Xujingzi (Custom Application)

Character Name:

Age: 1,842 +/- 20

Gender: Female

Race: Human

Appearance (Picture Recommended:) Scaling: 5'3" / 130 lb

Starting Location: Earth.

Biography: In the 14th year of of Han Emperor Huan's reign (3rd year of Yanxi Era), the special Imperial eunuch agents were mopping up of the last of the supporters of the Liang family, who had dominated the court for so long as regents. The Huang family, officials and great bankers on the north shore of Lake Tai, had so far avoided the wrath of the finally-freed emperor. A letter in the autumn changed all of that.

Soldiers of Eunuch Ju found the letter while searching the house of Dong Kuo prior to burning the premises. It referred to and detailed a series of loans, to the tune of 50,000 taels of silver, made at no interest to Dong Kuo and thereby passed on to fund Liang Ji's campaign to maintaing power. Most damning was the phrase, "For a mutual cause" at the bottom, just before the chop print of Huang Shi, who was patriarch.

While Ju discussed the matter with his lieutenants to decide who would be sent on the punitive expedition, two men scurried away from the firelight of the burning Dong residence. They had ties to the Liang family; one was even betrothed to the second daughter for once she becomes of age. They galloped from Luoyang, spending silver freely for fresh horses and stealing horses when they ran out. These messengers arrived a few days before Eununch Ju's men.

Their message was received with a grim expectation. Huang Shi had been preparing for such a time ever since knowing that the Liang had been destroyed. Even while the peasantry celebrated in the streets, he had been busily burning documents and sending to friends and contacts to have all ties severed. It had almost worked, if not for that one letter. Overnight, the family packed what they could and sold what they couldn't. Their second daughter Rong was 8.

There is no safe place in China for a fugitive family like theirs; they will have to flee the empire and seek their refuge in the barbarian lands of central Asia. It would be a hard flight, but Huang Shi had great hopes of calling upon his foreign contacts once they were abroad. All forty members of the household fled westwards and entered the Kushan Empire, where they settled in the northern mountains.

The wealth of the Huang family saw to it that life wasn't harsh. More than two years passed in peace. The family adapted to the local culture and tongue as well as they could. They prepared for the wedding next year of their daughter to one of the heroes who had saved their family.

One day in the winter of that year, there was an unexpected knock on the door, followed by an unexpected swift kick. It was the local police arresting everyone and seizing all of the property. It may have been nice to say that Rong escaped into the wilderness, but no such storybook happening happened. An agent of Eunuch Ju had arrived in the town, chasing after the cold trail of the Huang family, and had convinced the governor that he could expect improved relations with the Han Dynasty if he would simply turn over fugitives to the proper authorities.

The trek back to the capital was long and cold. The blankets thrown over the wooden bars of the prison-wagons were hardly proof against the freezing winds of the mountains and of the western plateau. The Huangs huddled for warmth, but there was no illusion of warmth in their hearts; what awaited them was surely an executioner's cleaver, descending.

Eunuch Ju fulfilled all expectations save one. When he was writing the sentence for Rong, he paused and beckoned her closer. His bony fingers turned her head this way and that. He tapped on her feet, examined her fingers, and at long last gave a grunt of satisfaction. The emperor was building for himself a harem of a thousand concubines, he said, and it would be a pity to waste a fine specimen, even one born of a traitor, to a rude execution.

She saw nothing of the executions; there were too many tears.

Rong arrived at the palace within a week, but there was a line while training took place. Between the hundreds of concubines and the concubines-to-be, there were whispers of Emperor Huan's infrequent virility. She tried to appear small and not draw his eyes and succeeded quite admirably. What she hadn't expected was manage to escape the palace altogether within the year.

One of the ancient wonders of the palace were logistics of organizing several hundred women, who must not be seen by the male peasantry, out onto field trips so that, by order of the Emperor, they would have broadened minds. Rong slipped the party on her first outing and the double headcounts both missed her because they were using outdated lists. She found a nearby farmhouse, whose occupants were all too glad to accept her Imperial finery in exchange for a plain, well-worn dress.

For the first time, under all the corners of the sky, Rong was alone.

By random eavesdropping in the square in the next village, she found a trio of people with rather unusual opinions of the mass evacuation of men. They thought that it was against the natural order of things, which was unusual when compared to the people who think that the Emperor was flaunting his sovereign power or when compared to the people who wishes that they could have gotten a look. These three people were also unusual in that they were women.

A polite tug on a sleeve, followed by a polite question, revealed to Rong that these were Taoist priestesses of the Long White Mountains. A few more inquiries later, they only had one question to ask before taking Rong back with them to induct into the order. Did she want to avenge her family?

Rong unhesitatingly answered that she did not. This surprised both them and herself. When she repeated the answer in the temple, it did not surprise the head priestess. Here was someone who did not have the human failings of anger, vengeance, or depression. It was like a gemcutter finding, not only a diamond in the rough, but an entire kimberlite column. She was given the precept name Xujingzi ("She who dwells in the void between boundaries")

The only hierarchy in the temple was by seniority, which Rong was all to happy to not disrupt. She quietly tended the gardens, studied the manuals, made the prayer rounds in the villages, and generally disappearing into the sect's workings. Distinguishment came when she was first allowed to spar at the age of fourteen.

