Luo Meihua (Luò Měihuá 泺 美华)

Luò Měihuá, 泺 美华, meaning: 美: beautiful and 华: magnificent/flowery, Luo is the surname and Meihua the given name.

General Stuff

She has a human form and a nonhuman form.(the huadian like mark on her head in her nonhuman form is just that, markings, it's not makeup.)

If you really need a real life ref I think her hair would be a type 2 something, but I kinda like how almost unnaturally flowy it looks right now.

She's skilled in the four arts (traditional chinese painting, traditional chinese calligraphy, qin(an instrument), weiqi(a board game)) but enjoys embroidering big tapestries.

Easily gets irritated with people who don't get it as fast as her.

She's a bit of a night owl.

Lives in a decently sized traditionally chinese house in the middle of a bamboo forest as an elder in her sect.(No servants though so the rooms she doesn't use are pretty dusty)

She can create rifts to other worlds and dimensions with Huo E Qi, while she mostly stays in her own Xianxia esque world she does hop to modern worlds from time to time ever since discovering the existence of boba tea which she loves.

She has two swords, her first one, the big one, her main weapon, is a zhanmadao named Hèsī 焃飔 ( 焃: fiery/bright, 飔: cool breeze of autumn) but later in life she also comes across the jian type sword(the black one) called Huó È Qì 活恶气 (活: to live/alive/living, 恶气: evil smell/resentment)

For those unaware, except gold and silver, jade has also always been a very popular material for jewellery in china, this is what her more green, turquoise and blue jewellery is made out of. (Jade also comes in black, red, white and lavender colours.)

Backstory Stuff

She was born year in the 4064 a.GW., was an orphan, had a twin brother, Meihua in general was not very close with her brother, she and her brother were not perfect mixes of Guxue people(explanation lower down) and human, instead Meihua suffers from a constant awareness of her body and how its not right something is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wro- While her brothers mental state was precarious and would only worsen as he grows up, the mix of instincts woulf mess with his perception of the world and how he's able to handle situations and emotions.

Had this been a modern world he would probably have been okay, and got help, but it isn't, and Meihua isn't someone who is tolerating with stuff like that and just in general not the person you want to support you in your mental health journey, she's more of a why cant you be normal you freak? Or adapt and fake it? type of person, and her dislike for her brother eventually down the line changes into complete disinterest(or is it just disguised hate?), she simply no longer considers him as anything more than a horribly annoying stranger people expect her to be nice to for some goddamn reason.

they joined a sect, had a horrible shizun who meihua nonetheless respected, since Meihua while not liking the guy, is pretty big on the whole, he's my shizun and thus i should respect him as that thing and thus never grows to hate him as her brother does(he was the victim of extreme bullying south korea style but amped up to ten because these guys are all disciples on the way to becoming cultivators), 

Meihua simply does not allow herself to hate her shizun. Because except filial pity, he also wasn't a good person but he's the guy who personally taught her weiqi(he just wanted a good opponent) and he's the guy who made her one of his personal disciples and let her disappear into the forest and repurpose an abandoned building into her own personal home and only appear to the rest of the sect for the occasional mission or test.(neglect is that you? not that Meihua cares, she loves it)

She gets kicked down into the Abyss with her brother when their heritage was revealed to their shizun(no other witnesses. Yet) during a conference/youngsters from different sects showing off/hunt thingy)

but she does not get out of the abyss with her brother(she abandoned him pretty quickly down there) It's down in the abyss where she stumbles upon a mad ancestor trapped under a mountain, she end up camping along the guys prison for a good while and eventually ends up

eating and consuming him(it also has the added benefit of him not being in pain anymore after that, since he's dead) at his insistence that it will help her deal with her dual nature and protect her from the mental decline that will affect her too, it just works slower on her than her brother, this does help, kinda, it makes the nonhuman part of her stronger, its instincts stronger, and kinda suppresses her human mind and way of thinking, which, to the ancestors credit, is useful if you wanna survive in the abyss.

