Long Mingyu

The finest master of the Long family’s last generation, five times running the representative of the Orthodox Alliance, a peerless swordsman and a peerless master of the sword aura. At the request of the old clan head, Long Tairan, he also served — though he was born to a cadet branch — as the Long family’s “Chief Sword Instructor,” teaching the young of the main line the true sword art of the Long.

When he spoke he was like a mountain of ice that never shifted: proud, poised, elegant in every gesture. There was not a man in the Wulin as flawless as he. When Long Mingyu rode out, people crowded the road for a glimpse of him, and he became the idol of countless women besides. Plenty of men tried to court his favour with beauty or with treasure, yet Long Mingyu gave away little in public and no more in private. Even when a host pressed a beauty on him he only went through the motions, and at the decisive moment still kept the bearing of a perfect gentleman.

He was on close private terms with Long Wu, the man most likely to become the next head of the Long family; he served as Long Wu’s personal retainer and was his closest friend. After the Long family fell, Long Mingyu’s whereabouts became unknown.

Long Mingyu grasped with ease the perfect golden blade-aura described in the Long family’s theory, and carried the aura through to its completed form; several of the finer points of aura theory were worked out in his hands. Whether he was generating the aura or reshaping the body of it, he commanded it without effort, and could even call it into the shape of a golden dragon. He alone made it true that the fine sword in his hand was nothing but an ornament.

By the recollection of those who watched, when Long Mingyu loosed the full force of his aura through the sword in his hand, Dragon’s Cry in the Rain, the world seemed to fall under a downpour of gold that left no eye able to stay open — and when the rain stopped, the enemy was always dead.

Childhood

Long Mingyu was born into the Long family, a descendant of one of the Long’s four great masters. His gifts were extraordinary and his diligence unflagging, so that even though he came from a cadet branch, the old clan head Long Tairan always favoured him above the rest.

From a very early age Long Mingyu showed a rare gift for martial study; indeed, from no more than the clan head’s plain instruction he found the threshold of the golden blade-aura on his own. From then on he was one of the Long family’s chosen, and he was set to read and train alongside Long Tairan’s fifth son, Long Wu, in the manner of a study companion. In time the two were more than fast friends: each drove the other on.

Coming of Age

In the year Long Mingyu came of age, the Long family chose his first opponent for him: Sword Ancestor Xuantian.

Sword Ancestor Xuantian’s gift for martial arts had few equals anywhere in the Wulin. The Xuantian Sword Art he had made for himself had never once been beaten, and the dark-iron greatsword he carried was a treasure among swords, made to answer his art. He was a fearful opponent.

And yet the Long chose him for Long Mingyu all the same. In that choice lay the family’s trust in him, and a trial of his own besides: whether he would become a legend of the Wulin or vanish into it like any ordinary man would be settled by his own strength and nothing else.

The duel was set at a place on Tianlie Peak that almost no one ever went to — and because of the duel, the Wulin packed it.

When Long Mingyu first appeared before them, the Wulin thought him far too young, even a little arrogant, and expected that he would leave his bones on Tianlie Peak.

They were wrong, and wrong past any correction. When Long Mingyu drew Dragon’s Cry in the Rain and that golden aura blazed across the sky, the Wulin remembered him from that day on — and remembered the golden dragon his aura had taken shape as.

Long Mingyu won. He was covered in wounds, blood soaking through his clothes, and still he won. From that moment he was no longer an ordinary man of the Wulin but the sword of the Long family that had beaten a legend.

And because the golden aura he loosed in that duel came down like a rain of swords out of heaven, a splendour no one there forgot, the Wulin gave the man a name of his own: the Dragon’s Cry in the Rain.

At the Head of the Orthodox Path

From the day he beat Sword Ancestor Xuantian, Long Mingyu became the Long family’s face. He had no part in managing any of the family’s affairs; his work was to prove how strong the Long were, and to prove his own strength in the doing.

Some years later Long Wu came of age, and Long Mingyu formally became his personal retainer, serving him in the role of “the finest master of the Long family.”

