Since The Order was founded it has converted Ghost Envoys by the thousand, and among that number the ones rated Grade-A could be counted on one hand. Suozhe predates the ranking system entirely, so he has no rank at all — and yet, even among the Grade-A envoys, his strength is the greatest without question.
That said, hardly anyone in The Order knows this one exists, and nobody knows where he is. Perhaps the secret died with Mu Tianmiao and became a permanent riddle?
Suozhe has no miraculous martial art to speak of. What he has is the head. Through conversion, the single lock-eye in that head can fire an extremely powerful beam, and the beam goes through any defence in the world, however solid, striking whatever it is aimed at directly.
That “lock head” can also be taken off. In a way nobody can explain, it locks down an opponent’s every movement — they can do nothing but watch Suozhe’s fists come down and pound them into pulp.
Beyond that he has his two fists and nothing special, other than the fact that they are quite a lot stronger than they look.
He was a pitiable child. His mother, while carrying him, took in a rare poison by accident — the Night Violet. Both of them were expected to die. Instead she gave birth early to a freak with an absurdly small head.
To the physicians this freak would not live past ten, and if he did live he would never taste any joy in the world; better to deal with it early. His father would not give up. Every day he fed the child on goat’s milk, and every time he looked at him something close to dread rose in his chest.
As the child grew, his appearance grew stranger and more frightening. In the end the father could not bear it. Born with a shrivelled brain, the boy was left at the roadside by his family, watching the receding figure with his one remaining eye. It seemed his ending could only be to freeze to death slowly in the cold wind.
He did not freeze. To The Order’s leader, any waste can be put to use, this child included.
After that the idiot who knew only eating, drinking and sleeping was shut in a dark dungeon. Mu Tianmiao fed him well and dressed him in the finest silk, and day and night plied him with money and women, while endless dark voices whispered at his ear —
Do you want it? It is all yours, we give you everything, if only you serve us.
Little by little the desire at the bottom of him was dug out. He wanted the gold and the jewels, the rich food; greed, lust, rage, fixation — he learned to express them and to speak of them. He waved his short arms at the temptation again and again, but could not reach it, could not touch it.
In that endless confusion he understood that his head had been taken off his body, that stones had been packed into the body, that a great lock now hung at his neck. What was left of his brain was all inside that lock; his one remaining eye was set into it, held in his own two hands. His mind seemed to open out, to become boundless; he jumped from one dimension to another, from one way of thinking to another. His brain had long ceased to be human, and it had never once thought like one.
The waste did not know what he looked like. Ugly, presumably. The shadow in the dark called him Suozhe, and that is the name he has carried since.
Once the idiot became Suozhe, the whole of him changed. Everything in the world became illusion to him; the bustling world was dung. With Suozhe’s power he can lock space itself, and look across time at all things — for a former idiot, the world he now sees is past anything a normal person can imagine.
He wants to fight. Since his conversion, though, he has stayed in the dungeon, waiting.
Then one day the dungeon door opened, and he could feel it: a master of extraordinarily violent, heavy Sha-Chi had been locked into a cell. Only a wall stood between them, and the shadow forbade breaking it, so Suozhe could not meet the man properly.
So Suozhe began to work with his will alone, building an illusory space out of nothing and fighting that master in an endless war of minds. In that dark asura ground the master became a black-winged demon, raging through Suozhe’s mind, while Suozhe raised cage after cage to trap the demon and cut it down.
Decades passed and neither won. Neither ever would. Both of them enjoyed the endless fight — it was the only entertainment two men who might be sealed in that bottomless dungeon forever had, and for that reason neither ever struck to destroy the other’s mind.
Perhaps the eternal war will end one day. It would end when one of them dies of age, or when a third person walks into that bottomless pit.
Rainblood II: Ye City
On the eighteenth day of the seventh month, Year 40 of The Order, Suozhe felt it: another presence had come in, and this presence was remarkably like the one locked in the cell — the lord of the Bastion of Mó.
Suozhe was beside himself with joy. To him it meant his life, which might have rotted down there underground, had changed. Wherever the change took him, he would spend everything he had on the one real fight of his life.