The cruellest, most bloodthirsty and least human member of the Council of Eleven, and a martial artist of the first order — which is why almost nothing was left standing wherever he went.
During the Mask Riots he set out for Prison Mountain, beyond Huangcheng in the southwest, to settle a grudge more than a hundred years old. What Bloodbath did not know was that a death-match to shake heaven and earth was waiting for him there.
What made Zhu Nan’s martial arts unusual — what made the Blood Blade Sect’s arts unusual — was this.
Unlike the Wulin of the central plains, with its study of Sha-Chi, the Blood Blade Sect’s arts rest on a secret method handed down since ancient times: blood can be channelled to move Sha-Chi through the body and strengthen it. For that reason every member of the sect makes offerings to blood, worships blood, and uses blood as the medium for every kind of martial cultivation.
And Zhu Nan’s gift was rare even among generations of Blood Saber disciples. He could turn his own blood into a weapon, in whatever shape he willed, which in a fight left an opponent with nothing to prepare for. When the fighting was done he could draw the blood back into his body with ease — a thing uncanny beyond words.
The most terrible part was this: whenever he wounded an enemy, the blade his blood formed would carry that enemy’s blood away with it, so that a man lost great quantities of blood without ever noticing.
Zhu Nan called the blade he condensed out of his own blood “Blood of a Thousand Autumns”. Whirled about, it came on like one red wave after another, giving an enemy nowhere to escape to; and once it opened a wound, Blood of a Thousand Autumns would immediately draw the wounded man’s blood out through it until he had none left.
After joining the Council of Eleven, Bloodbath put his own heart and spine through Transcension. In his character art the heart shines in his chest like a reactor.
With Transcension behind him, the whole series of forbidden Blood Saber arts he had never been able to break through opened before him and rose to a higher plane, until he had reached the highest realm of the art.
Before the Tianling Massacre
The Blood Blade Sect was a Wulin sect that was neither wholly orthodox nor wholly unorthodox. It made offerings to blood, worshipped blood, and used blood as the medium for every kind of martial cultivation.
Zhu Nan and Qiluo were the finest disciples of the sect’s new generation. Both had been given to the sect as children; they had grown up together, and each loved the other, and there was no hiding that from the eyes of the sect master, Xue Antian.
But Xue Antian’s only daughter, Xue Qianxun, had also loved Zhu Nan hopelessly for years, and watching Zhu Nan and Qiluo together day after day she could only sicken with grief alone, until she fell gravely ill.
Xue Antian doted on his daughter, and decided to ask Zhu Nan privately to accept a betrothal to Xue Qianxun: if he agreed, the succession to the sect would be his. Zhu Nan was a man who weighed advantage, and after turning it over again and again he accepted. Xue Antian set the wedding date, and at the same time sent Qiluo, Zhu Nan’s lover, off to the southern frontier on a task that would keep her away for months.
The moment Qiluo was gone, Zhu Nan moved into Xue Qianxun’s chambers, and Xue Antian thought nothing of it. By the time of the wedding feast Xue Qianxun was already carrying Zhu Nan’s child, and her colour had much improved, which delighted Xue Antian.
On the wedding day the guests filled the hall, and after the great feast every one of them was drunk and asleep — Xue Antian, Zhu Nan and Xue Qianxun among them.
Then a figure nobody had expected appeared at the Blood Blade Sect: Qiluo, sent away on her task. She had been carrying Zhu Nan’s child when she left, and she had learned that Zhu Nan and Xue Qianxun were to be married, so she had come back.
She slipped all the way to Xue Antian’s chamber and killed him on the one night he had slept soundly. Then she cut her way into the bridal room, drove a blade into Xue Qianxun’s belly, and killed her together with the child she carried. While Zhu Nan stood stunned, Qiluo fought her way out of the sect, leaving a shrill laugh behind her.
The strain of the fighting cost Qiluo her own child. She fled into the deep mountains, and no one ever saw her again.
For decades after, Zhu Nan was master of the Blood Blade Sect, and never once did he sleep a whole night. Whenever he closed his eyes he heard an infant crying, and it turned his blood cold. Sometimes he would see two infants crawling towards him, catching hold of his legs and calling him “father”. The nightmares made his temper grow stranger year by year, and by the time of the Tianling Massacre the Blood Blade Sect had become a horror of a sect that killed without count and thirsted for blood.
And in the southern frontier a terrible sect rose, its emblem the faces of two uncanny infants. The ancient Nascent Soul Society had originally taught nothing more alarming than reverence for the purity of an infant; but it had fallen under the control of a supreme power that could turn the first blood of infants into endless Sha-Chi. Nobody had ever seen the one who held that power; all they knew was her name — Lady Nascent Soul.
After the Tianling Massacre
In pursuit of greater power, and for any trace of Qiluo, Bloodbath took the rest of the Blood Blade Sect’s core to Tianling Peak. There the men of the Wulin, infused with Sha-Chi, fell on one another. Every senior member of the sect who climbed the peak that day died, leaving only the master, Zhu Nan — and the Blood Blade Sect had in truth ceased to exist.
Zhu Nan survived, and because of his rare gift the Golden Swordsman thought highly of him and invited him into the Council of Eleven. With the sect already a name and nothing more, and the nightmares tormenting him almost without pause, Zhu Nan resolved to throw away his former life and spend the rest of it settling accounts with that nightmare. He took the name “Bloodbath” and joined the Council of Eleven.
Once his Transcension was complete, the forbidden Blood Saber arts he had never broken through opened before him and rose to a higher plane, until he had reached the highest realm of the art. But the cruel, twisted nature he already had was amplified further still by the Sha-Chi device, until Bloodbath had become almost entirely a bloodthirsty killing machine. The only things that still interested him were the screams and the blood of a killing, and the final settling of the doomed bond that had tormented him for so long.
Later he learned the legend of the Nascent Soul Society of the southern frontier and of Lady Nascent Soul. He was elated and afraid at once: the two children who had died for nothing, the grudge and the love that spanned a hundred years, the nightmare that would not let go — all of it was about to be released at last.
In the thirty-first year of The Order he decided to go alone into the southern frontier and find out the truth of the Nascent Soul Society. There he also found Kuhai, who had been gathering Sha-Chi all along and destroying it deep in the volcanoes of Prison Mountain. Kuhai told him why he had really joined the Council of Eleven. Any other member of the Council present would likely have fought Kuhai on the spot; to Bloodbath it no longer mattered, and once he understood the truth he simply walked away alone.
Perhaps, for him, he had already died on the night Xue Qianxun, Xue Antian and his own child were killed. What kept him going afterwards was the chance of finding, once more, the woman who had forged his nightmare…
(The rest of the story was never fully told in the earlier games; what follows is pieced together from the setting and the background given in Phantom Blade III.)
In the end, amid the volcanoes of Prison Mountain that would not stop erupting, Bloodbath met The Order’s Nether Envoy An Chan, and the two of them broke out into the most earth-shaking fight of all. An Chan proved the better of it, and killed Bloodbath.