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Across the wartorn land of Remnant, a young man flees his burning village and finds refuge in an old temple. There, he will find a new mentor in Master Shu Ren, ancient master of Lotus Temple Sect of martial arts. Trained from a young age in martial arts and the secrets of perfect aura control, a young Xia will be unleashed on the land. Remnant's last.
FanFiction.Net summary

Xia is a Wuxia RWBY fanfic by Coeur Al'Aran where a recently orphaned Jaune Arc is made a student of the Lotus Sect, under the wise Master Ren, and taught how to live and how to fight.


Xia contains examples of the following...

  • Adaptational Badass:
    • Jaune takes to the Lotus Sect training far better than he ever did learning at Beacon in canon, after starting from the same (nil) level of training and even lower level of fitness (being younger). Even after many Volumes of improvement, being able to comfortably kill Grimm and protect himself, Jaune was still easily the weakest of the young adult protagonists. Here he's barely Beacon-aged, if that, and he's already manhandling Mercury and Emerald, and standing up to Tyrian (though still losing).
    • Blake here isn't self-taught by a terrorist lifestyle to the level of a prospective Beacon applicant. Rather she's a disciple of another Sect, the Blackened Ribbon, and can give Jaune a real fight when Mercury and Emerald (who could steamroll almost any Beacon student including upper years) couldn't. It's implied that she's the stronger one rather than Adam, who got only a brief tutelage from the same source that's more useful to him psychologically than physically.
    • Sun Wukong, in canon a Huntsman-in-training Freshman, is one of Menagerie’s "Heavenly Generals" and based on Weiss’s words, has a reputation as The Dreaded amongst the Atlesian army.
    • Mentioned Grandmasters of various Sects include An Ren (canon: a civilian woman who died in a house collapse) and Kali Belladonna (canon: a housewife whose best feat is fighting off a home invader with a baking tray). As middle-aged leaders of disciplines that let teenagers hold their own against veteran Huntsmen, this implicitly makes them some of the most dangerous people on the planet.
  • Adaptational Job Change:
    • It's implied that the Huntsman academies is basically closed down for normal education with all nations either at war or preparing for it. Young adult characters like Yang, Ruby, and Weiss who would be studying in school in canon are shown to be in apprenticeships instead, so that more field work can get done.
    • The wartime economy and humanitarian crisis apparently hasn't made it a good environment for a flamboyant fame-seeking urban thief. Roman and Neo here deal in human trafficking — that is, smuggling refugees by sea off of Anima to Sanus where there's at least a lower probability they'll be murdered by an army of faunus.
  • Adaptational Nice Guy: Adam still has all the major reasons to be resentful of humanity and still makes war on the nations most guilty of persecuting him and his people, but here he seems as reasonable as any military commander could be expected to be, lacking the spite and bloodthirst that defined him in canon. According to him, learning (however briefly) from the Blackened Ribbon Sect gave him the ability to control and defeat his own hate instead of letting it consume him.
  • Adaptational Superpower Change: What's shown regarding Aura in canon is here explained as a shallow, unskilled form of the power taught to Huntsmen because that's quicker and easier to get larger numbers of trainees to the level where they can kill Grimm. Master Ren teaches Jaune that with much longer tutoring and discipline (especially how to awaken one's own Aura rather than having someone else ignite it), Aura can be a much more versatile tool than just a cudgel to swing around and armor to block with.
  • Adaptational Villainy: Violent extremism is much more mainstream among the faunus population in this setting than it was in canon, to the point that it's not terrorism perpetrated by guerillas but actual war between nations. Accordingly, Blake does not seem to be questioning herself at all, helping to massacre a human village on Vale's coast with gusto. Sun, who was emphatically not convinced by extremism in canon, is here one of the faunus army's most notorious warriors.
  • Adaptational Wimp: There's no evidence here that Raven is the Spring Maiden or that Vernal is strong enough to convincingly fake that she is. The latter, who in canon was as strong or stronger than any of the protagonists, seems barely stronger if at all than the Branwens' random mooks and gets humiliated by fifteen-year-old Jaune — then again, less than a year later Jaune would go on to hold his own against Tyrian, so maybe she was just overshadowed.
  • Adaptation Personality Change: The trauma of losing his family and being taken in and trained by Master Ren has caused Jaune to become more serious, contemplative, and cognizant than he ever was in canon.
  • Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
    • This Jaune only has limited interaction with most of the other youths who are his friends in canon. His longest and most significant contact has been with Weiss, but instead of an unrequited crush at first sight, the irritation is very much mutual between them thanks to their clashing personalities and backgrounds.
    • Said friends have largely been scattered around the setting and don't know each other. Ruby and Yang are apprenticing in Vale, Weiss doing the same for Atlas, Blake is fighting for the opposite side in the war, and Ren and Nora are members of a Sect in Mistral.
