The Empire of the Three Seas (三海皇国)
Codex entry
Saying among outer prefecture scribes
The Empire of the Three Seas sprawls across lush lowland deltas, forested uplands, and storm-wracked northern plains, ruling as much by custom as by decree. Its ancient cities, canal-strewn heartlands, and mountain-guarded frontiers have been shaped by centuries of perpetual negotiation among clans, councils, and sworn leagues, rather than unbroken autocracy.
Unlike the centralizing empires of the east or the contractual republics of the southern coast, the Empire of the Three Seas governs through a system of decentralized ritual consensus, where law is memory, and enforcement is moral alignment rather than coercive fiat.
Heartlands, Origins, and the End of Despotism
The Land between Three Seas and the Shadow of Despotism
The Empire of the Three Seas arose in unceasing dialogue between rivers, fields, clans, and councils. Its foundation speaks to a hard-won harmony born from negotiation, resistance, and the long, stubborn memory of suffering. Where some realms exalt the glory of empire as a tale of destined rulers and divine mandates, the ancient heartlands extol caution, consensus, and a perpetual reckoning with the dangers of unchecked power.
The Empire’s people remember the shadow of tyranny, an age of hydraulic despots. These served as priest-kings and engineer-lords, each wielding mastery over the land’s most capricious and essential force: water. Their reigns have only ever served as warnings to future generations, their legacy the basis not of the Empire’s legitimacy, but its relentless wariness of central power.
After these despots came the birth of the Empire’s heartlands and the emergence of a new way—neither anarchy nor autocracy, but a ceaseless, creative balance between custom, calculation, and collective wisdom.
The Hydraulic Tyrannies: Before the Empire
Geography and Ecology of the Ancient Heartlands
Before the Empire, the land between Three Seas bore mark of struggle against the wild and unpredictable energies of water and earth. Chief among these were the lands in what would become Zhēnxún (珍循郡), the salt-rich coastal expanse of Lǔyáng Province (卤阳省), and the loess-carved heights of Jìnyōu (晋幽省).
Zhēnxún, the mythic heart, was a landscape of small, patient rivers, each winding its own course through a fertile plain. These rivers, born in low hills and forested uplands, ran west to the encircling Western Sea and south into the wide-mouthed arms of the Great River (大河). The terrain was a living tapestry of fields laced by old canals, orchard-clad mounds, stone-paved towns with embankments still bearing the marks of ancient repairs. It was here that the earliest experiments in cooperation and contention took root, for no single village or lord could ever hope to master the rivers alone.
Lǔyáng, to the southwest, hugs the Empire’s coast, battered by winds and tides. Here, the ancient port cities arose on salt flats and sand spits, and generations of commoners learned to survive in a world of storms, shifting marshes, and endless negotiations between land and water. Fisherfolk, salt harvesters, and canal-builders formed guilds that often rivaled their local lords in both skill and influence.
Jìnyōu, to the east, was another world entirely, a land of inland plateaus, deep loess valleys, and stony ridges where the wind sang mournful ballads. Water was both rare and precious, and its mastery the highest art. Dikes, terraces, and reservoir towns clung to the land like scars, each the fruit of some long-forgotten pact or catastrophe. Here, too, the people learned to rely on each other, if only to survive a winter or hold a hillside together.
Between these provinces, the old heartlands were a patchwork of microclimates and ecologies, bound together by the relentless challenge of floods, droughts, and the need to channel, store, and share water. Out of this crucible, the peculiar genius and the foundational trauma of Imperial society emerged.
The Hydraulic Despots: Ritual, Calculation, and the False Ideal of Li (礼)
Before the assemblies started rule in the Empire’s age of consensus, power in the heartlands was held so-called hydraulic despots—dynasties of ritual engineers and priest-kings who claimed the sole right to command rivers and direct waters. They claimed political, spiritual, and scientific rule through the primacy of li (礼), the cosmic order of ritual, form, and rectification. To them, this cosmic order was only accessible through the intuition (心) of master priest-engineers.
The despots’ methods combined the calculations of “hydraulic arithmeters” with a zealous faith that the world could—and must—be forced to conform to the hidden patterns of li. Every dam, embankment, and canal was planned for both practical utility and ritual perfection. Their engineers devised elaborate systems of epicycles, corrections, and sub-rules, believing that if their models could only capture the hidden ideal of li, no matter how complicated or arcane, nature itself would be made to submit.
In their arrogance, the despots demanded that the land and water fit their abstractions, rather than adapt their wisdom to the actual pulse of river and soil. If the embankments failed or the floods proved worse, it was said that the people had failed in virtue, or that some cosmic ritual had been left incomplete. The models themselves could never be at fault.
Over time, the arithmeters’ calculations grew ever more baroque, their ritual calendars more arcane, their embankments more rigid and overbuilt. Engineers and local worthies who questioned the doctrine were marginalized or worse, accused of impiety or even treason. Their states became apparatuses of control: every village a node in the hydraulic network, every household a potential scapegoat.
Their power was awe-inspiring but brittle, for it relied on the continuous performance of absolute control: a false rectification of the world that grew ever more detached from lived reality.
