Zhen Lin has the wings of a nightingale, which are currently being overtaken by what looks like somebody's awful My First Bedazzle Project. Somebody thought this would be funny. Well, they were kind of on the mark in that. He hasn't actually used them to fly since he was a child and probably can't use them for much more than very, very slow hovering for short distances. Maybe a few feet.
Also for some reason, to put it in completely modern terms, lightning is super effective against him. If he gets hit by more than plain old static electricity, he's down.
Heaven's Judgment : Trial by Fire - If there is a fire within a one hundred meter radius, Xun Zhen Lin is automatically set on fire. No exceptions. At all. He has no fire immunity. The fire is painful. Since this is Manta Carlos, he should be on fire pretty much all the time. They're not usually intense fires unless there's a giant raging forest fire nearby. Because of this, he cannot be killed by any fire at all but he can still be horribly maimed by them and is usually in the process of being horribly maimed by them. Also these he will keep burning as long as there are fires within a hundred meters. There is no way to douse him besides putting out the other fires. The closer he is to a fire, the more it hurts. It seems to be at a mark of every ten twenty meters though.
When he burns, his fires are invisible to the naked eye but any person with even a drop of supernatural blood would be able to see then. The degree of clarity depends on how much blood they have and which race. More divine beings and elementals, for example, will see this very clearly. People with clarity related powers will see this, too, and those whose powers border on this category might be able to smell him burning.
There are, however, two benefits to this because Heaven can be strangely merciful in disturbing ways. For one, If anybody tries to purposely set Xun Zhen Lin on fire by taking it to his actual body, they will first get a nagging feeling that maybe that's not a great course of action to take. Depending on how involved with divinity that this person is, they might feel this nagging feeling more strongly, like somebody yelling in their ear Yeah, don't do this, man. If the person continues anyways, they will instead find themselves set on fire tenfold. This is basically a magical equivalent of the Mark of Cain. They can be doused in normal ways. But look, since they're on fire, that means he still feels it. Because it's still fire. He simply hurts at normal levels while the other person is in terrible and awful agony. Moral of the story: do not set Xun Zhen Lin on fire. Just shoot him in the head.
Xun Zhen Lin also can scry in fires, provided he can get over the fact that it's very painful to be close enough to one like that. If he can get over, though, he can use the fires to show him images that they were present for. So if the fire was burning while a robbery happened, he can look into it and see a perfect recording of the event. The only problems are that once a fire is out, it's out for good. Fires also don't like retaining things for long so he has an hour of clarity at most and passed that are just scraps and blurs. It should be noted that the image will only be as big as the fire is and that even if he can see it at a distance, it's the same as seeing anything else from a distance. You need to get up right next to it to really tell.
Hell's Retribution : Curse of Avarice - If at any point, his wings become fully covered in gold, it will spread to the rest of his body and turn Xun Zhen Lin into a completely stationary statue. He can still be set on fire. And will also be sentient. And unbreakable. Forever. Unlike the Trial by Fire, there is no benefit to this because this was from demons. Why would they give anybody a break?
Birth Place / Hometown : Xuchang, Henan Province, China
Occupation : Admissions Office Clerk
Father : Ha!
Mother : Lonely
Sibling(s) : Forever
Biography : A long, long time ago, there was an angel. It was a Virtue, known sometimes as Virtue Gamboge, because its name could not be spoken on Earth. It did not fall when Lucifer did and stayed loyal and steadfastly faithful to the Lord for its life. It was, in other words, a completely boring figure because it was not meant to change.
Similarly but not as long as go, there was a man who was born, for whatever reason, being free of both sin and virtue. Based off of this, it could be misunderstood that he was a bland cutout who did absolutely nothing and lived an equally bland life of no importance. This would be the wrong conclusion because the man knew what he had been born as and purposely exploited it. He was, in this way, untouchable by Heaven because being free of sin, he could not be judged, and also untouchable by Hell because being free of virtue, there was nothing to take away.
Unfortunately for the people around him, this meant he got away with anything and everything, at least when it came to non-physical affairs. Even though the man had no magic of his own, mystics found it useful to employ his unique skills to do things that they could not. Meaning things like human sacrifice, stealing from minor gods, and the such. Unable to accumulate both spiritual "good" and "evil," he was able to do such things without consequence because his soul was something that was so locked away that it was likely it could not be touched by anybody besides God Himself. He grew in power, amassed followers, and, as most people did when they were mad with power, became such a nuisance that it was impossible for higher beings to not take formal notice.