  • All-Powerful Bystander: Any one of the old-style Sects still remaining implicitly produce the most dangerous fighters in the world, far deadlier individually than Huntsmen. But over time they've allowed themselves to fade away from world affairs. By the present, they're so obscure that barely anyone remembers they existed in the first place and the knowledge they have is completely lost to the public. Atlas now faces an Outside-Context Problem because one Sect has openly thrown their lot in with Menagerie and spread their teachings to the whole army, giving their soldiers unheard-of abilities Atlas has no answer to.
  • Ambiguously Related: What relation Master Shu Ren has to canon protagonist Lie Ren and his family isn't known initially. Eventually, it's clarified that he is one of Lie's great-grandfathers.
  • Ambition Is Evil: Cinder, as per RWBY canon. But she's arguably worse here, trying to steal the forbidden techniques the Lotus sect has in order to make herself more powerful.
  • Ambitious, but Lazy: Cinder comes to the Lotus temple seeking teachings for power, but Master Ren takes one look at her and accurately pegs her as this. She's incredibly entitled and thinks the universe should just bestow upon her anything she might want, and all she should have to do is take it. Master Ren says flat-out that the scrolls she wants are worthless to her (and thus there's no harm in letting the shady woman have one) because she won't put in the effort to understand or practice the techniques — she'll just expect the act of reading the thing to magically make her more powerful, then inevitably blame anyone but herself when it doesn't work. Just as predicted, months later she returns furious saying that the scroll was a farce just because achieving the technique wasn't as easy as reading it.
  • Arrogance Breeds Laziness: Jaune is surprised and disappointed to find that the wider Sect community is not a bastion of enlightenment, but instead it's rife with the same human complacency they sneer at the city folk for. The masters have risen to the top for good reason, but they are the exception that proves the rule — very few of the lower-ranked acolytes measure up to the discipline or skill they should. Rather, they're content to half-heartedly practice the basics, not learn hardly anything, and yet coast on the idea that merely being in a Sect makes them better than normal people. Jaune (having been taught for about two years) and Weiss (having trained for longer but only as an 'inferior' Huntress) can pretty handily beat down average initiates older than them who were likely trained from youth.
  • Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy:
    • Defied; Master Ren is very deliberate in keeping Jaune grounded at the same time he teaches him a martial art that makes him stronger than most people. Jaune is realistically confident in how he stacks up as a fighter and fully understands that doesn't give him the right to be an asshole or bully, though he has to remind himself sometimes not to dismiss potential opponents just because they only have 'inferior' Huntsman training.
    • This lesson turns out to be learned from experience; as more of the Sect community is shown, it becomes clear they're all terminally arrogant and self-serving. The whole social system relies on the idea they're better than everyone else, and can just ignore everything happening in the world to sit back and have their petty dick-measuring contests. There's rampant politicking, backstabbing, and corruption, but they would see those things as evil if done by anyone outside their exclusive little clubs. They largely care more about beating each other down to earn status than they do about becoming better people or doing anything good for the world with their power.
  • Aura Vision:
    • A technique taught by the traditional sects is to perceive other people's Aura without needing to rely on eyes or line of sight. Jaune instantly spots Mercury's prosthetics because he has no Aura from around the knees down, and Emerald's illusions are of limited effectiveness on him because he can sense her real position by her Aura even if she's tricking his eyes or ears.
    • Blake knows a variant of the technique called Guiding Ribbon Compass which sends a pulse of Aura in a wide radius like a sonar, and when it hits another Aura source (i.e. a person) it displays that feedback on a medium (e.g. her sect's signature ribbon) to help the user interpret it.
  • Awesomeness by Analysis: Jaune, and any disciple of the old ways, can respond to enemies' moves with uncanny skill. He doesn't have Combat Clairvoyance or even Kung-Fu Clairvoyance (yet?), he just knows how fighting works on a purely biomechanical level. He can see opponents' tells for what they're about to try to do, in the way they change their stance or move their limbs, and knows how to respond to those things to gain an advantage.
  • Badass Army: The backbone force of Menagerie's army is trained by the Black Ribbon Sect for some length of time, making them nearly as strong as fully-trained Huntsmen but far more numerous. Having such strong soldiers lets them slug it out with Atlas, which has far greater technology and logistics but whose army is largely filled with recent conscripts given only months of boot camp.
  • Bare-Fisted Monk: Master Ren and his student, Jaune Arc, are both trained to be this. Jaune augments his fighting with a jian on occasion.
  • Blatant Lies:
    • Both Jaune and Master Ren see right through Cinder's lies about how she heard about them and why she's come to their temple. Her requests are so paltry at first that it's easier to just indulge her than risk provoking her by pressing her on those lies.
