Tang Yi
"When I came I was full of ambition; when I return my spirits are spent, as if the hot blood in my heart no longer boils. What is left in the Jianghu now that is worth staking my life on?"
A Tang Clan disciple. He took his master later than Zhao Huo, yet was made an Inner Disciple before him; and though he has been out in the Jianghu for years, longer than Zhao Huo, among the Tangs below who are still alive and haven't left, he is the oldest, and he has never once made a name for himself.
On the Ruined Temple route, he means to wake Zhao Huo, who was poisoned unconscious by after bringing word, but , who is beating Zhao Huo with a stick, pins it on him. He thinks Yunshang is especially heavy-handed with Zhao Huo, probably because of his face, and that the Tang Clan Female Disciples are a fierce lot. When he passes on Second Senior Brother's message, "Cut the nonsense!", he ad-libs a slap to go with it. On the night the thieves raid the Tang Clan, he is posted to guard the Men's Quarters and refuses Zhao Huo's support; if Zhao Huo keeps going in and out of the Disciples' Quarters, he will be accidentally beaten to death by him, and if he chooses to stand brazenly in ambush at the Training Ground, he is kicked away. After the hostage is caught, Second Senior Brother names him to help prepare the Poison Sand Vat.
During the study at Qingcheng, he shows up at the start but vanishes midway.
At the Wulin Assembly it is mentioned that Zhao Huo has looked weathered since childhood, a ten-year-old child looking like a fifty-year-old aunt, and that he wondered at the time why Zhao Huo wore blue. On the way home, sheltering from the rain in the Ruined Temple, he talks of retiring.
Notes
- He looks a lot like the Thick-Eyebrowed, Dark-Circled Senior Brother; both have thick eyebrows, but on a close look they are different people. He has no dark circles, and his hair is tied differently.