Ume wears a tattered, layered kosode of unbleached hemp and loose hakama trousers stained with red clay. His hair is long and matted with soil, partially tied back with a simple twine. His skin is weathered like granite, and his eyes often dart toward the floor as if watching something beneath the surface.

Ume is detached from human concerns, often pausing mid sentence to listen to the vibrations of the ground. He treats the earth as a living, speaking entity and often argues with invisible spirits residing in the bedrock. He is surprisingly calm during disasters, viewing them as the earth simply adjusting its posture.

For twelve years, Ume lived in the lightless caverns beneath the Spine of the World, dressed in the traditional garb of his ancestors from a distant eastern land. He did not seek isolation out of bitterness, but because the surface world was too loud, masking the deep, resonant voices of the tectonic plates. These voices, which he calls the Stone Singers, taught him the secrets of the mountain and the slow, grinding patience of the earth itself. He believes he is a vessel for their warnings, transcribing their rumbles into strange, jagged calligraphy on scraps of parchment. Recently, the voices changed. They spoke of a shifting rot in the upper crust, a silence where there should be vibration. Following the pull of a subterranean magnetic north, Ume emerged from his cave. He now wanders the surface world, a stranger in rustic Japanese silks, seeking the source of the earth's sudden, terrified hushes.