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Nine Provinces Number One Group
Song Shuhang
The main character, an outsider to the world of Cultivation who is initially added to the group by accident.
- Achievements in Ignorance: He successfully makes body-tempering liquid in an induction cooker and a hot pot, which ought to be completely impossible. And he accomplishes it on his first try, no less.
- Conditioned to Accept Horror: Eventually, the horrifying pain and repeated deaths that Shuhang has gone through inure him to the point where horrifying injuries and things that would be agonizingly painful to others barely affect him at all.
- Cool Sword: The Talking Weapon Scarlet Heaven Sword is technically not his Cool Sword (it's the life-bound weapon of Daoist Priest Scarlet Heaven), but Shuhang ends up with it for so long and does so many things with it that eventually Scarlet Heaven Sword starts mistakenly referring to him as its owner. When he finally has to give it back, he ends up getting a copy of it made from its inner demons instead.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: Whenever he acquires a magical treasure capable of reviving him, he tends to die and use it up almost immediately; this is lampshaded by Scarlet Heaven Sword. He also tends to suffer more physical damage than everyone else after he's gained enough power to easily recover from it.
- Iron Butt Monkey: He has shades of this at times; while he has incredible luck and advances at an amazing rate, it tends to come with extreme amounts of damage, none of which actually manages to seriously harm him.
- Mistaken for Badass: Early on, many people think he's a powerful cultivator despite knowing almost nothing. Even later on when he's genuinely powerful, various circumstances tend to lead to people believing him to be far more powerful than he is.
- Mistaken Identity: Numerous people assume that he is (or is related to) Slow-Witted Song, an infamous troublemaker from the Ancient Heavenly City, and end up attacking him as a result. Later on he's also frequently mistaken for Cheng Lin, since since his ghost spirit gives him her aura and she gave him his daoist name.
- Nice Guy: He describes himself this way, and it is mostly true; though he gains a tendency to troll more and more as the story goes on, he will generally try to help those he can and avoid being overtly unfair unless it's to someone who clearly deserves it.
True Monarch Yellow Mountain
Founder and leader of the Nine Provinces Number One Group, he tends to have difficulties getting the rest of the group to behave.
- Only Sane Man: Often serves this role to the more outlandish characters in the chat.
- Team Mom: He tends to serve this role to the rest of the characters, trying to keep them in line despite their death-seeking tendencies. Shuhang even gives him the nickname "Mama Yellow Mountain" in the QR Code group.
Senior White
An incredibly powerful, lucky, and charming venerable who comes out of seclusion shortly after the story begins, Senior White is often one of Shuhang's most powerful backers.
- Big Good: As the strongest member of the chat group for most of the story, he tends to serve this role
- Born Lucky: Senior White's luck is supernatural in its intensity. When Shuhang asks him how cultivators make money, he says that he just goes outside and finds it on the ground. His luck is so strong that other members of the group pray to him whenever they're doing something that requires luck, and consider it a terrifying omen if he's suddenly called away, since it usually means his luck is helping him avoid an impending catastrophe.
- Cool Sword: His Meteor Sword is a flying sword that is nearly intelligent enough to be sapient; early in the story, he loans it out to several people, including Shuhang, to help them with various problems.
- Even the Guys Want Him: When he fails to control his charm, it will function even on otherwise straight guys.
- Long-Haired Pretty Boy: His beauty is so intense that most people assume it is unnatural.
Palace Master Seven Lives' Talisman
A cultivator who made numerous oaths in his younger life and now has to fulfill all of them to advance.
- Rash Promise: He rashly made numerous binding oaths in his youth, and now struggles to fulfill all of them. Luckily, he carries a notebook with all the oaths he made.
Seventh Cultivator of True Virtue
Seventh wielder of the Nine Virtues Phoenix Saber, Seventh Cultivator of True Virtue is one of the older and wiser members of the group.
