Zhong Xiu Hua

Zhong Xiu Hua, known in God's Miracle as Dragon Marquis and addressed by his followers as Master Zhong, is the concealed financier and guild master behind Eternal Flame. His in-game identity, inherited political access, family capital, and fixation on Sun Xin Yu all belong to the same continuous antagonist: he enters the game to surpass Zhang Yang, then carries their conflict into business, public reputation, and physical violence when purchased strength does not secure victory. (Chapters 676, 690–693, 763–765, 777, 785–789, and 850–853)

Biography

Eternal Flame and the Dragon Marquis

Dragon Marquis first becomes visible through the institution he finances rather than through his avatar. Eternal Flame is only seven days old when it takes a Hardcore dungeon first clear from an established guild and uses the publicity to recruit aggressively. It pays collectors and producers according to output, guarantees monthly salaries to middle- and high-class combatants, and offers individual contracts to top players. The expenditure needed to sustain tens of thousands of members makes it clear that the unknown guild master is buying rapid growth on a scale few rivals can match, while keeping his own face and background out of public view. (Chapter 676)

The concealment initially also hides a major gameplay weakness: Dragon Marquis begins far behind the server at Level 78. Hundreds of hired players escort him, weaken monsters, and let him take final blows, raising him as quickly as one level every two hours. Sun Xin Yu's investigation then establishes that Dragon Marquis is Zhong Xiu Hua, her former Beijing neighbor and childhood playmate. Zhong has pursued her since childhood, entered God's Miracle because she valued strength there, and believes defeating Zhang Yang and Lone Desert Smoke will prove him worthy of her. He also recognizes the game as a vast new marketplace, so romantic fixation and commercial ambition reinforce the same campaign. (Chapters 692–693)

Zhong's family position gives that campaign reach beyond what Eternal Flame can win directly. His father is Zhong Jin Shan, his grandfather was a former prime minister, and his mother leads the investment fund that supplies much of his capital. After Eternal Flame exploits other guilds during a Territory Conquest, Lone Desert Smoke hunts it for seven days; pressure then reaches hundreds of other guild masters and threatens their real-world companies unless they force Zhang Yang to stop. Once Sun Xin Yu identifies Dragon Marquis, that external intervention and the guild's exceptional spending become intelligible parts of Zhong's real identity rather than unexplained powers of an anonymous player. (Chapters 690 and 693)

Zhong's first face-to-face meeting with Zhang Yang exposes the personal entitlement behind his public civility. He welcomes Sun Xin Yu as an old intimate, speaks of joining their political families, and treats her relationship with Zhang as humiliation and disobedience rather than her choice. When she leaves the room, he threatens to dismantle Silky Soft Holdings and take Zhang Yang's possessions in the game. Zhang punches him, and Sun Xin Yu warns Zhong against retaliation; Zhong refrains from ordering his bodyguards to attack because he fears her capacity for violence and the consequences of a clash with the Sun family, then redirects his anger toward Zhang's company and guild. (Chapters 763–764)

His retaliation demonstrates both reach and limitation. Government departments and media sources trouble Silky Soft Holdings, while Eternal Flame organizes an Anti-Lone-Desert-Smoke Alliance and attacks the teleportation traffic sustaining Zhang's territories. The broad assault antagonizes ordinary players who depend on those routes and is beaten back. In the professional league, Zhong reaches Level 142 and occupies an Eternal Flame roster slot but normally appears only after his stronger teammates have nearly secured victory; when he challenges Zhang Yang directly, he is beaten until he forfeits. Later, Eternal Flame mishandles sixteen Model 4.0 Tanks against an Ascended boss, and Zhong's attempt to bargain after Lone Desert Smoke intervenes ends with his force destroyed and his announced boss coordinates widely distrusted. (Chapters 765–777 and 782–783)

Scandal, Collapse, and Death

Repeated competitive losses push Zhong from coercion into a deliberate reputational attack. With Scholar Musou and other senior members, he approves false accusations that Zhang sexually exploits guild members and plans to abduct Zhang, drug both him and actress Luo Yu Rou, and record them with hidden cameras in her hotel room, where Luo is already present. The scheme is meant to separate Zhang from Sun Xin Yu, destroy his public standing, fracture Lone Desert Smoke, recruit its disillusioned members, and then seize its three territories. Zhang's abduction and the drugging of both victims occur, and leaked recordings and manufactured accusers reduce Lone Desert Smoke from fifty thousand to forty thousand members, making this Zhong's most consequential success. (Chapters 785 and 787–789)

The success does not hold. Zhang publicly challenges the accusations, a police investigation exposes thousands of supposed victims as fraudulent, and the narrative says the intermediaries will not implicate Zhong while also noting that he avoids making arrangements personally. Lone Desert Smoke loses members but its remaining core becomes more committed against Eternal Flame. Zhang then commissions an investigation into Zhong's history; the resulting report describes suspected disappearances carried out through agents and without direct proof, reinforcing why conventional prosecution has difficulty reaching him. Zhong's protection remains strongest inside China, while events in Brazil demonstrate that his family cannot shield him in the same way abroad and leave him publicly humiliated. (Chapters 789–790 and 798–803)

