Zhang is a human crawler who survives the dungeon alongside his best friend Li Jun and Li Jun's sister Li Na. His first encounter with Carl and Princess Donut occurs through the Maestro's Death Watch broadcast, when the show tries to make him choose which members of his endangered party will live. Zhang subsequently becomes an Earth Mover whose spells, equipment, and careful handling of vehicles help allied crawlers navigate the Iron Tangle and later floors. He joins the growing coalition around Carl without abandoning his original companions. By the end of the Ninth Floor, Li Jun has died, and Zhang and Li Na remain in the same party despite a painful silence between them.
Death Watch and the rescue of his party
Zhang enters the story as one of four people caught between troglodytes and Brindled Vespas. The Maestro removes him and Li Jun from the imminent fight and places them before an audience for a Death Watch segment. Li Na and the fourth crawler, the men's former warehouse manager, remain frozen in danger. The program turns a rescue into a game: Li Jun and Zhang must predict the outcomes of other crawlers' encounters to earn teleport points. Each point can remove one person from the trap, but the two men win only enough to save half their group.
At this first meeting Zhang is bald, level seven, and unusually hardy by Carl's measure: his Constitution is 15. The Maestro uses the party's existing ties to sharpen the forced choice. Li Jun says that he, Zhang, and their fourth companion worked together in a warehouse before the crawl; Li Na is his sister. Zhang identifies Li Na as his best friend's sister and describes the manager as a friend as well. When the host presses him to rank Li Na above their manager, Zhang refuses to give the answer the show seeks. His silence matters because the segment is structured to turn an existing group into a public spectacle of betrayal.
Li Jun initially chooses solidarity even if no one escapes. Zhang then offers to spend the points on Li Jun and Li Na, accepting that he himself would be left behind with the manager. Li Jun rejects that sacrifice too. Neither man accepts the Maestro's premise that survival requires them to discard the others. Carl and Donut are brought on as guests before the host can force the decision, and Carl challenges the show's restrictions until the furious Maestro sends the two men back to the still-frozen encounter.
Carl uses the few seconds before the monsters move to tell Zhang and Li Jun to collect their companions and run through the distracted troglodytes. Zhang reacts immediately when he returns: he directs Li Jun toward his sister and goes for the fallen manager. After the Brindled Vespas attack the troglodytes, the four crawlers slip past both groups. Zhang administers a healing potion to their injured companion before they reach a safe room. The escape establishes more than a chance acquaintance with Carl. Zhang and Li Jun have seen him risk a powerful host's anger to save strangers, while Carl has seen both men's refusal to buy safety with their companions' lives.
Earth Mover on the Iron Tangle
When Carl encounters Zhang again on the Iron Tangle, Zhang is still human and has reached level 28. His class is Earth Mover; Li Jun describes his build as a combination of mage and tank. He wears segmented black-and-gold armor that glows. Carl is trying to bring a rail cart through passages too tight to accommodate it when Zhang runs from a safe room with a shrinking wand. The wand has only one charge left, and Zhang has kept it for an emergency. Its effect on objects gives the group a workable way to move the cart through the constriction.
Zhang already knows the wand's limits from experience. It cannot shrink living targets, and the reduced object retains its original weight. Zhang explains that his party once used it on a monster's collar, which tightened as it shrank, and once on a train bearing down on them. In the train encounter, shrinking the vehicle killed those aboard and gave him a sudden gain of six levels. These uses show why he can advise Carl about both the tool's practical value and its lethality. With Zhang controlling the reduction, the crawlers are able to transport the cart that Carl's original plan could not move.
The Iron Tangle brings Zhang, Li Jun, and Li Na into closer cooperation with Carl's group. When Carl needs help with a dangerous portal operation, the three offer themselves before Imani can recruit volunteers. Zhang's former manager remains with the others defending an exit, so the volunteers do not simply leave their wider group unprotected. Zhang's readiness follows the earlier Death Watch rescue, but the work also has its own immediate stakes: the team must move a cart through a hostile rail network and use its portal while monsters press toward them.
Zhang's combat role differs from those of the siblings. Li Jun fights at close range, while Li Na restrains enemies with chains. Zhang follows her immobilizing attacks with Dirt Clod, a spell that batters the trapped targets with rocks. All three have acquired acid resistance after their encounter with Brindled Grubs on the Second Floor. That shared preparation is a concrete consequence of an earlier near-fatal fight. During the cart journey, Zhang stands guard in its middle section with Li Jun, Li Na, and Mongo while Carl drives and Katia covers the rear.
