Yuan–Manhattan

Yuan Guang’s relationship with Manhattan turns a failed delivery into the beginning of a long-term conflict. Manhattan commissioned the mission that brought Yuan Guang’s team into danger, yet treats its loss with striking calm: he pays Yuan Guang, offers him a sutra scroll, and expects the stolen Cube of Natho to find its way back to him. That confidence becomes a point of contrast with Yuan Guang’s later oath to destroy Manhattan and thwart his plans.

The hidden client

Manhattan first presents himself as a stranger who has forgotten his original name, inviting Yuan Guang to call him Manhattan. Yuan Guang recognizes that this is not the man’s real name, but the exchange establishes how little the ancient cultivator is willing to disclose about his past. Their more immediate connection emerges when Manhattan asks about the stolen cube. Yuan Guang explains that he came to report its theft to his employer and discover who betrayed his team’s location; Manhattan then reveals that he is the employer who commissioned the run.

The mission was not a simple delivery. Manhattan had arranged seven decoys to conceal the team’s position and came to collect his package discreetly. When the staff claimed they had lost contact with the couriers, he sensed they were lying and interrogated them, admitting that he may have done so too roughly. The ash pile nearby gives the encounter a physical trace of that violence. For Yuan Guang, Manhattan’s knowledge now has an explanation, but the revelation also exposes the imbalance between them: Manhattan designed the operation from a position of power, while Yuan Guang arrives as its surviving, dispossessed courier.

The stolen Cube of Natho

Yuan Guang asks what the team had been transporting and why Manhattan and Yinyang Khan wanted it so intensely. Manhattan identifies the object as the Cube of Natho, an artifact made in the chaotic years before Sky-Biter’s ascension. He says he spent substantial resources arranging its secret recovery and transport. Its importance, however, remains only partly explained: in the right hands it could save the world, while in the wrong hands—specifically those of Yinyang Khan—it could become a weapon of terrible power.

Manhattan’s answer gives Yuan Guang a measure of the stakes without giving him a full account of the artifact’s workings. The cube is at once a lost package, an object with world-altering potential, and the focus of a contest between powerful cultivators. Manhattan’s willingness to answer is limited; Yuan Guang senses that further questions will not produce more. Their exchange therefore begins with an asymmetry of knowledge as well as strength: Manhattan decides what to reveal, while Yuan Guang must act without understanding the whole conflict into which his mission has drawn him.

Payment, mercy, and karma

After explaining the cube’s significance, Manhattan tells Yuan Guang that his delivery payment is behind the counter and says he may also take Manhattan’s sutra scroll, which he no longer needs. He then turns his back on Yuan Guang, a gesture that signals confidence in the face of another cultivator and can also be read as an insult. Yet he does not attack or punish the courier for losing the package. Yuan Guang is surprised that Manhattan will let him leave, especially after the mission has failed.

Manhattan rejects anger as a narrow emotion that clouds judgment. His apparent mercy is not disinterest: he suspects Yuan Guang’s survival will eventually lead the cube back to him, and invokes the pull of karma as the reason. When Yuan Guang admits that he does not understand, Manhattan frames the answer as something that will become clear only when Yuan Guang learns to see farther ahead. The exchange leaves their relationship unresolved. Manhattan neither treats Yuan Guang as an enemy to eliminate nor releases him from the larger design; instead, he regards Yuan Guang’s continued existence as part of the route by which the cube may return.

An oath against Manhattan

The relationship acquires a prospective adversarial dimension when Arc offers to train Yuan Guang on the condition that he swear to destroy Manhattan, any students Manhattan has taken, and Manhattan’s plans. Yuan Guang initially objects that he is nowhere near strong enough. Arc sets no deadline, allowing the pursuit to take years or decades, but warns that abandoning the goal or passing over a reasonable opportunity to destroy Manhattan will cause the oath to destroy Yuan Guang’s core.

Arc then makes the terms explicit: she will teach Yuan Guang everything she knows if he vows never to befriend a Nuclear Path cultivator, to defeat Manhattan and those who follow Manhattan’s Path, to oppose their plans when possible, and ultimately to destroy him, even if centuries are required. Yuan Guang accepts with a qualification of his own: he will defeat Manhattan and his followers once he has the power, and oppose their plans whenever possible or reasonable. The Dao answers the spoken promise by closing an invisible grip around Yuan Guang’s bullet-core and forming a chain from his words; a faint pressure remains on his soul to keep the vow present. Manhattan’s earlier prediction that Yuan Guang’s survival would draw the cube back to him thus stands beside a new commitment that makes Yuan Guang’s future opposition to Manhattan binding rather than merely possible.