People do not speak his name. Both sides of divinity challenged him. Demons left out of frustration from having none of their deals fulfilled -there was no way to collect his soul but also there was no way to take back what they had given. Angels found it more of a struggle because he was good at pretending they had his attention, only to throw it all away when it really mattered and laugh in their faces.
Virtue Gamboge, never one to venture far from Heaven, finally decided to have a go at it. Its patience was endless, since that was how it had been made, and that with its lack of contact with humans made it blind to the fact that patience could be turned against it. For years, it visited this one human and tried to turn him from his ways. It feel into the trap of thinking that it could change him when others had failed and took small successes as a sign of major change. After two odd decades, the Virtue's guard had dropped to the point where it was relatively easy for the man to ambush it and, with the aid of gloryhounding demons, actually killed it. Cursed weapons and hellfire was used.
The Virtue appeared back in Heaven, traumatized, but otherwise unharmed. It stayed in Heaven for years longer until heard that the man had met an even more horrific end and, while disturbed, assumed that was the end of the story. That would have been very simple.
The man was reborn, soul and memories fully in tact. Some way, some how, the cycle went on. Kingdoms rose and fell in the span of hours and though most people lived in blissful ignorance of this turmoil, those at the center of it held fast and remembered. It was during this time that several magical families began to emerge and establish alliances to keep a watch out for this single man who perverted all natural order. Curtis. Ishikawa. Laughingwood. Xun. There were others, too, and though not all of them were yet well known or well stabilized, this was as early as they could be traced back. If anybody remembered so far, anyways. But what was perhaps the most guarded secret, one that was so hidden that it was eventually lost to human memory, was that they were all his descendants. The demons remembered and that is why to this day, his descendants are still hunted down by them.
For the first few lifetimes, the Virtue merely ignored the man reborn. It had more important matters to attend to besides. Inevitably, however, the two crossed paths again, because those who are long lived often tend to do so. Conflict occurred. Soon, the man found himself lying right on his back and at the other end of the Virtue's very practical and very clearly mortal-forged sword. Before what should have been the final strike, however, the Virtue merely tilted its head to the side. And put its sword away. The man was confused but decided to take the chance to get in another swing. The Virtue threw him back onto the ground. He tried again. Same result. Not long after, he became so frustrated that he promptly gave up and left the Virtue to itself.
Within a month or so, he was dead again. This was nothing new to him. Divinity continued to hear reports of his activities for a few more lifetimes before all of the information suddenly crashed to a halt. One lifetime passed, then two. Three. For a while, there were suspicions that he was merely waiting for some kind of opportunity to do something drastic but as the decades rolled on, more began to suspect that he merely died for good. Neither Heaven nor Hell claimed to have his soul, however, so it was assumed that he either fell into purgatory or maybe one of those other quieter afterlives.
The Virtue waited. Eventually, a century or so later, he met the man again. This time, they did not fight. They said nothing at all, actually, merely keeping each other company until he finally died of old age for what might have been the first time in the entire cycle. The Virtue was very good at waiting and kept itself occupied with its duties as the man went through the beginning of another life.
They kept meeting through the different lifetimes, in different locations on different continents. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they did not. The man caused little trouble from that point on and the Virtue said nothing of his continued existence. With time, however, a sort of friendship occurred between them. The man, having already committed every sin known to humanity, had his conscience catching up with him at last. Since he was still hated, he sought a neutral ear in the one being who seemed not to care at all.
Time went on. People forgot. Some divinities forgot but not all of them did. Eventually, they found out again that the man still existed and the old demons he had cheated before decided to take revenge. They did not do this in the usual violent way, however. Instead, they sent down one of their own, a powerful trickster with a disarming air who took on innocent looking forms which tended to invoke feelings of protectiveness in others. The demon befriended the man slowly in between his meetings with the Virtue, just as patient as the angel because, in essence, it was that Virtue's counterpart.
