Character from The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
A Mugenese scientist who experimented on Speerly children in laboratory camps — the face of clinical cruelty, who tortured Altan for years and treated shamanic power as a phenomenon to be studied through suffering.
Doctor Shiro ran the Mugenese research facility in Snake Province where Speerly children — including young Altan — were subjected to experimentation designed to understand and weaponize shamanic power. He represents the Federation of Mugen's most systematic horror: not the chaotic violence of Golyn Niis but the methodical, documented cruelty of a state that views an entire people as research material. Altan's opium addiction began in Shiro's facility — the drug was administered to trigger and study shamanic responses. Everything that Altan became as an adult, the burning and the self-destruction, has roots in what Shiro did to him as a child. Shiro is the trilogy's Unit 731 analog — the reminder that some atrocities are committed in laboratory conditions with careful record-keeping.
Clinical and precise — a scientist's bearing rather than a soldier's. The kind of person who takes notes while people scream. Mugenese military dress with the detachment of someone who views his subjects as specimens rather than people.
Also known as: Shiro, Doctor Shiro