Tang Xiaolou
"Just an outsider disciple, not recognizing your own place, and you dare lay a hand on my godson?"
Great Martial Aunt of the Tang Clan. She sat in the Scripture Hall for twenty years, toiling hard and sacrificing her youth for the Tang Clan, missing her season to marry. Only when she was close to forty did a widower come to ask for her hand, and she found a home at last. promised her in person that so long as it was not a matter of harming heaven and reason or betraying her ancestors, the Tang Clan would see to it that even the hardest task in the world was done for her, and she was married off in grand style.
She has always been personal rather than principled, and is the most partial of women. Though she has married out, she comes back now and then to throw her weight around, and the disciples, out of respect for her seniority, dare not defy her. She also thinks Zhao Huo is nothing but a lowly menial laborer who still bears the surname Zhao after all these years, and cannot bear to see him do well.
She has no children of her own, and Chao He won her heart with one "Mother" after another, so she acknowledged this sweet-tongued godson, hoping he would support her in her old age and see her buried. All her love rests on him: she hopes he will join the Tang Clan, master martial arts, order the sect's disciples about, and lend her godson prestige. She even hides her hard-saved money under candied fruit for her godson to use to win over his fellow disciples.
But she is a poor judge of character. After Chao He joined the sect he caused trouble without end, and she always came out to back him. It went on until the Outer Fort incident, when Chao He stirred up the Beggar Sect and to fight. was summoned three times and did not appear, which amounted to contempt for the Sect Leader and the crime of disrespect, and he was seized and brought back to the mountain. She wept and wailed, accusing Zhao Huo and Second Senior Brother of cruelty and tyranny, and demanded the Sect Leader strip them of their martial arts. How could the Sect Leader believe such nonsense? He is not muddled. But he values loyalty and feeling too much: he took the offender Chao He's punishment upon himself and, as Sect Leader, petitioned the sect for punishment.
On one side was her beloved godson; on the other, were they not the kin she had learned martial arts with and grown up with in years past? Whatever others said to reason with her, she treated as farting, and only when the Sect Leader was hurt by her willfulness did she finally come to her senses a little. She slapped Chao He across the face, and when he began to cry she could not help but ache for him. Yet she secretly resolved that this was the last time.
Notes
- The wife of a certain Zhang, a face-washing soup vendor in Meishan Town.
- She deeply hates the Diancang Sect for killing Tang Clan Disciples in the past, and calls them the green-robed Diancang turtles.
- She dislikes the Ye siblings accordingly, and wants to skin Ye Yunshang to study the treasure, or marry her off to Chao He; she has no filter at all.
- When she speaks ill of the Ye girl in Shangguan Ying's presence, Shangguan Ying talks back and she has no way to answer.