Zhong nevertheless returns to the game instead of withdrawing. Eternal Flame remains one of China's leading guilds for a time, but its reputation is damaged and it cannot contribute a Forbidden Scroll during the demonic crisis despite standing among the region's strongest organizations. His own authority is increasingly defensive: he fears another confrontation with Sun Xin Yu, acts primarily through paid experts and alliances, and depends on his mother's money to keep the guild running. The same structure that produced its rapid rise therefore becomes a constraint—continued strength requires continued salaries, equipment expenditure, and obedience bought from players whose loyalty is transactional. (Chapters 817, 820, 828, 832, and 838)

Zhang's acquisition of a controlling share in Hua Yi Trust Fund removes that foundation. Zhong's mother loses her board position and much of her remaining wealth after borrowing heavily to resist the takeover, and the fund's support for Eternal Flame is cut off. Zhong falls a month behind on salaries; the guild drops from 68,967 members to 29,873 before Longrich reveals that Zhang paid him to defect and expose the financial crisis. Scholar Musou, Death Arbiter, and the other core players follow, leaving roughly one thousand low-level members. Eternal Flame's collapse strips Zhong of the game organization he built to defeat Zhang and turns his rage toward a direct, personal solution. (Chapters 850–851)

Zhong abducts Zhang during the World League Championship and has him taken to an abandoned metalworking factory. He intends to burn the body and erase the evidence, attempting to emulate the traceless disappearances that an earlier investigation suspects his agents of arranging, but the abduction is the trap Zhang and Sun Xin Yu have prepared: a GPS device leads police to the warehouse. Faced with arrest, Zhong refuses commands to lower his unlicensed gun and fires at Zhang. A police marksman shoots him through the head before his shots connect. Subsequent investigation uses witnesses, recordings, physical evidence, and his psychological evaluation to reconstruct the incident and uncover his criminal history; by the end of the supplied corpus, Zhong is definitively dead and Dragon Marquis's guild has already disintegrated. (Chapters 798, 852–853, and 856)

Appearance and personality

Zhong is a handsome young man whose controlled presentation changes with his fortunes. At his first real-world meeting with Zhang Yang, he sits calmly over tea and adopts the manners of an easygoing gentleman for Sun Xin Yu; once she leaves, his expression becomes cold, prideful, and openly disdainful. By the final abduction, financial and guild collapse have left him disheveled, pale, and visibly unstable. The corpus does not give fixed hair color, eye color, height, or a detailed description of his Dragon Marquis avatar. (Chapters 763–764 and 852)

Pride, possessiveness, class entitlement, and concealed vindictiveness define him. Sun Xin Yu remembers that he can smile while angry and regards that discrepancy as devious hypocrisy; Zhong himself believes status is inherited through superior blood and interprets rejection as an injury to his rightful position. He can suppress a tantrum when consequences threaten his father or when Sun Xin Yu frightens him, yet each loss intensifies his need to reassert control. His behavior is also calculating rather than merely impulsive: he buys expertise, hides behind intermediaries, and plans multi-stage attacks, but humiliation repeatedly breaks that discipline and eventually pushes him into an armed crime committed in front of police. (Chapters 693, 764, 783, 785, 798, 838, and 851–852)

Abilities and gameplay

Zhong's effective power is distributed across three systems: his under-documented personal avatar, Eternal Flame's purchased labor and equipment, and his family's real-world political and financial access. The corpus gives only limited mechanics for his own Class A Inheritance, but it demonstrates the resources he can deploy, the methods by which he applies them, and the constraints that cause each system to fail. (Chapters 676, 690–693, 765–783, 798, and 850–852)

Dragon Marquis and Class A Inheritance

Dragon Marquis begins at Level 78 and uses hundreds of escorts to accelerate his leveling rather than relying on personal grinding efficiency. By the professional-league stage he has reached Level 142, but Eternal Flame fields him mainly in matches that its stronger members have already nearly won. In a direct arena match, he cannot meaningfully resist Zhang Yang and forfeits after a prolonged beating. These scenes establish that money closes his level gap and buys him a roster position, but not that he has elite individual control. His exact player class is never stated in the supplied corpus. (Chapters 692, 776–777)

By the encounter with Sandras, Zhong can levitate without a mount, leading the narrator to identify him as a Class A Inheritance holder. The inheritance's name, origin quest, transformation statistics, active skills, cooldowns, and elemental properties are not revealed. Levitation is therefore his only securely demonstrated personal mechanic. Even with that inheritance and a group of transformed core players, he cannot overcome Eternal Flame's healing shortage or the boss's regeneration, and he is killed after Lone Desert Smoke attacks the depleted group. (Chapter 783)