For the common folk of the heartlands, the age of the hydraulic despots was a time of great uncertainty masked by ritual certainty. The old chronicles and folk songs remember an endless cycle of construction and collapse: great embankments raised with fanfare and sacrifice, only to burst under the weight of a once-in-a-generation flood; villages relocated or condemned; fields abandoned to silt and salt; families ruined by taxes and conscription for projects whose purpose few could truly understand.
Floods were not seen as natural calamities but as failures of virtue, of the people, the ritual, or the “cosmic alignment.” The suffering that resulted was justified by the doctrine of li, as if disaster was a test of submission rather than a sign of systemic error. The more the world refused to fit the despots’ model, the more rigidly the model was enforced.
Yet beneath the surface, unrest simmered. Whispered doubts and quiet heresies circulated among the laborers and lesser engineers, who saw with their own eyes that some embankments held and others did not often in ways the epicycles could not predict. The river, in its wisdom, could not be forced.
It was in these moments of crisis, when the embankments cracked, and the old priest-engineers wailed for more offerings, that the seeds of skepticism took root. Some say that in the muddy half-light of a breached dike, a new idea was born: that the world was not waiting to be rectified by ritual, but that knowledge must begin in awareness, experience, and the humble acknowledgment of error.
Mathematics and Metaphysics of the Hydraulic Despots
The Era of Epicycles: Ritual Arithmetic and the “Cosmic Alignment” of Water
The hydraulic despots of the Empire’s heartland styled themselves as rectifiers of the world’s pulse. To them, every river and marsh was a living vessel for li (礼), the cosmic order. Their mathematics served as ritual calculus, an attempt to force the world into an ever more elaborate alignment with their image of ritual harmony.
The hydraulic despots inherited a system where every embankment or floodgate was calculated based not on direct measurement, but on a layered system of corrections—epicycles—to “ideal” forms derived from ritual calendars, ancestral tables, and the sequence of dynastic omens. Their method resembled the late-imperial astronomers who, to predict planetary motion, layered cycle upon cycle—circle on circle—each added to account for observed discrepancies, but always clinging to the ideal of the “perfect sphere.”
Heaven moves in circles; so too must we bind the rivers in circles.
The despots’ priest-engineers saw every floodgate as a reflection of li (礼), the cosmic ordering. No measurement of river flow stained their scrolls—only the rhythms of the moon, the dynastic calendar, and ancestral anniversaries.
They wrote the commanded level L(t) at time t as
where
L0 is the dynastic “zero datum” (m),
each $A_k$ (m), $\omega_k=2\pi/T_k$ (rad d⁻¹), $\phi_k$ (rad) encode a sacred cycle of period $T_k$ (days),
N grows whenever a failure—overflow, drought, siltation—insists on a new correction.
On festival days they added a dimensionless flag Ξ(t)∈{0,1} to shift the water for good omens:
with B(m) tuned post-hoc to erase any mismatches.
Ritual Fix Routine
Observe residual $\Delta(t)=L_{\rm obs}(t)-L_{\rm cmd}(t)$.
Choose next unused period $T_{N+1}$.
Fit $(A_{N+1},\phi_{N+1})$ to $\Delta(t)$.
Declare the new epicycle sacred; inscribe on bronze tablets.
Thus the system never shed terms, growing ever more baroque—and ever less predictive beyond its calibration span.
Adding enough sines and cosines of different periods and phases does let anyone approximate any periodic signal to arbitrary accuracy. Mathematically, this is exactly what Frequency domain analysis guarantees. Rivers are dominated by stacked periodicities:
lunar tides (≈ 12 h 25 min & 14.8 days);
diurnal evaporation cycles;
the annual monsoon pulse;
multi-year climate oscillations.
Each priest adds a new term when Nature embarrasses him. Over centuries the table of epicycles grows into a crude Fourier series. Predictions stay “good enough,” so the ideology survives. The ancestor offset and other omen-driven tweaks act like free parameters, serving the same role as bias terms in regression: one can always nudge the curve up or down on auspicious days. This method soaks up error while letting modelers claim victory after the fact.
The despots insisted there was always a hidden, unseen li, only accessible through the intuition (心) of the master engineer-priest. The real river was irrelevant: all was epicycle, all must be forced to fit the model. The calculations became more and more complex, but no more predictive, only more authoritative.
Non-periodic shocks, however, like a once-in-a-century landslide–dam burst are invisible to a pure epicycle engine. Because every fix is retrospective, one gets no extrapolation outside the calibration window. The priesthood’s refusal to prune old terms leads to over-fitting: ever-growing tables that eventually contradict each other. Either way, changing the core model was unthinkable. Doing so would have meant overturning the entire ritual order and thus the legitimacy of the regime. Moreoever, only the elite trained in cryptic methods and ritual logic could add or interpret epicycles, locking knowledge within the ruling class. Failure was always blamed on “improper alignment” or failure to add the correct correction, never on the premise of the system.
Thus the hydraulic despots produced a brittle, baroque mathematics that explained every failure with a new term, but could predict nothing new, leading to a society where mathematical authority became an arm of social and ritual domination.
