The wife of Mu Tianmiao, the old Nether Lord of The Order, and mother of the young lord Mu Xiaokui. She was a daughter of the court’s General Wan, and she did no small part in founding The Order. Her nature was bold and open-handed, her martial skill high, and her ambition greater than most men’s — though there was fine judgement underneath the bluntness.
In the twenty-second year of The Order, Wan Qiaoru died in childbirth, and her weapon, the Iron Empress, was left to her daughter Mu Xiaokui.
Wan Qiaoru was a woman, but her strength far outstripped any man’s, and that was what let her wield the blade her father had been given in secret by the court — the Iron Empress. The sheer size of that Command Sword, its make, even its weight, went far past the limits of its age; it was forged by a top-secret research arm of the court’s Ministry of War. Pour her own Sha-Chi into it and the sword would amplify that Sha-Chi without limit and release it again, giving it the terrible power to shatter anything like so much porcelain.
Against that, the blade demanded enormous strength and constitution of its bearer, and perhaps for that reason General Wan had always treated it as no more than a mark of imperial favour and never truly used it. Then Wan Qiaoru carried it away in secret when she left, and from that day it never left her side, until her death. The Command Sword also became the only medium through which Mu Xiaokui could still feel her mother’s presence.
Wan Qiaoru was a daughter of the court’s General Wan. Raised in a general’s household, she was open, direct and high in martial skill.
How Wan Qiaoru and Mu Tianmiao actually met cannot be established now. What is beyond doubt is that she always wanted to smash the old order and set up new rules, and that this was the same goal Mu Tianmiao had. So from the day Mu Tianmiao set his mind on building something of his own, Wan Qiaoru followed him, and she earned no small credit for him.
Unlike the calculating, thrice-weighing Mu Tianmiao, Wan Qiaoru had more of a man’s temper — which does not mean she was all force and no finesse.
The destruction of the Myriad Demons Society shows as much. The Society had been the great threat to Mu Tianmiao for years; he brooded over it for a full year and finally produced a superb plan that would erode and break the cult slowly from within.
Mu Tianmiao could no longer remember why he had brought the matter up with Wan Qiaoru, or what he had expected when he waited for the quiet woman listening to him to give her verdict. Wan Qiaoru said the plan was brilliant and seamless, but not the sort of thing a man would do; to wipe out the Myriad Demons Society there was no need for anything so troublesome.
Mu Tianmiao had long since decided that Wan Qiaoru had more dash than careful plotting, so the answer did not surprise him and he laughed it off.
He had not expected that three days later Wan Qiaoru would stand before him again, silver armour bloodied, her dark hair flying, the head of the Myriad Demons Society’s master in her hand.
Mu Tianmiao feared this rash act would bring the Society down on them. Before he could put the fear into words, Wan Qiaoru told him the Society had already been wiped out to the last man: she knew they would never let it go, so of course she would leave no trouble behind — she blew the dam upstream and turned the whole Society into a sheet of water.
She told him, smiling, that courage and cunning together are what make a general; only the reckless are good for nothing, and not fit to walk beside him.
The Wulin turns like weather and death follows close behind it, and those who live in it rarely expect in earnest to grow old beside a partner.
Mu Tianmiao knew perfectly well that the chance of the two of them seeing each other past seventy was vanishingly small. Caught in layer upon layer of plots, the likelier ending was that one of them would leave this murderous world first.
But he had not expected that Wan Qiaoru, who had seen him through the founding of The Order and through the Dragon-Demon War, would die in childbirth. Martial artists are hardy at the best of times, and Wan Qiaoru was a tiger’s daughter from a general’s house, stronger than anyone; Mu Tianmiao could not work out, by any reasoning, why it had happened.
After long years of not working it out, Mu Tianmiao, who had never believed in fate, began to suspect it was retribution. He remembered clearly that after he had imprisoned the lord of the Bastion of Mó, that lord’s wife had died in childbirth out of sheer grief. Perhaps this was fate mocking him, or perhaps it was the curse of that despairing lady.
Mu Tianmiao came at last to accept that Wan Qiaoru was gone. From then on, through the rest of a life full of suspicion and double-dealing, only his memories held a single bright and gentle light.