Tang Zhongling

First Meeting1 / 7

Tang Clan Sect Leader

"Why become Long Yuan? You can become anyone."

Born Tang Zhongling, the current Tang Clan Sect Leader.

Fierce of temperament and hating evil as a personal enemy, he was once a legendary figure ranked among Wulin's Ten Greatest Experts. Sadly, after middle age his body declined greatly, and the Flying Swallow Meteor Feather became a thing of the past.

In the Battle of the Supreme Bliss Cult, he swallowed poison without hesitation to force his Power up, and used the Flying Swallow Meteor Feather to slay the Right Guardian—though he has been plagued by the root of the illness ever since.

Biographies

The twenty-seventh generation Sect Leader of the Tang Clan.

In his youth he was fierce of temperament and hated evil as a personal enemy.
He roamed the four directions as a hero, and with his signature Ultimate, the "Flying Swallow Meteor Feather", he beat the world over without meeting a rival.
The Tang Clan's fame spread far, and at the same time he offended no small number of good men of the Jianghu.
Only after he married his fellow disciple and took up the post of Sect Leader did he begin to hold himself in.

Over more than ten years of fretting over the sect's management, he aged a great deal.
In recent years illness brought on by stress led him to hand the mundane affairs to his third disciple to manage in his stead.

He once led his Disciples in the great Battle to wipe out the Old Demon Cult.
Together with the Abbot of Songshan Temple he fought the Seven Immortals of the Supreme Bliss Cult and shattered the Ten Thousand Immortals Formation,
thwarting the Supreme Bliss Cult Leader's ambition to take the Central Plains at Qinzhou.

In the peak showdown, he served as one of the five representatives of the righteous factions and fought the Right Guardian of the Supreme Bliss Cult,
swallowing poison without hesitation to force his Power up, and at last narrowly won and slew this monstrous evil,
though it left him with a root of illness that would never heal.

After this battle, both the Tang Clan and Songshan were gravely weakened,
yet Songshan remained respected by the world, while the Tang Clan became a dog in the water that everyone beat.

He saved the Junior Sister he had secretly loved for years, but could not buy back her tears.
The great mistake had been made, and those involved could never find peace in their lives.
Even so, he still proposed to her and promised her a lifetime.

Some years after the marriage they were blessed with a pearl, yet his beloved wife remained silently joyless. For all he could roam the Jianghu at will, he could not settle his own household.
In the end his wife threw herself from a cliff in her despair, and Tang Zhongling's illness grew ever heavier.

Deeds

• He was once a supreme master who could look down on all the heroes, and was listed by the Gengyang Reading Studio as one of the Central Plains' Ten Great Heroes.^[1]
• At his peak the Sect Leader was fiercer than ghosts and gods. When he stood on the same side as the righteous, the wicked all fled; when he opposed the righteous, even the experts of the Six Great Sects had to call on the Nangong Family to mediate.
• In his youth he may have looked like a thug.^[2]
• His battle record is beyond counting. He is both righteous and unorthodox, and loves to defy the Imperial Court (though he pays his taxes on time). Were it not for the Mud Cult, the Tang Clan would surely be treated as a Demon Cult.^[3]
• Many of the troubles he stirred up roaming the Jianghu as a youth were reduced from great matters to small and from small to nothing by the weight of 's face. When he heard that had passed away, he grieved as if he had lost an elder of his own family.
• In his youth he once chased a lecherous young nobleman who had trifled with for a thousand li, forcing the man to flee far to the Fujian Branch of the Songshan Sect and seek the protection of Abbot Shi Ming. He knocked at the door over a hundred times outside, and only when the heads of the Nangong and Shangguan families both came to persuade him did he return in disappointment. This is what gave Shi Ming his Inner Demon.
• Years ago he told the Wulin Alliance Leader Long Yuan, "Forgive the Tang Clan for not joining in your plans. It is not that we are stubborn and unruly, but that the Tang Clan's flame has been passed down from ancient times to this day." Yet when the sent its troops, he was the first to charge in, alongside the eminent monks of the Songshan Sect.
• With the Flying Swallow Meteor Feather he cut off the weapon and fingers of Yuan Chengfeng, one of the Seven Immortals of the Supreme Bliss Cult, and kicked him down from Emei's Golden Summit.
• Many years ago he took Tang Buyi and Tang Zheng, then not yet ten, to storm the execution ground outside Lin'an's Qingbo Gate, carrying the head of the traitor Wu Xi to buy a way out for the condemned prisoner . Several hundred experts of the Capital Guards and the Imperial City Bureau could not stop them, and the three came and went as freely as if into unpeopled land. Without pausing to rest, they then raced to the Western Shu battlefield and struck the Seven Immortals of the Supreme Bliss Cult head-on.

Notes

• His illness has left his stomach weak, so he must eat lightly and often takes rice porridge.
• After he falls ill, because of a BUG, he wakes with a start over the rice porridge and gains Affinity
• The white hair in the execution-ground scene twenty years ago is simply because no younger version portrait had been prepared.^[4]
• The unruliness of and the arrogance of both follow the Sect Leader's former manner. But since his illness his temperament has changed a great deal, growing ever more approachable.
• Though he resents the Imperial Court's corruption and oppression of the people, he deeply respects loyal officials and filial sons. Though he is both righteous and unorthodox, he treats those of the Buddhist faith with great courtesy.
• He accounts his life upright, yet is mocked as the "Old Demon", which fills him with endless sighs.

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