Duanmu Siping

Duanmu Siming (Twin brother)

Duanmu Xi (Half-brother)

Duanmu Siyun (Cousin)

Duanmu Lian (Aunt) †

Situ Li (Cousin)

Situ Li's father (Uncle)

Situ Li's aunt (Aunt)

Great-grandmother

Duanmu Luoyue (Ancestor) † (body only)

**Duanmu Siping** was the twin sister of Duanmu Siming and the younger half-sister of Duanmu Xi . She was the daughter of the 61st Yangming Master Duanmu Yin (who is also the father of Duanmu Xi) and Situ Lan, who gave birth to Siming and her in late September.

Since the birth of twins was seen as a bad omen in the Duanmu family, their mother decided to send Duanmu Siping to the Zhiren house, an orphanage-like place where unwanted children with spiritual powers were sent to train as monks. These monks would assist the Yangming Masters in their rituals, if they were unable to complete them themselves, since a ritual should not be interrupted. This, however, could exhaust the monk and even cause their death, as they lacked the spiritual power of a Yangming priest.

Siping was born with strong spiritual powers compared to her twin brother Siming, who was pretty weak in that matter. But because Siming was the male heir of the Duanmu household, it was decided that Siping would be the one who would be hidden from the world and become a monk in the Zhiren house in order to help Siming complete the sacrifices when he became a Yangming Master. Also, because they were born as twins, both Siping and Siming had the power to copy other people's spiritual abilities, as long as they were within their own power limits.

While Siping was living in the Zhiren house, her mother took Situ Li under her wing, due to his mother's early death, and asked him to help her look after Siping, since she was unable to do so.

Years later, when Duanmu Xi became the head of the Duanmu family, he pitied the monks and closed the Zhiren house, sending the children, including Siping, back to their families. Despite that, Siping still chose to assist and sing for Duanmu Xi in two rituals, greatly upsetting her mother and her cousin, Situ Li. The two of them, then, decided to give her a poison that, in a low dosage, would cause permanent loss of her voice. This made her unable to sing for both Duanmu Xi and the audience she had gained from an earlier, anonymous release of a song of hers. When she figured out that her own family would cause such harm to her, in a moment of despair, she drank a large amount of the poison, took Situ Li's knife and asked Duanmu Xi to kill her through a letter she had written for him. Since it's a heavy sin to commit suicide and she would end up in hell, Duanmu Xi fulfilled her wish and sent her to the afterlife with the knife. After this and some other conspiracies were revealed to be her mother's doing through Siping's letter, her mother couldn't handle it and went mad. She then sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the power to curse Duanmu Xi and eventually committed suicide. The rest of the Situ family, especially her sister (Situ Li's aunt) and her nephew (Situ Li), still considered this and Siping's death to be the fault of Duanmu Xi, trying everything in their power to torture and kill him for revenge.

1. ↑ *Ling Qi* chapter 361, page 4