Lu Wutang

Tall, slender, and conventionally good-looking, Lu Wutang is a young Chinese man with olive-green eyes and short black hair worked into a French braid held by red fasteners and capped with a red ribbon. A purple diamond marks the skin beneath his left eye, seafoam-green bells dangle from red earrings on each side, and matching rings ride the fingers of his left hand. He favors a lilac changshan traced with dark purple lines over dark purple trousers and black footwear, often topped by a dark purple jacket bearing a warped yellow stripe; the manga adds a chain collar to that jacket that the anime leaves out. In childhood he wore a simple blue shirt and had yet to grow out the braid.

Wutang generally reads as gloomy and withdrawn, keeping to himself until Lu Shaotang appears, at which point his sour mood evaporates under the weight of his heavy crush. His real weapon is his mind. He sizes people up from their habits and mannerisms, counts cards well enough to play blackjack without dropping a hand, and once dismantled the logic behind Shin's telepathy by splitting the ability across conscious, semi-conscious, and subconscious tiers, then flooding his own head with math to overload it. He applied the same analytical bent to Slur, reading his mental state and even floating a theory that fusing the man's personalities might resolve it.

At the age of eleven, Wutang was on the receiving end of abuse from other members of the Triad. Lu stepped in, beat back the bullies, and joined him afterward on a rooftop balcony, where he admitted he had endured the mistreatment on purpose as part of a longer game. She was impressed, called him sharp, and urged him to keep honing that gift. Her praise set him on a path of climbing through the ranks on intellect alone, an ascent that eventually made him the strategist of the clan, and it planted the seed of the infatuation he still carries for her.