Tang Weiyuan

First Meeting1 / 6

Fourth Senior Brother

"My goodness, Junior Brother, your face is really ugly ‑ it doesn't suit your soul."

Real name Weiyuan, the Tang Clan Sect Leader's closed-door disciple.

Entrusted with the task of going down the mountain to peddle medicine and buy daily necessities, he never tires of it, and often exploits loopholes in the Clan Rules to smuggle goods and sell them to his fellow disciples at a markup for the difference.

Biographies

A closed-door disciple of the Tang Clan Sect Leader.
Of unknown origin, he was found in a crate of fruit bought and brought up the mountain, and even as a swaddled babe he could eat enormously.

On the surface he keeps to his place,
believes firmly in honesty, and is especially good at playing the innocent,
and is much trusted by the Sect Leader, who lays the weighty duty of keeping the accounts on him.

He often takes advantage of buying firewood, rice, oil, salt, and other daily necessities
to acquire all manner of rare goods,
and resells them at high prices to disciples within the Clan for private gain.

If you can afford it, he will gladly smuggle goods for you.

He often travels north and south as a peddler.

Young as he is, he has rich experience of the Jianghu, is well informed, and knows a great many people.

There is nowhere he cannot go and nothing he cannot sell, and he has earned himself a not very flattering nickname: "Gets-in-Everywhere".

At the crucial moment he always turns up as if nothing were amiss, in places where by rights he should not be, peddling the goods you need. Extremely suspicious.

Fourth Senior Brother has made a good deal of ill-gotten money, but he has also helped a great many people who needed help.

He sells treasured swords and Spirit Pills to warriors about to go to their deaths; sells Secret Manuals to youths carrying blood feuds; and carries family letters a thousand li for others. Once a deal is struck, he does right by it to the end.

Greedy for money though he is, he does not look down on the poor and is quite willing to lend a hand, calling it an investment. He never mocks you for having no future; in every dealing he has with a person, he assumes you will live to a hundred.

He takes on the peddler's errands no one else will do so that he can meet as many people as possible, make a name for himself, and look for kin who may no longer be among the living.

Fourth Senior Brother learned of his own origins, and that his parents were alive and well, with ten brothers and sisters at home, all raised in comfort. He felt both envy and resentment, yet the great stone on his heart was at last set down.

The complaints he had brooded over for so many years, when he stood before the parents who shared his blood, he could not bring himself to speak, and he could not say clearly just what had come over him; he only felt that these people did not seem like ones he could act spoiled with.

In the end he politely declined his birth parents' urging to stay, and returned to the Tang Clan.

With rich fare to be had, he would not eat it, and still shamelessly fought his fellow disciples over plain tea and coarse rice.

He is as sly and money-grubbing as ever, and still filial to the Sect Leader.

Fourth Senior Brother has his family too, and it is right here in the Tang Clan.

Origins

• once said, "One snowy day the following year, I picked up Weiyuan; two years after that, I had ." From this we know Fourth Senior Brother is two years older than the Junior Martial Sister.
• Constellation unknown.^[1]
• The Master who picked him up and taught him was the late "Master of a Thousand Ingenious Devices", Tang Ling. Later, seeing that he had no heart for forging and thought only of making money, Tang Ling passed him on to .

Greed for Money

• "A character whose Affinity rises whenever you spend money" – Bird Bear^[2]
• He is an ambitious man; in his eyes, with money, women naturally follow. As for women like Shangguan Ying who are good at making money, he only sees them as rivals.^[3]
• Fourth Senior Brother often cannot get anyone to answer his public errands, because he uses his purchasing duties to beg others to carry his smuggled goods along the way, then turns around and sells them at a markup. After he had cheated his fellow disciples once around, no one would fall for it again, and when pressed he pushes Zhao Huo out to fob them off.
• Greedy though he is, he is still quite loyal to family and friends. Thanks to Zhao Huo, he splits in half the money he extorted from Chao He. When married, he grudged no expense, volunteering to arrange the dowry and prepare the wedding, so that she would marry in grand style.

Martial Arts

• He dislikes resorting to force, and even a friendly spar is too much sweat for his taste.
• When danger finds him abroad, he usually pays money to avert it. When the money in his hands is taken from him, his true strength shows, and he can beat even two bandits to death.
• His Temperament is Cautious, almost timid. He always holds that harmony brings wealth, and rarely comes to blows. When was misunderstood and set upon by Long Xiang, he, a man of the Wulin, went so far as to beat the drum at the yamen and lodge a complaint against an ordinary commoner.
• The Mechanism Box (qiè sì) on his back can transform into many shapes. Yet, mindful of his merchant image, Fourth Senior Brother would rather be beaten bloody by Venerable Golden Crow than let the box transform in front of a crowd.
• The pineapple on the box is not real; it is a metal Hidden Weapon shaped like a pineapple that bursts open and kills.^[4]

Notes

• Because of his peddling he often does not sleep in his bedroom, but when he comes back everyone ends up sleeping very crowded.
• He loves fried dough sticks.
• On the Ruined Temple route, hearing that Zhao Huo has gone to Qingcheng to heal, he sets out to visit, but because he does not want to buy a gift for the Qingcheng Sect Leader, he puts up in Qingcheng Mountain Town instead. He is an old friend of Shopkeeper Chu of the Dujiang Inn in Qingcheng Mountain Town, having once given him a sum that saved his life when he was down and out, and on the strength of that favor secured himself a permanent right to stay at the inn.
• Ye Yunshang calls him Fourth Fatty and gives him a miserable time of it.

---

1. Facebook－Original Bird Bear 2023/3/24 ↩︎

2. Facebook－Original Bird Bear 2024/6/1 ↩︎

3. Q&A Collection October 2024#_2024-10-08 ↩︎

4. Q&A Collection August 2024#_2024-8-18 ↩︎