    • Jaune almost instantly clocks Marrow as a spy assigned to gather info on him rather than a traveling merchant as he claims, and narrows that down to a spy working for Ironwood shortly thereafter, just using a little deductive reasoning. He supposes that espionage probably isn't Marrow's usual game and he's just bad at it.
  • "Both Sides Have a Point" Remark: While at the Hidden Dragon Sect, it’s revealed that all the other sects refuse to take in war orphans from the current conflict, which their Grandmaster finds morally repugnant. However, another Grandmaster contends that in taking responsibility for children that the Blackened Ribbon’s war with Atlas has orphaned, they’re simply absolving the renegade Sect of their responsibility in causing the problem; while he can’t agree with the action, Jaune admits to himself that he understands this reasoning as well.
  • Broken Pedestal:
    • Jaune is horrified to learn of Master Ren's history.
    • The impression Jaune has of the old Sect society is colored by his first and longest exposure to it being Master Ren, who certainly wasn't always a paragon of virtue but taught him to be reasonable, unselfish, and humble. He comes into interactions with other Sects assuming them to be broadly the same, only to be increasingly disappointed to find them arrogant and self-serving, exactly as he should have expected for a community founded on the idea of being better than everyone else but composed of flawed people.
  • Cool, but Inefficient: The way Huntsmen are taught to use Aura is simple, relatively easy to learn, and works well enough to support an entire profession with superhuman abilities, but it's optimized for 'maximum number of good-enough results' rather than 'optimal results'. Master Ren cites jumping a great height and landing as an example — a Huntsman would use their Aura as a brace to absorb the force of jumping and landing, and like any brace their Aura sustains damage from the effort. With the old ways, one pools Aura within one's legs to make them stronger and tougher in themselves, enough so that they can withstand jumping and landing without being damaged at all.
  • Cool Old Guy: Master Ren is this in spades, being able to quote philosophy and kick Grimm ass in equal measure.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Jaune's fighting skills let him school any human opponent unless they have similar training or a much greater level of mastery with more common training, and he can kill Grimm. But he lacks the Aura techniques needed to kill Grimm quickly and simply the way a Huntsman could with their uncomplicated beatstick Aura training. This almost causes disaster when he's escorting a woman and child and a pack of Grimm attacks. Jaune has trouble landing his precision moves in the chaos of the battle and can't kill them fast enough to protect his charges, only for Yang and Ruby to swoop in and clean up the monsters in a moment with their big guns and super strength.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle:
    • Jaune's first fight against an opponent besides his elderly master shows how far he's come in just two years, and maybe how feeble the average bandit is. Beating Vernal and four other Branwen thugs is closer to slapstick than anything else.
    • Raven, for all her feared reputation as a bandit, can't so much as cut Master Ren's baggy robes before he disrupts her Aura with Pressure Points and stabs through her arm, convincing her to yield.
    • With all pretense of holding back out of the way, Jaune proves that he was holding back way more than Mercury was in their spar. He pretty decisively stomps both the boy and Emerald at the same time even when the latter tries to trip him up with her Semblance. Jaune is only forced to flee when the two are bailed out by Tyrian, and the fact that it wasn't a Curb Stomp against one of the world's most dangerous Huntsmen drives home how brutally one-sided it was against Cinder's lackeys.
    • Yang only kind of tags Jaune once, because he was expecting her opening attack to be a feint and was caught off-guard when it wasn't. Otherwise, he dances around her attacks with ease, and the only reason he can't put her down just as easily is because she's specialized to tank damage. Instead, he uses Demonic Gu Soul to incapacitate her and she's helpless to defend against it or keep fighting afterward.
  • Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Some of the scrolls of the Lotus sect implicitly deal with this, such as attempts to use aura to become immortal. Master Ren warns Jaune not to attempt such, and to be wary of others that are marked because they can lead to tragedy.
  • Death by Adaptation: Jaune's family (except his father) dies by attack of Grimm on their village.
  • Difficult, but Awesome: The traditional methods of Aura control are both more complicated and more precise than the version taught to modern Huntsmen, which has become dominant for being easier and more scalable. But once you master the former, you can fight better, longer, and with more versatility than any of the latter.
  • Disappointed by the Motive: As usual, Master Ren isn't impressed by Hazel's goals to avenge his sister, explaining to Jaune that vengeance has only drove the man to fall in with murderous monsters, and even if he gets what he wants he'll be left with nothing but the knowledge that said sister would hate him for the things he's done in her name.
  • Doing In the Wizard:
    • Master Ren explains that this seems to have happened historically to the Supernatural Martial Arts discipline he practices. His predecessors managed to figure out a system of Pressure Points that worked great as the basis for honing Aura and using it to enhance physical abilities. But the whole philosophy had a foundation of mysticism and superstition. As Ren understands it now, the meridians are a purely practical system describing how human biology interacts with the tangible effects of the soul, and there's nothing spiritual about it in itself like its inventors had believed.