Yuè Qiányuán and the Epiphany of Awareness
“Can the world be known more directly than through endless augury?”
One year, in the waning moon of late spring, the embankment at Beigu ford cracked and threatened the fields of three villages. Yuè Qiányuán, a mid-ranking engineer, arrived exhausted and muddy, patching the breach with reed mats and earth, racing against the relentless water.
As the water receded and exhaustion set in, Yuè lay by the crack, feeling the cool mud against his skin. In that moment, sensation overwhelmed him: pain, fatigue, the ache of his hands. Deep within, however, a silent watcher remained. He realized: I am not my sensations. I am the awareness that notices them.
This flash of insight caused him to doubt the layers of calculation and ritual he’d been taught. For if his own awareness could witness his senses, perhaps the world itself could be known more directly, without endless corrections.
Yuè Qiányuán’s Naïve Algebraic Model
“Let us balance forces as simply as we balance weights.”
Yuè reasoned: Instead of starting with ritual ideals and patching failures, why not model the actual river, from measurements and physical constraints?
Stage–Area Calibration
Yuè measured cross-sectional area $A$ at two depths $(h_1,A_1)$ and $(h_2,A_2)$, then assumed
Hydrostatic Force on a Straight Wall
Approximating the pressure prism as triangular over unit width, the lateral force per metre:
He then solved this quadratic in h to find the safe design stage $h_{\rm safe}$ that his embankments must resist.
Triumph and Blind Spot
Yuè’s did away with correction terms. If the world changed, so too did the measurements and the model. The embankment became a living structure designed for the real, not the ideal. Yuè’s embankments were marvels: they were cheaper, easier to maintain, and often more robust than the old priestly models. Farmers sang his praises, and rival engineers muttered darkly of heresy.
With time, however, Yuè’s faith in his own method became rigid. He refused all corrections that did not fit his algebraic scheme. Predictive power lasted 23 years until a flood 70 cm above $h_\text{safe}$ collapsed the bank. The records later showed his linear A(h) under-estimated area for large depths. The missing curvature was fatal. The concept itself would be invented along with calculus centuries later. It would take even more centuries for Lewis Cauchy to invent the epsilon-delta limit and the whole field of Mathematics in his Arvepian lectures.
Thus when a rare flood overwhelmed his designs, his embankments failed catastrophically, and entire villages were lost. The hydraulic despots declared Yuè’s method an affront to li, blaming him for “breaking faith with the spirits.” His followers were scattered, his models denounced as dangerous.
The Second Awakening: Xuē Hàozōng and the Depths of Mind
“Thought itself is but a wave—beyond lies the silent watcher.”
In the wake of Yuè’s fall, another crisis struck: a drought, then a flash flood, bursting the embankments at the confluence of three rivers. Xuē Hàozōng, a quiet, meticulous engineer, spent days with his crew patching breaches. When the river calmed, Xuē rested, staring into the eddying water, mind abuzz with doubt.
He realized: Even my thoughts are not myself. My awareness contains them, but is not limited to them. This second epiphany cut deeper than Yuè’s: not only sensation, but even thought was a surface ripple over deeper, stiller water.
If Yuè saw beyond sensation, Xuē saw beyond thought: awareness contains all models, yet transcends each. From this seed grew his system-wide vision.
Xuē Hàozōng’s Linear Algebraic Revolution
“Rivers are many; let us solve them together.”
Xuē saw that the world’s interconnections were more intricate than any one equation. Instead, he framed the rivers, embankments, and floodways as a system of linear relations.
Incidence Matrix Formulation
Model the watershed as nodes k and channels e, with integer incidence
Algebraic Flow Balance
Unknown edge-flows $\mathbf Q\in\mathbb R^{|\mathcal E|}$, known source/sink $\mathbf S\in\mathbb R^{|\mathcal N|}$, and
Because $|\mathcal E|>|\,\mathcal N|$, the system is rectangular. Xuē chose the minimum-energy solution by the method of successive projections, or what we now recognize as iterated averaging. All pure algebra: rearrange, add, subtract.
The result was an array $\mathbf{Q}$ that farmers could check with floats and sand timers. When any $Q_e$ exceeded Yuè’s safe conveyance ($Q_e>Q_{\rm safe}$), the bank at that reach was shored up: a system-level fix.
Xuē taught that all models are only approximations. The key was to keep awareness open, to respond to what arises rather than fixating on any one “ideal.” His embankments lasted longer, required fewer emergency repairs, and proved more adaptable to change than either the priestly epicycles or Yuè’s algebraic certainty.
The Age of Mastery: Cuī Chángyuān and the Triumph of Experience
With time, as embankments and rivers grew still more complex, neither linear algebra nor any fixed method could capture every contingency. Linear-network algebra could still balance volumes, but its uniform-crest assumption broke where banks alternately pinched and fanned.
Cuī Chángyuān, a legendary engineer, pioneered “trapezoidal slicing”: breaking river cross-sections into variable-width trapezoids, modeling the real as the sum of local solutions and their inverse operations.
Cut the river into steps; each step tells its own truth.
