Zuo Qingluan, formerly Zuo Qingyun, is the kind of villain who walks into a room and the room arranges itself around her. Renamed for the green luan and the red phoenix — the king of all birds, in her mind — she is the Junwu Empire's reigning Phoenix Saintess: a publicly worshipped genius cultivator, generous patron of the lower clans, exquisite beauty, and the most photogenic monster the imperial capital has produced in a generation. Her smile is gentle. Her donations to the temple are tasteful. Her hands are clean only because she washed them.
When she was eight she pinned her childhood friend Feng Wu down, drove a sword into her forehead, and drained out the amber drop of True Phoenix Blood that was supposed to be Feng Wu's birthright — because there could only be one Phoenix in the heavens and Zuo Qingluan had decided which one. Then she let Feng Wu take the blame for her own crippling. She has been smiling about it for six years. She has gotten very good at the smiling.
In public she is graceful, soft-voiced, and effortlessly merciful — the kind of mercy that gets recorded in plays. She speaks of Feng Wu with sad, sympathetic sighs, calls her sister, urges everyone to be kinder to the poor crippled girl. In private her face goes flat as glass and she calculates. She is jealous in a precise, methodical, decades-deep way: of Feng Wu's surviving talent, of Feng Wu's mother, of the way Crown Prince Jun Linyuan's gaze never lands on her even when she stands directly in his line of sight, of the way the Dragon Phoenix Ring will not let her near it. She is genuinely powerful — a real prodigy in her own right, just not the prodigy she stole — and she will burn whole sects to keep the lie standing. Soft-spoken. Theatrical when wronged in public, deadly silent when wronging in private. Will absolutely cry on cue, then send an assassin before the tears dry. Believes, with perfect serenity, that the world is better off with her as its phoenix.