    • Jaune inadvertently demystifies the Schnee Semblance when Weiss uses it on him. He can feel the way her glyph is manipulating his Aura to achieve its effect, wonders whether an Aura master might be able to recreate it through skill alone, and reaches out his own Aura to 'flip a switch' and hijack it for his own benefit. He tries to excuse what he did by explaining in scientific terms, only to further flabbergast her because not only should hijacking a Semblance be impossible, but a Semblance is regarded as an unknowable power that works because it works, so quantifying it should also be impossible.
  • Draft Dodging: Men and women of age and able body without dependents are being drafted all across Vale to prepare for potentially being pulled into Atlas and Menagerie's war. Jaune has no interest in either side of the conflict, no particular patriotism, and his own business that he needs to take care of, so he takes some effort to avoid interacting with the military in case they think to levy him. That eventually happens when Yang tries to conscript him and he defeats her and escapes. This incident is later shown to make him officially wanted in Vale for draft dodging.
  • Driving Question: As of Chapter 20, "What is the history of the Lotus Sect, and why did Master Ren not tell Jaune anything about it?”
  • Dying Moment of Awesome: Even when being overwhelmed by superior foes like Hazel, Cinder, and Tyrian at the same time Master Ren just sounds disappointed by their motives, still teaching a lesson even as they try to end his life.
  • "Eureka!" Moment: Jaune has trouble figuring out the Iron Limb technique for a while, causing pain and damage to himself while attempting it which defeats the purpose. After briefly being held at swordpoint by Weiss, he idly notices that the metal blade of her rapier bends when she swings it. Jaune realizes that metal which is too hard becomes brittle — he had unintentionally been performing the technique too strongly, to the point where the only possible way for his hardened skin to move was to break. He goes on to successfully perform the Iron Limb by easing off, making his flesh much harder but still flexible enough to move without injury.
  • Finger Poke of Doom: A skilled and learned practitioner with Aura can use that energy to fuel attacks that to the outside observer appear to be nothing more than harmless pokes or jabs, but in reality cause effects like shutting down a section of the opponent's Aura or poisoning their body like a venom.
  • Fire-Forged Friends: Jaune and Weiss don't get along at first, because of their clashing backgrounds and the fact she's clearly been told to find out his secrets but refuses to take what she learns seriously. It's only after she makes a little headway controlling Aura the old way that the walls start to break down — on Weiss's end that proves his techniques are real and worth toning down the haughtiness, and on Jaune's end it means she's effectively his student now and he'll be damned if he walks away from that responsibility. This all happens while they're fighting running battles against bandits and Menagerie, protecting and even killing for each other.
  • Friend to All Living Things: After a few years of training, Jaune is so serene that he can calmly communicate with a random bear that comes up to him to bum some of the fish he's catching off him, and neither one is remotely distrustful of or threatened by the other.
  • The Greatest Style: Shu Ren established the Lotus Sect in an attempt to create a style that combined all the strongest, secret techniques from all the Sects into one school, strong and versatile enough to one day take back their historical glory from the Huntsman Academies. Naturally, Jaune has mostly only learned the basics and doesn't know most of what would set him apart from acolytes of other styles.
  • Great Offscreen War: One Point of Divergence from canon is that the peacetime after the Faunus Rebellion was a brief respite of twenty-ish years. Recently, the conflict between Menagerie and Atlas has flared up again with such intensity that all the kingdoms are preparing for a potential second Great War. Able-bodied civilians are being drafted and excess resources commandeered all over, which contributed to Ansel being destroyed, as most of the people who would have defended it were called away. Even places that aren't destroyed are under considerable turmoil as their economies are starved, and they are plagued by bandits with no one left to fight them off. As Jaune chases Cinder's party to Mistral, one of the main battlegrounds, the screen moves to show some of the war, but Jaune himself refuses to get involved near the front lines.
  • Groin Attack: Mercury gives away that he's holding back against Jaune when the latter decides to test him by throwing an all-out punch to the nuts. In a panic to protect his junk, he reflexively blocks and counters with more speed and skill than he was showing before.
  • Handicapped Badass: As it turns out, Master Ren is a badass not only in spite of being positively ancient by any standard, but also in spite of suffering from advanced lung disease that should have killed him decades ago.
  • Healing Hands: This power is a technique taught by the traditional sects many years ahead of where Jaune is in his own learning. There's an easier method to get similar results, though, which Jaune uses to save Winter: transferring his own Aura into the wounded area, not to repair it himself, but causing her body to react to the intrusion by flooding the site with her remaining Aura. Then, blocking off her meridians so her Aura stays pooled where it needs to be instead of receding like it normally would, healing the injury when usually her meager dregs of Aura wouldn't close it fast enough to keep her alive.
