Feng is slim and quick, with straight black hair twisted into a plain knot and secured by a faded red cord. His attentive dark eyes track hands, hinges, and exits before settling on a face; his expressions arrive a beat before his words. His inherited robes hang too long at the sleeves, which he pushes back with brisk, habitual flicks. His fingertips are permanently soot-blackened from tending relic lamps, and he carries the dry smell of lamp oil, old paper, and scorched sesame. He moves with a keeper's careful economy, but when startled he pivots so sharply his sleeves snap like flags. The unexpected detail: he has a tiny, meticulously stitched patch inside one sleeve showing a cheerful green frog, sewn there by his grandfather.

Feng is alert and methodical, yet he has a soft spot for people who are plainly out of their depth. In calm company he can be wry and unexpectedly playful; under pressure he becomes brisk, exacting, and hard to interrupt. He distrusts easy promises but is capable of risking himself for a stranger. His instinct to preserve can look like kindness one moment and possessiveness the next.

Feng grew up in the rooms behind a riverside shrine, where his grandfather, Wu Zhen, kept the lamps burning around objects that pilgrims left in trust. Feng learned to clean bronze without wearing away its inscriptions, to recognize counterfeit offerings, and to read the tiny changes in a flame that warned of a draft. At fifteen, a flood tore open the shrine's lower vault. Feng disobeyed an order to flee and went back for the relics; his grandfather went after him and was badly injured when a shelf collapsed. During the long recovery, Wu Zhen taught him that preservation was not the same as possession, a lesson Feng resents whenever it conflicts with his instinct to lock everything away. Now Feng serves as keeper of the shrine's surviving relics and cleric of its local river-and-lamp tradition. His aunt, Suyin, manages the shrine's food stores and believes he is too suspicious to make a life outside its walls. The shrine's roof leaks, its lamp oil is nearly gone, and a traveling buyer has offered enough money to repair both if Feng will part with a sealed bronze reliquary. Feng watches Ko more closely than he admits because Ko's mannerisms remind him of someone who once knew the reliquary's hidden latch.