- Cool Sword: His cultivation (as well as his dao name) is based on the Nine Virtues Phoenix Saber, a Legendary Weapon that grants incredible powers.
- Legacy Character: As his name implies, he is the seventh person to inherited the position as the wielder of the Nine Virtues Phoenix Saber.
Doudou
Yellow Mountain's sapient monster dog, who causes Yellow Mountain no end of trouble.
- The Gadfly: Doudou generally provokes Yellow Mountain at every opportunity, regardless of the consequences.
- Fearless Fool: Doudou is one of the members of the chat group who is least concerned with the long-term consequences of his actions.
- Talking Animal: He's a talking dog.
Spirit Butterfly
Soft Feather's father and lord of Spirit Butterfly Island.
- Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: He has shades of this; to him, no boy is good enough for his daughter. Fortunately for him, Soft Feather isn't interested in romance yet anyway.
- The Chessmaster: He's extremely attentive to details and very good at manipulating things to go the way he wants.
- Doting Parent: He deeply loves his daughter and will do basically anything for her.
Soft Feather
The first cultivator Shuhang meets in person, and the daughter of Spirit Butterfly.
- Daddy's Girl: She cares deeply about her father and often considers his opinions.
- Leg Focus: The story often emphasizes her perfect legs.
- Nightmare Fetishist: She tends to enjoy things that other people in the group find horrifying or intensely unpleasant, such as being launched into space, subjected to the Impregnating Gaze, or listening to Dharma King Creation's singing.
- The Not-Love Interest: While her introduction and early interactions with Shuhang follow a lot of romance tropes common to the genre, and they both end up important to each other, she's not interested in romance herself in the present day and their relationship is entirely platonic. Subverted in one of the future timelines, where her future self implies they did eventually become dao partners.
Su Clan's Seven
A discipline of Heavenly River's Su Clan and brother to Su Clan's Sixteenth.
- Blood Knight: He likes to fight a lot and generally takes any opportunity to challenge others to duels.
- You Are Number 6: Like most talented members of the Su Clan, he has a number for his dao name.
Su Clan's Sixteenth
A discipline of Heavenly River's Su Clan and sister to Su Clan's Seven.
- Bully Hunter: Early on, she would go around in the mortal world looking vulnerable in order to lure unscrupulous men into to trying and accost her, just so she could beat them up for training.
- Evil Twin: Depending on your perspective. As part of a ritual used to heal (and test) her, she has to hunt down and fight innumerable duplicates of herself.
- Rescue Romance:
- Played for laughs on her first meeting with Shuhang. He initially attempts to step in when she's being accosted by bullies... only for her to get mad at him because she was acting as a Bully Hunter intentionally, luring them in so she could beat them up for training, and now she has to find more bullies to beat up.
- Played straight later on, when she falls in love with him after he goes to great lengths to find a way to cure an injury she suffered during tribulation.
- Waif-Fu: She's petite and slender; but while she's not the strongest member of the chat group, she's still a powerful cultivator, as many people who unwisely challenged her have discovered.
- You Are Number 6: Like most talented members of the Su Clan, she has a number for her dao name.
Thrice Reckless Mad Saber
The most death-seeking and reckless member of the group, as his name suggests, Thrice Reckless Mad Saber constantly gets himself into trouble with his words.
- The Gadfly: This is often what gets him into trouble, since he delights in nettling the other members of the group, including people vastly more powerful than him.
- Fearless Fool: No amount of logic or danger can prevent him from seeking death.
- Reincarnation Romance: He is the reincarnation of the Scholarly Sage, and ends up with Skylark, who he loved but never met again in his past life.
Immortal Master Copper Trigram
A shady fortuneteller whose predictions are almost always backwards, as well as a Master of Disguise so skilled that nobody knows their actual gender.
- Ambiguous Gender: Because they're so good at disguise, and because nobody has ever seen them out of disguise, their true gender is unknown.
- Fortune Teller: But their results are almost always reversed, giving them an infamous reputation; if they predict good luck, then you'll have bad luck, and vice-versa.
