Channa

One of the Order's Shadow Edicts, a monk, called the Dark Monk. Every Shadow Edict under Shadow Sovereign Mu Tianmiao has a charge of his own; Channa's is simply the martial arts he carries. A monk with the word demon fixed to his name earns no respect by it, but the name does measure the distance between him and the cloister: neither precepts nor karma are what he is after. The craft itself is.

He has mastered three hundred and sixty heretical arts long lost to the world. The number is close to absurd. A heretical art usually dies with the man who made it; to hold even one is rare, and he holds all three hundred and sixty. Rarer still is his range of weapons: in at least nine of them he ranks among the Wulin's ten finest. To stand on nine weapons at once is not a matter of tricks. It means each one has been brought to the point where he can meet a specialist on equal terms.

His temper turns without warning, and he has vanished without a trace. On the Order's roll his entry runs only a few lines: no teacher, no deeds, no destination. A man who merely withdraws from the world still leaves marks behind; he left none. The name Dark Monk still comes up now and then, but always with the same two facts — three hundred and sixty arts, nine weapons. No one can name a single thing he has done.