  • Healing Magic Is the Hardest: Healing Hands is a particularly advanced Aura technique. Less advanced is using one's own Aura as a tool to manipulate another's Aura into healing them more effectively. But using one's own Aura to fuel the healing is much harder, as the healer's power doesn't know how to do all the processes instinctively when it's outside their body, and must be deliberately controlled to do them and not make mistakes.
  • Hero Antagonist: Yang and Ruby are good people doing desperately needed work, but also act as representatives of Vale's military, and part of that is enforcing the draft. Jaune can't afford to be drafted and tries to slip away in the night, but Yang expected this and confronts him. She doesn't want to force him, but the punishment for letting him go would fall on Ruby as well. Jaune demonstrates a third option that will hopefully give everyone what they want: if she tries her best to force him and fails.
  • Heroic Neutral: Despite the ongoing war between Mistral and Atlas/Vale, Jaune refuses to get involved as it's too big and complex for one person to end it alone, never mind that the Lotus sect's teachings would be easily abused by others if either Kingdom knew of it. While he would still help others in need, getting his master's scrolls back from Cinder's group is his main priority.
  • I Let You Win: Jaune figures out pretty quickly that Mercury is sandbagging during their spar. He responds by holding back quite a lot himself, so neither party gets the full extent of the other's skill and abilities. As it turns out, Jaune was holding back a lot more than Mercury.
  • Instant Expert: Instant in a relative sense, anyway. Master Ren privately muses that Jaune has well above-average aptitude and potential with Aura. It takes him only a couple of short years to pretty well lock down the basics of the Lotus art and go up against Huntsman-level enemies like Mercury and Tyrian, when the traditional discipline is supposed to take much longer to show results like that.
  • Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Winter and Weiss can afford the best tutors from the most advanced kingdom and are particularly confident in what they learned. They, above all others, are arrogant and dismissive whenever Jaune alludes to the Lost Common Knowledge of Aura he was taught, stating bluntly that Aura does not work how he claims, and this is proven by generations of science. Jaune can't help but be amused at their overinflated assurance.
  • Last of His Kind: Master Ren was the final disciple as well as the first of the Lotus Temple Sect before Jaune winds up in his care. The sect technically survives as the Storm Lotus Sect, a Meaningfull Rename to distance themselves from Master Ren when they were almost killed to a man by a coalition of sects that (incorrectly) thought attacking them would draw Master Ren out of hiding.
  • Little Hero, Big War: The fic follows the perspective of Jaune, a civilian who suffered the loss of his family and later became a martial artist, who's on a personal mission to take back Master Ren's scrolls after Cinder's group stole them. All while navigating through and steering clear of a complex Great Offscreen War that the original Team RWBY characters are actively participating in.
  • Lost Common Knowledge: The way Master Ren tells it, before the modern age, the traditional Sects and their teachings weren't some kind of special, secret knowledge. They were just... how Aura worked. In the olden days, if someone wanted to harness Aura to fight the Grimm, they would go study at a nearby monastery. As human settlements became cities and kingdoms, the Sects could not train the number of students needed to protect the growing population, so Huntsmen were invented to make up the difference. Soon, there were so many Huntsmen that the Sects weren't needed anymore, and the traditions largely faded away. Nowadays, there's no publicly available evidence that the Sects existed or still do, and their teachings are not only lost but openly seen as impossible because they don't line up with the conventional wisdom taught to Huntsmen. It's only recently that the Blackened Ribbon Sect has come out of hiding to train the armies of Menagerie, giving them abilities that Atlas neither understands nor knows how to respond to.
  • Martial Pacifist: Beyond not wanting to get tangled in the ongoing conflict and focusing on his personal goals, Jaune would rather avoid killing anyone if he could help it. When forced into conflict, he’ll take the most efficient method of neutralisation that doesn’t involve causing lethal or even debilitating harm to his opponents; even in the case of Cinder’s faction, his objective is retrieval of the scrolls as opposed to killing them (although he’s aware this is the likely outcome).
  • Meaningful Rename: The historical Lotus Temple Sect in Mistral took the name Storm Lotus to disavow Shu Ren, who kept using the original name for his own school, invoking the "storm" of conflict that his actions brought them when the other Sects came to kill them all in retaliation for his crimes.
  • Mentor Occupational Hazard: Master Ren is fully aware that this is inevitable — even if nothing happens, he is going to pass on before Jaune has time to learn everything. When Cinder and her entourage arrive with transparent ulterior motives, Ren realizes the deadline is likely fast approaching, and gives Jaune the information he needs to preserve the Lotus tradition and continue his training on his own when the time comes.
  • Mooching Master: As payment for saving his life and taking him in, Master Ren has Jaune perform most of the necessary chores to support both of them, as he's clearly too old to have to take care of himself anymore. Jaune almost instantly sees through it — the Master is not exploiting him, he's giving a traumatized child an immediate distraction and goal so that he doesn't fall into depression. The long labor also disabuses him of the aimless civilian lifestyle he grew up in and gets him in the right mindset to properly learn the Lotus art.
