Xuan Li

The Grand Scholar of the Order. When the old learning runs past everyone else, the answer is that they know little, and that the Grand Scholar Xuan Li, who makes that his study, would know far more.

Talk with Zuo Shang always leaves him with new thoughts, as though he had been invited to watch a game with Lóng and the Blight laid out on the board. Zuo Shang has said that Xuan Li joining the Order is a blessing to the Wulin.

He is a descendant of the Xuan clan. Zuo Shang wiped out his elder brother and the whole of the Xuan family, and left him alive. He says it plainly enough to Zuo Shang's face: he lives on borrowed time, and thanks the Shadow Edict for not killing him.

How that debt is to be reckoned, he does not say.

By his account the Blight is a force of destruction from beyond the stars, named in the Celestial Tome. It seems to have a will of its own, or perhaps the will of countless minds: every fragment is the whole. It spreads among the stars by one simple rule, and everything it touches is consumed into itself.

Something else from beyond the heavens stands against it. Perhaps visitors whose knowledge and power far surpass this world's raised a thing in this world to restrain the Blight; the ancients, knowing no better, called it Lóng.

He speaks of Meng Hua as well: she and Inanis destroyed each other, her consciousness scattered into the Discordance and fused with the Blight, becoming the Lady of the Veil. As for puppets, a puppet's mind is projected from a human one and may be beyond the Blight's reach; and even if it is not, the link can be cut in time to escape.