Jiang Cheng

Around the age of nine, Jiang Cheng’s father Jiang Fengmian took in Wei Wuxian, the son of an old friend. Wei Wuxian’s presence in the family was an immediate point of contention, as many suspected that he was Jiang Fengmian’s bastard son (include Jiang Cheng’s mother Madam Yu). Wei Wuxian was the opposite of Jiang Cheng: charming, funny, sociable, and wild. He also better embodied the clan’s motto —Attempt the impossible—and seemed to garner Jiang Fengmian’s favor more than Jiang Cheng. Despite initial tensions, however, Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian became fast friends and brothers in all but blood. As the world became more tangled and violent around them, Jiang Cheng always took care to protect his bastard brother, and Wei Wuxian pledged his allegiance to the Yunmeng Jiang Clan.

As cultivation disciples, Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian regularly trained and learned together. When the power and dangerous Qishan Wen Clan compelled each of the major clans to send disciples for training, teenaged Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian were among the attendees. When this “training” turned out to be a ploy to endanger the smaller clan’s youth in service of taking down a monstrous yao beast, both young men took lead rolls in devising and executing a plan to escape and find help. Their action in this battle not only put a target on their backs, but also inadvertently drove the first wedge between the two brothers. Jiang Cheng escaped with a group to find help, though it took him days. Wei Wuxian stayed behind with Lan Wangji, a man he would later marry after the world had already been turned upside down.

In the aftermath of the disastrous “training”, the Wen Clan began to make aggressive moves to bring other clans to heel, starting with Lan Wangji’s home in Cloud Recesses, then moving on to Lotus Pier, the stronghold of the Jiang Clan. The Wen representatives used Wei Wuxian as a flimsy excuse to attack, killing almost everyone in the process. Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian narrowly escaped, but Jiang Cheng’s Golden Core—an internal store of spiritual energy that allows a person to practice Qi cultivation—was brutally destroyed, devastating any hope of rebuilding his clan as leader.In the months that followed, Wei Wuxian worked tirelessly to come up with a way to heal the wound while Jiang Cheng fell into a deep depression. Eventually, Jiang Cheng followed Wei Wuxian’s instructions to seek out the help of a reclusive and powerful cultivator in the mountains to have his core restored. Jiang Cheng is, at the canonpoint I draw him from, unaware of the fact that the Golden Core that was “restored” in him is actually Wei Wuxian’s own core transferred out of his body, a sacrifice to allow Jiang Cheng to take his place as the clan leader and raise the Yunmeng Jiang Clan back to life

Jiang Yanli was the eldest child of the clan, but as a woman, she cannot be clan leader. Rather, she married the future leader of the Lanling Jin Clan and had a son, Jin Ling. Jiang Cheng threw himself whole-heartedly into loving his nephew (in his way) from the very first day. Between Jiang Cheng and his paternal uncle Jin Guangyao, Jin Ling was always destined to be a sheltered, spoiled, and perhaps maladjusted little heir. After the events that soon followed, Jin Ling became the sole object of Jiang Cheng’s familial affections—a tremendous burden for one boy to bear.

Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng grew apart over the years, largely due to Wei Wuxian’s dedication to protecting the last dregs of the dying Wen Clan and his insistence on practicing (and perfecting) Demonic Cultivation, a maligned practice. Years of being at odds with society finally came to a head for Wei Wuxian: he was framed for killing Jiang Yanli’s husband, and when she was killed protecting him from a resultant assassination attempt, Wei Wuxian lost his mind. His murderous rampage shook the entire cultivation world. To avenge his sister, Jiang Cheng rallied with the Jin Clan (seeking to avenge their fallen leader) to lead the charge in a siege. This siege resulted in Wei Wuxian’s death and left Jiang Cheng betrayed, abandoned, and undercut to rebuild again.

Jiang Cheng’s duchozweirz starts to manifest in eczema-like bumps across his body. Eventually the bumps will grow in size and sprout feathers—usually painful pin feathers that aggravate the transformation further. This beginning phase can only last a few days before the brutal peak of transformation hits, a violent quarter-hour that rends and draws his body out, twists him into the form of a massive osprey-like bird. Stark feathers in black and white, talons and beak a corpse-purple, the phoenix still stands 6 feet high with an 18-foot wingspan. Over time, the white feathers start to go gray; he seems to be shedding something. Black powder, like soot. The phoenix has about twelve hours to rampage before feathers start to loosen and fall away, revealing that his body is slowly turning to charcoal. Like frostbite, it starts in his extremities and slowly overtakes his body, brittle edges knocking loose the further it goes. Eventually, the phoenix turns entirely to charcoal and crumbles.

Besides flight and serious ripping power, the phoenix can catch and carry anything that weighs less than it does. The black powder shedding down his feathers will cause fever if inhaled, a fever that can only be broken by fucking. If the fever isn’t broken, the victim will die to death, player’s choice of what that looks like. If the powder falls on an open wound, it will immediately begin to rot, and that rot will spread until it kills the victim. Sorry…

The phoenix behaves like a wounded animal—thrashing, biting, clawing and destroying anything that comes near him. Or anything that comes in eye sight. He has enough awareness to pause before tearing into a loved one, if he manages to find any of those, and he can be calmed down enough to be engaged for sex. This is the only way he can be brought down from transformation without dying, and the detransformation is just as nasty as it was to get to birdmode.