The priestesses practiced martial arts primarily as a way to strengthen the body and to focus the mind and secondarily as a means of self-defense. Xujing fought in peace and lost, but not before demonstrating a palm strike that missed entirely but managed to dent the wooden wall of the arena ten feet away. This level of aptitude called for passing on the teachings of the Nine Dark Manual.

This was one path to power which had very little in the way of applied fighting. For years, Xujing sat on a straw mat and performed the exercises of the moving of qi along the taiyin, shaoyin, jueyin, the eight extraordinary meridians, and collect in dantian. The able practitioner gathers, from the distilled essence of heaven and earth, a bottomless sea of qi. The thought moves the will, the will moves the qi, and the qi moves all things.

Xujing erred in trying forcefully to breach into the seventh and highest understanding of the Nine Dark Manual without first having strengthened herself through the appropriate exercises. This was understandeable because those exercises were to be repeated for twenty years before readiness. She succeeded in channeling the purest qi in what felt like an ice-cold slug of mercury along her veins. In that same moment of exhultation, a meridian cracked along its length and plunged the impatient into a gasping sickness.

The road to recovery was four months long and apparently paved with the thin gruel that people feed to the elderly who are on death's doorstep. Under the advice of the senior priestesses, the bedridden Xujing laid aside the practicing of qi and spent her time facing the ceiling and contemplating the way.

She sat again in four months, stood in six, and walked in ten. By her sixteenth birthday, she was again practicing the arts. The Emperor was dead. Long live the Emperor.

Executive Summary Version
Rong was born in about 150 CE. She lost her family to politics and escaped the Imperial harem. She became a Taoist priestess. She received the name Xujingzi. She learned martial arts and practiced Ki. She had a training accident and spent the recovery time contemplating the way.

Attributes:
Strength: 50
Agility: 50
Ki: 250
Endurance: 75

TP: Ki Control, Ki Sense

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Roleplay Sample: The oni had broken out the guide ropes again. There was a war happening again somewhere in the universe and the influx of newly-inhumed souls The line of souls wound back and forth across the entry hall and vanished out of the doors. It was always loud here, the murmurs of the souls mixing together into a sea of noise that was only occasionally beaten down by the demands of silence from the patrolling oni shepherds.

There were many potted plants out here in front of the Check-In Station, althought the vast majority of them were arranged as if by someone who hadn't the foggiest notion of feng shui. A particularly ancient one, its roots having cracked through the bottom and infiltrated the thin grout between the stone slabs, stood in the centre of the eastern side, occupying the Dui position. In the expansive shade beneath this tree sat a fixture that was almost as old as it.

That fixture may have been annoyed, several centuries ago, at being referred to as a fixture. This was Xujing, the Unmoving Maiden Thinking of Nothing, who has meditated under this tree for over a thousand years. Empires had passed before her faint smile, but very few souls had stepped out of line to converse with her. Even though death wonderfully freed the mind from worldly pressures, the prospect of afterlife kept attentions pointed forward and towards the Yama's door.

Given near-infinite time, even the most improbable things are bound to happen. A small king stepped out of line, drawing a few words of protest from those of his ministers who had been executed alongside him during the coup. The coup was an enlightened one, as the manipulators had devised it as an opportunity to test a novel method of communications. Since you can't have more than one king and there is no gap between kings, they reasoned, you can use the instantaneous passage of succession to heirs by carefully torturing kings. This rapidly got out of control when the insurrection was hijacked by prandialists, who hold that food should be freely available for everyone as a basic right.

King Beninji the Second sat down in front of the white-robed figure. The two stared at each other for long minutes. The ministers shuffled on.

"Why do you sit here?"

"I sit here for the same reason that your ministers walk in line," Xujing replied, smiling.

"They go to their afterlife. What is there for you here?"

"The same."

"The Judgement lies ahead, the onis had said."

"I have my own treasure house. Why would I search outside?"

There was a long silence. The King usually got angry at his court if someone had answered so impertinently, but he was not at his court. Furthermore, he had most recently observed the loyalty of the ministers of his court and was reminded of where he was now.

"What do you have in your mind?" He inquired.

"Nothing."

"If you have nothing, then what is there for you to do?"

"Try to throw it out."

"How can you throw nothing out?"

"Well," Xujing said, "then I try to carry it out."

King Beninji was enlightened.

The two sat together under the fig tree and watched the world pass by. Not long after, the five men who had begun the insurrection arrived. They were surprised to see their former king sitting by the side of the line, but dared not step out of line.

"What are you doing there?" They called.

"I am having my afterlife." Beninji answered.

"We were right to overthrow you. You don't even understand that the afterlife is up ahead!" They jeered back.

Beninji was about to reply when Xujing put a hand on his shoulder. She shook her head and said nothing, simply smiled and nodded towards the conspirators. A handful of moments passed, then an oni trundled up and gave each of the five two solid thwacks for being loud and disorderly in line. They passed on in silence.

Xujing released her hand, "Beninji, where is your afterlife?"

"It is here." He pointed at the ground where he sat, next to the fig tree.

Xujing shook her head, her smile taking on a slight sad cast. She reached out and took his hand, then rested the hand back into his lap where it was before.

Beninji was enlightened.

Later that day, the former king reached the Yamma's desk and was judged worthy to go into Heaven.

You can't start off the RPG being dead, you'll have to start on a planet.

*Bump with bio fix*

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