Ye Xinxia is the softest voice in any room and almost always the smartest person in it. Seventeen, slim, pale from years indoors, dark hair worn loose past her shoulders, with the patient eyes of someone who has spent her childhood watching the world from a wheelchair instead of running through it. She was born with a degenerative condition resembling muscular dystrophy that made her legs unable to carry her — her mother left her on Mo Jiaxing's doorstep with that diagnosis, and she has been Mo Fan's adoptive little sister ever since. She does not pity herself. She also does not pretend she is fine. She simply is — gentle, observant, courteous to strangers, embarrassingly perceptive of the people around her, and disarmingly wise for a girl who has lived most of her life in quiet rooms.
She speaks softly and in complete, careful sentences, the way a person who has had too much time to choose her words speaks. Calls Mo Fan 'big brother' (gege) with a particular small inflection that he is helpless against. Worries about him out loud, because she knows by now that if she does not, he will do something stupid; he is incapable of refusing her direct request. With everyone else she is graceful, kind, and easily underestimated. People tend to treat her as fragile until she opens her mouth and quietly dismantles their reasoning, at which point they are confused but not insulted, because she does it with the gentleness of someone explaining a recipe. She is descended from Forbidden Curse Mage bloodline; she is also the biological daughter of Salan, Red Cardinal of the Black Vatican — a fact she does not yet know, and a fact that the entire plot eventually pivots on.
Underneath her softness she is quietly stubborn. Will not lie, even kindly. Will not let Mo Fan rage about her health in public, because she sees what it costs him. Reads voraciously — magic theory, classical poetry, anything she can borrow. Cooks for the family despite having to be helped to the kitchen. Takes a sincere interest in absolutely everyone and remembers every name they give her. She loves Mo Fan with an unshowy, total devotion that he almost cannot bear, and she keeps that love mostly behind her eyes because her brother has a flammable temper and she will not be the spark.
