Xuanyuan Po

Xuanyuan Po is a Bear-tribe cultivator whose crippling injury leads him from Star Seizer Academy to the founding household of the Orthodox Academy. His loyalty to Chen Changsheng and Luoluo outlasts public disgrace, separation, and war, while his innate strength, Heavenly Thunder Bringer, and inherited fist arts eventually make him the foremost direct combatant of the Demi-human race's younger leadership.

Biography

Joining the Orthodox Academy

Xuanyuan Po arrives at the Ivy Festival as a thirteen-year-old freshman of Star Seizer Academy, already unusually large but straightforward enough to insist that his opponent need not hold back. Tianhai Ya'er exploits that contest to destroy his right arm after Xuanyuan refuses to retreat, ending what seems to be his path as a cultivator. Rather than consume his academy's resources when its physicians cannot cure a demi-human body, Xuanyuan withdraws voluntarily and washes dishes in the night market to save for the journey home. He still wants to cultivate, but his clan's teaching against accepting human pity makes him reject dependence even when he has no other plan. (Chapters 43–50)

Luoluo seeks him out because she has avenged his injury and recognizes his situation; she then brings him to Chen. Xuanyuan initially suspects that the apparently ordinary human youth who commands Luoluo's respect must be a swindler. Chen pierces Xuanyuan's transformed arm with a bronze needle and proves that sensation remains, offering a long treatment rather than an instant cure. Xuanyuan struggles to accept help until Chen distinguishes pride from stubborn stupidity. He writes his name into the academy register and acknowledges Luoluo as teacher, placing himself within Chen's instructional lineage and turning medical hope into a new school affiliation. (Chapters 49–50)

Recovery makes Xuanyuan part of the academy's daily life before it restores him as a fighter. He cooks, trains against the lakeside trees, helps Tang Thirty-Six defend the grounds, and uses his healthy left arm to hurl the shattered academy gate at attackers. In the Grand Examination, he trusts Tang's simple plan to close distance and commits all his strength to one advance, defeating a Meditation-realm opponent with a punch powerful enough to breach the arena's silencing array. His later concession to Gou Hanshi shows that he has also learned to accept his companions' tactical judgment rather than treating every withdrawal as cowardice. (Chapters 88–100 and 142–145)

Training and Separation

Xuanyuan's right arm requires months of Chen's treatment, continuing into the following summer, but he maintains physical training throughout the recovery. Once its meridians are restored, Chen selects the Heavenly Thunder Bringer for his unusually broad channels and berserk true essence. The method lets him control the innate divine strength that had previously been little more than raw force. He defeats a succession of All-School Martial Exhibition challengers despite not yet reaching Ethereal Opening by human standards, eventually metamorphosing, uprooting a willow, and using it to smash an upper-level Ethereal Opening swordsman through a wall. His growth validates the early decision to remain at the academy instead of accepting the end of his cultivation. (Chapters 100, 426–463, and 501)

Training also changes the meaning of his success. Jin Yulu, impressed by Xuanyuan's thunder-bearing fists, promises a generous reward to the Bear tribe. Xuanyuan cries because the recognition will ease the lives of the elders and villagers who financed his journey while he has been eating costly food in the capital. His responsibilities within the academy remain humble—food, logistics, practice, and protection—but the household regards those duties as integral. Chen's memories repeatedly place Xuanyuan in the kitchen or by the trees alongside Luoluo and Tang, evidence that he has become a companion and student rather than merely a patient. (Chapters 279, 303, 370, 463, and 501)

When Chen's life is threatened during the change of rule, Xuanyuan leaves the academy and covers eighty thousand li in seventeen days to seek help from White Emperor City. The journey exhausts him, yet he cannot enter the Imperial Palace even with Luoluo's seal, and he finds Jin Yulu's estate under surveillance. Later observers mistake his departure for flight, while the academy loses another of its original members. Xuanyuan does not return to the capital after learning Chen survived: unable to reach Luoluo or Jin, he remains in White Emperor City so that someone from the old academy can still watch over its isolated vice principal. (Chapters 656, 694, and 919–921)

Return to White Emperor City

For several years, Xuanyuan washes dishes in a lower-city tavern while patrons mock his withered arm and accuse him of inventing his association with the Pope. He ignores them because he does not regard honest labor as disgraceful and because his apparent obscurity serves a purpose. Each night he delivers provisions near the Imperial Palace and studies its food orders; his years as the academy's cook let him infer Luoluo's presence, health, and mood from the ingredients she prefers. When a missing favorite food precedes news of the Heavenly Selection, he realizes that the princess is being maneuvered into a marriage she does not want and accepts his duty as her student. (Chapters 919–921)

