"AT TIMES, A MYSTERIOUS CHINESE INVENTOR......THE CLASS FIXER, OR IT'S TERRIFYING MAD SCIENTIST......THE SCHOOL'S NUMBER ONE GIRL-GENIUS......OWNER OF THE CAMPUS' SUPER POPULAR CHAO XI AT OTHERS......MY TRUE IDENTITY IS...AN ALIEN FROM THE RED PLANET, MARS."


[[I stole this from Wikipedia because I'm too lazy to write an about me section.]]

WARNING! THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS!

Student Number 19: Chao Lingshen (超 鈴音 Kana: チャオリンシェン, Chao Rinshen?) Listed Birthday: 1 December 1988. She is the top student of the entire year group (also referred to as the "smartest kid in the school"). A rich Chinese girl, she is in many clubs and is particularly into cooking. Before the Mahora Festival, she runs the "Chao Bao Zi" restaurant out of a specially modified streetcar, (which is apparently able to fly, as shown in ch. 160), along with Satomi, Satsuki, Ku Fei, and Chachamaru. She is best friends with Satomi, and both enjoy using Satomi's inventions on Ku Fei. Her origins are mysterious (No records of her have been found dated any earlier than 2001) and she claims to be related to Negi by blood. She was the primary sponsor of the Mahora Fighting Tournament and offered a cash prize of 10,000,000 Yen to the winner. She has come into conflict with the school administration for spying and trying to reveal the existence of magic to the world at large. She even went as far as imprisoning Takamichi T. Takahata and "Mini" Setsuna when they started to investigate the truth of the tournament. She also leaked details of Negi's search for his father, which, combined with his performance in the festival tournament, turned him into an instant celebrity. Her intentions are mostly secret (although world domination is listed as her primary interest, she dislikes war, hatred, and the unilateral control of major powers), but even Evangeline warns Asuna that Chao's kind of evil is far worse than her own. Chao later reveals her intention to quit school and return home on the last day of the Festival, and says that if she missed that chance she would not be able to return home for another 22 years. Chao has often claimed that she is a Martian to those who have asked, more specifically that she is from a a Martian colony a hundred years in the future, and that she is a descendant of Negi.



Chao sets a trap for Negi during the festival, confining him and his partners inside of Eva's resort for a whole week. This gave her the opportunity to deploy a massive army of robots and capture several key points on the Mahora campus, as well as other locations around the world, and activated a powerful spell to cause people to freely recognize the existence of magic, bypassing the usual skepticism most people would have. She presumably returned to her own time afterwards, but Negi was able to use the World Tree to travel all the way back in time to the final day of the festival to try again to stop her. The final day of the school festival has become a battle as a large portion of the festival's attendees have been used to raise an army to fight her robot forces. Chao then makes her appearance before Asuna and Setsuna, equipped with what appears to be a futuristic battlesuit and promptly defeats them. Negi battled Chao on a zeppelin high over the war game, where she revealed her connection to both her teacher and the Thousand Master. With her time-watch apparently destroyed, she showed that she is also capable of using magic, much to the surprise of everyone, and especially Negi. Her elemental affinity is fire. However, unlike Negi, her magic is derived from several symbols which are drawn on her body.



During the battle, Negi warns her not to use such power as it may endanger her life, but Chao ignores the advice stating that this was for all or nothing and she had worked hard for over 2 years. Everything else didn't matter. When Negi asked Chao if the two years she had spent with her classmates were irrelevant, Chao had paused momentarily and admits that it was the one factor she had not counted on. At the climax of the battle, the magical symbol on Chao's head bursts, causing her to be engulfed in Negi's final attack. Chao was defeated, but the battle left them both exhausted and out of power, both magical and mechanical. Fortunately, they were saved by their classmates. But the fight also gave Hakase enough time to complete their spell, Just as Chisame managed to break through Chachamaru's attack in cyberspace to restore the school's barrier. However, As per Chao's orders in the event of her defeat, Hakase was not to cast the Forced Recognition Magic spell, but instead a spell to remove hatred and sadness from the world for one day. After the end of the plot, she prepares to head back to the future, keeping her word for losing and to protect the past from knowing of the future. However, Negi stops her, both in defense of the people who want her to stay and to offer her to become a "Magister Magi" like himself, hoping the two of them will fight in the past to change her future. However, seeing that she did lose and that she must keep her part of her promise, Chao chooses to return to the future. After getting rid of most of the class with a book revealing her own family tree, which would also include who Negi marries, she says goodbye to her closest classmates (Satsuki, Satomi, Chachamaru and Ku Fei), as well as a goodbye to her ancestor Negi, she travels back promising to meet again. (Seiyū: Chiaki Osawa (Negima!), Megumi Takamoto (Negima!?), VA: Trina Nishimura)

Trivia

* In The Chuang Yi version, her name is rendered as "Chao Rinshen".
* In Chinese, 音 is never pronounced as shen or sheng in any district of China. The precise pronunciation of 音 in Chinese is yīn.
* According to her characer design notes in volume 8, Chao was going to be called Lin Mei-Fa.