A Nether Envoy of The Order, a close companion of the Nether Lord in his youth, and a mysterious figure buried deep in the dark.
He dresses all in black, with a broad bamboo hat on his head. Metal components show here and there at his waist and wrists.
His hair is silver-white, and he looks only a few years younger than the Nether Lord.
Inside The Order every member must take a title, and only those on the closest terms ever learn one another’s real names. That is why the origins of The Order’s members are, as a rule, unknown.
Among them, though, the most mysterious is The Order’s Nether Envoy known as the Seventh Man. He comes and goes without pattern and leaves no trail, and as far back as any record reaches he has kept himself wrapped in a black cloak with only the lower half of his face showing. Apart from The Order’s old the Nether Lord, no one knows what he looks like, no one knows where he came from, and no one knows what task he has been given.
All that can be established is that he met the old Nether Lord in their youth and became his close friend, and that he was one of the three people present when The Order was formally founded.
Over the forty years that followed, The Order met with setbacks and knew prosperity too, and the number of Nether Envoys rose and fell. The one thing that never changed was the Seventh Man, always in the old Nether Lord’s shadow.
What has the Seventh Man done for The Order? Apart from the Seventh Man himself, probably only the old Nether Lord could say. Everyone else in The Order generally knows just this much: in The Order’s twelfth year, in the campaign against the Bastion, he served as the old Nether Lord’s chief aide and won great merit. When the old Nether Lord fought the last Bastion Lord of the House of Mó in single combat, it was the Seventh Man who stood guard over the duel and held back any man of the Bastion who tried to break in.
That battle cost The Order dearly. Two of the four Nether Envoys of the day were lost, and the Seventh Man himself was badly wounded, left with a chronic ailment that never healed. After that he began to fade from the sight of The Order. Over the eighteen years that followed, Inanis, Xiao Si and An Chan all came in as new Nether Envoys, and by then the Seventh Man had all but stopped appearing before anyone. Almost no one knew anything about him at all.
In The Order’s thirtieth year, its footholds in the Southern Wulin were torn out root and branch, and the Living Envoys sent there were never heard from again. The old Nether Lord therefore decided to send his two most favoured adopted sons, Soul and Zuo Shang, into the Southern Wulin. To leave nothing to chance, he also did something unheard of: he let each of the four Nether Envoys send one Living Envoy of his own along, to assist his two adopted sons in probing the south.
In private, though, the old Nether Lord sought out the Seventh Man alone, and the two of them laid a scheme to bring down the Nether Envoy Inanis:
The old Nether Lord had learned some time ago that the master of Grave Mountain in the Southern Wulin, the Red-and-White Ladies, had been among the top courtesans of the Golden Jade Pavilion that Inanis once ran. If the Ladies and Inanis were ever to make contact again, the truth of the Golden Jade Pavilion massacre was likely to come out, and Inanis was likely to turn against The Order.
So the old Nether Lord devised a scheme inside a scheme. He presented the Living Envoy under the Seventh Man, Haishi, as a private envoy of his own, and then sent him south as the leader of the party. At the same time he arranged for a forged letter to be intercepted. Its gist was this: the Seventh Man’s wounds were too grave and he needed treatment urgently, which called for the Eye of Xuanyu to find a cure, and so Haishi, acting with the Seventh Man on the Nether Lord’s supposed authority, had lured Xuanyu into the Southern Wulin to die at Mirage’s hands.
Whoever seized that letter would be bound to put Haishi under house arrest. From there Haishi could deliberately block Inanis’s own Living Envoy, Yuzhu, from killing the Red-and-White Ladies — which would only harden Yuzhu’s conviction that the Ladies were traitors, would end them for good in the end, and would leave Yuzhu in his grip, forced to tell Inanis a false version of the truth.
Before long word came back to the two of them: the plan had gone exactly as the old Nether Lord had foreseen. Both of the Red-and-White Ladies were put to death, and Yuzhu, with that leverage on him, submitted.
In The Order’s fortieth year, word came that the old Nether Lord had been killed.
“After that day you had a coffin made for me. Now that coffin has been kept for you. I never thought it — you have gone ahead of me after all.”
The white hair beneath the cloak was wet with tears, and grief for what had passed filled the air.
“Will you contend with Lord Zuo and the other Nether Envoys?”
The one servant left at his side asked it under his breath.
“No contest, no contest. His estate — let him leave it to whomever he likes.”
The Seventh Man pushed himself up from the chair, hesitating. He was old, and the old are no different from the dead.
Only his heart had not aged, and had not died. And so he would keep the promise he made long ago: to protect that person for his old friend.
He was a piece on no one’s board now. He was simply himself, and he would see the last of his business through.