With flows and forces cast in matrix and algebra, Cuī recognized a third path: partition the cross-section itself and apply the simplest local rules.
Trapezoidal Decomposition
At any section, record pairs $(h_i,b_i)$ of depth to top-width. Between successive layers $(h_i,b_i)$ and $(h_{i+1},b_{i+1})$, define a trapezoid slice whose area is
Piecewise Discharge Formula
This ancient square-root rule was passed down in manuscripts since before the Empire. Each slice’s discharge is
with $b_{\rm avg}=\tfrac{b_i+b_{i+1}}2$ and $h_{\rm mid}=\tfrac{h_i+h_{i+1}}2$. The total is
Adaptive Trim Loop
1. Forecast next peak $Q^\star$ via Xuē’s matrix with updated sources.
2. If $Q_{\rm tot}<Q^\star$, identify the slice $j$ with greatest sensitivity $\partial Q_{\rm tot}/\partial b_j$.
3. Algebraically compute $\Delta b_j$ so that $\sum_i Q_i(b_j+\Delta b_j)\approx Q^\star$.
4. Craftsmen widen only slice $j$.
With only finite increments and table lookups, Cuī Chángyuān managed to solve hydraulic woes for centuries till the invention of infinitesimal calculus, differential equations, and hydrodynamics.
Cuī’s insight was that no method can capture everything, but a plurality of approaches, each adapted to the case at hand, could collectively approximate harmony. Under his guidance, the Empire abandoned both epicycle and algorithmic dogma. The age of tyrants ended, and the era of Way-Seers began.
The End of Hydraulic Tyranny and the Rise of Way-Seers
Rivers Tamed, Fields Fed, and a Century of Abundance
With the end of the hydraulic despots and the discrediting of their arcane epicycle-mathematics, a new age dawned upon the heartlands of the Empire. No longer bound by rigid and fantastical calculations, the new schools of awareness, observation, and adaptive mathematics began to reshape the world itself.
The rivers, once the source of terror and superstition, became predictable. Embankments and canals, designed by engineers using practical observation and the evolving tools of algebra and linear systems, held strong against seasonal floods. Droughts could be anticipated and averted by careful storage and new diversions. Water management was transformed from an exercise in ritual appeasement to a science in which every success was measured by results, and every failure became lesson, not a taboo.
Irrigation networks spread across the heartlands and then beyond. Small rivers and tributaries that once threatened devastation were now harnessed and brought into a unified patchwork of paddies, orchards, and terraced fields. The great inland sea’s brackish marshes were tamed, salt-pans and canal towns proliferated, and once-vulnerable coastlands grew prosperous. New settlements, emboldened by reliable water and abundant food, sprang up where once only the bravest would build.
For the first time in generations, the specter of famine faded. As embankments held and canals spread, grain harvests surged. Food surplus became the rule rather than the exception. Stored wheat and millet filled granaries in every market town. Livestock multiplied, orchards bloomed, and the produce of the land was traded along newly dredged rivers and paved causeways.
The population, once stunted by hunger and disaster, began to grow with breathtaking speed. Infant mortality fell, and children who might once have been lost to the river or the lash of the taxman now survived and thrived. Villages grew into towns, towns into bustling cities, and the heartlands grew from a patchwork of battered communities to a living, breathing web of interconnected settlements. Families expanded, lineages flourished, and new guilds and societies formed to organize the labor and share the fruits of this abundance.
A Century of Prosperity and Expansion
With abundance came energy and aspiration. The Empire’s heartlands became a cradle of invention and expansion. New tools and techniques, both mathematical and mechanical, flourished in fields and workshops. Pottery kilns, loom houses, and blacksmith forges multiplied, each powered by the surplus of food and the relative safety of settled life.
The surpluses fed both bodies and dreams. Young people who might once have known only the fear of flood or hunger now found opportunity in markets, assemblies, and leagues. The first great trading routes, secure and well-provisioned, connected the inner provinces to the coasts and borderlands. Artisans, merchants, and scholars followed, carrying with them the seeds of new cities, dialects, and cultural ferment.
Civilization spread out from the old heartlands, following the rivers and roads, moving into loess plateaus, northern plains, and down to the southern wetlands. What had once been marginal lands threatened by drought or bandits now supported bustling farmsteads, mill-towns, and new forms of communal order.
The Shadow of Prosperity: Competition, Conflict, and Complexity
Yet prosperity did not bring peace. With every gain in food and security, the pace of change accelerated. Populations pressed against the land’s limits. New towns competed for water rights and trade. Lineages, once small and local, expanded into complex networks of kin, each with their own ambitions, rivalries, and grudges.
Markets grew, and with them, markets for violence. Where once the greatest danger had been flood or famine, now neighbors eyed each other’s fields and storehouses with envy or calculation. Disputes flared over canal water, over whose embankments should be repaired first, or whose crops would ship to the city markets.
Guilds and leagues, newly empowered by their role in building and maintaining the infrastructure, became power blocs in their own right. Towns hired sworn brotherhoods for defense, or for raiding a rival’s warehouses. Assemblies quarreled over taxation, over who should pay for what repairs, over who could claim the blessing of a successful harvest. Negotiation, once the preserve of ritual, became a daily necessity, its failures erupting into open brawls or simmering feuds.