Guild finance and force projection

Eternal Flame converts Zhong's capital into rapid institutional strength. It pays fixed salaries to tested combatants, rewards collectors and producers for quotas, signs top players individually, and recruits recognized experts such as Scholar Musou, Longrich, and Death Arbiter. This model earns early dungeon prestige and eventually produces a top professional team and one of China's four most significant guilds. Its cost is continuous: even a hypothetical Level 4 roster paid only the middle-class rate would require 1.2 billion gold per month, while top contracts, equipment, and war assets increase the burden. (Chapters 676, 765, 776–777, and 789)

Zhong can also field Anti-Lone-Desert-Smoke coalitions, paid covert operatives, bodyguards, and Model 4.0 Tanks; an investigation additionally suspects that agents working for him arranged earlier disappearances, without establishing direct proof. Sixteen Tanks give Eternal Flame hundreds of protected combatants against Sandras, but the guild commits them simultaneously instead of rotating damaged vehicles out of combat; the Tanks break after about eight minutes, leaving too few healers for the exposed force. Zhong's reaction is to negotiate, threaten to publish the boss location, and then carry out the threat after defeat. The episode demonstrates access to costly systems and subordinate manpower, while also showing that possession does not substitute for tactical mastery or trusted coordination. (Chapters 765, 782–783, and 798)

The financial model's hard limit is loyalty. Zhong promises rewards and future territory profit to motivate senior members, but their service lasts only while his money and political status remain useful. Once salaries fail and Longrich reveals a larger payment from Zhang, the same experts who gave Eternal Flame its competitive strength leave within minutes. Zhong retains the guild-master title but not the organization behind it, reducing his scalable in-game power almost to nothing. (Chapters 785 and 850–851)

Political, commercial, and covert resources

Zhong's family grants access to officials, companies, capital, and coercive pressure. Threats against corporate markets force other guild masters to intercede for Eternal Flame, and later departments, investigators, and media allegations disrupt Silky Soft Holdings. His mother finances the guild through Hua Yi Trust Fund, while his father's political ascent and his grandfather's former office create the expectation that ordinary opponents cannot challenge him directly. Zhong prefers indirect methods that preserve deniability, including intermediaries, paid operatives, planted evidence, kidnapping, and surveillance. (Chapters 690, 693, 765, 785, and 798)

Those resources have jurisdictional and institutional limits. Zhong fears provoking the politically powerful Sun family, lacks the same protection outside China, and avoids asking his father for favors that might damage the upright public image required for political advancement. His mother's capital can be cut off through corporate control, hired followers can defect, and indirect crimes remain safe only while no direct evidence connects him. When he personally supervises Zhang's abduction with a firearm, witnesses, GPS tracking, and police recording eliminate that deniability; panic then turns his last available weapon into the immediate cause of his death. (Chapters 693, 764, 801, 838, and 850–853)

Power progression

Relationships

• Zhang Yang: Zhong's central rival in both the game and real world. Zhong tries to defeat his guild, take his territories and business advantages, destroy his reputation, and ultimately kill him; Zhang answers with competitive humiliation, investigation, financial takeover, and the police trap that ends their conflict. (Chapters 690–693, 763–765, 777–789, 798, and 850–853)
• Sun Xin Yu: Zhong's childhood neighbor and long-term fixation. He follows her into God's Miracle and treats marriage as both possession and a political alliance, but she rejects his personality, identifies Dragon Marquis for Zhang, and repeatedly constrains Zhong through the threat of her own family and abilities. (Chapters 690, 693, 764, 787–788, and 852–853)
• Luo Yu Rou: The actress Zhong selects as an unwilling instrument in his framing operation. His scheme has Zhang abducted to her hotel room and drugs both of them, damaging her career and entangling her life with Zhang's; Zhong later regrets the outcome when her new film business becomes profitable. (Chapters 785, 787–790, and 851)
• Liu Wei: A ruined antagonist whom Zhong has released and preserves as a potential weapon against Zhang. Liu Wei's rash attempt to sabotage the Angus battle fails, and Zhong dismisses him after Serena kills him. (Chapters 738, 754, and 763)
• Scholar Musou: Eternal Flame's leading strategist and professional player. Zhong accepts his plan to corrode Lone Desert Smoke through scandal, but their relationship is based on employment and status; Scholar leaves when the guild can no longer pay and Zhong's protection loses value. (Chapters 690, 765, 785, and 851)
• Longrich: A core Eternal Flame player who secretly accepts Zhang's payment, exposes Zhong's financial collapse, and helps trigger the guild's mass departure. His relocation to Brazil places him beyond Zhong's ordinary reach. (Chapters 690 and 851)

Items

• No named signature item: Zhong's documented personal gameplay advantage is an unnamed Class A Inheritance that permits levitation; the corpus does not establish a named weapon, armor piece, mount, or artifact as his own. His decisive material assets are instead guild salaries, hired players, Tanks, corporate funding, bodyguards, and the handgun he uses during Zhang Yang's abduction. (Chapters 676, 692, 783, 798, and 850–852)