However after she does this Meihua does kinda want her previous self back, she is afraid of how she thinks now, of how she sees the world now, its useful in the abyss, but her home is not the abyss, it's the human realm, and she knows that this way of seeing the world, this way of perceiving the world, will not do her any favours once she comes back(don't worry, she'll find a solution.) More info on exactly how this affects her will be lower down

Eventually she gets out of the abyss only to return to a destroyed sect, (insane?)brother who had found Hou e qi in the abyss, came back, destroyed sect and tortured shizun to death, she gets really fucking mad, furious, and sad, because like, the sect was her home, her home, and that was her shizun, sure he wasn't a good guy(really not a good guy, i feel like i need to emphasize this, he was a resentful self-loathing little fucker with identity problems) but still.

So anyways, she steals the sword Hou E Qi from her brother, realizes that Hou E Qi actually helps her keep her identity as luo meihua the mix of human and Guxue intact, not letting her be

Luo meihua, the Guxue or Luo meihua, the human. Because Hou E Qi tries to constantly consume, to break her mind, so now she must stand strong and united, because even just a tiny breakage would give Hou E Qi the in it needs.

She returns to the remains of the sect, goes into the very strong and qi rich cave system,  and used hou e qi in a ritual to time travel to over 5 millennia before her birth essentially destroying her own timeline( she originally had intended to only be sent back a century or so but that's what you get when you experiment with homemade rituals and powerful cursed sapient weapons who hate you)

Newly thrown into a world in a time long before her own she became a courtesan (a shuyu) for a while,

took part in the Great War(1000 b.GW - year 0) during which her original sect was formed, was part of her sects faction, but was allied with the power-couple's (shen liyue and her husband) faction too, eventually being allied with only shen liyue after her and her husband split.

and aided in the creation of Hou E Qi(cause she wanted back that peaceful mind she had had when possessing the damn sword),

went away from the jianghu for a while after her sect seemed to go through its transformation quite well, and took on various human mortal identities such as that of a general serving one of the mortal emperors, took a break from the world and entered closed cultivation for a few centuries much like Su Wulin did,

came out again, found out old ally and friend from the Great War Shen Liyue had finally been reincarnated, checked in on her for a bit, but Shen Liyue(2nd life) was in her outlaw/trying to keep herself from breaking into pieces era and alternated pretty heavily between chasing away meihua and begging her to keep her company depedning on what memories where the strongest at that specific moment.(around 2783 a.GW),

joined in on Wu Huanye's war on Shen Liyue's(3rd life) suggestion(3498-3523 a.GW),

abstained from Shen Liyue's own war(3623-3841 a.GW) a century later though,

later helped Shen Liyue die of old age with her blood to fulfill the requirements of the reincarnation ritual (ca 3898-3904 a.GW)

Once her original time started nearing soon after Shen Liyue's death and reincarnation she went back to her old og sect as an elder to await the arrival of her og shizun, still not quite sure what she would do once she met him

But she did meet him, she met him, and somehow he ended up becoming her personal disciple, due to his backstory he's generally rather distrustful, but Meihua just handled him as she did the version of him she knew, meaning she taught what needed to be taught, played weiqi with him, let him bitch about other people to her(he doesn't start doing this until a good amount of years later, he did it before because back then he was the person in power, right now he's the disciple and she's the teacher) and otherwise just left him to his own devices.

Year 4043 a.GW shen jinhong, her og shizun now disciple, is invited to Wu Huanye's big banquet along with a bunch of other people, there he meets Shen Liyue, and it turns out he's the reincarnation of her son, Shen Aizhen. Luo Meihua already suspected this, along with the few other elders left in the sect old enough to remember him, but it was nice to have confirmation. What wasn't nice was the angry scolding she got from Shen Liyue for not telling her her son had finally reincarnated, and the disappointed one from Wu Huanye for not telling her about it so that she could finally be rid of Shen Liyue using up all the prisoners in the dungeons for her experiments since she'd have something more important to focus on.

