Zhi Fung

Zhi Fung was born a nomad, but his tribe's traditional hunting grounds were broad and flat, affording them an easy bounty of grain and game from the land. This also made his tribe less itinerant than most, so they were easy to find, and as a result, built up significant trade ties with the Shin.

As a young boy, Zhi was fascinated by plants and herbs, and so he was (atypically) put to work gathering them. Often, he'd wind up selling his crop to a Shin doctor. By the time Zhi was thirteen or so, he knew this doctor very well, and was always pestering him with questions. The doctor recgonized Zhi's mind as one well-suited to the healer's art, and made an unorthodox request to Zhi's parents: that he be trained in the Shin capital, as a gesture of goodwill.

Zhi had difficulty acclimating to the insane pace of the capital; he was overwhelmed by culture. Yet, he focused on his learning to compensate, and as a result, was the best student in the class. His knowledge of the human body and its energy flows was practically encylopedic, and those who came to him for aid during his training were well-served and usually better off.

Zhi returned after almost a decade, to a tribe and people that had changed little. Again he had to adjust, this time back to the slow life of a tribesman, but this adjustment he enjoyed. He acquired a reputation as a wise and skilled healer, and soon, neighboring tribes sought him out to aid their sick, or to measure their young, even to inspect their crops and horticulture.

Zhi was visiting another villiage when the Mad Emperor struck against his countrymen. He returned with all speed to his home, where he found naught but devastation; his skills had made his tribe's home something of a hub, so the Shin sought to strike there early. He fled with what remained of his family and friends, using his fluency in the Shin language to sheild them when possible. They made for Konn, as he understood it was a refuge.

When Konn fell, something within Zhi, a hope that the Shin were simply misunderstood and that all this death was only a mistake, died. He realized that prosperity must be met with misery, or else the world will fall out of balance, and that the Emperor was simply an agent of this force. He began to see around him the energies, positive and negative, that contributed to the whole of the world, and he realized that his skill in saving the sick and weak had upset the balance. He now fully understood the reticence of the master Shin doctors, how they would so rarely use the most potent treatments, even when it would save a life. He fled to Uusam, with the rest of the Konn refugees.

Zhi's doctoring became more restrained - he would often advise that it was fated that an ill person should die, and only rarely would he use his potent herbs to cure an infection or disease. Even so, his reputation in Uusam grew - there were none who knew more of the human body, its ailments, cures, and banes than he. He would often train warriors of the most fortuitous places to strike - his cost was only that they use the knowledge to promote balance, to aggressively end aggression.