As complexity grew, so too did the need for new forms of order. Informal compacts multiplied, some local, some reaching across provinces. The first “recognition leagues” appeared: alliances of villages, guilds, or brotherhoods, bound by mutual oaths and the logic of reputation, not by the authority of any single lord or engineer. These leagues patrolled trade routes, mediated disputes, and even fielded militia in times of threat.
Perpetual Negotiation and the First Recognition
This was not yet an Empire in the sense of a united, ordered polity, but a world in perpetual negotiation, where every gain in knowledge or prosperity brought new layers of rivalry and unrest. The rivers ran true, but human hearts and ambitions remained as wild as ever.
No single equilibrium lasted long. Periods of harmony and growth would yield, again and again, to fresh waves of conflict set off by drought, plague, or some freak event like a sudden dam failure or the disputed succession in a wealthy lineage. Equilibrium would be reached only to be shattered, then painfully reconstructed by assembly and oath.
For three centuries, the heartlands and provinces of the Empire had known cycles of abundance and upheaval, invention and strife. Yet, in the third century of what later scholars would call the Third Era, an extraordinary calm settled across the realm remembered by poets and assemblies alike as the First Recognition.
It began as the slow, cumulative achievement of negotiated settlements, proven engineering, and mutual recognition. The rivers were predictable and generous, embankments rebuilt and refined through many generations, holding strong against both flood and drought. Old worries from starvation, sudden ruin, and the unpredictable fury of water gave way for a time to peace and plenty. With their bellies full and their children safe, the people turned their energies to building, learning, and reaching outward.
During this era, the Empire truly earned its name. No single city or clan could claim dominion, but from the inland sea to the loess plateaus, from the salt coast to the first rich markets of the south, an unprecedented network of assemblies, leagues, and recognized compacts stretched like a living lattice. Trade routes opened, and the towns along the Great River and its many tributaries became centers of exchange, craft, and quiet competition. Artists and engineers, farmers and scribes all found patronage, safety, and the chance to leave a mark on a world that seemed, for once, stable.
Even the mechanisms of governance, often contentious and uncertain, fell into a rhythm. Grand Councils every mid-season saw disputes settled with a minimum of blood and a maximum of ceremony. Oaths were sworn, pacts made and remade, but broken only rarely. Reputation became a new currency, with honor and trust prized as highly as gold or grain.
It was a peace of dynamic balance. Innovations saw new crops, new tools, even the first careful experiments with written contracts and official calendars, but none so disruptive as to tip the realm back into chaos. This First Recognition endured for more than a hundred years, a span that many later centuries would look back on with longing and no small measure of disbelief. In that time, the Empire stretched from the green hills of the southern coast to both shores of the inland sea, united not by scepter or sword, but by the ongoing miracle of negotiated order.
Even golden ages are but interludes in a longer story, however, and this peace sowed the seeds of its own undoing.
The End of the First Recognition
Populations pressed at the boundaries of arable land, new towns blossomed into rival cities, and ambitious lineages strove for advantage in every assembly and market. It was in this cauldron of competition that invention, once the engine of prosperity, became the harbinger of crisis.
The Black Powder Revolution struck like a thunderclap in 3E 420. For generations, disputes were contained by the checks of reputation, the slow turning of assemblies, and the subtle force of sworn brotherhoods. Now, advanced metallurgy leading to the arquebus and the cannon helped violence become sudden, impersonal, and difficult to contain. Ancient fortresses that had once embodied the slow, negotiated order of the realm fell to a few volleys of shot. The time-honored compacts of leagues and assemblies, forged through patient recognition, began to splinter under the stress of new, unpredictable force.
Yet every new weapon brought its counter. Within a decade, by 3E 431, the master armorers of Lǐjiāng (澧江省) by the Great River unveiled cuirasses built from plant silk, pitch, and resin. Within a generation, siegecraft and subterfuge became arts of invention in their own right. No sooner was one balance of power established than it was upended by the next innovation or alliance.
The order of recognition became a memory, and negotiation became a way of life once more, but now with more violence. Guilds fortified their halls and cities raised new walls. Merchant families hired inventors and mercenaries to guard their caravans and sabotage their rivals. The very abundance that once secured peace now provided the resources for ever more intricate conflict. Trust, the lifeblood of the First Recognition, drained away as markets and oaths grew slippery.
In this new, centrifugal age, many could not bear the endless, shifting contest of order and power. Some fled south of the Great River, founding city-states and trade-polities where a single hand, backed by gunpowder and coin, might once more enforce a measure of peace at the cost of liberty. These southern enclaves became, by turns, trading partners and pirates, havens for refugees and rivals to the heartlands.
The old dream of unity haunted northern assemblies, but always foundered on the memory of tyranny and the impossibility of returning to the old compact. No warlord, league, or city could claim true primacy not for lack of trying, but because the Empire’s very structure, shaped by centuries of negotiation, could not be bent to a single will. Every attempted monopoly collapsed into new alliances, betrayals, and unexpected reconciliations.
