Second Senior Brother — Pursuit of the Truth

Second Senior Brother is Tian Xie Zi's second disciple and the Phantom King whom the Ninth Summit knows as a gentle, flower-like man. His fondness for sunlight, flowers, and elegant poses initially makes him appear vain and harmless. In truth, his cultivation unites paired opposites: he nurtures plants by day and destroys them at night, carries both life force and a Phantom's death aura, and can turn his genial manner into cold, exact violence when his family is threatened.

His identity is defined less by a personal name than by his place among the four brothers. He quietly watches over Su Ming, risks the destruction of his own consciousness to awaken Eldest Senior Brother, and eventually accepts administrative responsibility for a new Ninth Summit despite disliking restraint. His long separation from the family develops him from an eccentric gardener into a leader, but never erases the habits through which he first learned Creation. After the dying aeon destroys his body, Su Ming finds his mark as a Phantom-like life within a flower of fog and ultimately restores him with the other senior brothers.

Biography

Freezing Sky and the Ninth Summit

When Su Ming arrives, Second Senior Brother has filled much of the Ninth Summit with cold-resistant plants. He appears as a refined man in white who smiles under the fading light, yet his daily and nightly behavior seem to belong to different people. By day he patiently plants and nurtures life; at night he becomes cold, drifts through the gardens like a ghost, uproots his own plants, and then suspects someone else of stealing them. Tian Xie Zi explains that gardening is Second Senior Brother's chosen method for clearing his mind. Su Ming later interprets the two halves as a profound Creation practice: the same hands that bring life into being also destroy it. (Chapters 220–225)

His kindness is usually indirect. He watches Su Ming through the younger disciple's first epiphany without sleeping, sits behind him until he wakes, and dismisses the vigil as merely planting flowers on his platform. When Zi Che crosses the Ninth Summit's boundary and threatens Su Ming, Second Senior Brother mobilizes the life force of the mountain's plants, defeats him with the Hands of Creation, and sentences him to serve the household rather than killing him. He also advises Su Ming not to force growth with cultivation, because unnatural acceleration cannot clear the heart. The contrast defines his teaching: he is willing to use growth as a weapon, but he refuses to confuse coerced growth with inner cultivation. (Chapters 225–231)

Second Senior Brother also teaches practical ruthlessness. He names the second style of Su Ming's God of Berserkers Transformation “Phantom Flash” and advises him to focus on whether an enemy's life truly remains, attacking again if uncertain. Before Su Ming leaves for the Sky Mist Shaman Hunt, he gives him black grass raised with Phantom aura; once placed, it becomes concealing mist in which the traveler can rest. Even his parting request that Su Ming identify the imagined thief of his plants masks concern. The grass and the aura of death he earlier supplies for Spirit Plunder make his dual nature directly useful to Su Ming's survival and experimentation. (Chapters 289–321, 336)

South Morning and the Immortal conflict

The continental calamity scatters the Ninth Summit. Second Senior Brother searches the Eastern Wastelands for Tian Xie Zi and concludes that their master has somehow left both the land of Berserkers and Yin Death Region. During that search, Immortals ambush him and Di Tian suppresses him beneath Great Leaf Immortal Sect. Years of confinement leave his presence weak and his body unable to recover quickly even after Su Ming finds him. The rescue brings the family crucial information, however: Tian Xie Zi's absence is no longer simply a disappearance in South Morning, but a trail leading outside their world. (Chapters 676, 705–718, 725)

On the journey back, his composure lets him identify Yu Xuan as neither Berserker nor Immortal and connect her life-and-death presence to the Emperor of Abyss' True World. A more personal reckoning follows when he meets Zi Yan. He admits that he once liked her and asks her to leave with him, but she refuses because their old fondness is not the life she has built with the man who cared for her through South Morning's upheaval. Second Senior Brother accepts the answer without coercion, wishes her happiness, and leaves despite his pain. His gentleness here is not evasion: it is the ability to let go once another person's choice is clear. (Chapters 719–722)

The brothers then confront Eldest Senior Brother's petrification. Second Senior Brother determines that pure Nine Li blood can help break the Immortal Enchanted Vessel's power, but the awakening also requires Hu Zi to protect their brother's consciousness and Second Senior Brother himself to cast the Great Heavenly Phantom Art. He must disperse his body and soul into the world to stir every Phantom in the land; interruption could turn him permanently into an unconscious fragmented soul, while failure could erase Eldest Senior Brother's consciousness and leave Hu Zi unable to wake. The three-to-six-month working succeeds because each brother accepts a distinct mortal risk and Su Ming protects the process. (Chapters 727–735)