Before he can act, Xuanyuan discovers the gravely wounded Bie Yanghong and Wuqiong Bi hiding in his home. Wuqiong Bi had once tried to kill him, yet he refuses both revenge and betrayal, obtains medicine, feeds the pair, and protects their secret. Bie Yanghong trusts him because he is an Orthodox Academy student and repays that character with instruction. He identifies Xuanyuan's withered arm as a successful but overly deliberate concealment of Heavenly Thunder, then teaches him to reconcile accumulated strength with the speed of a fist. The lesson resolves long-standing problems in Xuanyuan's cultivation and gives him the confidence to enter the selection. (Chapters 940–952)

Xuanyuan enters not to marry Luoluo but to prevent anyone else from winning until help can arrive. He takes nine matches across three platforms, publicly identifies himself with the Orthodox Academy, and argues that neither ancestral spirits nor political procedure can replace Luoluo's own choice. The resulting attention rallies priests, Tang clan stewards, Bear warriors, and lower-city citizens around him, disrupting Madam Mu's schedule before Chen can reach the city. He then survives the Celestial Tree's Wildfire baptism, but the final opponent is the disguised Demon Lord. Xuanyuan knowingly risks his life, calls down lightning with his concealed right fist, and loses only after the Demon Lord uses a mysterious seal to counter the blow; his shattered Qi openings end his immediate resistance but expose the supposed marriage candidate's inhuman strength. (Chapters 952–972)

After the contest, Xuanyuan helps shelter the dying Bie Yanghong and grieves when he returns too late with the senior's requested beef buns. Bie leaves a fist style for him through Chen, while Wuqiong Bi expends her remaining cultivation in a dangerous transmission that repeatedly breaks and repairs Xuanyuan's withered arm. He survives with majestic true essence and divine Qi in his body, though he is initially too weak to celebrate and considers himself useless for losing. Chen reframes the defeat: Xuanyuan forced the hidden negotiations into public view and now carries both experts' legacies, giving him years to master what one desperate contest could not complete. (Chapters 999–1004)

The Throne Contest and War

In the decade after White Emperor City's crisis, Xuanyuan converts those legacies into military authority. Later narration identifies him as a renowned demi-human general and, in pure direct combat, the strongest of his race's active leaders; even Zhexiu is unwilling to confront the combination of Heavenly Thunder Bringer and Bie Yanghong's fist head-on. This development fulfills the potential recognized at the Orthodox Academy without erasing Xuanyuan's origins. His restored right arm and command position are not a rejection of washing dishes or academy chores, but the long consequence of treating those apparently humble years as continued preparation. (Chapters 1160 and 1167–1168)

During the postwar coup in the capital, Xuanyuan is expected to be outside Xuelao City with the demi-human armies. Instead, he has concealed himself in the North-Pacifying Army and enters the Orthodox Academy at the critical moment. He calls down lightning before its gate, carries the Mountain Sea Sword, and warns that anyone who advances will die. His intervention protects the nearly undefended school and helps turn the North-Pacifying Army against the rebels. Cao Yunping later interprets Xuanyuan and Luoluo as contingencies in the White Emperor's larger plan, but whatever the sovereign intended, Xuanyuan personally chooses the academy as the position he will hold. (Chapters 1167–1170)

Once the rebel army is defeated, Xuanyuan passes his authority to a human commander and remains at the academy rather than pursuing status. The new teachers and students treat him as a legendary stranger, while the unused kitchen and lakeside trees make him remember the household he helped build. His final choice is equally personal: he neither resumes command nor follows Jin Yulu into retirement, but becomes Luoluo's guard after she is named Crown Princess. He ends the corpus watching over her as she cultivates, returning the military power and fame he has acquired to the duty that kept him in White Emperor City years earlier. (Chapters 1180 and 1183)

Appearance and personality

Xuanyuan is already big and tall at thirteen, with youthful features that are soon partly hidden by a heavy beard. As he matures, he is repeatedly described as stalwart, with a body like a small mountain and arms as thick as trees. For years the contrast between his powerful left arm and withered right arm makes him look tragically unbalanced, but the right arm eventually regains its original form. During berserk metamorphosis his body enlarges, his clothes tear, black fur emerges, and ancestral patterns appear across his skin. (Chapters 43, 49, 234, 919–920, 963, 1002, and 1168)