The First Recognition thus ended in a thousand gradual dissolutions: pacts unraveling, compacts splintering, alliances shifting with the wind. For decades, the land was a maze of fortresses, contracts, and provisional trust, each new stability provisional, each new equilibrium a brief and local thing.
In the chaos, however, the Empire endured as a stubborn culture of negotiation and memory. It would take centuries, new crises, and fresh inventions before a new, hard-won equilibrium could be born.
Founding of the Southern Merchant Republics
As the Empire’s long First Recognition dissolved into a patchwork of shifting compacts and broken alliances, a hunger for order, for unity, even for despotism took hold in many hearts. The memory of the old hydraulic tyrannies had faded, and the wounds of constant negotiation and violent innovation were fresh. In this age of uncertainty, whole clans, embittered councils, and ambitious merchant houses gathered their followers and fled south, crossing the Great River into lands beyond the reach of the Empire’s consensus. There, amid the jungles, deltas, and newly-built ports, they founded their own realms: city-states and despotic leagues where the will of one could, at least for a time, replace the burdens of perpetual negotiation.
This migration and foundation of the Southern Merchant Republics remains a pivotal, if bittersweet, moment in Imperial memory. In the Empire’s own annals, it is both a commemoration of loss and a lesson in resilience: the price of rejecting the slow discipline of consensus, but also a recognition that the world is too broad, and ambition too various, for any one order to contain.
The Great Recognition and the Coming of Modernity (3E 550 and Onward)
It was not until 550 years into the third era that a new, more enduring order emerged from the cycles of prosperity, fracture, and migration. This settlement, the Great Recognition, rose not from the will of a monarch, nor from the fiat of a single assembly. It settled in a realm tired from chaos, having hard-won a mutual understanding among the leagues, clans, villages, and assemblies that remained.
The Great Recognition was not a constitution, but an agreement to agree. It formalized, in living memory, the practice of consensus at every level of imperial life: village, district, guild, and convocation. Local authority was recognized if, and only if, it was upheld by the acknowledgment of its peers and rivals. No single model prevailed—some provinces held to old ways, others to new, but all agreed to accept and participate in the ongoing dialogue of the realm.
For the first time, the Empire could be said to possess a real, if flexible, identity—neither a state of anarchy nor the frozen peace of a despot, but a perpetual and creative negotiation.
Trade flourished once more, towns revived, and the old scars of civil flight began to heal. In some regions, the children of those who had fled south now returned as traders or envoys, their own republics already caught in their own cycles of order and upheaval.
Inventions and the Empire’s Great Tying
Just five years after the Great Recognition, in the year counted as 3E 555, a new invention appeared from the East: the telegraph. The Empire of the Three Seas, always eager to adapt the useful while shunning the unwanted dominion of foreign empires, had made the telegraph a feature of its own towns and convocation halls. Wires and towers soon ran from the northern steppe to the inland sea, from the western salt marsh coastline across the heartlands, into the canal-cities of Lǐjiāng, up till the Loess plateaus.
The invention of the telegraph induced a social revolution: discussions could now span provinces in an hour, not a season. The webs of recognition, and the twin pulses of rumor and reputation drew tight across far-off lands. The Empire found itself more interconnected and more exposed to the currents of news, panic, and ambition. The convocation adapted, assembly protocols and recognition rituals were revised, but the essential logic of the Empire as a balance of local legitimacy and negotiated consensus endured.
The Eastern World Island: Shadows and Far-off Storms
While the Empire of the Three Seas weathered its own crises and gradual renewals, the lands far to the east underwent transformations of a different order recorded in annals more as far away omens than immediate concerns.
Upheavals began in 3E 543 as northern tribes swept into the Aracian Republic, wielding new rifles and skirmishing tactics that shattered the legions’ old certainties. To allay these dangers to the Republic, Legatus Faustus Valerianus—later known as Caligulus—reformed Aracian military discipline, introducing new tercel formations that turned the tide of war. Years of struggle and political maneuvering followed, ending in the Valeriana family attaining undisputed prominence. Legatus Faustus Valerianus Caligulus had become the First Man in Aracspur. Soon after, the telegraph was born in the Eastern World Island, an invention that would soon spread up to the Republic’s western provinces.
The true turning point came in 3E 654, when the Aracian Senate, exhausted by internal and external turmoil, acclaimed Flavius Valerianus Caligulus as Imperator, ending the old Republic and founding the Imperium of Aracspur. Aracspur’s emperors expanded, consolidated, and struggled in uniting vast lands under their banners, and eventually the rising faith of the Ternary Prior.
To the Empire of the Three Seas, these upheavals appeared as shadows on the horizon: worthy of careful attention and study, but seldom allowed to disturb the rhythms of their own negotiated order. News from the east was watched with a wary eye: useful inventions like the telegraph were swiftly adopted and adapted, military developments scrutinized, yet the grander currents of imperial ambition or faith were always kept at arm’s length. The assemblies of the Empire, recalling the price of tyranny and the hard-won resilience of consensus, debated each eastern innovation with curiosity and caution, intent on learning but never on blind imitation. Thus, while the thunder of distant storms echoed across the World Island, the heartlands of the Three Seas continued their slow, ceaseless work of negotiation and renewal, rarely allowing the dramas of the east to reshape the inner logic of their own society.