- Master of Disguise: They can disguise as basically anyone, flawlessly, at any time.
Medicine Master
A master of supernatural medicine, Medicine Master is one of the first Cultivators to meet Shuhang in person and gives him substantial assistance early on.
- The Medic: As his title implies, he's a master of medical alchemy and is usually the one members of the group turn to for thorny medical issues.
- The Mentor: Early on, he serves this role for Shuhang in exchange for information about how Shuhang managed to create Body Tempering Liquid so easily.
Wandering Monk Profound Principle
A Buddhist monk who has taken a vow of silence; as a result, he communicates entirely in emojis.
- Elective Mute: His vow of silence means that he doesn't speak, though he does communicate with emoji.
- Warrior Monk: He's both a Buddhist monk and a powerful cultivator.
Xuan Nu Sect's Skylark
One of the oldest members in the group, Skylark is a blue-haired woman who was the teacher of the Scholarly Sage.
- The Fog of Ages: Initially, she remembers very little of her past, though she recovers it as the story progresses.
- Reincarnation Romance: She ends up with Thrice Reckless Mad Saber, who is the reincarnation of the Scholarly Sage, who loved her long ago.
- Resurrective Immortality: She automatically revives whenever she's killed due to her connection to eternity.
- Time Abyss: It's unclear exactly how old she is, but since she was already an experienced adult cultivator when the Scholarly Sage was born, she's at least thousands of years old. In fact, she's the oldest Seventh Stage Venerable in the entire universe.
Scholarly Faction
The Scholarly Sage
A man wearing scholarly clothing appeared in the air.
He just stood there, with the aura and bearing of a grandmaster.
When people saw him, for some reason, they felt that he was very cool.
He just stood there, with the aura and bearing of a grandmaster.
When people saw him, for some reason, they felt that he was very cool.
The founder of the scholarly faction, who died long ago in battle when attempting to ascend to become Wielder of Heaven's Will.
- Badass Bookworm: He was a scholar and also, for most of his life, the strongest man in the world.
- Department of Redundancy Department: His name in the English translation, "the scholarly sage"; normally, one would assume that a sage is scholarly!
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: His life story and place in the story strongly resembles Confucius, and his faction completes the trifecta of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian thought, to the point where the author had to clarify that they're not the same person.
- Phrase Catcher: He is constantly described as "very cool" by just about everyone. When Shuhang briefly succeeds at summoning a copy of him via his obsession, the sole description he gets is that he looked very cool; and the chapter itself is called "very cool."
- Posthumous Character: He died long before the story began, but his influence is still felt in the present day.
- World's Strongest Man: During his life, he was known as the man who suppressed the entire world.
The Heavenly City
The Heavenly Emperor
The founder and leader of the Heavenly City.
- Friendly Enemy: While she's notionally an enemy of Shuhang and company due to being on the side of the Fat Ball and the current Wielder of Heaven's Will, she's generally friendly to them due to possessing Soft Feather's ghost spirit.
- Grand Theft Me: She briefly possesses Soft Feather, then ends up possessing Soft Feather's ghost spirit on a more permanent basis.
Slow-Witted Song
A troublemaker and gadfly from the time of the Heavenly City, his constant trolling of other members of the city cause constant grief for Shuhang in the present day due to their shared name and close physical resemblance.
- The Casanova: In addition to all the other reasons people have for hating him, he constantly toyed with the hearts of basically every woman in the Heavenly City who would give him the time of day.
- The Gadfly: The way other people in the Heavenly City speak about him implies that he interacted with them this way.
- The Ghost: While it's established fairly early on that he's still alive in the present day, and he has intricate connections to almost all the main characters, many of whom are actively seeking him out, he is neither seen nor heard from for thousands of chapters on end.
- Identical Stranger: He looked extremely similar to Shuhang, leading to Shuhang getting regularly blamed for his past actions, though anyone who inspects them closely notes that there are clear differences.