The portal plan also depends on Zhang's control of the vehicle. When an enemy braces himself against the track to avoid being pushed through a portal, Carl calls for Zhang to move the cart instead. Zhang eases it forward, bringing the portal to the resisting target while the others release him before they are pulled in too. Later, in Trainyard E, the intended sequence again assigns Zhang the controls: after the first mantaur is sent through, he is to switch the rail portal's destination so the summoning can be used against Grull. He drives the portal cart close to the war god while Carl and the others prepare the second summoning. Once the train has gone through at the end of the floor, Zhang returns to the cart and shuts the portal down. His contributions are timed actions within the group's plan, not incidental presence beside the fighters.
Work with the allied crawlers
Zhang continues moving with Li Jun and Li Na as their group cooperates with Carl's wider circle. On the Sixth Floor, he casts a spell that lengthens the timer over mushroom guards whom Li Na has rendered unconscious, extending their incapacitation from one minute to ten. The two actions fit together: her attack removes an immediate threat, and his magic gives the others longer to act before those enemies recover. Carl greets Zhang and Li Jun when their team regroups after the encounter.
During the Butcher's Masquerade, the three enter the talent show as jugglers. They travel in the same procession as Carl's allies and perform a short knife-juggling act before withdrawing backstage. Zhang is later reported unconscious after the violence around the masquerade, while Li Jun and Li Na help search for Eva. These appearances place him among the cooperating crawlers without making him the architect of that floor's broader confrontation.
Zhang also participates in the group that returns to help Carl near the end of the Eighth Floor. Carl finds Li Jun, Li Na, Zhang, Chris, Imani, Katia, and other allies among more than twenty people who have come to the church area. The group must make a route to safety through ground threatened by destruction. Chris, Zhang, and others undertake a controlled demolition and create a channel beneath the church. Carl lends Zhang a shrink wand because of his experience with that kind of magic. Zhang later reports that he needed only two uses and returns the wand. The task joins his earlier object-shrinking experience to an evacuation problem rather than to a direct attack.
On the Ninth Floor Zhang receives a rank in the allied military organization while Li Jun and Li Na seek treatment for Li Jun's lost eye. His actions during the attack on Club Vanquisher are again tied to a coordinated plan. He and Li Jun carry wire behind Carl's group, enter the Dagda temple while appearing to inspect its windows, and help seize the passage into the club. Zhang reports that he has secured a vestibule door open. During the battle he holds a door while Li Jun and Bautista guard other exits, helping the group keep its auras active. When the confrontation becomes a deadly staged contest against the nagas, the presentation singles Zhang out as a likely casualty. He survives and exults in that survival once the fighters reach the Calligrapher's Guild.
The Cape of Odds
Zhang is among the crawlers awarded a Celestial box for surviving the Club Vanquisher fight. His prize is Zhang's Cape of Odds, a white cape marked with the colored rings of an archery target. Even without its active power, it improves all his statistics by 15 percent and raises his Dodge skill. The cape thus strengthens the same crawler who had long served as an armored spellcaster and operator in dangerous, tightly timed plans.
Its active power is less dependable. Once an hour Zhang can use Roll the Dice, which selects from 333 possible effects. Many are beneficial, including temporary strength or flight, but 66 are harmful. The bad outcomes are temporary and do not kill him outright, yet they include paralysis, severe reduction of his statistics, and the summoning of the god who hates him most. After 19 uses, he would gain the ability to choose an outcome. That delayed control creates an incentive to gamble repeatedly despite the risks. Zhang wears the cape but tells Carl he intends to activate it only if necessary. No use of that power is established in his Ninth Floor appearances.
Li Jun's death and the stairwell
Li Jun's friendship with Zhang remains explicit through their last scenes together. Facing his own death, Li Jun sends Li Na a message for Zhang: he regrets that he cannot say goodbye in person, refers to a bet between them, and asks her to protect him. The message shows that Zhang is one of the people Li Jun is thinking about at the end. It does not explain the bet, and its outcome is not a basis for inventing a separate episode in the friends' past.
After Li Jun dies protecting Donut, she worries that Zhang may blame her. Carl expects Zhang to grieve and perhaps blame himself for not being there. Imani stays with Zhang while he is upset. Zhang then speaks to Donut directly. He tells her that Li Jun feared he would never do anything important and worried about Li Na's future without him. Zhang is proud of what his friend did and of Donut's part in helping Li Na grow stronger. When Donut apologizes, he answers with admiration and respect rather than accusation. His response is a distinct choice amid the grief; it should not be confused with Li Na's more hostile reaction.
Li Jun's death leaves Zhang with a strained connection to Li Na. She continues to answer his messages for a time, but when he asks what she is doing, she says only that she is hunting. At the end of the Ninth Floor Zhang enters a stairwell alone. He tells Carl he does not know whether he will accept a deal. Li Na is still partied with him, yet she has not spoken to him, and she descends without a farewell. Zhang is alive when he leaves the floor. The later course of either crawler's relationship or fate is not established by their Ninth Floor departure.