Born in the Court of the Water Dragon on Archipelago, the son of a Thunders woman and a Salemite man, Nanjo received a short schooling in his birthland before he and his family moved back to Salem in order that Nanjo's father seek the blessings of his own parents for his marriage to a foreign woman.

The reception in the small Salem town was not friendly however and it was not long before neighbours, brought up since birth to fear that which is different by the fear-mongering Salem Church, called in the Witch Hunters. They came in the night and barred the doors and windows before setting Nanjo's family's home alight.

Nanjo alone managed to survive by finding a tiny sheltered spot that was just large enough for the young one to fit into. Regaining consciousness hours later, Nanjo awoke in the burnt out remnants of his home, his parents dead and the townsfolk happily claiming a victory over the forces of darkness. Nanjo, with bitterness and hatred in his heart slunk away back to the land of his birth.

Upon returning to the Court of the Water Dragon, Nanjo lived on the streets for a while, homeless and penniless, until a kind old man offered him food and a warm place to sleep. The old man was a prominent herbalist within the neighbourhood, well sought-after for his skills and offered to take Nanjo on as an apprentice and work for him in order to earn money and earn his stay at the old man's home. From that day onward Nanjo was told to refer to his guardian as Grandfather Cheng.

Grandfather Cheng also had a son who was a member of the 108 Dragons called Huojin. The 108 Dragons were, for the most part, the real people in charge of the Court of the Water Dragon, committed to protecting the people of the Thunders from oppression, but not above making profit at the same time. Huojin was impressed enough with Nanjo's diligence in service to his father that he took it upon himself to train Nanjo in the fighting arts as well as those of tracking and surviving out in the forested wildernesses that Huojin grew up in before he and his father moved to the Court of the Water Dragon. Huojin requested that from then on he be referred to as Big Brother, calling Nanjo Little Brother, and promised to look after Nanjo and help him whenever he needed it.

When Grandfather Cheng grew sick and died, his age finally catching up with him, Big Brother Huojin offered Nanjo a place in the 108 Dragons, but Nanjo refused, saying that he still thought he had much to learn and needed to find his own path in life. Huojin agreed and said farewell to Little Brother as Nanjo signed up for the militia. After a short time there Nanjo could not silence the hatred in his heart and when he felt he had learned all he could from serving in the militia he departed in secret for Salem, seeking out the Witch Hunters who had put his family, his life and his innocence to the torch so many years ago.

He found the ruins of the old town where his parents had tried to live and upon investigation found that the Salem Church had returned to it some years later and judged the entire town guilty of heresy merely by association with Nanjo's family. The whole town had been destroyed as a result.

His trail gone dead Nanjo found himself short on funds and opted to use his connections to the 108 Dragons to enlist himself as a Bounty Hunter for hire. His new career allowed him to travel across the entire Shard world where he continually searched for any clue to finding the murderers of his family, but so far he has yet to find them. In the meantime he employs his knowledge of the fighting arts, tracking and survival in the wilderness as well as his potent knowledge of herbs to build his experience and his fame as a merciless stalker of humanoid prey, often taking contracts where the target is wanted dead rather than alive.

As is often with those who live on the fringes of society with dispossession for society and hatred for the things that people do to one another, Nanjo met up with a strange man calling himself McCoy whilst stalking a target on Frontier. McCoy seemed to recognise Nanjo's pain and hatred for those who would kill that which is different from them. McCoy was apparently travelling roughly in the same direction as Nanjo as he tracked his prey and found the strange man in black a similarly capable wilderness traveller, their time alone in the dense forests of Frontier allowing them to become aquainted and finding that they both had views and experiences in common.

Before they parted ways McCoy told Nanjo that there were others like them that gathered together in order to promote true freedom from the oppression of other people's rules where they strove to live without care for how you looked or what you did in your past. McCoy stressed that those who followed him did so entirely of their own free will and that he never asked anyone to join him if they did not want to, committing only as much as they were prepared to to the path that McCoy walked.

Nanjo and McCoy continued to bump into each other on occasion while Nanjo travelled around and met the other member of McCoy's Brotherhood of the End Times, finding that they were, like McCoy had said, similar in experience to himself. Knowing the advantage of having a gang at your back Nanjo agreed to travel with them on occasion, but stressed that he would not give up his career as a Bounty Hunter nor give up the search for the Witch Hunters who killed his family. McCoy agreed and said that when Nanjo was truly ready, he would tell him what their true goal was. Until then, Nanjo was free to come and go as he pleased.