After Eldest Senior Brother awakens, the restored household cannot keep Su Ming from leaving the land of Berserkers, but it can take responsibility for the search he cannot continue. Su Ming entrusts the hunt for Tian Xie Zi to his three senior brothers. Second Senior Brother's role thus changes from the missing family member who must be rescued to one of the people able to preserve the family and pursue its absent master. Later visions of his smile and of the Ninth Summit's courtyard show why that promise matters to Su Ming: the family remains the spirit of the realm and the image of home against which every later separation is measured. (Chapters 639, 746–762)

Divine Essence and Ecang

Second Senior Brother does not accompany Su Ming through most of the Barren Lands of Divine Essence, but his words and absence continue to shape the journey. Su Ming recalls the old story he told about an Abyss Builder couple when recovering memories of his mother, and a vision of the earlier Ninth Summit shows Second Senior Brother meditating beside Hu Zi and the petrified Eldest Senior Brother. In the surviving Ninth Summit, he has lost the sunlight on his face and the easy smile of his youth; he dreams that Su Ming defeated Dao Yuan and became powerful, then wonders whether hope itself was only a dream. The separation has turned his former helplessness into self-reproach over not being strong enough to prevent Su Ming's loss. (Chapters 819–823, 1167)

Su Ming nevertheless invokes him with pride when Tian Xie Zi's Divine Essence disciple-in-name challenges his place. He calls Second Senior Brother the King of All Phantoms, one of the four extraordinary disciples whose identities Tian Xie Zi described while leaving clues in the Ninth Tribe. The title reframes the flower-loving cultivator's oddities as expressions of a larger nature: the death aura, changing behavior, and mastery over fragmented souls all arise from a Phantom existence rather than from an unexplained mood disorder. Even at a distance, Second Senior Brother's remembered status helps Su Ming authenticate the relationships and trail Tian Xie Zi left behind. (Chapters 920, 931–944)

The Fifth Furnace and Morning Dao

The brothers eventually find Second Senior Brother in the wider world, where he has entered Hundred Flower Sect and formed a relationship with the woman who was once his master. Their reversed titles become a running joke: he asks her to call him second senior brother, while she reminds him that she taught him. When Su Ming reunites with the group after more than a thousand years, Second Senior Brother recognizes him beneath an unfamiliar face and meets him with calm joy rather than spectacle. His refined persona has acquired a new habit of reciting poetry, but the humor remains the same means of easing intense feeling that he used on the original Ninth Summit. (Chapters 944, 1049, 1135, 1164–1170)

The reunion also reveals his origin and the reason he could move through different identities. He began as a soul fragment gathered by the first Phantom Equal of Phantom Dais Tribe. When that cultivator died, the fragment unexpectedly gained intelligence and drifted until Tian Xie Zi found it, transformed it, and used an Abyss Dragon Scale to give it corporeal form. Later, as the Phantom King, Second Senior Brother could assume different forms and enter families or sects to perfect his Phantom Dao. These changes did not make his loyalties disposable: Change of Heart preserved the root established by Tian Xie Zi, so every adopted exterior still led back to the Ninth Summit. (Chapters 726, 1167)

When the brothers and Su Ming's Ecang clone gather displaced cultivators in True Morning Dao World, Second Senior Brother becomes the rebuilt Ninth Summit's first Sect Master because the others refuse or ignore the title. Administration initially makes him feel bound; for six years he must regulate both speech and conduct instead of living freely, though he gradually develops a slight liking for the position. Under that leadership, the refugees' settlement expands into a major sect with nine mountains. The same period shows that his contribution is organizational rather than a documented formal realm advancement: the corpus establishes the Phantom King and Sect Master as mature states, but does not supply a complete sequence of cultivation breakthroughs between them. (Chapters 1180–1205)

Ancient Zang and the final truth

The dying aeon destroys Second Senior Brother along with the other people Su Ming loves. Ancient Zang then confronts Su Ming with familiar faces and alternate lives whose relationship to the lost individuals is deliberately uncertain. The clearest correspondence is Great Dao Paragon Sen Mu, whose one hundred reincarnations include the same flower-like, determined figure as Second Senior Brother. Su Ming abandons an attack capable of destroying One Dao Sect because that voice belongs to a past he refuses to cut off. When he later crosses the skies, sunlight on Sen Mu's face casts Second Senior Brother's shadow among the flowers of the old Ninth Summit. (Chapters 1373, 1434, 1471, 1477)

Su Ming's eventual restoration does not simply equate Sen Mu with his lost brother. He searches other Harmonious Morus Alba wings for compatible traces, first gathering only feeble soul marks that resemble the people in his memories. Across later cycles, he finds Second Senior Brother's mark within a flower made of fog, where his state has changed into a life form similar to a Phantom; Hu Zi's mark remains close as the surrounding wind. These fragments supply what Su Ming needs to reconstruct the person he remembers rather than accept one alternate manifestation as sufficient. (Chapters 1478–1481)

