Xie Xiaorong

The healer who keeps the pharmacy in Pangzhen. He knows Soul before Soul names himself, and only then gives his own name: Xie Xiaorong, disciple of the divine healer Xie Huichun.

He is not like the Transcended healers outside. His mind is still his own, and when Soul asks whether he still has his senses, he does not deny it.

Xie Huichun was heir to the Xie family's martial art, but he thought saving lives mattered more than making a name with it. From the family's breathing methods he built a school of medicine of his own and saved countless people over the years. When the Maskwalker uprising came he spent his fortune gathering men to break Transcension, and helped Maskwalkers who had gone astray hold their killing urge in check.

The one he could not save brought a mob to his door. They called him a quack, bound him, and cut off the hands that had saved so many. He was never the same afterwards, and in the end it was Soul who sent him on his way.

After their master became one of those things, Xie Xiaorong and the others followed him and underwent the same Transcension. Xie Huichun left a medicine behind; taken on time, it holds the mind against the erosion. It only lasts a little while.

He tends the secret medicine and healing draughts Soul carries, and can raise both their strength and the number of times they may be used. He says it plainly: one day he may become one of those things himself, and Soul will have to send him the same way.

His senior fellow disciple Xie Qiudong now practises in the backstreets of Pangzhen, a mask of copper coins over his face. To Xie Qiudong, his junior's obscurity proved that years of hard study can go unnoticed all the same.