  • Mythology Gag: Coeur already used the concept of An Ren being alive and adopting Nora in The Eternal Crown.
  • No-Sell:
    • The second Emerald tries to cast an illusion on Master Ren, he notices and uses an Aura technique to give her a Poke in the Third Eye.
    • Knowing he'll be punished for fighting back against drunk teenagers in an unwelcoming village, Jaune decides to treat the encounter as a refresher on Aura defense, and just stands there ignoring the beating until they gas themselves out.
  • Not So Stoic: Jaune learned from Master Ren not to let his emotions get away from him, but hits his Rage Breaking Point after Weiss tries to execute a surrendering enemy after he'd just finished taking another opponent's life to protect her in the heat of battle, furiously ranting that he doesn't care about helping Atlas and thinks both sides of the war should die and get it over with so more disasters like his home village don't have to keep happening. He's also thrown completely off balance when he finally finds sign of encountering Cinder again.
  • Not the Illness That Killed Them: Master Ren has been slowly dying of lung disease just slightly faster than he'd be dying of old age even without the lung disease, and by any standard he should be dropping any day now for literal decades. Instead he goes down fighting Cinder and most of her associates at once.
  • Old Master: Master Ren has spent the majority of his long life honing the Lotus art to the keenest edge. In his old age, there's not a single character who's shown to be able to threaten him one-on-one — he dances circles around Raven, and can comfortably fight Cinder and Hazel at the same time.
  • Paper Tiger: As usual, the Branwen bandits are mostly only threatening to people who have literally no means of defending themselves. In this case, the clan is largely comprised of deserters who were too chicken-shit to cut it in the real military, even as just basic soldiers. Raven is implied to be more dangerous, but even she fails to intimidate Master Ren at all.
  • Persona Non Grata: The Lotus Temple Sect is apparently this to the Black Ribbon Sect (if not other Sects); every member of the latter school to have identified Jaune as an adherent of the former immediately acts with murderous intent owing to some unidentified past grievance he’s unaware of. After the first such incident with Blake Belladonna, he obfuscates the details of his school to anyone else he can; in the case of Adam Taurus, their encounter is far more peaceable as a result, but Jaune is well aware that any second encounter wouldn’t be so positive given the high likelihood Adam reconvenes with Blake in the meantime.
  • Poisonous Person: Demonic Gu Soul is a technique where the Aura user afflicts themselves with poisonous substances that, over time and with the correct meridian cycling, not only build Acquired Poison Immunity but also cause one's own Aura to become toxic to other people. The scroll detailing it also includes methods for surviving poison to help achieve this, such as applying another poison and causing them to interact and lose potency. Jaune reads ahead to find that to survive Tyrian's venom, and incidentally builds a minor degree of Demonic Gu Soul in the process.
  • Pressure Point: The "meridian" system of Chinese medicine and spirituality is adapted here, in a manner that's both demystified and justified. RWBY does have a "life energy" that does "run through the body" and cause effects, in the form of Aura. Though the inventors of the system in this setting were likely wrong about the meridians having any religious or philosophical significance, they were right that there were certain places on the body that were functionally important to the flow of Aura and focusing on those points could have major effects. Most of the intermediate-and-above Lotus teachings deal with manipulating the meridians of oneself and others. Master Ren demonstrates by lightly poking Raven a few times, causing her Aura in that area to fail to protect her from his blade.
  • Quality over Quantity: An acolyte at one of the traditional temples may take decades to learn the full breadth of Aura and its capabilities, and will end up with more strength, endurance, and versatility than most modern Huntsmen. But a Huntsman may need only a few short years before taking up the fight against the Grimm, because they only need to learn Aura as a shield and a bludgeon, and humanity is numerous and prosperous enough now that they need protectors sooner rather than later. Master Ren explains that both of these approaches are valid and have their pros and cons, and the only part of it that seems to bug him is that the old ways are dying out when he feels they're still valuable.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: Master Ren imposes strict discipline on Jaune, but in practical ways rather than dogmatic ones. He wants Jaune to have all the skills to be self-sufficient and keep his tradition alive, but he mentions other masters would go overboard with arbitrary rituals and sacrifices that do nothing more than enforce control and suffering on the student.
  • Renegade Splinter Faction: The Blackened Ribbon soldiers fighting for Menagerie in the war are there without the blessing of their Grandmaster, who refused to support the war but at the same time refused to force her students to stay behind against their wishes.
  • Retired Monster: Shu Ren, in his youth, was willing to massacre other sects to gain access to their techniques.
  • The Reveal: The Lotus Sect and Shu Ren are hated by the other Sects because the latter built the former out of knowledge stolen violently from other temples in an attempt to create The Greatest Style. In particular, he abducted and murdered dozens of acolytes from the Blackened Ribbon to force its then-grandmaster to give up its secrets to stop the killing.
