XUE YU (薛妤) - SAINTESS & CROWN PRINCESS OF YEDU, SECOND OF SIX HOLY REALMS - A-Yu, to her companions, Dianxia / Nulang to her attendants, Yu Yu to those who love her most

There was a time when Xue Yu was nothing more than a careless little girl, held up in the palms of her father's hands like a treasure, a child that need not see storms or anything but peace and freedom in her life. That was before her father became the ruler of Yedu after his brother's unexpected death, and she became the heiress to the holy realm. Yedu is the second of six holy realms, one of three forces (mortal, immortal and demon) in the known world tasked with the persecution of evil - specifically the jurisdictions over crimes committed by those that cultivated or else had some supernatural power. The little girl grew up in an instant - she was a princess, a future empress, and on her shoulders were the lives of not just the people of Yedu but that of every living creature in the holy realms, the mortal realm, the demon realms and otherwise. She was very aware of her duty, very aware of what she needed to become.

Xue Yu was already clever, and she became powerful quickly. As an immortal focusing cultivation toward spiritual arrays, her physical body was naturally weaker - but she continued to throw herself headfirst into difficult challenges and forcefully trained her body to heal without the use of elixirs. Regardless of the labeled difficulty level, she took missions from the fate book, an extension of universal destiny that rewarded completion of such missions to the various Holy Realms and their participants. She developed her own standing in her father's court and began to deal with affairs of Yedu on top of that, frequently as its representative. She never spoke of her difficulties to anyone, nor usually asked for any help, preferring to grit her teeth through pain and exhaustion and aiming to become a dependable and efficient ruler. By the time she became a young woman, her peers and her hand-picked attendants, bar few, could really keep up with her in cultivation or the lightning way she settled affairs.

Though she doesn't believe herself to be a particularly sympathetic or merciful goddess, Xue Yu believed in trying to understand all the circumstances of a case. That is, after all - her job. She also, while knowing the world could not be that way, acts as much as she could to exchange kindness for kindness and sincerity for sincerity. She is a bit wooden, however - a bit distant, a bit removed, a bit cool, a lot blunt - someone people did not instinctively want to gravitate toward or found likeable. She spent most of her time on work and cultivation and rarely had time for much else.

Despite her status as an immortal and a cultivator of the "righteous" path - Xue Yu did not hate demons, fae, or any other immortal being that fell under her jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the holy realms. She didn't see differences as evils or distinguish "sides" between the different creatures of the world, seeking to persecute wrong and injustice, and that only. She could not preside over mortals, cultivators or not, as that power belonged solely to mortal kings - but she doesn't take kindly to the oppression of innocent demons either, dealing punishment to immortals who have done such a thing. Her own entourage is made up of an eclectic mix of attendants, some of whom she collects when she runs into them on her missions out to the mortal world. It makes her unpopular amongst her peers, a great portion of whom have their prejudices set already.

In the previous life, a mortal cultivator she pardoned from the stand of judgment of Yihe, first of the holy realms, became the king of immortals after her help teaching, honing talents and raising him up. They cared for each other - and then he betrayed her, but worse than that - betrayed her ideals, used the life and powers he obtained with her help to seal away the Demon Realm and its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants away forever. In trying to defeat him so that she might break the seal open, she accidentally triggers the fate book, which sends them backwards in time to a point prior to their first meeting. Betrayal is a crime against her own person that she couldn't forgive. This time she does not pardon him but a different prisoner. Someone else does, however, and determined to stop the mortal cultivator and keep him from the path he claims is right, she starts her life over again.