Qiyan Agula

Overview
Qiyan Agula (乞颜•阿古拉, Qǐyán Āgǔlā), also known as Qi Yan (齐颜, Qí Yán), is the Prince of the Grass Plains and one of the main characters of Jing Wei Qing Shang.

After her family and tribe was wiped out by the Wei generals, Qiyan Agula devoted herself entirely to revenge. Under the tutelage of the mysterious masked person, Agula tossed aside her past identity and transformed herself into Qi Yan, a frail scholar of the Wei Kingdom, in order to infiltrate and cause chaos in the imperial court. However, due to a series of events, Qi Yan found herself engaged to the daughter of her greatest enemy, becoming the Fuma to Princess Zhenzhen, Nangong Jingnu.

Through various schemes, she was able to wipe out the majority of the Nangong imperial family as Nangong Jingnu's Fuma, and when she finds out about Nangong Rangs plan to make Nangong Jingnu the first female emperor, she agreed to help. With her mind, she was able to aptly come up with plans and schemes which propelled the public opinion and stability of the future of a female emperor a fair amount. She was also able to use this as a motive to carry out multiple measures which eliminated threats to the throne for Nangong Jingnu, gaining the trust of Nangong Rang while also killing off members of the Imperial family.

When Nangong Jingnu ascended the throne after her father's death, it didn't take long for her to find out about Qi Yan's true identity as Qiyan Agula, and while she was understanding of it, she did not yet know of Qi Yan's involvement in her father's death or of the fact that she was a woman as well.

Once Nangong Jingnu found out that Qi Yan had killed her father, she was in a rage, divorcing her and relegating her to a prison cell, even whipping her with her own hands, which left large scars on her chest. The court eventually decided to return Agula back to the grass plains as a political move. While Jingnu was hurt by this, she had steeled herself towards this, as a ruler, however, after a conversation with her sister, she had a last-minute change of heart and sent emergency troops to go capture Agula under the disguise of being from the Grass Plains. By that time, the procession for Agula had already almost reached the Luo River, which was the crossing point between the Wei Kingdom and the Grass Plains.

When she was brought back, her health had already deteriorated an alarming amount. Her awful health had been originally because of the near death experience with drowning in her childhood and also because of the drugs that she had taken to restrict her body from developing normally towards womanhood, but to make sure that no one found out about her true identity as a woman, she had delayed medical treatment for this illness for far too long. And now, with the depression and the whippings, her originally weak constitution was even worse.

Nangong Jingnu built an isolated section in the Imperial Palace as a hiding place for Qi Yan, as she was dead in the eyes of the court, and of the grass plains. She stayed there to recuperate her health until the outbreak of a war sprang up at the Luo River. With the pleading of Qi Yan, Nangong Jingnu reluctantly decided to send her with emergency troops to try to placate the army of the Grass Plains.

When she met with Guqi Bayin on the battlefield, there was happiness and celebration before Qi Yan refused to go back as the Khagan of the Chengli Tribe. Once she said this, Bayin told her to go back and to never appear in front of him again.

Despite the hurt that this caused in Qi Yan, she was welcomed back into the Wei Kingdom warmly as a war hero despite her past. She relegated herself to the Back Palace as the Imperial "Husband," content to live out her days, but also wanting to help carry the weight of the mountains and rivers for Nangong Jingnu.

Her health continued to worsen, spurred on largely by a book that described the gruesome murder of her father and pregnant mother. It went so far as to say that by killing her mother, it took three lives with one, implying that they had defiled her mother's body to ensure that there was no chance of the infants being alive.

When she asked Nangong Jingnu to help her take her revenge on the men who had done these atrocities, Nangong Jingnu was hesitant, saying that they were crucial to the kingdom at the moment and that she had to look at the bigger picture as the emperor. Despite knowing that this was best for the kingdom and that she herself was the one that had taught Nangong Jingnu to, "Look at the bigger picture" she was distraught. And with her depression, her illness began to worsen at an unprecedented rate and she asked to be moved to the Chengchao Palace where she wouldn't be able to see Jingnu every day under the excuse that it would invite criticism if she were to stay at the Ganquan Palace. She stated, "...this subject does not wish to leave the impression of a 'bitter wife' in your Majesty's heart with the remaining days that this subject has left." Her wish was granted.

There, Qi Yan's worsened even more until she was only barely able to walk, but with the reappearance of Ding You, her former doctor who studied under the tutelage of the masked person, there was finally hope. In the years where he was away, he had studied day and night about Qi Yan's condition, and was able to find the antidote for the forbidden pill that Qi Yan had ate in her youth. Her physical condition became better, but her mental state continued to deteriorate to the point where she would sometimes wake up with no knowledge of anything that had happened in the past 13 years, believing that her revenge was not yet complete. At first, the memories would come back rather quickly, but soon, it started to take days and weeks for them to return.

In the end, she decided to stage her own death, feeling as if every moment that her parents' murderers were still alive was torturing her. She would use her faked death to spur Nangong Jingnu on to kill the men who had brutally murdered her parents. She said, right before taking her pill that Ding You had made, "This will be the last time that I set you up, Jingnu."

With her death, she asked in her suicide note to be buried near the river where she should have drowned in her youth in a thin coffin. She asked for the date to be labeled the year it was back then. She stressed that she did not ever regret the years of marriage but she wished to have never appeared in the Wei Kingdom.

Nangong Jingnu followed her instructions to a T, even going as to the records of her ever existing were wiped, rewritten was that she had died in Jingjia, First Year. She went against the overwhelming currents to carry out every single thing that the letter asked, placing her in a thin coffin and burying exactly where she instructed.

Years later when Nangong Jingnu had already retired from the throne, she came to visit the grave. Inexplicably, the coffin was empty. This was the biggest hint that Qi Yan could give to her that she was still alive. The last lines of that chapter ended with, "Qiyan Agula! This time, I'll find you even if I must search to the ends of the Earth!"

Appearance
Born to a father from the Grass Plains and a mother from the Wei Kingdom, Qi Yan has a mixture of features from both ethnicities, but is noted to look more like a person of the Wei Kingdom and very little like her father in comparison to her mother. When she was a child, her hair was kept in many small braids that hung loosely. As an adult, she is tall, and has a so-called manly stature due to a mix of puberty-blocking pills and her grass plains blood; however, she is also "soft and flimsy" and thought of as weak and delicate. Her face is extremely androgynous, and there is a thin scar crossing her left cheekbone to the side of her nose from a riding accident during the early years of her marriage. She has a piercing hole in her left ear left over from her childhood. She has "inky brows" and "long and dense eyelashes". Her most notable features are her amber eyes.

Personality
She is single-mindedly focused on her vengeance, and considers herself a cold-hearted villain. However, she is not unreasonable nor blinded by her past trauma, as she recognizes that the common people of the Wei kingdom can not be blamed alongside the royal family for her tribe's obliteration. Qi Yan is also an extremely hard worker, which is demonstrated when she was studying in the nameless valley — she became fluent in the language of the Wei, became a master at calligraphy, etc. in those years, and later was appointed as the Flower Seeker in the palace exam. Her brilliant mind allows her to mastermind multiple plots to achieve her goals.

Trivia

 * Since birth, she has lived under the presumed identity of a man, because her father wished to seal her mother as the Khatun of the tribe officially. Thus, she was given the wolf king tattoo on her chest.
 * Her calligraphy can be considered at a master's level, and her works, penned under the alias of "the hermit shepherd", are highly sought after.