She was once the Chief Adjudicator of the imperial Bureau of Rectitude: a woman who hated evil as though it had wronged her personally, who held that it must be rooted out to the last root, and who would not bend for a favor or a bribe. In the thirteenth year of The Order, on the court’s orders, she led her subordinates to a gathering at Tianling Peak — and was never seen again.
After she joined the Council of Eleven, that sense of justice twisted further. She now held that every crime deserved death, no matter how small it was and no matter what reason lay behind it.
Perhaps the Banyuehua who had genuinely wanted to clear the world of its filth died on Tianling Peak long ago; the one who came back down was only a husk that could not let go of its obsession…
As an Adjudicator of the Bureau of Rectitude, Banyuehua could hardly have stayed behind the scenes. Quite the opposite: she routinely led from the front, travelling from place to place to take prisoners with her own hands.
A woman in the service of the state naturally did not carry the weapons of an ordinary fighter. Her armament, “Buried Flowers Beneath the Moon,” is in fact one name for two weapons: the Bright Moon Blade, hung on her left, and the Flower-Burial Gun, hung on her right. Her mastery of the pair let her produce, again and again, an effect of 1+1>2.
After the Tianling Massacre she accepted Transcension. The parts remade were a small part of the left half of her face — the mouth excepted — and her whole left side. Transformed, she could perform far stronger martial techniques, and could put a precisely aimed gunshot into an opponent in the instant after her blade connected; almost no one could avoid it.
Before the Tianling Massacre
In the eleventh year of The Order, Banyuehua became the ninth Adjudicator of the Bureau of Rectitude — an Adjudicator who refused to do things by the Wulin’s rules, and who wanted to bring the Bureau back to what it had originally been.
By then the Bureau had been hollowed out. The Wulin powers and the officials of the court’s Ministry of Justice had colluded for so long that the office existed in name only, its officers drawing their salaries and doing nothing. It was precisely this that made the unbending Banyuehua resolve to put the institution in order and accomplish something real.
Not long after taking up the post she brought several major cases to a close. The pirates who had run wild around Kuigang Harbor for years were cleared out under her command, and even Shen Ba, the Eighth Elder — the great magnate who had called the tune in Nancheng for so long, with seven sects and fifteen gangs under his hand — was thrown into the imperial prison through her efforts. Her utterly different way of doing things left the great houses and the wealthy merchants both afraid of her and resentful, and some among them had already begun spending money on connections in the capital, hoping to have her removed from above.
In the thirteenth year of The Order, a mysterious figure on Tianling Peak issued a summons to heroes, gathering the finest fighters of the realm to view the Heavenly Tome together. Banyuehua then received orders from the Ministry of Justice: go to Tianling Peak and seize the Remnant Volume of the Heavenly Tome. She took the Bureau’s best people up the mountain and waited for her moment…
After the Tianling Massacre
When the Tianling Massacre was over, Banyuehua turned out to be one of the nine who survived it. And she finally learned that the men above her had known all along how dangerous the Heavenly Tome was, and had foreseen that something like the massacre would happen. Taking the Remnant Volume out of the hands of the realm’s greatest martial artists had also been far beyond the reach of Banyuehua and the Bureau. The order was given anyway, because they wanted the attempt to kill her.
Once she knew the truth, Banyuehua was utterly disillusioned with those above her — yet her determination to uphold the law of the Wulin had never been firmer. That need had grown past anything the court expected of her loyalty; it had become a private fanaticism. To judge the Wulin single-handed, she reached an understanding with the other ten: together they would break the Heavenly Tome down and develop what it held, and, like the rest of them, she put herself through the Transcension it required.
Not long after, Banyuehua resolved to rebuild the Bureau of Rectitude herself. She sent letters far and wide, calling back the veterans who had not climbed Tianling Peak with her that year. Such was the pull of her character that they came, one after another, and like her they accepted Transcension and joined her “new” Bureau of Rectitude.
In the thirty-first year of The Order, the Council of Eleven resolved to carry out “Blossom on All Sides”: each member would take their own people to a city of the Phantom World and raise it in revolt. Banyuehua led her Bureau of Rectitude to the most lawless city in the Phantom World — Huangcheng, in the southwest.
Huangcheng had always been hard to reach and worse to live in, so its sects had grown up worshipping force and settled their differences in open bloodshed. Later, under the auspices of Bie Yingzong, the city’s underworld and its respectable side made peace. Each side kept to its own side of the line, and both agreed not to disturb the ordinary people of Huangcheng more than they had to; the city gained a peace it rarely got.
And that was when Banyuehua arrived. Pulled by two things at once — an idea of judgment gone crooked, and the hunger for killing that Transcension had left in her — she began to pass sentence on every “crime” she recognized, without distinction. For people who lived by the blade, the sentence was always the same: beheading, carried out at once.
Each time she carried out one of those executions with her own hands, she felt that the justice the old Bureau of Rectitude had defended was being spoken aloud at last. The price was that her iron crackdown brought Huangcheng no stable order at all; the city only grew more chaotic.
In the end, unable to bear her heavy-handed rule any longer, the Wulin of Huangcheng banded together and prepared to hire the mysterious The Order — to ask it to send someone who would help wipe the Bureau of Rectitude out.
The Order took the contract and sent one of its Living Envoys, Lei Dang. But the state of Huangcheng was worse than The Order had imagined, and soon word of Lei Dang stopped coming as well.
So the Nether Lord sent his adopted son, Soul, to Huangcheng in turn. Another storm of blood was about to break…