As Long Wu’s retainer and friend, Long Mingyu handled people much as Long Wu did. Through sheer skill in diplomacy he brought the six great sects under his control, trading a handful of inner arts for the backing of the great orthodox houses, and by that means won real standing in the Wulin: he became the representative of the Orthodox Alliance.

The Orthodox Alliance was an organization the orthodox schools of the Wulin had built together, so that every house’s strength might be gathered against the heterodox and the demonic; its representatives had always been elders of long standing in the Wulin. Long Mingyu’s fame was very great, and still some questioned whether he was simply too young.

The doubt rose and fell and rose again, and each time Long Mingyu proved himself once more. Again and again he led the orthodox in clean, complete work against the dregs of the Wulin, and made the name of the Orthodox Alliance ring louder with every campaign.

Thanks to his service the Long family stood higher in the Wulin’s esteem than ever, and most of the Wulin came to see it as the very model of the orthodox path, its influence on that side second only to Long Er’s. But that same rise drew the eyes of the unorthodox, among them the symbol of everything the Wulin feared: the Bastion of Mó.

As Long Mingyu and the Long family rose, the Bastion of Mó came into conflict with them again and again. Both houses took their losses, but in the Wulin’s mind the Long still held the Bastion firmly underfoot, and that belief lent Long Mingyu and his family something close to a sacred air.

In The Order’s fifth year, Long Mingyu arranged a duel with the Bastion Lord, Mo Tian. The fight was barely about to begin when Mu Tianmiao burst in and stopped the two of them by force.

One could say the Long family was a fine sword kept in its sheath, and yet gathering itself to strike, impossible to read. But the Wulin knew who held it: when that sword came out it was Long Mingyu who drew it, and his blade was enough to sweep away any enemy who dared move against the Long.

Strife Within the Family

As the finest master of the Long family, Long Mingyu became the gilded signboard of the family’s might abroad. He preserved the last measure of its dignity through its decline, and gave it the look of strength on the surface.

And for that same reason — that he was as strong as he was, and a Long Wu man to the letter — the other sons of the main line who coveted the clan headship, Long Er among them, came to see him as a thorn they could not pull out.

In The Order’s tenth year the old clan head, Long Tairan, died suddenly, and the whole of the Long family fell into panic. Long Mingyu, as Long Wu’s retainer, moved with Long Wu and his wife into Xinglong Manor, helped Long Wu look into the truth of the old clan head’s death, and watched over the couple day and night against any mischance.

In The Order’s twelfth year the Bastion of Mó was destroyed by The Order’s hand. Not long after, word reached Long Mingyu that the Bastion might hold a clue to the truth of the old clan head’s death, and he went of his own accord to the Bastion’s ruins to look into it. He never guessed that the whole thing was a trap set by Long Er and The Order together. He walked into it, and was ambushed in turn by The Order men and Long Er’s retainers who had been lying in wait there; after a long fight with that ambush he went over a cliff at the edge of the Eastern Sea, and whether he lived or died no one knew.

From that day on, no one in the Wulin ever knew where he had gone.

Phantom Blade II

In The Order’s thirty-first year, Zuo Shang went deep into the desert to trace Xuanyu, and at the Thousand Buddha Grottoes there he met a man who seemed to be an aged Long Mingyu — crippled now, able to do nothing but sit in a wheelchair, and still almost impossible to defeat. He helped Zuo Shang, who had come into the desert to investigate, unravel the scheme Xuanyu had laid, and appears to have passed on to him some of the “secret arts of the Long.”

(This stretch of the story was never fully told in the earlier games.)

Phantom Blade III

In The Order’s thirty-eighth year the uprising of the Five Fingers broke out again. When The Order’s people looked into it, they found that the Little Finger, one of the Five, seemed tangled up with Long Mingyu in a hundred ways… And by the dying words of the Ring Finger, Long Mingyu appears to have stood in some unusual relation to the old clan head Long Tairan — most likely that he was his illegitimate son.

(The rest of the story has not yet unfolded in any released work.)