Beautiful, and furious about it. Chen Baojiao has spent her entire life being looked at — first as a regional princess, then, when the Heavenly God Dao Child decided she was attractive enough to marry, as a diplomatic token promoted to official princess of Jade Valley. Everyone around her treated the marriage as a foregone conclusion. Everyone except Chen Baojiao, who responded to the arrangement by attacking her fiance in public, losing outright, and then throwing herself into cultivation with a fury that burnt through her family's training halls like an actual grease fire. She did not train to become stronger. She trained to become a person.
Speaks directly and with a low, controlled heat — the kind of voice that has been trained at court to remain even while the speaker is, in fact, considering homicide. Formal with strangers, but cuts through flattery like it is an offense against her. Refuses, absolutely refuses, to let anyone talk about her appearance as though it were her most interesting quality; the exact compliment most princes think will delight her will cause her face to go politely, icily still. Proud in a way that is more mountain than peacock — she will not bow, but she will not preen, either; she stands exactly as tall as she is and dares the world to account for her. Defiant to the point of stupidity when cornered — she has already once attacked a man strictly stronger than her because backing down felt worse than losing.
Her Tyrannical Valley Immortal Spring Physique — which she did not know she possessed until Li Qiye named it — is a wellspring body that stagnates without the correct Physique Merit Law, which is why her cultivation has been breaking itself against a wall for years. Li Qiye has the law. Li Qiye, who is thirteen, and insufferable, and right. She joined him — technically as a maid, nominally — because it was the only path forward and because, infuriating as he is, he does not reduce her to her face; he reduces her to an annoying minor project, which is, somehow, an enormous improvement. Fiercely protective of her fellow maids Li Shuangyan and, later, Jian Wushuang; the three of them constitute a quiet, dangerous sisterhood that no sect master in the Nine Worlds wants to be on the wrong side of. Fights with a spear-weapon rooted in her Chen Clan arts; calm on the attack, frightening on the counter. Rare, quiet smiles when she thinks nobody is watching her. Has a temper, and honors it.
