General

"The One who See through the Unreal and Divine the Way, the True Lord of Greater Yin."

- ——The introduction of General 'Note：The word “General” is a mistranslation which may cause some confusions. It's probably because there isn't a neat counterpart word in English.  In original Chinese verison, his title is "国师"(GuoShi) which was a honorary title granted to famous and trusted religious participants by emperors in ancient China. It literally means "the preacher/teacher of the nation",  but in history, they normally served as emperors' personal religious consultants.'

General was a very powerful Taoist. He was once the Emperor's trusted servant and since the Emperor was obsessed with achieving immortality, he naturally asked General to fulfill his wish. However, General failed him repeatedly which made the Emperor furious. After realising that he might lose his status, General began to command people to catch snakes for him and use snakes to boost his magic, hoped that one day he would regain Emperor's trust.

Due to his dark arts, General's appearance had been changed greatly. His skin became grey and wrinkled like tree bark. The souls he harvested from snakes were converted into magic power and stored in his body which made he tall and strong.

Personality
General craved magic and power. He used his personal army to hunt down snake demons and tried to drain their magic. Meanwhile, he justified his behavior under the guise of protecting people from demons, and consequently demanded people to offer more snakes.

On the other hand, his greed also became his downfall. In the movie, he had a chance to kill Xiao-Bai, Xiao-Qing and Xu Xuan, however, he stopped the demon-slaying trap because he wanted to drain Xiao-Bai's magic.

Abilities
General still had a superior status in the government system and was an expert in Taoism's magic. He commanded a large army consist of human soldiers and magical paper soldiers. He channelled his magic with Fulu (符籙), a paper talisman with mysterious symbols used in Taoism, and could conjure paper cranes with his Fulu and paper soldiers.

He was a master of magic traps. In the movie, he set two different traps to catch Xiao-Bai, one was a demon-capturing trap that could use huge claws to capture demons inside of trap, the other was a demon-slaying trap that could conjure ice and blizzard to disintegrate victims' bodies and souls.

Trivia
It's likely that General knew Snake Mother. When he was ambushed by Snake Mother, he recognized her immediately.
 * In original Chinese version, General had a title "洞虚衍道，太阴真君", though it was simply translated into "Announcing the General" in English Version. The title means "The One Who See Through the Unreal and Divine the Way, the True Lord of Greater Yin". It indeed existed in history. However, it consisted of two titles "The One Who See Through the Unreal and Divine the Way" and "the True Lord of Greater Yin" which belonged to two famous Taoists respectively.
 * General is very bad character and he was born July 7 and his zodiac sign is Cancer.