The only Grade-A Ghost Envoy The Order admits to, and one whose fighting strength is reckoned beyond all match. Yu was made by merging and remaking Blast Demon and Blade Ghost, two of the Three Terrors of Moon Bastion from years past — and that origin left a split mind in him as well: the moment the two personalities inside Yu disagree, his fighting strength drops a long way.
Because Yu was remade out of Blast Demon and Blade Ghost, and both of them were remade full of an endless rancour, The Order turned that rancour into the source of the pair’s strength. So it is that Yu’s moves mostly carry a Sha-Chi of purple-black that pours out of him, and that can put a man in a vision of countless skulls wailing and pressing in on him.
After the remaking Yu has four arms and four legs, holding sickle and great cleaver, and when the two of them are of one mind the two weapons come on like flowing water, leaving an enemy no gap to find anywhere.
Early Life
Blast Demon and Blade Ghost were once the two most prized disciples of Yue Shangjun, lord of Moon Bastion. Blast Demon was a big man; Blade Ghost was long of limb. Blast Demon, the senior of the two, was violent of temper, while his junior Blade Ghost was wilful and unruly, and often talked back to master and senior brother alike.
Their characters, their builds and their martial arts were all different. But the two of them loved the same person: their junior sister, Bloom Fiend.
Bloom Fiend was slender by nature, her face like the moon over a lotus pond, her smile like a flower, and the young men of the Wulin crowded after her.
Blast Demon and Blade Ghost, apart from their training, spent every hour thinking up ways to please their junior sister.
Bloom Fiend, as it turned out, had no feeling for either of them. She treated them as senior brothers and nothing more, warm neither way, and however hard the two of them tried they could not win her.
In the thirtieth year of The Order, so that no fire would break out behind him when he moved on the Southern Wulin, the Nether Lord opened a large-scale attack on Moon Bastion at the start of the year. The Order first sealed Moon Bastion’s escape routes from the sea, then sent a great body of Ghost Envoys in against the walls.
That night Yue Shangjun was poisoned in his wine first and died; Blast Demon and Blade Ghost held out stubbornly, and ordinary Grade-C Ghost Envoys were cut down in heaps, with some Living Envoys unable even to close with them. But against the ghost-like advance of a youth in black they could not catch his movement at all, and could only fall back fighting, and set Moon Bastion alight.
In the blaze Blast Demon wanted to go down with Moon Bastion, and Blade Ghost dragged at him with all his strength to get him out. In the confusion a burning beam came down on them: Blast Demon’s spine was broken and one of Blade Ghost’s arms was ruined. As they struggled up out of the dark, a huge black shape stood before them and took them away as easily as picking something up.
Some days later they woke in a cold, dark cell, with several men in cloth wraps standing over them, tools of every kind in their hands. Laughing, the men told the two of them they were about to conduct a great experiment.
From then on, the two of them, Blast Demon and Blade Ghost, who could never agree, were gone, and in their place stood the first Grade-A Ghost Envoy The Order had ever had: Yu.
This Grade-A Ghost Envoy is divided down the middle, half to each: four arms, four legs, and a head made of two faces. Anyone who sees him goes cold. He had best not appear anywhere at all, for the rancour that comes off him will destroy everything he sets eyes on.
Their one weakness is that their thought is not one. Once the two of them begin to quarrel, the strength falls away sharply.
And Bloom Fiend? No one knows where she went, and looking for her became the wish of Yu’s life: he swore to find his junior sister again and marry her.
In the fortieth year of The Order the old Nether Lord was murdered, and the Nether Envoy Zuo Shang took the seat of the Nether Lord, and became Yu’s new master.
On the sixteenth day of the sixth month word came that Soul had beaten Lei Dang and Leng Tu one after another at Soul-Severing Cliff, and on that news Zuo Shang decided to send Yu out in earnest to deal with Soul — Black Wound.
Rainblood II: Ye City
On the seventeenth day of the seventh month in the fortieth year of The Order, Yu, under Zuo Shang’s orders, lay hidden deep in the Ghost Envoy workshop, waiting for The Order’s young mistress, Mu Xiaokui, to come. She arrived before long, with her Ghost Envoys at her back. The Ghost Envoys in the workshop, laid on beforehand by Zuo Shang, all turned on Mu Xiaokui at once, and Yu took his moment and struck: he settled her Ghost Envoys without any effort at all and left Mu Xiaokui badly wounded, then went back into the dark with her as the bait, waiting for Soul to come.
At the fourth quarter of the shen hour Soul came deep into the Ghost Envoy workshop and looked to Mu Xiaokui’s wounds, and Yu chose that moment to appear. But Soul brought up Yu’s junior sister, Bloom Fiend, of his own accord — and with that the two personalities inside Yu began to quarrel again, and Soul took the chance to fight a Yu at war with himself.
Yu saw that he could not take Soul, and grew anxious; and at that moment the Blade Ghost personality suddenly proposed that they run, and go and find their junior sister. The Blast Demon personality agreed, and the two of them left the Ghost Envoy workshop outright and were not seen again.