Second Senior Brother finally awakens beside Hu Zi and Eldest Senior Brother in the restored world. His first response is a dazed look toward the earth and then the sky, where his eyes grow moist. When he realizes the youngest brother is absent, he repeats Eldest Senior Brother's question and bites his lip in anguish. His life has been restored, but the reunion is deliberately incomplete: Su Ming has returned his family to one another by excluding himself from the home he created for them. (Chapter 1481)

Appearance and personality

Second Senior Brother normally appears as a handsome man in his thirties with a kindly, refined air. He wears white, has long hair in later appearances, and is repeatedly compared to a flower. He enjoys turning one side of his face toward the sunlight because he believes the pose attractive, although Zi Yan tells him that his natural gentle smile suits him better. At night on the original Ninth Summit, the warmth falls away: he drifts among the plants with a chilling presence and behaves like a wary ghost. (Chapters 220–223, 722, 944, 1049)

His personality mixes sincere care with vanity, teasing, and evasive humor. He watches over junior brothers in silence, calls the relationship itself sufficient reason for helping them, and rarely demands gratitude. He can also be shameless, flirtatious, and fond of redirecting embarrassing conversations into poetry or jokes. Hard experience darkens him—after Su Ming's disappearance his smile becomes rare, and leadership curtails his freedom—but neither sorrow nor status eliminates his ability to make the Ninth Summit feel like a family. (Chapters 227–230, 821, 1164–1170, 1204)

Second Senior Brother's gentleness has a lethal boundary. He uses plants, life, and death with precision against intruders, advises Su Ming to kill repeatedly when an enemy's survival is uncertain, and can contemplate disintegrating his own body without hesitation to save Eldest Senior Brother. His acceptance of Zi Yan's refusal shows the other side of that resolve: he distinguishes protecting someone from possessing them and leaves once her choice is made. (Chapters 227–231, 289–290, 722, 727–735)

Abilities and cultivation

The corpus shows Second Senior Brother in several established states—Tian Xie Zi's Creation disciple, Phantom King, and later Sect Master—but does not dramatize a sufficiently complete sequence of formal Berserker, Second-/Third-Step, or Ancient Zang advancements. His known mechanics and limitations therefore provide a firmer account than inferred realm labels.

Phantom nature and transformation

Second Senior Brother originated as a soul fragment assembled into a Phantom by the first Phantom Equal. He gained independent intelligence after that cultivator's death, and Tian Xie Zi later transformed him and used an Abyss Dragon Scale to gather a corporeal body. As the Phantom King, he can change form and blend into the children of different families or disciples of different sects while cultivating his Phantom Dao. The scale is part of how his body was obtained, not a repeatedly activated combat item, and the text does not establish limitless transformation without effort or context. (Chapters 726, 931, 1167)

His Phantom aura resembles death while retaining an affinity with life. It can nourish black grass that unfolds into concealing Phantom mist, and Su Ming initially uses its aura of death as a condition for Spirit Plunder. Second Senior Brother can also recognize related liminal presences in others, which helps him identify Yu Xuan's connection to the Emperor of Abyss' True World. This perception is specialized rather than omniscient: he reaches certainty only after comparing her aura with the creature accompanying her and Tian Xie Zi's teachings about the four Great True Worlds. (Chapters 319–336, 719)

Hands of Creation and plant Arts

The Hands of Creation join life and destruction. By day, Second Senior Brother nurtures flowers and plants to perfection without forcing their natural growth; by night, he uproots what he created and expresses the opposite half of the cycle. In combat he can draw on the combined life force of the Ninth Summit's vegetation, restrain opponents, and transmit withering through transformed life forms. The method is learned cultivation developed through Tian Xie Zi's instruction to clear his mind, while its day/night opposition is also shaped by Second Senior Brother's Phantom nature. (Chapters 225–231, 264, 272, 289–290)

His advice establishes limits on the method. Accelerating a plant with raw cultivation power may produce growth, but it does not train the heart and therefore cannot substitute for natural Creation. He also treats apparent death as uncertain, watching for hidden life and striking again when necessary. That caution is practical because enemies may divide, transform, or conceal their surviving essence; it is not evidence that the Hands of Creation automatically detect or extinguish every kind of immortality. (Chapters 230, 289–290)

