Yuan–Jaw-Long

Yuan and Jaw-Long’s relationship began in the precarious world of sect labor, where both men hoped that work might eventually buy them a path into cultivation. Jaw-Long’s death, alongside Mingxia’s, became the wound that Yuan carried into his pursuit of Slash. Yet the bond is not presented as uncomplicated heroic devotion: Yuan’s grief and loyalty coexist with a later admission that revenge served his own need to prove he was more than a Scrap.## Background and Shared Ambition Yuan and Jaw-Long worked together for a sect, each hoping eventually to buy a spirit pill and become a cultivator. For Yuan, the hope had once seemed like a possible way out of a life assigned to him by birth. Half the population were Scraps, born without the potential for a qi core and left to work themselves to the bones serving cultivators. Sects had few uncorrupted spirit pills to spare; they generally used them to help Second Coil disciples advance, while Scraps might be elevated only when attacks had killed too many disciples. When that rare opportunity came at a sect where Yuan worked, its elders chose local children over him, judging him too old to train. It was at least in that period of sect work that he met Jaw-Long and Mingxia.

Jaw-Long’s particular ambition was to become a cultivator. Yuan remembered that the two of them had worked together in the hope of eventually buying a pill, a concrete shared project in a world that treated cultivation as a privilege bestowed by talent and sect authority. Their partnership therefore rested not only on companionship but on a common wager: that labor might purchase a future the elders were unlikely to offer them freely.## Death, Grief, and the Vow of Revenge After Slash’s band killed Jaw-Long and Mingxia, Yuan’s anger fixed on the thought that his friends might be discarded in a ditch and their unjust deaths forgotten. He could not accept that outcome. Revenge became both a promise to the dead and a refusal to let the men who had killed them escape consequence. Even when he understood that defeating Slash would require greater power and might cost him his half-life, he remained committed. He believed he could not face Jaw-Long and Mingxia in Nowhere if he backed away when revenge seemed within reach, and he had already sworn an Unspeakable Vow.

That resolve was not merely a passing reaction. When Holster remained vulnerable because her Human Pillar nature left her at risk of capture by slavers, Yuan still placed burying Slash first among his priorities. He valued Holster and wished her well, but judged revenge to be the task he could not abandon. His insistence that he would not fail, and that no one would bury him again, made the old image of the ditch part of his own feared fate as well as the fate he could not bear for his friends.## The Complication of Loyalty During his struggle with Slash, Yuan’s claim to have avenged friends he deeply knew was put under pressure. Slash accused him of replacing Jaw-Long and Mingxia with a train and an orphan only a week after their deaths, and challenged him to name their hopes and dreams. Yuan could recall Jaw-Long’s desire to become a cultivator and their shared effort to buy a pill, but he could not remember why Mingxia had been saving money. The question unsettled him: he had called them friends, yet could not account for the details of their private hopes.

Yuan did not accept Slash’s attack as proof that he had never cared. He believed he had cared for Jaw-Long and Mingxia as much as a man in their line of work could afford to care. But he asked himself whether he would have pursued their killer so relentlessly if Slash’s band had ambushed him alone. His answer was that he would have pursued Slash anyway. Yuan recognized that he sought vengeance first for himself: he wanted to prove his strength and show that he had risen above the status of Scrap, able to fight back against people who had killed him casually. His friends’ deaths, he concluded, also gave him a way to tell himself that his pursuit had nobler grounds than the hunger for power he despised in other cultivators.

This recognition does not erase the shared work, the remembered ambition, or the anger at their unjust deaths. Instead, it makes the relationship morally difficult to simplify. Yuan’s loyalty is real, but it has been folded into a personal struggle over humiliation, strength, and identity. Jaw-Long remains central to the reason Yuan gives himself for continuing, even as Yuan learns that grief can become an explanation that conceals as much as it honors.## From Revenge Toward Responsibility The cycle of vengeance that Yuan chose to enter was itself part of the danger. Arc warned him that the Gun fed on recurring bloodshed, encouraging one side to retaliate until another death produced another avenger. Yuan still accepted that risk rather than let Slash’s band go unpunished. His anger at Jaw-Long and Mingxia’s deaths was powerful enough to make him take the bet, even after Arc described how the same cycle had ensnared others.

Later, Yuan’s decisions showed the costs of treating retaliation as a solution. He had used techniques Arc taught him in the hope of worsening the ammunition shortage in Fleshmarket and provoking its sects to destroy one another. When Arc confronted him, he could not deny that he had hoped the warring sects would slaughter each other, casualties notwithstanding. The Gun’s arrival then brought a rain of qi-charged bullets down on Fleshmarket. Yuan formed a Barrier around himself and Revolver, sheltering with his mentor under their layered defenses. His attempt to turn conflict toward his own ends had become part of a catastrophe whose consequences reached far beyond the original pursuit of Slash.

Yuan’s concern also widened beyond the dead he sought to avenge. After Revolver saved his life, Yuan refused to leave him suffering under the Gun’s curse, even though helping him might delay revenge. He regarded the rescue as a debt owed to one of the few people who had shown him unconditional kindness and could not bear to lose another ally. When Revolver later spoke of killing without distinction—Scraps and cultivators alike—Yuan answered with an apology. That moment does not undo the harm surrounding the cycle of violence, but it marks a changed emphasis: the living and the endangered could no longer be treated merely as obstacles or instruments in a private reckoning.## Meaning and Legacy Jaw-Long’s place in Yuan’s story is defined by a tension between intimate memory and the uses Yuan makes of loss. Their shared plan to buy a pill gives the relationship a material foundation: both men were trying to work their way past a status that denied them access to cultivation. After Jaw-Long died, Yuan’s pursuit of Slash preserved that aspiration as a demand for justice, but also exposed how strongly Yuan wanted to prove his own strength. The relationship thus connects his early experience of exclusion to the identity he later struggled to claim.

Yuan’s eventual mastery of the Gun Path, when he names himself the Gunman and declares that the Gun is part of him but that he is greater now, does not bring Jaw-Long back or settle the questions Yuan raised about his motives. It does, however, stand in sharp contrast to the status that once defined him: the man who had been treated as a Scrap claims a power he can master rather than merely endure. Jaw-Long’s remembered ambition remains part of the route that led Yuan into that struggle, while the limits of Yuan’s memory and his admission of self-interest prevent the friendship from becoming a simple justification for revenge. Their bond is both a source of resolve and a measure of how far Yuan’s understanding of responsibility had to change.