Age: 22
Fighting Style: Wu's fighting style combines internal and external styles of martial arts. For the most part her styles, trained in Yunxi Monastery, consist of wǔdāngquán and xiao hong quán.
Appearance:
((sans the little friggin' flower thing >_>))
Wu Ling Chao stands at 5 feet ten inches, with a lithe, agile build that does not lack muscle. She has straight, black, sleek hair that reaches down to her shoulder blades--however, Wu always ties it up at the back, so that it appears far shorter than it actually is; to date almost no one has seen her with her hair down. The natural colour of her eyes is a dark, steely blue, but because this is a mark of her hated half-foreign descent, Wu wears dark brown contacts. She has several piercings, including a stud under her lower lip, two rings on her left eyebrow, and a stud on her right eyebrow. She also has a number of tattoos, all representing the nine fundamentals of ancient Chinese philosophy; for example, she has the symbol of Wu Wei down her left bicep, and Wu Xing on her right shoulder.
Personality: The first impression one may get of Wu Ling Chao is that if you approach her she'll kick you in the balls and then KO you with an elbow to the cranium. The way she glares at everyone as if they personally had grievously wronged her, that perception wouldn't be all that wrong. Wu does indeed keep herself distant from others, and coldly rebuffs other peoples' attempts to get to know her, making it clear she has one purpose in life, and it ain't to make friends: she is here to make herself the best of the best, and other people will only get in her way. The only reason she came to Ginryu was because she had heard the master there had perfected a new, powerful style of fighting, and she wants to master it herself.
Wu seems almost obsessed with her training. She is almost never found doing anything but some kind of training. When she isn't sparring and training her martial arts skills, Wu is studying the philosophies of the classical Chinese philosophers or practicing calligraphy. It is a bleak sort of existence, and in a way even Wu herself has acknowledged this, but she refuses to believe her ideals are anything but the best way of living.
Several of Wu's ideas are very strange, some even some contrasting. Raised in Yunxi Monastery, Wu has very strict ideals on how a person should act: she holds talkative, outgoing people in distaste, as she believes silence and solemnity is the best way to train and learn. Publicly, she also claims to hold rock music and its ilk in high distaste, as in Yunxi such 'grating noise' was spurned and disliked. In reality, she has developed a taste for the music, but refuses to allow anyone to know of this. In addition, her tattoos and piercings, gained over the years after leaving Yunxi, seem to fly in the face of her stringent beliefs, but each one represents a revelation or 'understanding of life', to use the Xianxia philosophy term, that she has had.
Finally, and quite significantly, Wu seems to have a bitter dislike of foreigners, especially foreigners who try to 'violate the sacredness of Chinese culture', whether it be through learning martial arts or learning a dialect of Chinese, or even claiming to simply like Chinese food. She was practically horrified when she discovered the master of Ginryu was a foreigner--for she had assumed, because of the complexity and great difficulty of the style he had developed, that he had to be from the mainland. This 'hatred' stems from the fact that Wu herself is part-Russian rather than full Chinese, and though the elders of Yunxi knew and accepted this, she came to consider it a brand of dishonour, a mark of the deepest shame. Thus as soon as she could, Wu began to wear contacts to hide her eye colour, and since then has claimed to be full-blooded Han Chinese.
History: Wu Ling Chao was born of a union that was never supposed to happen. Her mother was a Russian woman who had come to the city of Suzhou, near Yunxi Monastery, to learn about the Buddhist Xianxia sect; it was here that her mother met Wu's father. After several months, they began to see one another secretly, knowing that the Yunxi elders would condemn any intimacy amongst their ranks, and that the consequences for her father would be severe. Unfortunately, they were eventually found out, though not before her mother had become pregnant with her father's child. Her father was cast from the monastery, and ultimately killed himself in shame, while her mother was forced to stay in Yunxi, having nowhere else to go; they accepted her, if only because she was bearing a child and it would have been wicked to cast her out on her own in such circumstances.
A few months later, her mother gave birth to Wu, but died soon after due to complications in childbirth. Rather than give the child the name of a shamed monk, the girl was given the surnames Ling Chao, and from then was raised in the largely male-dominated Yunxi Monastery. She never knew of her true heritage until at the age of seventeen, the elder monks of the monastery confessed that it was true; by this time, the teenaged Wu had already developed her own ideals, and the thought that she was not a full-blooded Han Chinese horrified the girl. She left soon after, and never returned to Yunxi, though she bore the teachings of the school for the rest of her life.
((Bah. Didn't finish. Will finish the history soon, but nothing important was left out :v))