Luo Meihua, back then in her og timeline, talking about the father:

"It's funny, how you all assume, why would they have sealed him, why go through the bother of trapping him, when it's so much simpler to kill? The answer is obvious. He could not be killed. You all assumed that what you were trapping was a simple demon. But if he was a demon, why not kill him? Because he wasn't a demon. Sure, he behaved like one. Sure, he lived like one. Sure, he did seem to think himself one. But the fact remains, he wasn't. But he forgot his bounds. He forgot his nature. He forgot his origins. When you fought him, how did he fight? Did he rip with his claws? Did he kick? Did he punch? Maybe he even used a blade? Our kind does not fight like that. Not when it's serious. But he did. He knew that if he fought like demonkind, if he fought like humankind, he would lose. And yet. He did. Why? Why was he so committed to his false life? Or had he forgotten how to fight? Had he forgotten his bounds, his nature, his origin?

I believe he forgot. Why else would he doom me to this cursed existence? Why else would he not have turned my mother before my conception? He must have forgotten how to. There is no reason to give life to a child, if the life given is such a cursed in-between like this.

He must have forgotten."

Some details on the Guxue people and Hou E Qi:

Her Guxue people is one capabale of extreme regeneration, even a severed head wont stop them much, they can either grow the severed head back and let the old one wither away unnaturally fast( a few min maximum) or take up the severed head and simply reattach it to their body, the only things that can kill them are themselves or others of their species, the only way for them to be defeated by others not of their species is for them to be sealed away by strong arrays that hurt them continuously, making them use up all their energy to keep themselves alive and preventing them from escaping, eventually after a few centuries of this the captured specimen will either end their own misery or have gone so mad from the torture that they no longer remember how to.

This species has, like their name suggests, gu like blood(you can think of it as tiny, tiny microscopic parasites that make up her blood which she can control) By feeding these parasites to other beings its possible to control that beings body like a puppet, track them wherever they are, heal them by rushing up the healing process, cause both pain and pleasure and if the being has ingested enough blood it's even possible to regenerate them to a similar degree as the species itself, although all of this (except the natural healing stuff) requires continued uninterrupted concentration on the parasite owners part and the abilities get weaker the further away the parasite owner is.

all this is however purely physical and does not affect the victims mind, what does affect the mind is that Luo Meihua has learned some dreamwalking techniques which she is able to use to manipulate other people's dreams and through those dreams access their memories and place illusions on their minds to plant fake memories or induce amnesia or similar, this is however a skill that can easily be turned on the owner by someone else proficient enough in the art or someone who simply has enough willpower to fight against it.

Now you might remember that I describe Meihua as having a Guxue’s instincts and body? But a human mind? yes, her body is moving, her instinct tells her that that identity, that existence is fleeting, malleable, transformative. But her human mind tells her that no, her body, her identity, her being stops where her skin ends. Even if the blood is outside of the body, that is not her, that's just blood, even if her blood is inside another person, controlling another person, that's not her, that's just her blood inside someone who is not her. The body it's inside of is not part of her, even if her instincts will her to believe so. This is what creates such a dissonance between her two natures, the human one, who tells her that she is her body, the Jing inside her body, and possibly if she can manage to come that far, the Shen she will have managed to change into.

But her Guxue nature tells her that no, everything she is is where her blood is, because her blood is her, if her blood flows through another person? then that person is her, obviously. What else could it be? If her blood mixes with a river? Well she is now part of the river, or the river is part of her, the details of it ain't that important, this is what her Guxue nature tells her. These conflicting natures and understandings and ways of seeing and interpreting the world is what causes her such big problems. 

Hou E Qi is a sword forged from a former member of her species turned into metal(thus the name) during the Great War that ended 4 millenia ago and has been known for bringing enormous power to its users and it can also create rifts between worlds, something that once she discovers it, Meihua continuously abuses to get a break from her own world, it also corrupts all its users minds and feeds of off them, however for Meihua its a blessing in disguise since Hou E Qi's resentments actually helps her regulate her unbalanced natures, having a voice in her mind actually kinda helps balance her, it helps her keep her identity, her self, intact, because now there's someone else here too, it helps her human and Guxue side to kinda work together, because now theres and other here too, something both her natures need to unite for, for them to be able to keep the other from consuming them, because Hou E Qi consumes minds by fracturing them, by breaking them, by separating them. And so for Meihua's continued existence her nonhuman side and her Guxue side must unite, must adapt to each other not just try and force one side, one way of understanding the world, to the forefront of her mind and her actions.