Xi’an Chi Xan first appeared in X-Men 2099 #1 (October 1993), created by writer John Francis Moore and artist Ron Lim for Marvel’s Earth-928 future. Born in Reno to a mid-level corporate family—his father Nguyen, his mother Ann, and two sisters—he manifested a mutant power from childhood: a green, scabbed left hand that could break down the molecular bonds of matter. When that gift became public, his parents sold him to an Alchemax bioshop to protect their standing. He escaped before he arrived, lived on the streets, and joined the outlaw gang known as the Lawless, earning the name Desert Ghost. A later flight from bounty hunters took him to Saigon, his grandfather’s homeland, where a near-death fight against the assassin Quickdeath gave him a vision of the man he might become. He returned to America determined to put the violence behind him and rebuild mutant community in the image of the twentieth century’s Professor Xavier.

At the abandoned Nuevo Sol Arcology in the desert he and Shakti Haddad—Cerebra, whom he had drawn away from Stark-Fujikawa—gathered outcasts and invited the most powerful mutants she could find. When Timothy Fitzgerald completed the circle, Xi’an named them the X-Men. The idyll collapsed almost immediately. Lytton Synge framed him for the murder of Las Vegas mogul Noah Synge; a sniper’s bullet put Xi’an down, and his body sealed itself in a regenerative cocoon. He woke with a second gift, a golden right hand that could take on the injuries of others, though using it drained him. He cleared his name, disabled his traitorous former Lawless comrade Junkpile without killing him, and tried to hold the team to a creed of chosen destiny rather than inherited hate. The past would not stay buried. Hallucinations of his biker self mocked the preacher he had become, and a psychic duel with Master Zhao in a mindscape of Saigon let that older, crueler personality back in.

The change was visible at once: temper instead of patience, demands instead of invitations. He left the X-Men, accepted Brimstone Love’s offer, and was broken and remade by the Theatre of Pain as Controller X, an “artist” who recorded victims’ suffering for paying clients. Even inside that role he plotted against his new masters. Later stories returned fragments of the man who had founded the team—sometimes healer, sometimes destroyer, always split between the desert visionary and the Lawless ghost. Across the thirty-five issues of X-Men 2099 and scattered later 2099 appearances, Xi’an Chi Xan remained the series’ uneasy heart: the would-be Xavier whose own hands would not let him stay saved.