Contact Across the World Island: The Empire and the Imperium
With the dawn of the modern era, the Empire of the Three Seas found itself closer than ever to the tides of history sweeping the World Island. In the east, the assassination of Emperor Titus Papirius Perennis in 3E 815 plunged the Aracian Imperium into chaos. The resulting Great Crisis shattered the old order, as the Senate failed to select a clear successor and rival claimants raised their own legions. Civil war raged across Aracspur, echoing westward but never quite breaching the heartlands of the Three Seas.
It was in this crucible that Publius Aetius Gaudentius, rising from the ranks of the legions, began his remarkable ascent. At the Battle of the Golden Vale in 3E 829, Gaudentius led a decisive flanking maneuver against invading Haltaman forces in Orontia. As the civil war dragged on, the Emperor received envoys from the Ternary Prior in 3E831, foreshadowing the new religious and cultural tides that would soon sweep the continent.
Over the following years, Gaudentius consolidated power and launched the campaigns that would see the final pacification of the Haltaman Shahdom. The Imperium of Aracspur thus emerged as the unchallenged master of the Eastern World Island. The banners of Aracspur flew from the Eastern Ocean to the Tukharian Desert north of Zar Dragul. Triumphs and decrees echoed in every city. For the first time in remembered history, the frontiers of the Empire of the Three Seas and the Imperium of Aracspur stood less than a fortnight’s ride apart, divided by only the far western marches and mountain deserts.
This contact brought no immediate conflict, only cautious curiosity. In the chronicles of the Empire, the coming of Aracspur was felt first through merchants and pilgrims: travelers on the new roads who carried tales of golden triumphs, imperial decrees, and the mysterious rites of the Ternary Prior. For many in the Empire, these stories were cause for fascination and unease in equal measure. The idea of a world-spanning Imperium, ruled by the will of one man and sanctified by a single faith, seemed both a marvel and a warning.
The first embassies were formal and elaborate. Aracian envoys from Gaudentius arrived at the 3E 835 Spring Grand Convocation, bearing gifts and letters heavy with gold and imperial seal. They invited the Empire’s assemblies to acknowledge the Imperium’s triumph and “share in the peace and favor of the Ternary Prior.” The Empire’s response was measured, courteous, and resolute: polite greetings, gifts in return, and a firm refusal to cede either territory or sovereignty. Recognition, the Empire explained, was not the gift of a single court but the product of ongoing negotiation among many. No declaration, however grand, could unmake the centuries of their own order.
Even as diplomacy proceeded with formal caution, contact grew rapidly in practice. Aracian goods of glass, coin, textiles, and books started appearing in Empire markets. Engineers and scholars traveled east and west, sometimes officially, sometimes in secret, seeking knowledge and opportunity. The first imperial telegraph lines were soon joined by lines carrying Aracian signals. Agreements were hammered out in convocation and at the frontier. Traders found ways to profit from the new reach of law, while outlaws and exiles sought the gaps between codes and recognition.
The two civilizations watched each other with profound skepticism and recognition. To Aracspur, the Empire of the Three Seas appeared maddeningly diffuse: a patchwork of assemblies, compacts, and rituals impossible to dominate or even fully understand. To the Empire, the Imperium was at once alluring and terrifying. Its unity promised order but threatened the very pluralism that had, for so long, been their armor against tyranny.
Thus, the boundaries held because neither could fully imagine becoming the other, though both sides maintained strong garrisons just in case. In the decades that followed, the rhythm of contact settled into a wary but fruitful coexistence: invention and goods flowed, but each realm remained, in its deepest logic, itself.
In 3E 851, Emperor Gaudentius undertook a grand project to settle the distant Exarchatus Ultimus—those far western marches where the borders of Aracspur brushed the lands of the Empire of the Three Seas and the ancient peoples of the Tukharian highlands, Kailashi valleys, and Zar Dragul plateau. Seeking to weave the Imperium’s vast diversity into a new frontier, Gaudentius encouraged families and adventurers from every corner—Aracian, elfin, Tyskan, Lourenese, and more—to settle and intermarry, bringing their customs, speech, and bloodlines to the edge of the known world.
The policy met with mixed fortune and subtle resistance. Women of the Empire, proud of their own heritage and wary of outside influence, were often cool to the advances of foreign settlers, favoring marriage with other clans, leagues, and villages within the Empire. By contrast, many Northern men, drawn by novelty and the promise of status, took concubines from the cosmopolitan newcomers, weaving new and sometimes fractious family alliances. These encounters filled the border towns with new languages, customs, and private intrigues, but rarely produced the seamless unity that Aracian planners imagined. For the Empire of the Three Seas, it was another lesson in the stubborn endurance of local identity: even at the world’s crossroads, recognition and trust could not simply be commanded from above.
