You TanZhi—AhZi

You TanZhi’s relationship with A'Zi is defined by an increasingly stark imbalance: he risks himself to serve and protect her, while she uses his loyalty as permission to endanger him. Even after he recognizes that she shows no pity when he appears dead, his attachment remains powerful enough to draw him back toward her.

Unequal Beginnings

A'Zi’s cruelty is apparent even before You TanZhi becomes her subordinate. While fishing, she rejects the ordinary purpose of catching food and uses the rod to pierce six fish, then throws them back into the lake. The scene establishes a pattern of treating living creatures as instruments of amusement or experiment, a pattern that later extends to You TanZhi himself.

Their relationship becomes more consequential when Xiao Feng finds A'Zi gravely injured in the snow. He has gone three days without food and is lost in a storm, but his immediate concern is keeping her warm. Hearing two tigers nearby, he pursues them in the hope of finding food and help. The urgency of caring for A'Zi shapes his encounter with Wanyan Aguda and the Jurchen, whose hospitality and assistance provide the setting for her recovery.

Over the following months, Xiao Feng tends to A'Zi while she remains too weak to move. She receives rare ginseng each day, and he uses his internal energy to help regulate her breathing. He undertakes this care in memory of A'Zhu’s devotion and because he regards looking after her sister as fulfilling A'Zhu’s wish. This history makes A'Zi’s later treatment of You TanZhi part of a broader contrast: care is offered to her, but she does not reciprocate it toward the person who serves her.

Service and Testing

A'Zi turns You TanZhi’s iron mask and obedience into grounds for dangerous tests. When a caged lion is brought to the palace, she tells him to put his head inside so the animal can bite the mask and test whether it will hold. He hesitates, but she casts his fear as disobedience and threatens to have him fed to the lion. Her test makes clear that his safety matters less to her than proving his submission.

The same imbalance governs her pursuit of the frost silkworm. After You TanZhi catches it and returns with it to Nanjing, A'Zi confines it in an urn. In the summer heat, the creature makes the palace progressively colder; she also has it face poisonous snakes and insects, which die as the silkworm feeds. After ten days, she orders You TanZhi to put his hand into the urn and let it feed on his blood. He had feared this moment, but her command leaves him facing a choice between compliance and her displeasure.

He kneels and kowtows, asking her to remember his name, You TanZhi, rather than calling him Iron Freak if he dies helping her. A'Zi agrees to use his name and praises him as loyal and devoted. The exchange gives him a brief recognition he plainly values, but it does not alter the terms of their relationship: she calls him a loyal lackey, and he thanks her for the praise even as he prepares to risk his life.

The Frost Silkworm and Abandonment

When the silkworm bites him, You TanZhi assumes an inverted posture drawn from the illustrated instructions in the Tendon-Changing Sutra and concentrates on the directional marks in the diagram. Its cold energy travels through his body as he follows the indicated route. A'Zi eventually kills the silkworm and applies its fluid and blood to her own palms, trying to absorb its power. She sees You TanZhi still upside down and covered with frost, concludes that he is dead, and orders an attendant to bury him.

The attendant does not dig a grave, instead leaving You TanZhi’s body in a brook. That careless disposal inadvertently saves him: his body is gradually thawed by the water, and the iron mask warms and melts free of the surrounding ice first. He regains consciousness and escapes. His survival is not the result of A'Zi’s concern; she had already turned from him to the silkworm’s remains and her own practice.

From the brookside, You TanZhi recalls that he had willingly exposed himself to poisonous creatures to help A'Zi train, yet she showed no sign of pity when she believed him dead. He had watched her take pleasure in the silkworm’s strange effects and apply its substance to her palms. The contrast between his self-sacrifice and her indifference makes his loyalty difficult to mistake for a mutual bond.

Attachment After Recognition

Even after this abandonment, You TanZhi continues to imagine his death as useful to A'Zi. He reasons that the silkworm’s poison might help her master her palm technique, then recognizes that returning would likely expose him to further experiments: if her skill succeeds, she may test it on him; if it fails, she may send him after more venomous creatures. He concludes that either path could end in his death and stays away from her.

That judgment does not extinguish his attachment. Later, while hearing that the Beggar Clan cannot find Xiao Feng and is discussing a new leader, You TanZhi decides to tell them that Xiao Feng is serving as Lord of the Southern Chancellery in the Liao Empire, hoping their numbers and martial experts might help him kill his old enemy. Yet the thought of returning to Nanjing and seeing A'Zi immediately stirs him. His desire to see her persists alongside his plan for revenge, showing that recognition of her danger and indifference has not freed him from longing for her.

The relationship therefore develops through repeated reversals: service earns him a moment of praise, but not protection; apparent death brings no grief from A'Zi, yet survival does not end his desire to return. You TanZhi’s devotion is both the means by which A'Zi obtains help and the vulnerability that keeps him oriented toward her. The text presents that attachment not as reciprocal affection, but as a painful bond in which the servant’s hope outlasts the evidence of his exploitation.