  • The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Reports say that the Faunus army from Menagerie has made landfall on Vale's coast as retaliation for the kingdom supporting Atlas with trade, where they then proceeded to raze villages, taking no prisoners and leaving no survivors except for refugees who fled at first sight of trouble. Supposedly they even massacred other Faunus who didn't join them in slaughtering innocent humans.
  • Rock Beats Laser: Menagerie is acquitting themselves well in open war with Atlas despite having no comparable military industry to answer Atlas's use of heavy armor, aircraft, and artillery. Their main advantage is Supernatural Martial Arts, a concept so old that it's fallen out of public memory.
  • Secret Art: Each Sect has a subtly different martial arts style and a selection of signature Aura techniques that are kept within their membership. At least, that's the idea. Some adepts strike out on their own and establish their own Sects under the impression they'll be able to come up with a trademark technique, only to fail and not be taken seriously for it. The Lotus Temple Sect is so hated because its founder committed terrible crimes in order to steal this sacred knowledge from many Sects. The Storm Lotus Sect is the exception for having no secrets and sharing their knowledge freely among the others, as penance for one of their own being said criminal.
  • Secretly Dying: Jaune lives with Master Ren for years and only gets an inkling that the old man is not well when his first excursion out of the temple is to a nearby village to pick up medication. Talking with the elderly alchemist, he finds out that the old man was given a prognosis of only a few years for a lung disease, but then proceeded to outlive the doctor and is still going decades later.
  • Serendipitous Survival: Weiss is in the middle of investigating a murder in a village when she's delivered a letter from her sister by some vagrant named Jaune, whom the letter tells she should keep an eye on. She's skeptical, and generally treats their interaction as babysitting some random guy who doesn't know anything about forensics and keeps asking dumb questions about her more important work. Then the murderer turns out to be "Heavenly General" Sun Wukong and she would absolutely die there if not for Jaune being one of the few people in the world who could reliably fight them off.
  • Sheltered Aristocrat:
    • Winter comes from money in Atlas and has no clue how life works for the remaining 99% of Remnant's population. She thinks the reason there's no luxury cosmetics (like hair dye to disguise her) for purchase at a nearby village is because it's wartime, not because it's a village built from wood in the middle of nowhere where just getting food to eat every day is hard work.
    • Weiss doesn't understand how a group of people can survive without being able to go to the store to buy fancy food products like spices and sauces.
  • Sole Survivor:
    • As far as anyone can tell, Jaune was the only one present in Ansel at the time of its destruction to make it out alive.
    • Winter meets Jaune after losing her entire squad in a skirmish with Menagerie, and getting medical aid before she herself succumbs.
  • Spared by the Adaptation: Unlike in canon, here's An Ren is very much alive.
  • Spider-Sense: Aura Vision isn't exactly like sight with its narrow field of view. Sensing Aura is omnidirectional with a certain distance and can pick up activity before any normal senses can detect anything. Jaune gets alerted when a Huntsman-trained fighter enters the same building he's in while flaring their Aura for protection, and he can feel when he's being pinged by Guiding Ribbon Compass which tips him off that he's being tracked.
  • Stock Wushu Weapons: Jaune trades in his regular broadsword from RWBY canon for a jian he receives from Master Ren.
  • Supernatural Martial Arts: A given, since RWBY canon already established Aura can make you stronger and faster and tougher, but this story delves a lot more into just what you can do with such Aura. In RWBY there is the supernatural physical ability that comes from Aura, and there are the martial arts that are used to fight — two separate things that are useful together. Here, supernatural Ki Manipulation is shown to be a crucial element in the protagonist's martial arts discipline, which gives the aforementioned physical ability as well as varied and versatile powers through skill and technique.
  • Super-Speed: The first proper meridian technique Jaune masters is one to enhance his legs for running. Once he gets the hang of it, he can outrun deer (which can run at least 30 mph) and since it's his soul being expended instead of his biology, he can keep going like that for hours, covering ground at speeds any normal person would need a vehicle for.
  • Take That!: Coeur has been deliberate in defining the story as a tribute to Wuxia, not Xianxia. In Chapter 2, Master Ren goes on a tangent saying that there are versions of Aura teachings that claim to unlock immortality or godlike strength through mysticism or alchemy, and that it's all nonsense invented by foolish men afraid of death or con-artists tricking people with snake oil.
  • Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Jaune needs Weiss's help to follow through on his leads to track Cinder's party, Weiss has been ordered to figure out what Jaune's secret is, and both of them need each other's help to get out of danger. Those are the only reasons they're working together, as their personalities are constantly in conflict, not to mention Jaune's obvious competence that Weiss claims to want to understand but refuses to.
