Yu Baohua
Yu Zhu's younger sister.
Raised with a good education and plenty of affection, she presents herself as a refined, well-read young woman.
She inherited her father's snobbish nature, longs to climb to wealth and status, and envies Yu Zhu's comfortable life.
Fortunes
- She studied in town under an old scholar who never passed the exams, so she can read, write, and keep accounts, and at most recite a few popular poems. To earn his money, the school's tutor praised her talent constantly, until Father Yu truly believed his daughter was a heaven-sent genius. In truth, she could not even tell that Yu Xiaomei was mocking her with talk of bamboo flowering.
- Unwilling to be looked down on all her life, she had already secured a decent betrothal. But when she learned that Yu Zhu's fiancé was a rich and powerful Young Lord, she tried to break off her engagement and marry Yu Zhu's fiancé instead.
- Thanks to Yu Xiaomei's scheme, she had no choice but to flee home to escape debts, and came to the Kongtong Sect. To her surprise, had sold her too, to cover his gambling debts. was worrying over where to find a beauty to replace , and on hearing the news at once spent fifteen taels of silver to buy her, forcing her to become a Direct Disciple to appease the local folk.
- Becoming a Direct Disciple made her taste the mockery and malice once heaped on . The Iron Fist Gate members complain she is not pretty enough, no match for Yu Xiaomei or Xiahou Lan; that she has some learning and talent from her schooling, yet beside Wei Ju she is as mud to cloud; and that she is delicate and weak, weeping at the least trouble, nothing like Yu Zhu's strength and willingness to bear hardship.
Yu Zhu
- When she meets Yu Zhu, everything she says is laced with envy of her sister's easy life. She says herself that from six or seven or eight she had to help with the family's livelihood, her fingers growing calluses from the abacus, never knowing that at the same age Xiao Zhu was not working an abacus but iron.
- She once believed 's words, thinking truly lived a life of plenty while coldly letting the family suffer in their poor village, and so her resentment ran deep. When she later learned the truth, her bitterness dissolved into guilt. But Baohua holds that the fault lies with their father and that she too was kept in the dark, so she has no heart to mend the sisters' bond, only hoping they stay far apart; that Xiao Zhu does not come to collect the debt is kindness enough.
- She wrote home letters on 's behalf, yet never expected to return at all, since the breach between them was already a chasm no lifetime could bridge. But Xiao Zhu did return. From then on Baohua was wholly won over, and wished to take Xiao Zhu as her model.
- After and are both thrown in prison, she uses her standing as a candidate for First Lady to threaten and bribe the guards into letting her visit the cell. She claims to envy her elder sister and to be on bad terms with her, and that her visit is purely ill-intentioned, when in truth it is a masterful act to fool the guards. She steals the cell key and brings a great many tools from the smithy, trying to break the shackles and help them escape, but the shackles prove too strong and she fails.
- If Yu Zhu and Zhao Huo become a couple, Baohua now and then teaches her sister some pretentious little tricks to help her win the Sect Leader's favor.