Great Heavenly Phantom Art

The Great Heavenly Phantom Art allows Second Senior Brother to disintegrate his body, spread his soul through the world, and stir the Phantoms of the land into a collective attack. To awaken petrified Eldest Senior Brother, the Art requires sufficiently pure Nine Li blood to weaken the Immortal vessel, Hu Zi to protect the target's consciousness, and uninterrupted months of preparation. Mutated blood from a Shaman Dragon offered only a four-tenths chance; combining it with the Great Patriarch's source blood raised Second Senior Brother's estimate to nine-tenths. (Chapters 727–734)

The costs are explicit. Interruption or backlash can erase Second Senior Brother's will and leave him an unconscious fragmented soul for eternity. Failure can also disperse Eldest Senior Brother's consciousness and trap Hu Zi in dreamless sleep. The technique is therefore neither an instant mass summons nor a safe revival power. Its successful use depends on rare blood, multiple specialists, a protected casting interval, and Second Senior Brother's willingness to risk his own existence. (Chapters 727–735)

Combat judgment and instruction

Second Senior Brother is stronger than early Hu Zi and can overwhelm Zi Che through the plants of the Ninth Summit. He combines a gentle appearance with careful lethality, particularly against enemies capable of escaping through alternate forms. Although he names Su Ming's Phantom Flash and explains how to apply it, Phantom Flash remains Su Ming's transformation style rather than proof that Second Senior Brother possesses the same technique. His contribution is diagnostic: focus on the target's remaining life rather than the spectacle of speed. (Chapters 223, 227–231, 289–290, 1200)

Change of Heart and leadership

Tian Xie Zi's Change of Heart keeps Second Senior Brother's roots stable while he changes personality, body, sect, and outward role. Planting is his chosen method of clearing the mind, and later form-changing among families develops the Phantom Dao without displacing his identity as a Ninth Summit disciple. Becoming Sect Master is an administrative development, not a confirmed cultivation breakthrough. It limits his spontaneity and forces public discipline, but it also expands the protective responsibility he once exercised only over three brothers to a sect of displaced cultivators. (Chapters 222–225, 726, 1167, 1180–1205)

Relationships

Tian Xie Zi: Tian Xie Zi finds the intelligent Phantom fragment, transforms it with an Abyss Dragon Scale, and accepts him as his second disciple. His teaching gives Second Senior Brother the stable foundation from which the Hands of Creation and Phantom Dao develop. Second Senior Brother later searches beyond South Morning for him. (Chapters 222–225, 725–727, 1167)
Su Ming: Second Senior Brother quietly guards Su Ming's epiphanies, supplies Phantom grass and death aura, names Phantom Flash, and treats helping him as a brother's ordinary duty. Su Ming later rescues him, entrusts the search for Tian Xie Zi to him, and ultimately reconstructs his soul across cycles of life and death. (Chapters 225–336, 705–746, 1471–1481)
Eldest Senior Brother: He respects the eldest disciple's authority and risks permanent loss of self to awaken him from petrification. Eldest Senior Brother later assigns the separated brothers different routes in the search for Su Ming, and both help govern the rebuilt Ninth Summit. (Chapters 670–735, 1164–1180)
Hu Zi: Their relationship is filled with insults, teasing, and unquestioned trust. Hu Zi protects Eldest Senior Brother's consciousness while Second Senior Brother casts the Great Heavenly Phantom Art, later complains about being abandoned during their search, and remains beside Second Senior Brother even when both survive only as transformed marks in the Vast Expanse. (Chapters 223–230, 727–735, 1164, 1481)
Zi Yan: Second Senior Brother once admired Zi Yan and asks her to leave with him when they meet again. She refuses because her present life and attachments differ from their remembered possibility. He kisses her forehead, wishes her happiness, and does not challenge the decision. (Chapters 519, 720–722)
Di Tian: Di Tian ambushes and suppresses Second Senior Brother beneath Great Leaf Immortal Sect during the search for Tian Xie Zi. The resulting injuries persist after Su Ming's rescue and make the Immortal conflict a personal violation of the Ninth Summit. (Chapters 705–718, 725)

Items

Abyss Dragon Scale: Tian Xie Zi uses this scale to gather corporeal form for the intelligent Phantom fragment who becomes Second Senior Brother. It is foundational to his embodied life, but the corpus does not show him wielding it as a separate combat object afterward. (Chapter 726)
Phantom grass: A black blade of grass grown with Second Senior Brother's Phantom aura transforms into protective, concealing mist when placed down. He gives it to Su Ming before the Sky Mist Shaman Hunt so the younger disciple can rest safely. (Chapter 321)
Folding fan: Second Senior Brother carries and opens a fan during the brothers' later reunion, using it as part of his refined, poetry-reciting presentation. No independent supernatural effect is attributed to it. (Chapter 1170)