  • Training from Hell:
    • Downplayed. It's tough, sure, but Jaune isn't being beaten to within an inch of his life every day. Just expected to learn the hard way and learn well. Most of Master Ren's teachings generally boil down to "figure it out yourself" only acting as a guide to help Jaune figure things out. The most grueling thing about it is that he has literally nothing to do besides necessary chores and training, which stuns Weiss who considers herself hardworking but (at least in better times) has hobbies, luxuries and downtime.
    • Other Sects have their own methods of training and some are much more torturous than others. The Burning Winds Sect gets its name from intentionally living in a terrain formation that funnels all the hottest air from the local climate into a near-constant superheated gale. Part of their training is having to learn skill and fitness while spending most of their time on the edge of dehydration and heatstroke.
  • Underestimating Badassery: Huntsmen and Huntresses are seen by the public as the standard for a fighter to meet; either you're a Huntsman (or at least have the same training and powers) and thus at the top, or you're not and thus not threatening. Unbeknownst to them all, there's a whole secret community that works on a completely different scale. Jaune isn't anything too special on that scale — he's a fast learner but not exceptionally learned or experienced — and when he consistently denies being a Huntsman everyone stops taking him seriously. But in absolute terms, he's not too far below a middle-aged veteran Huntsman, and so bandit thugs, soldiers, and Huntsman apprentices his own age get a nasty surprise when they assume he's easy prey.
  • Ungrateful Townsfolk: Jaune regularly runs into problems from villagers who are resentful of their current circumstances and take it out on any outsiders who happen to wander in. One village is perfectly willing to throw a refugee woman and child out to fend for themselves in the wild, openly attack Jaune for telling them off for it, and then cry for fairness and compassion when there's consequences after displaying nothing but unfair cruelty.
  • Untrusting Community: All the kingdoms are in the middle of wartime. Just about all towns or villages Jaune stops at are wary of him as an outsider, ranging from refusing small-talk until he declares his purpose, to opening fire with arrows when he approaches. The way they see it, outsiders are at best an unwelcome strain on already thin resources, or worse, they're up to no good since anyone with his description should already be drafted and not roaming.
  • Victory by Endurance: Jaune and Weiss are met at the gates of the Burning Winds Sect by a sentry who ignores their greetings and attacks without a word. He's a hulking man wielding a huge weapon far too slow to tag Jaune or dodge his blows, but before long Jaune gasses himself out. Weiss spots the trick: the sentry is used to the area's eponymous burning winds and is trying to stall Jaune until he suffers heat exhaustion. He does and passes out, implicitly losing, but not before Weiss resolves the fight by offering a gift of Dust-summoned ice in exchange for hospitality.
  • Weak, but Skilled: As fighters go on Remnant, Jaune is skilled enough that only veteran Huntsmen can reliably beat him in a martial arts bout. But he only carries small personal weapons and hasn't yet learned Aura techniques that would make him significantly stronger than a normal human, so he doesn't have the sheer stopping power of a bruiser-type Huntsman or Huntress. This makes him noticeably weaker against Grimm than people, since he has to use difficult precision strikes to kill or wear down the monsters when a Huntsman could just hit or shoot them.
  • The Worf Effect: Traditional disciplines like the Lotus art are meant to get better results in the end than the Huntsman academies do. This is proven very quickly when several characters, whom the readers know from canon are some of the most dangerous Huntsmen-trained fighters in the world, cross paths with Jaune and Master Ren and proceed to get schooled.
  • Worf Had the Flu: Raven doesn't put in as good a performance against Jaune as she really should and he manages to outmaneuver and hoodwink her. She remembers what happened when she fought Master Ren, fears Jaune might be capable of the same thing, but doesn't actually know how it works so she overcompensates by focusing almost entirely on defense and not taking any risks she'd normally be comfortable with as a Huntress.
  • Wrong Context Magic: The Aura teachings kept by the old Sects are completely unknown to modern Remnant. Experienced Huntsmen and conventional experts don't know any of the abilities are possible, don't know how to respond to them, and can barely believe what they're seeing when it's right in front of them. Weiss desperately grasps for weak excuses to explain something as simple as bringing up Aura over a specific body part rather than the entire body at once, even when she can see Jaune put on a light show with just his fingertips.
  • Wuxia: Implicitly, the story is this. The author's notes even go into details about what sort of storytelling elements to expect.
  • You Are Not Ready: After one too many ominous incidents, Master Ren feels forced to introduce the full roadmap of the Lotus discipline to Jaune as he fears there will not be time to reveal it gradually. He makes it clear to his student that he is not to attempt to learn from any of the most advanced manuals, no matter how tempting they might be. The techniques therein are incredibly precise and complex, and rely on foundational knowledge and mastery from the earlier manuals. If Jaune were to attempt an advanced technique without the needed control and experience, the consequences would (not could, would) be dangerous or even deadly.

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