The Jade General

*“We try to bring him in, to give him a proper name for a brother. Yet even if he does not overtly resist, our efforts fail. To bestow a moniker on him is to take paint and brush to water.”*

- Alexandros Darshan VonSalim following his first meeting with the Jade General.

**The Jade General** is the Primarch of the XVIIth Legion - the Warriors of Peace. This mysterious Primarch, whose natural name has been lost long ago, has devoted himself to studying Pariahs. Making war with a scholar's mind, the Jade General is an extremely dangerous, martial artist who slays his foes with only his hands and feet. His and his sons path has always been one of choosing the most logical choice to his strange mind, whether it be loyalty, traitorhood, or something else altogether.

## **History**

### **Han**

The world upon which the Jade General's pod landed was the planet of Han. A world of plentiful resources, Han was home to many flourishing kingdoms and to many grand temples. However, these were not temples to any primitive deity who required blood sacrifice but to something far more precious: knowledge. Where these temples may once have been dedicated to gods, they were now entirely given over to study and each contained thousands upon thousands of scrolls containing knowledge accumulated over hundreds of years, from ways to treat common illnesses that afflicted Han’s populace to chemical compounds one could use to make weaponry. It was into one of these temples that the Jade General was taken following his discovery by a monk, who found the child seemingly abandoned and wondering the wilds alone. While at first, they intended to pass the child on to a farming family, they soon discovered that he had an insatiable appetite for knowledge and an extraordinary intellect. So it was that he became a monk at one of the temples, a Keeper of Knowledge.

While for his first years as a monk the young Jade General was content to simply read and discover. However, within a few years he had read all that the temples had to offer and his thirst for knowledge remained unsated. It was then that his goal, the goal towards which he would strive for his entire life, was to discover the greatest mysteries of the universe. The first to which he turned his formidable intellect was less a matter of discovery so much as rediscovery. The ancient texts spoke of various substances, harder even than iron, which had been possessed by the ancients and techniques by which a single man could create a thousand spear heads in a day where a blacksmith could create only a few dozen.

Tinkering amidst the simple wooden walls of his personal chamber, the Jade General worked for days without rest, testing hundreds of different ways in which he could create such a metal and such a mechanism. Eventually, he found a way to create this metal, which he named steel after that named in the ancient texts, and wrote an entire treatise upon various methods one could use to create steel of varying hardnesses and flexibilities. As he set his mind to how to create a machine capable of mass-producing objects, his first discovery spread like wildfire across Han, with Kings paying the temples entire rooms full of gold for the privilege of receiving a copy of the Jade General's treatise. However, the Jade General was far from finished.

Within a matter of months, he had discovered a way of making a crude iron machine capable of producing hundreds of spear heads in a single day. Once again, kings paid huge sums for a copy of his treatise on the matter in a desperate bid not to be out done by their rivals.

Where once, the world of Jin had been united under the rule of the Celestial Lords, said to he descended from the god Heaven, the embodiment of all things, the world was now divided into three warring states, Zhu, Ju and Fei. It was the Kings of these three states who were most desperate to gain access to the Jade General's new inventions, each wishing to outdo his rivals and seeing the new technologies as a way of accomplishing it. However, as the Jade General continued to create new technologies, with each these rulers were obliged to empty their treasuries in order to gain access to it. Eventually, they decided enough was enough and began to offer this talented young monk a steady wage and access to everything he would need to continue inventing if he would only give them access to his inventions. Where any other would likely have agreed, the Jade General refused, no matter what the kings promised. So, deciding that if they couldn't have sole access to his inventions then they must stop him from creating inventions, the kings began to send assassins to kill the Jade General. However, they had made a grave underestimation of the young Primarch.

Despite his principal interests lying in science, the Jade General still possessed the formidable physical abilities of a Primarch and easily disposed of the assassins sent to kill him. However, as the assassins kept coming, the Jade General began to see the art of killing as a science, which could be perfected and then applied to any situation. It was to this matter the Jade General turned his mind, and he continued to churn out both new technology and new treatises upon techniques he had developed to kill.

However, within a few years the Jade General's need of resources to create new inventions outstripped those he could acquire and so, he sent out a message to all three kingdoms demanding that they give him the resources he needed or he would destroy them. Angered by his repeated refusal to serve them, only one kingdom, Zhu, agreed while another, Fei, actively declared war upon him. Only Ju remained neutral, trying to stall and delay the Jade General for as long as possible.

Using the army of the Kingdom of Zhu and equipping them with the latest of his inventions, the Jade General crushed first Fei and then Ju creating a huge kingdom. Over the next years, his kingdom would expand to cover all of Jin as his demands on resources and manpower grew, and he conquered other kingdoms to sate these needs. So it was that the Jade General became the successor to the Celestial Emperor without ever desiring to.

