Eternus Hyperion was born Pu-jin Yi in 1923. Her father, a brutish man, was wealthy owning many wives and concubines. Her mother, Yang’s first wife, was a submissive woman with bound feet who wanted better for her daughter. Early life was hard for young Pu-jin; she had no status as a daughter, and soon was ignored after her father’s third wife bore a son. Even so, the girl loved to sit in the peaceful gardens of the courtyard at their main house.
One day in 1928 when Pu-jin was about five, she was walking in the bamboo thicket behind the gardens, and came upon a wounded serpent. Though the creature could have struck her, Pu-jin knelt by it and moved the small yellow snake out of the scorching sun and into the shade. It crawled away, but in a few weeks, the young girl began to notice that the animals of the courtyard always came out when she was there, especially a small turtle that enjoyed walking in circles around her feet. Pu-jin named him Kan.
The Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, and to gain influence, Yang Xia-lin moved his household to Jinzhou. Pu-jin and her mother hated living under the Japanese rule, and in 1933, the woman died; poison was suspected, but never proven. After that, Yang Xia-lin grew even more tyrannical, often beating and scolding his young daughter. Soon, Pu-jin’s only refuge was in the forest among the animals.
In late 1938, after the Communist-Kuomintang alliance against the Japanese, Yang Xia-lin married 15 year-old Pu-jin to a Kuomintang officer. Wen Fu was bitter soldier; he hated everyone and lived for violence. He beat her daily, and had one of his concubines killed for looking him in the eyes. Two years later, Pu-jin gave birth to a baby girl who was beaten to death at age 1½ by her father, who had wanted a son.
Wen Fu broke down the door to her room, wrenched the baby from Pu-jin’s arms, and in a drunken rage, violently killed it with his bare hands. He leered at his terrified wife, screaming that he was lord of the dragons, a local way of saying that he was evil. Then, Wen Fu ripped a patch of rice-paper out of the wall, chopped off one of the braids of the dead girl, dipped it in her own blood, and painted the character for ‘chaos’ on the parchment. Pu-jin lay in terror as he raped her, all the while holding the paper to her face, raving that he was chaos, free and dangerous.
When the Japanese surrendered in 1940, the Kuomintang took over Jinzhou and started rubbing out Communist influence. One night Pu-jin commented to a servant that she thought the Communists weren’t the enemies of China. The treacherous woman told her master, and Wen Fu flew into a rage. He beat Pu-jin until she was unconscious, then, had the character for ‘chaos’ tattooed on her forehead as a reminder of his power over her.
In 1946, the Kuomintang-Communist Civil War broke out and Wen Fu was sent to fight near Chaotang. Pu-jin took that opportunity to rebel, using house funds to aid refugees from the south.
One night in 1948, Pu-jin was breaking curfew to smuggle rice to children of Communists being held in the main prison, when she ran into a Kuomintang patrol. The two soldiers took the supplies and threatened to kill her. A foreigner stepped out from behind a building and tried to drive them off, telling the men that she was his servant. When they picked up their guns to execute him, he simply looked into their eyes and told them to leave. Incredibly, they did so.
The foreigner introduced himself to Pu-jin as Zythe To’lac, an American with the Anti-Communist Movement in Russia. He was working undercover as an official from Moscow ‘aiding’ the Cultural Revolution in China and fighting the Kuomintang. Pu-jin also introduced herself and told Zythe about her life and husband. After she finished, he asked her if she wanted to help him in his work for the freedom of all peoples.
Pu-jin agreed, and Zythe To’lac, who was a 9th Generation Gangrel, Embraced her. On that night, Pu-jin Yi joined the ranks of the Kindred, and began learning about her clan and kind. Zythe found her shelter to sleep that day, but on returning to the house the next night, Pu-jin received word that Wen Fu had obtained a leave and would arrive in Jinzhou on the following night. Frightened, she fled to Zythe, begging him to help her flee, and he readily agreed.
So, the two left the city, traveling as far as they could in one night. As the dawn neared, and having no hiding place from the sun, Zythe taught Pu-jin the Discipline of Earthmeld so they could both seek shelter under the ground. Thus they spent that day, and all that followed while they trekked through the mountains southwest towards Tibet.
During the trip, Zythe taught Pu-jin the Traditions, and other information vital to all Gangrel. He asked, one day, what her name meant, and Pu-jin told him that it that it was part of a proverb meaning ‘the reverent, never-setting sun’. Zythe then renamed her Eternus Hyperion, and the young Kinred found that the new name matched how her soul felt, even though she did not yet know English or Russian.
The two made it to Tibet, then crossed Nepal, and headed over the mountains into northern India. In New Delhi, Zythe discovered that a desperate situation had come up back in America, and he was needed. He sent Eternus ahead into the southern Dravidian region with mortal guides and instructions to meet one of his fellow spies in Madagascar.
While on the way, the party got lost in the jungles, and accidentally stumbled upon a leper colony one dark night. The mortal guides fled, but Eternus, having no fear of the disease, went in. A woman whose face was gone, pulled the young Gangrel into a mud hut where another woman, also severely marred by leprosy, was giving birth. Eternus helped deliver the baby boy.
Once she managed to reach Madagascar, the spy friend of her sire’s paid for her flight to Chicago where she moved in at Zythe To’lac’s town estate. Though he spent most of his time in other countries working against Communism and dictators, Zythe had numerous connections among the Giovanni, Ventrue and Brujah.
Eternus worked in Chicago until roughly 1967 when she partnered with a 9th Generation Ventrue who had infiltrated the corrupt government of the People’s Republic of China. He posed as an ambassador to the other Communist nations, and she as his attaché. They mostly operated out of an office on the mainland, though often spending time in Hong-Kong. In 1984 they were assigned to Moscow, and remained there until mid-December, 1998.