Xuan Li.

As the Order's Grand Scholar, Xuan Li devotes his studies to the Blight and Lóng.

When no one else can make sense of old learning, the Order points to its Grand Scholar, whose understanding goes much deeper. By blood a Xuan, Xuan Li pores over the records about Lóng and the Blight to trace the origin of whatever came down from past the sky.

Conversations with Zuo Shang give him fresh ideas, much like watching a game where Lóng and the Blight are the pieces on the board. According to Zuo Shang, the Wulin is fortunate that Xuan Li has joined the Order.

Survivor of the Xuan Clan

No one else from his clan remains. Zuo Shang exterminated Xuan Li's elder brother and the entire Xuan family yet let him live, and Xuan Li tells Zuo Shang this directly: he is living on borrowed time and is grateful to the Shadow Edict for sparing him. He does not say how the debt will be paid.

Xuan Li thinks in causes and origins. In his account, the Blight is a destructive power from past the stars, recorded in the Celestial Tome, and it appears to have a will of its own, or the will of countless minds, because each fragment is the whole. Another presence from beyond the heavens, he maintains, opposes it: visitors with knowledge vastly beyond this world's might have raised something here to hold the Blight back, which the ancients named Lóng without knowing better.

Regarding the Blight

“Everything it touches is consumed and becomes part of the Blight.”

A line in which Xuan Li describes the way the Blight spreads from star to star.