Though the so-called Central States were united under the General's guidance, the world was larger than these kingdoms.  Many of the aristocrats from the Central States had fled rather than submit and, in cooperation with nomads and even the distant Empire of Borjiginhan. In what happened next, one must, from our vantage point, suspect the hand of Chaos, for the aristocrats were soon united under a powerful psyker, Oljeitu.  Where precisely Oljeitu was from is unknown, but what is clear is that he had access to arcane secrets hitherto unknown on Han, not simply in the Central States, but in all countries under the sky.  Court Sorcerers were a court staple all over Han, but their powers were limited and knowledge limited.  Oljeitu, in contrast, clearly exercised a level of control and technique requiring an educational infrastructure simply beyond the bronze age society of Han’s various nascent civilizations.  Oljeitu went on the offensive, devastating the army sent to pacify the Xuehe oasis cities that had allied with Prince Gu Jiahao.  Worse still, Oljeitu began gathering and training psykers.  The number of these witches was never particularly high given how rare the psyker gene is, but Oljeitu also appears to have had psycho-reactive devices allowing ordinary mortals to channel some degree of empyrean might with horrific consequences.  A tide of madness and death was thus unleashed that even the General's strategic brilliance and well drilled armies were unable to check.  However, psykers had plagued Han in the distant past and legends remained.  A strange community of hermits known as the Shensha was known which drew upon strange members of all societies.  Once in a generation, these odd hermits would descend from their mountain refuges to scour the countryside for children with what we now understand to be the Null Gene.  On rare occasions they would be employed as exorcists in the world below, but in general, these Shensha were avoided.

The General had disregarded both sorcerers and Shensha as curiosities ultimately irrelevant to administering an empire, an oversight which cost him dearly.  By the time the General was able to mobilize the Shensha, the countryside was overrun by mutated beasts.  Taking the Shensha as an elite force, The General deployed them both as retinue to aid him and as a mobile force able to hunt down the sorcerers.  Thus, it was that the General's campaign became a careful series of traps designed to draw out sorcerers and strike them down, while he devised chariot units with massive crossbows to hunt down the mutated beasts running rampant.  In time, the tides turned and the General, accompanied by the Shensha, personally slew Oljeitu at Shengya.

It was in time of reconstruction that followed that the Emperor came to Han.

## **Personality**

With his brothers, the Jade General brooked no easy familiarity. Alexandros remarked that, "*We try to bring him in, to give him a proper name for a brother. Yet even if he does not overtly resist, our efforts fail. To bestow a moniker on him is to take paint and brush to water.*"

Honed on the battlefields of Han, the Jade General's mind set him apart even among his brothers. Unsentimental to the point of foregoing a name, many assumed he would be a distant commander, directing rather than leading his troops. However the Primarch swiftly dispelled this notion, viewing his own power as a weapon to be wielded like any other - with utmost precision. Combining an understanding of biology that few could equal with the breath-taking finesse of Han martial arts, in battle he was a warrior of absolute composure, no matter the chaos around him.

While adept with a wide variety of weapons, the General preferred to employ his astonishing martial arts ability - one might say unarmed, but such a word never truly applied to a Primarch. Often his foes were undone by their sheer bewilderment when they faced him. Few things were so incongruous in an age of volkites, plasma and grav-weaponry as a warrior who slew with fists and feet. He became a strange paradox, taciturn in person but inspirational on the battlefield. However, there existed a flaw in his composure; a distrust of psykers, fed by disasters he witnessed on Han, that bordered on the obsessive.

## **Wargear**

* ***The Equilibrium Plate*** - Favouring mobility over protection, the Equilibrium plate nonetheless was incredibly strong. The product of several months’ toil in the XVIIth Legion's forges, it was a suit of artificer armour based on Crusade-pattern armour but vastly improved by the artificers. Its already sophisticated systems were further augmented with medicae devices fashioned by the Jade General himself.
* ***The Obsidian Fang*** - The finest example of Han blade-crafting ever to exist, the Obsidian Fang was the sword favoured by the Jade General whenever he required such a weapon. As with all his weapons, it was optimised for lightning-quick attacks and economy rather than the heavy blades wielded by many of his brothers. Rumour dogged the blade, claiming that it employed technologies from the Age of Technology which allowed it to sap a foe’s strength.
* ***War and Peace*** - The product of many years’ refinement, these unique thunder gauntlets and boots contained archaeotech disruptor-cells of rare potency, surpassing almost any full-sized power fist in sheer power. Coupled with the Primarch's native strength, speed and skill, they sealed the fates of uncounted foes.

## **Gallery**

Remembrancer sketch of The Jade GeneralRemembrancer sketch of The Jade General, during the Great Crusade.