He is honest, literal, hardworking, and profoundly stubborn. His inability to flatter authority or disguise a thought can make him seem slow, yet he understands people through concrete habits and acts on loyalties others overlook. He endures years of ridicule without defending his reputation, but publicly challenges the Heavenly Selection once Luoluo's freedom is threatened. His mercy toward Bie Yanghong and Wuqiong Bi shows that simplicity is not the absence of moral judgment: he dislikes Wuqiong Bi, aids her anyway, and later tells her plainly that it is unfair for her to live when her kinder husband dies. (Chapters 49–50, 84, 920–921, 940–952, 958–960, and 1000–1002)

Abilities and cultivation

Xuanyuan's cultivation combines a Bear-tribe physique and metamorphosis with meridian treatment, the Heavenly Thunder Bringer, the Celestial Tree's Wildfire baptism, and the final legacies of Bie Yanghong and Wuqiong Bi. His progress is irregular because his right arm is first destroyed, then medically restored, deliberately atrophied to conceal power, shattered again against the Demon Lord, and finally remade through a Divine Domain expert's transmission. By the final decade, these once-conflicting sources work together strongly enough to make him a leading demi-human general and exceptional close-range fighter. (Chapters 43–50, 463, 951, 963–971, 1002–1004, and 1168)

Bear-tribe physique and metamorphosis

Even as a young cultivator, Xuanyuan possesses immense natural strength, thick meridians, a large true-essence capacity, and the stamina of a mountain hunter. His bulk does not prevent speed: experience chasing red minks over cliffs lets him close more than thirty meters while an opponent retreats seventeen, making his direct advance unexpectedly difficult to evade. Before mastering refined techniques, he weaponizes the environment by carrying gates or uprooting trees, and his control of force is treated as a demi-human racial talent. Raw strength alone is vulnerable to superior technique, however, as Tianhai Ya'er demonstrates by destroying his guarded arm. (Chapters 43, 88, 96, 100, 142–143, and 463)

Metamorphosis enlarges Xuanyuan's body and transformed limb, covers him in black fur, and makes his skin resistant enough that ordinary weapons cannot penetrate it. In combat it also releases more of his innate strength, allowing him to overwhelm a higher-realm swordsman with an uprooted willow. During the Celestial Tree trial, patterns emerging on his transformed body carry a primordial Qi that marks him as demi-human and keeps the Wildfire from simply consuming him. The change is not invulnerability: it cannot compensate for a vast cultivation gap, and Wuqiong Bi can forcibly trigger it while controlling his body with one finger. (Chapters 43, 50, 463, 963, and 1002)

Heavenly Thunder Bringer

Chen chooses the Heavenly Thunder Bringer after restoring Xuanyuan's meridians because its violent circulation suits his broad channels, berserk true essence, and innate strength. Its internal principle is concealment: thunder is accumulated without outward sign, making the apparently dead right arm a reservoir of terrifying force. Its external method is the fist, whose speed and direct connection to the body allow stored power to be released without the delay of a weapon. Xuanyuan initially overemphasizes concealment, deliberately allowing the arm to wither and sacrificing speed for accumulation until Bie Yanghong teaches him that thunder's intent may be hidden but its natural shape should not be smothered. (Chapters 463, 501, and 950–951)

The method first appears as sparks among uprooted willow leaves and later lets both fists draw thunder and lightning. Its supreme demonstrated strike expands Xuanyuan's withered right arm, calls a bolt from the sky, and stirs the Wildfire Qi of the distant Celestial Trees before fist and lightning hit together. The Demon Lord cannot receive it casually and instead counters with a mysterious seal, shattering more than ten of Xuanyuan's Qi openings. By the later coup, Xuanyuan can again summon lightning at the Orthodox Academy gate, and the restored arm shows that the earlier bodily distortion is no longer necessary in the same form. (Chapters 463, 501, 970–972, 1167–1168)

Wildfire baptism

As a Heavenly Selection finalist, Xuanyuan enters a Celestial Tree and confronts the Wildfire preserved by demi-human ancestral spirits. His ancestral patterns keep the flames from treating him as an outsider, but the fire still drives his true essence through his meridians and Qi openings at uncontrollable speed, creating pain and a real risk of internal combustion. Chen's earlier acupuncture has widened those channels, allowing Xuanyuan to pass the first obstruction in better condition than other candidates. He then submits without resistance to the ancestral spirit; approval of his loyalty and courage permits the true Wildfire to enter and strengthen his body. (Chapters 962–965)