- Non-Indicative Name: While he's sometimes a Fearless Fool and his behavior was occasionally Too Dumb to Live, he was actually quite intelligent; in fact, part of the reason he's so hated is because of how frequently he fooled others.
- Trickster Archetype: He serves this role in the mythology of the Heavenly City, constantly tricking everyone who interacts with him.
Cheng Lin
An immortal who caused the fall of the Heavenly City, she was also the first ghost spirit and the ghost spirit to the second Wielder of the Will, Striped Dragon. For complicated reasons she gives her daoist name to Shuhang, meaning that her enemies frequently mistake him for her.
- Born-Again Immortality: Her path to immortality allows her to give birth to herself in order to live forever.
- Deader than Dead: Subverted and played for laughs. Cheng Lin insists that she's dead, and later on she's regularly referred to as "so dead that she cannot die again." Nonetheless, this doesn't stop her from communicating on Shuhang's chat and generally interfering with the world. Her "father", Wielder of the Will Striped Dragon, describes her as having a complicated relationship with death.
@#%× / Waiting For a Promise / The Virtuous Lamia
Once the most beautiful woman in the Heavenly City, @#%× shed her body and became a being composed purely of the light of virtue. For complicated reasons, she ends up attached to Shuhang and accompanies him for most of the story. Her name is untranslatable in any modern language but the closest approximation is "Waiting For a Promise", in reference to her waiting for Cheng Lin to return and kiss her.
- The Echoer: As Shuhang's light of virtue, she generally only talks by repeating things that she heard.
- I Will Wait for You: She was so deeply in love with Cheng Lin that waiting for Cheng Lin to return is literally referenced by her daoist name.
- Playing Possum: She has a habit of feigning her death without warning, often at inopportune moments, by making an elaborate death cry and then collapsing dramatically. It's usually more surprising than convincing.
- Snake People: As Shuhang's light of virtue, she takes the form of a snake-woman.
- The Unpronounceable: Her daoist name can't be translated or pronounced in any modern language; in the text, it's rendered as @#%×. A rough approximation is apparently "Waiting For a Promise."
- World's Most Beautiful Woman: She was apparently the most beautiful in the Heavenly City.
The Netherworld
Senior White Two
The previous ruler of the netherworld, who somehow avoided disappearing when his corresponding Wielder of the Will vanished and who therefore retains control over half the realm. He looks exactly like the main universe's Senior White, and has many of the same mannerisms.
- Berserk Button: He loathes being called Senior White Two (which is a homophone for "Senior White Rabbit" in Chinese) and doing so is a sure way to attract his ire. He also hates the Fat Ball, although not nearly as much as the Fat Ball hates him.
- Big Good: Even if he's technically supposed to be evil, he generally serves this role for netherworld-focused arcs, since he's the primary enemy of the Fat Ball, who serves as the Big Bad.
- Identical Stranger: As the name suggests, he looks exactly identical to Senior White, and has the same name and mannerisms, in addition to their stories broadly overlapping.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: As the ruler of the Netherworld, he's technically evil, but he's far better than the Fat Ball, who rules the other half.
- Poke the Poodle: Many of his "evil" actions amount to this, trolling people like Shuhang rather than actually harming them.
- Sour Supporter: He is one of Shuhang's most important backers, but generally retains a bit of sourness in their interactions to preserve his reputation as the ruler of the netherworld.
The Fat Ball
A fat floating ball made of liquid metal that looks like a sphere of mercury, the Fat Ball is the current ruler of the Netherworld, though (much to its hatred) it is forced to share it with Senior White Two, who refused to disappear the way a ruler of the netherworld normally would when the Wielder of the Way changes.
- Big Bad: The Fat Ball serves this role for most of the story, as the most prominent and powerful enemy with which Shuhang has an irreconcilable relationship.
- Berserk Button: Anything to do with Senior White Two will make it absolutely flip out and drop everything in order to go after him.