Slowly, the man turned back to his old ways but this time, he did so under the false belief that this was different. Now he had a real reason, a legitimate reason. And if he decided that he didn't like those anymore, the demon was right there at his shoulder to whisper new ones, twist it to seem like the man simply hadn't understood fully what he had been doing before. It was all his fault, yes, but that was fine because he could redeem himself by following this other way. It was lifetimes before the Virtue caught on and when it did, the man and the demon had already torn down one of the lesser known gates to Heaven and had chucked it into a nearby mountain. Which was Mt. Etna. During the same year when it had its most violent recorded eruption. 1669 was a bad year for most people involved.
As a result of this, now everybody knew that the man was still around. His more minor descendants now banded together in this mad dash to assure everybody that no, they wanted nothing to do with him. They hadn't want to be associated with him hundreds of years ago and they definitely did not want to be now. They argued with every divine being that showed up, especially the demons who were still hunting them down after all this time. Eventually, the European branches managed to get a bargain. They pointed out that the man had committed most of his crimes in the east, not the west, thus throwing their distant Asian relatives under the chariot to save their own skins. The Ishikawa were furious. The Xuns were quietly plotting revenge. The Laughingwoods, with the Curtis at their side, angrily told their European cousins to shut the hell up because they had probably just delayed a worst retribution to come in later generations.
The Virtue showed back up a few decades later. One moment, nobody knew where it was and in the next, it was back in Heaven. What it was doing, though, nobody had any idea because almost immediately afterwards, it simply melted so well into the background that when asked for, people merely drew a blank. Behind closed doors, however, it was in constant communication with God as it started to doubt. Out of love, it was told to simply stay in Heaven until the matter was sorted out. Above all, it was not to pursue the man, nor was it to take any actions against him.
Meanwhile, down on Earth, the man and the demon were wreaking havoc on the magical community that had spawned from him. Revenge for their "betrayal," so to speak. Those who fell to them had their souls hastily collected up, to be consumed or to go towards other ventures. Very soon, however, they started targeting more people -distant bloodless relatives, close friends, mere acquaintances. The body count went up steadily every week.
The man was having the time of his life but as the years rolled on, bloodlust evaporated as his conscience returned. The demon continued to soothe his concerns but now its words were only a temporary relief that disturbed him more and more as time went on. It too late for him to stop now, however. There was too much that he had already done. For this life, at least, maybe he could try and start to fix what he had wrought. It would never truly be enough but he had to try.
Soon afterwards, he was found by Virtue Gamboge. Before he could even try to explain anything, the angel simply decapitated him, ending that part of the cycle. He retained awareness for four seconds. In the first two, there was enough time to register his head and his body falling in different directions. In the third, he saw the look on the angel's face suddenly change to a mixture of horror and remorse. In the last second just before his death, he watched the Virtue go up in flames as it Fell.
After the man had died, the former angel went immediately back up to the gates of Heaven, though doing so was now incredibly painful. The shock and desire to repent was desperate enough for it to simply continue on. It was stopped but the power of a Virtue, even one that had fallen, was still enough for it to lose the typical guard. It did not, however, have enough power in it to escape the cherubim. But as it prepared itself for the worst, they merely led it back to where it had been before, debating with the Lord.
Many, many years of discussion later could be summarized in a few points. It had disappointed God. The fact that it wanted to repent was good but even if it did so, it would not be a Virtue again since it had disobeyed a direct order. It might not even be an angel anymore since it had already Fallen. Gamboge accepted all of this but still wanted to know what right it could do. He told it to make a choice. It thought on the issue but because of its indecision, asked for advice.
Whatever it was that was said during that time, the next anybody knew of Gamboge was that it had simply ceased to exist. A new angel was to be formed from the little grace that it had still retained. It was only a drop of what it had once had but the fact that any remained at all was important. In time, its former grace would return. But this was not that time; it would be thousands of years in the making. Thus this cycle went on.
Back with the man, the cycle of death and rebirth kept turning. Five lives after Gamboge had killed him, however, he was finally captured by an uneasy alliance between demons, angels, and various elemental spirits to mitigate the animosity. The angels unhappily argued for second chances, the demons just wanted him to rot. Eventually a deal was sealed, with Heaven and Hell essentially gambling over his soul. Each side would keep half of it, give him his dues, and let him free to reincarnation just one time.
Ten years later, a child with golden wings was born to the disgraced son of the Xun family.
Additional Information : Virtue Gamboge is currently known as Mal'akh Echo.
