Wife of Long Wu, one of the nine children of the Long family’s last generation — and the finest physician the Long family ever produced.
She was quiet by nature and fierce underneath. She had little taste for talking with others, and preferred to sharpen her medicine in silence.
As the legitimate daughter of a Grand Secretary’s house in the Imperial City, Gongsun Xiaofeng had both a brilliant natural gift and access to the contents of the Heavenly Tome, and the two together made her, in time, the foremost physician of her age.
In medicine, she joined the flow of Sha-Chi to the healing methods recorded in the Heavenly Tome, and from that union she grasped, by her own invention, an art that uses the circulation of Sha-Chi to pull a body back from the edge of death and drive it to full strength in a matter of moments. She named it “Phoenix Soul Ward.”
The Remnant Volume of the Heavenly Tome is vast beyond measure, strange beyond reason. It has been studied since ancient times and is still neither fully understood nor fully broken; to grasp even one or two of its truths is enough to hold a thousand times the learning of ordinary people.
Gongsun Xiaofeng came from a Grand Secretary’s family in the Imperial City, and so she had the chance to reach the Volume and to study it. Add a quick, bright mind and wide learning, and in time she drew from the Heavenly Tome a medicine no one else knew of. Word had it that her skill had passed beyond the limits of common sense — that she could heal the dead and lay flesh back on bare bone — though in the end few ever had the chance to see it proven.
Things too far above the world, too bright to look at, seldom last long in it. She knew this well. So she kept to low ground, rarely showing her ability before others, and bent her head to her studies alone — until at last she stood by herself at the head of the medical world, beyond anyone’s reach.
The strong, by nature, keep company with the strong.
To shore up the Long family’s standing, the Grand Secretary’s daughter (Gongsun Xiaofeng) and the son the head of the Long family favoured most (Long Wu) were duly married. Their match was no more than the political alliance great houses make as a matter of course, and yet it proved the saying true. With not a shred of feeling to build on, the two had none of the heat that lovers share, but they treated each other with respect and lived in harmony. Servants would sometimes joke that they did not seem like husband and wife so much as two colleagues at the same post — no talk of moonlight and flowers, only of the road ahead and what they hoped to find on it.
On what the Wulin should become and how the Long family should grow, their thinking matched to a strange degree. They wanted the Long to hold extraordinary power and to be careful with it — never to abuse what they could do, never to bend others with threat and force. Virtue and fair dealing should make the family a pillar the Wulin could lean on, the root of the respect and trust people gave it.
Such trust and such unspoken understanding are rare enough between ordinary couples.
But before any of that could be reached, they first had to stand at the head of the Long and keep the family at the summit of the Wulin; only then would there be strength to spare for the rest, step by step. Both saw this as clearly as a mirror, and both did all they could for it — even the son born to them later was born to add one more weight to the contest for the clan headship.
With Gongsun Xiaofeng holding the whole of the Long family’s medical institution in her own hands, and with the peerless sword art and golden blade-aura handed down through the Long main line, the two worked together to hold up the great legend of the Long family and to keep it in the people’s hearts. Everyone understood plainly by then that Long Wu had all but become the only possible choice for the next clan head.
Their strength and their success earned them, in the end, the envy and the enmity of the other brothers and sisters; and the unrest and the splintering inside the Long family gave “The Order” the opening it had been waiting for in the dark all along.
In The Order’s tenth year, Long Tairan, thirty-fifth head of the Long family, died suddenly, and named no successor before he went. From there the quarrels among the nine children of the Long family deepened. To take the moral high ground, Long Wu proposed that his own branch leave the Long family’s main compound and live for a time in his own private residence, Xinglong Manor, and look further there into the truth behind the old clan head’s sudden death.
In The Order’s eleventh year, Gongsun Xiaofeng was with child, and the two were glad enough to have one more piece on their side of the board. At the same time they saw the situation tightening, and began looking for a way to keep a road open behind them, against the day they might need it.
In The Order’s twelfth year, Long Wu’s son was born. The couple set their maid Mo Zhaoyun to care for the child, and told her the plan for keeping the Long family’s line alive.
Later, Long Mingyu, who had always stood guard over Long Wu, received word that the Bastion of Mó might hold a clue to the truth of the old clan head’s death. He set out on his own for the Bastion’s ruins to look into it.
But on a rainy night not long after Long Mingyu left, Long Wu’s second elder sister, Long Yijue, came to Xinglong Manor with his fourth elder brother, Long Lie, and his ninth younger brother, Long Xing. That night the three of them drew their swords inside the manor, and the deathsworn they had brought poured in after them, and the fight with the Long couple turned into a fight to the death.
When the great house came down, she stayed at his side throughout, and fought beside him to the last, until her life went down to the Yellow Springs.
What was it that held her heart at the end — the surpassing medicine that would now never be passed on, or the great hope she and Long Wu never reached, or the child still in swaddling, whose fate no one could yet tell?
Down the long river of the years, no one ever knew.