Enemy relationship between Yuan Guang and Slash

Yuan Guang and Slash’s enmity begins with a massacre and a mock contest: Slash kills Yuan’s delivery team, then offers the sole survivor a supposed chance to fight back before shooting him between the eyes. The encounter turns Yuan’s death into the origin of a lasting revenge quest, while exposing the gulf between a newly awakened cultivator and the warband leader who killed him.

The massacre and the staged duel

Slash first appears as the leader of the marauders who have attacked Yuan’s delivery team. When one of his men points out that a Scrap has survived, Slash turns his attention to Yuan. The relationship begins under conditions of overwhelming power: Yuan has lost his companions, and Slash treats the survivor not as a genuine opponent but as an object of amusement.

Slash exchanges the stolen cube for one of his soldiers’ revolvers and proposes a contest with matching weapons, forbidding fists and techniques. He presents this as a fair chance, even saying that Yuan may go free if he kills him. But Yuan recognizes the gesture as a taunt. Slash adopts an awkward novice’s stance and begins a deliberately slow countdown, while Yuan fires first, placing shots between Slash’s eyes and then into his neck and chest. The bullets bounce off Slash’s skin and mask. When a later shot makes Slash’s head snap back, Yuan briefly hopes that the eyes might be vulnerable; the bullet instead falls flattened into a crescent shape. Slash admits that he felt that one, his eye marked by a red streak but otherwise intact, and points his gun at Yuan. The apparent duel has only given Slash another way to toy with his victim.

Yuan refuses to kneel or plead. He faces Slash standing and tells him he will return; Slash dismisses the promise, then shoots him between the eyes. That execution fixes the terms of their enmity: Slash has killed Yuan and his companions, while Yuan’s defiance persists even when he has no means to overcome the disparity between them.

Revenge becomes a pursuit

After Slash’s bullet, the conflict outlives the execution. Yuan returns as a Gunsoul to find that the marauders have taken his handgun, his possessions, and the cube, and that his delivery team lies hastily buried nearby. The loss of the gun lands with particular force: in a wasteland where he has no money, supplies, or transport, its absence is not merely personal but a threat to survival. Yuan’s first response to that deprivation is also a renewed declaration against Slash. He swears to the Wayfinders that his killer and the marauders will pay.

Revolver answers Yuan’s distress by lending him a loaded revolver taken from a bandit. Its round cylinder holds six small-caliber .38 bullets; Yuan decides he will have to make every shot count and vows to put three into Slash’s head. The weapon gives the revenge vow a concrete form, but not an easy prospect. Slash’s bullets had failed against his skin, he commands a large warband, and Yuan has only reached the First Coil. Yuan recognizes that finding and killing him will require training, allies, and greater firepower, not simply the resolve to return the shot.

The stolen cube supplies a trail as well as a reason to investigate. Yuan concludes that a greedy conqueror had ordered the raid to add the artifact to a collection, making his team’s deaths part of the price paid to obtain it. He judges Yinyang Khan, the likely power behind the theft, to be beyond his reach for now, but believes Slash can be tracked. From Gatesville, Yuan asks Kyung-sun for a map and a ride to Fleshmarket, intending to report the lost package to its original client and learn why the cube mattered enough to draw a warband a hundred leagues from its base. The questions widen the revenge plot into a pursuit of the people and purpose behind the massacre, but Slash remains its immediate target: Yuan means to find his murderer and return the bullet with interest.

A vendetta complicated by other debts

Yuan’s pursuit of Slash does not remain his only claim on the future. As the conflict at Fleshmarket reaches its catastrophe, Yuan has to confront his own part in the violence surrounding it: he had armed the rival sects in the hope that they would destroy one another, accepting the prospect of casualties as part of his plan. When The Gun announces its arrival with a rain of qi-charged bullets, Yuan wonders whether his actions helped draw it there. He cannot establish that they did, but he can no longer treat violence as something inflicted only by an enemy. The massacre that began his vendetta and the destruction now unfolding around him are not equivalent acts; still, his revenge cannot shield him from examining the harm caused by his own strategy.

That reckoning coincides with a more personal debt. Yuan sees Revolver struggling against the bloodlust imposed by The Gun’s curse and remembers that Revolver has saved him twice, first from Elder Polio and then from The Gun. He refuses to leave the kindness unanswered: if Revolver can be freed, Yuan will find a way, even if doing so delays the pursuit of Slash. The choice does not cancel his vow of revenge. It shows that the vow is no longer the only measure of what Yuan owes, and that he will not let another ally be lost while he is pursuing the man who killed his first companions.

Later, Yuan apologizes as Revolver describes how the curse has made killing feel like an instinct, turning former liberator and former slave into indistinguishable targets. The apology registers sympathy, not an easy solution: Revolver says he neither enjoys nor hates the killing, and that he now follows its pull. Against that bleak change, Yuan’s earlier promise to make Slash pay acquires a wider moral context. Slash remains the person who murdered Yuan and set the revenge quest in motion, but Yuan’s path forward is also shaped by the effort to keep the cycle from claiming those who have stood beside him.

A vendetta inside a widening conflict

Yuan’s enmity with Slash remains a personal debt, but the later crises of the story place that debt within conflicts that cannot be reduced to revenge. At Battletown, Yuan promises Arc that he will protect the Cube of Natho with his life. Arc’s bullet-core then explodes, sending a pulse of qi through her Authority and breaking Manhattan’s attack; the force knocks Yuan out of his Gun Demon Incarnation, and the cube rolls away across radioactive dust. The scene gives Yuan an immediate duty and a devastating loss, but it does not show him reaching Slash or settling their account.

That distinction preserves the original force of the vendetta without making it the whole of Yuan’s character. Slash’s killing of Yuan’s team gives his return a clear target, yet Yuan’s later choices also involve protecting allies and answering debts of care. The relationship therefore functions as an unresolved line through a story whose violence keeps generating new claims on him: the first execution establishes what Yuan wants returned, while subsequent catastrophes test what he will protect before he can pursue it.