Da Niu

Da Niu is a mortal ironworker whose friendship, fruit wine, and growing family anchor Wang Lin's decades of living as a woodcarver. Watching Da Niu pass from childhood into adulthood gives Wang Lin concrete experience of family, aging, and the life-and-death cycle. (Chapters 253–282)

Biography

The boy across from the carving shop

Da Niu is twelve when he begins visiting Wang Lin's woodcarving shop every day. Tall and sturdy for his age, he brings fruit wine, watches unfamiliar beasts emerge from the wood, and repeatedly tries to understand a craft whose spiritual meaning is beyond him. His curiosity is practical as well as sincere: after seeing a carving sell for ten pieces of gold, he resolves to learn even if Wang Lin's joking condition is sixty years of observation. He also becomes Wang Lin's informal promoter, drawing prospective customers into the quiet shop and warning Wang Lin not to demand too much. As Da Niu grows, his father puts him to work in the family ironworks. Exhaustion and responsibility reduce the time he can spend watching carvings, but the daily wine continues, and he still finds evenings to accompany the apparently aging, solitary “Uncle Wang.” (Chapters 253–257)

Work, marriage, and inherited responsibility

Over the following decades, Da Niu becomes the ironworks' main laborer, marries the daughter of shopkeeper Zhao, and has a son, Xiao Niu. He worries about Wang Lin's drinking and disguises the wine as medicinal ginseng when speaking to his child, showing how their relationship has shifted from a boy seeking entertainment to an adult caring for an elder. After Da Niu's father dies, Da Niu takes over the shop; after his mother's death, he supports his wife and teaches his son the trade as his father taught him. Xiao Niu is eventually accepted by a White Cloud Sect cultivator, helped by the body-strengthening pills Wang Lin had quietly given him. With the son away, Da Niu hires workers and again spends time in the carving shop. He and his wife treat Wang Lin as a parent, giving the cultivator the ordinary family warmth that his mortal transformation had been missing. Their aging and bereavements also become part of Wang Lin's breakthrough in understanding life and death. (Chapters 261 and 264–265)

The snow catastrophe and a second ironworks

The conflict destroying the Four Sect Alliance turns Da Niu's ordinary life into forced labor. He is sent south to clear unnatural snow while his wife is moved elsewhere. Wang Lin gives each of them a wood carving that radiates warmth, but hunger, frozen bodies, and separation eventually break Da Niu's endurance. He leaves his work camp to search for his wife and collapses among corpses. Wang Lin finds him, reveals enough of his true youthful appearance for Da Niu to realize that Uncle Wang is an immortal, reunites the couple, opens a path through the border barriers, and leaves them gold. Da Niu and his wife settle in a nearby town, where he opens another ironworks and prepares for a daughter. He never sees Wang Lin again, although Wang Lin secretly checks on the family. Da Niu dies in old age still regretting that absence, and the protective carvings pass to his daughter as family heirlooms. (Chapters 269–273 and 282)

Appearance and personality

At twelve, Da Niu is already unusually tall; years of ironwork make him increasingly sturdy, and at seventeen he can work in a thin shirt despite the cold. He is curious, sociable, candid, and commercially minded, but his defining quality is loyalty. He continues bringing wine when work consumes his time, treats Wang Lin as family, and worries about his wife, son, and elderly uncle even while trapped in the deadly snow. (Chapters 253, 257, 261, and 272)

Abilities and cultivation

Ironworking and shop management

Da Niu is a mortal craftsman, not a cultivator. He learns ironworking under his father, becomes the shop's main worker by seventeen, and eventually inherits the business. The work builds his physical strength and gives him the practical ability to support a household, train his son, hire laborers, and reestablish the trade after fleeing the Four Sect Alliance. None of these accomplishments grant spiritual energy, flight, enhanced lifespan, or combat spells. The later uses of “Da Niu” as an alias for Wang Lin must not be assigned to this character. (Chapters 255–257, 265, and 282–283)

Commercial instinct and social initiative

As a child, Da Niu notices that Wang Lin's shop lacks customers and actively brings wealthier buyers to it. He understands the carvings' unusual effect, cautions visitors about touching them, negotiates socially on Wang Lin's behalf, and immediately recognizes the economic significance of a ten-gold sale. These are mundane skills, but they matter causally: his daily presence and his family's fruit wine draw Wang Lin into neighborhood life, while his practical initiative helps turn an isolated cultivator's shop into part of the street's social world. Da Niu cannot reproduce Wang Lin's spiritually infused carving technique despite repeated attempts and observation. (Chapter 253)

Endurance and borrowed protection

Da Niu survives hard labor and the catastrophic snow partly through physical endurance, but the supernatural warmth keeping him alive comes from Wang Lin's carved talisman, not from Da Niu himself. The carving protects against freezing and contains a thread of Wang Lin's divine sense, allowing Wang Lin to locate and rescue him. Faced with hunger, death, and isolation, Da Niu still reaches the limit of mortal resilience and emotionally collapses. This distinction is central to his role: his courage and labor are real, yet he remains subject to age, grief, weather, and death rather than secretly possessing a cultivation path. (Chapters 269 and 272)

Relationships

• Wang Lin: Da Niu grows from an inquisitive neighbor into Wang Lin's surrogate family. His wine and companionship shape Wang Lin's mortal life, while Wang Lin protects his family, rescues him from the snow, and remembers him long after his death. (Chapters 253–282, 337, and 393)
• Li Muwan: Da Niu never meets Li Muwan in the corpus. Wang Lin's promise that his wife is waiting far away, and his later memory of Da Niu while caring for Li Muwan, connect them only through Wang Lin's emotional life. (Chapters 255 and 337)
• Red Butterfly: Da Niu has no direct relationship with Red Butterfly. During her battle with Wang Lin, memories of Da Niu's parents aging and dying help Wang Lin stabilize his life-and-death domain against her emotionless domain. (Chapters 299 and 337)

Items

• Protective wood carvings: Wang Lin gives matching carvings to Da Niu and his wife. They radiate warmth during the unnatural snow, carry Wang Lin's divine sense, and later become family heirlooms passed to Da Niu's daughter. (Chapters 269, 272, and 282)
• Fruit wine: Da Niu and his family supply the wine that becomes part of Wang Lin's mortal routine and a lasting trigger for his memories of them. (Chapters 253–257 and 337)