The baptism is a permanent cultivation opportunity rather than a technique he later activates at will. It deepens his body and affinity with the ancestral power, and Wildfire Qi responds when he unleashes the Heavenly Thunder Bringer against the Demon Lord. The corpus does not specify a named realm gained from the rite or separate its later contribution from Wuqiong Bi's transmission. It therefore establishes enhancement and interaction with his fist, but not an exact independent increase that can be measured against his other sources of strength. (Chapters 963–971 and 1002–1004)

Inherited Divine Domain fist arts

Bie Yanghong's instruction begins by correcting the balance between speed and stored power. Before dying, he passes the essence of his mature fist style to Chen specifically for Xuanyuan, giving the bear youth a structured legacy he can study after the Heavenly Selection. Wuqiong Bi then forces divine Qi and true essence into Xuanyuan's body; the process repeatedly breaks and repairs the ruined arm and might have killed him, but leaves both her legacy and her husband's within him. Xuanyuan survives the transmission rather than instantly mastering it, and Chen directs him to continue studying and eventually visit the Ten Thousand Years Pavilion. (Chapters 951 and 1000–1004)

Ten years later, the fist style and Heavenly Thunder Bringer are explicitly described as working together. Their combination gives Xuanyuan an offensive edge that even Zhexiu avoids meeting directly and supports his reputation as the demi-humans' strongest pure combatant below their sovereign. The corpus does not name the individual moves of Bie Yanghong's style or show Xuanyuan completing every aspect of the couple's legacy. His latest state demonstrates mature integration in battle, not proof that he has exhausted everything transmitted to him. (Chapters 1167–1168)

Power progression

Relationships

• Chen Changsheng: Chen diagnoses and treats Xuanyuan's ruined arm, chooses the Heavenly Thunder Bringer for him, and later helps him receive Bie Yanghong's fist legacy. Formally Luoluo's student and thus part of Chen's instructional lineage, Xuanyuan becomes Chen's academy companion and defender, crossing the continent to seek help when Chen faces death and later protecting the school they rebuilt together. (Chapters 49–50, 202, 463, 920, 1004, and 1167–1168)
• Luoluo: Xuanyuan reveres Luoluo as princess and teacher, but his devotion develops into practical guardianship rather than romantic interest. He monitors her welfare through palace food orders, enters the Heavenly Selection to defend her right to choose, and ultimately becomes her personal guard. (Chapters 49–50, 920–921, 952–960, and 1183)
• Tang Thirty-Six: Tang's talkative cunning complements Xuanyuan's literal honesty. He supplies tactics for Xuanyuan's Grand Examination victory, teases his appetite and cooking, and becomes part of the academy household Xuanyuan remembers even after years of war. (Chapters 84–100, 142–145, 303, and 1180)
• Jin Yulu: Xuanyuan treats Jin Yulu as a respected elder of his race. Jin recognizes his cultivation, rewards the Bear tribe on his behalf, and later represents an alternate life of retirement that Xuanyuan declines in order to guard Luoluo. (Chapters 92, 501, 920, and 1183)
• Bie Yanghong: Xuanyuan shelters Bie Yanghong despite the danger posed by his wife. Bie responds with trust, corrects Xuanyuan's Heavenly Thunder Bringer, and leaves him a fist style; Xuanyuan's regret over failing to bring his last meal in time turns inheritance into a personal obligation. (Chapters 940–951 and 999–1004)
• Wuqiong Bi: Wuqiong Bi twice tries to kill Xuanyuan, yet he aids her when she is wounded because he refuses to exploit helpless enemies. At the end of her life, she violently transmits her cultivation into him, leaving a dangerous legacy that repairs and transforms the arm she once intended to sever from his future. (Chapters 541, 632, 940–941, and 1000–1004)
• Young Demon Lord: Xuanyuan recognizes the disguised successor as a threat to Luoluo and accepts death as the possible cost of stopping him. His strongest thunder strike fails against the demon's seal, but the resistance delays and exposes the alliance scheme before Chen's arrival. (Chapters 967–981)

Items

• Mountain Sea Sword: Chen retrieves this heavy legendary sword from the Garden of Zhou and gives it to Xuanyuan as the weapon most suited to his strength. Xuanyuan hides it among kitchen tools and firewood, carries it through the Heavenly Selection, and later wields it while defending the Orthodox Academy during the coup. (Chapters 328, 774, 940–941, 961, 971, 1110, and 1168)