In 4E 1, the year after 3E 853, Gaudentius proclaimed the favor of the Ternary Prior and established the new era’s calendar now used even in the Empire of the Three Seas itself. He died a couple years later in 4E 3 aged 117, leaving the Imperium to Desiderius Camilius. He took the name Manuel upon acceding. Only a few years later, Aracian power retreated from the far frontiers—4E 10 saw legions withdrawn from the Tukharian Exarchate after famines. In 4E 19, the last Exarch, Pythagoras, appealed in vain for protection from the Empire. The Exarchate would splinter and fade from history as nearby steppe powers and the agents of Zar Dragul took control.
Through every convulsion, the Empire of the Three Seas endured as a realm determined to persist by its own logic. The Great Recognition, established in 3E 550 and tested by inventions, invasions, and the lure of eastern unity, survived and adapted. Even as telegraph wires and railway lines spread across the World Island, as the faith of the Ternary Prior reshaped distant societies, as radio and mass print became widespread, even amid the intrigues of the Governor and Company of Chartered Economists, the heartlands of Empire held fast to the slow work of consensus and memory. By 4E 445, this negotiated order remained the defining legacy of a people who had learned, above all, the cost of tyranny and the stubborn virtue of never placing all power in a single hand.
Governance and Society
The Empire of the Three Seas is a realm without a throne, without a monopoly of violence, and without a final arbiter. It remains a vast, living federation of assemblies, compacts, and councils. It endures through unceasing labor in recognition and consensus. Governance in the Empire is fundamentally relational, a web of reciprocal legitimacy, ritual memory, and pragmatic negotiation.
Each province, commandery, league, or guild answers first to its own customs and partners. All remain tied, however, with the Great Recognition: a collective agreement, centuries old, to recognize, arbitrate, and participate in the broader network of the Empire.
Structure of Recognition
For all its diversity, the Empire of the Three Seas is more than a tapestry of local customs and scattered ambitions. Its true order emerges from the labor of drawing individuals and communities out of private enclaves: lineages, estates, guilds, or villages, into a realm where recognition is both visible and mutual. In this public domain, authority is not imposed from above, nor left to the caprice of family or fortune. Legitimacy instead takes form through rituals, assemblies, and open compacts, binding diverse peoples to standards that can be witnessed, debated, and at times broken, but never ignored.
Recognition (认) in the Empire emerges from a field of action, a living forum in which every party is measured by public deed and the ability to win acknowledgment from peers and rivals. The visible alignment of conduct, to act in such a way that others can judge, respond, and reciprocate all matter more than the transformation of hearts. No one is compelled to abandon kin or custom, but all must answer, at least in matters of public moment, to a standard shaped by the collective.
The Great Recognition itself takes shape at every league’s oath, every settlement of dispute by council or arbitration, at every meeting of the Imperial Grand Council. Provinces, commanderies, guilds, sworn brotherhoods, all have their own rites and ranks, but none can act with imperial legitimacy unless their actions are recognized and harmonized with the broader network. The Great Recognition puts no end to private ambition or kinship loyalty, yet it nonetheless transforms all these scattered pursuits into a shared, measurable order. Its structure lets fa—institutions, norms, and public deeds—draw people out of their narrow houses and set them side by side, each measured as a participant in the realm’s ongoing life.
The Grand Recognition
The Grand Recognition is the living marrow of the Empire’s order, at once the memory of an age-old consensus and the ever-renewed performance of unity among the Empire’s provinces, leagues, and estates. Its origins reach back to the end of the First Recognition and the fracturing chaos that followed. When violence, invention, and unchecked ambition nearly dissolved the bonds of the old heartlands, a new generation of councils, guilds, and sworn brotherhoods gathered at Zhēnxún to forge a different path. There, after months of negotiation and days of ritual, they mutual recognition and a commitment to acknowledge, arbitrate, and coordinate as equals, so long as their counterparts did the same.
After eight centuries, it stands as a ceaseless labor, a weaving of oaths, bargains, and reckonings through which the folk of many provinces become a people bound by shared rule.
Roots in Crisis
Before the Grand Recognition, the land knew only brittle rule and restless bloodshed. Every strong hand, be it a priest-king, guild-master, or lord of embankments, sought to bind water, kin, and labor to his will. With the fall of the hydraulic despots, and later the sundering of the First Recognition, order broke into shards. Lineages, towns, and leagues fought to shield their own, drawing tight behind old walls and house-law. Each patch of soil, each toll-road, each stretch of canal became a prize or a snare. Blood feuds and shadowy oaths, not open trust, shaped the course of life.
But folk learned, through grief and slow wisdom, that no house, no clan, could hold the wilds alone. Time and again, floods, fire, or the march of outsiders laid waste to all who stood apart. It was in these crucibles that the Grand Recognition first took shape through a chain of local compacts, slowly joined into a wider pledge. At the riverside groves of Zhēnxún, in the storm-battered salt towns of Lǔyáng, in the stone halls of Jìnyōu, the folk sent delegates to reckon, debate, and set down what was owed and what was forsworn. In these early gatherings, old feuds flared, oaths broke down, and more than once the ground of council was watered with blood. from each, however, came new forbearance.
From Private Norms to Public Order
In those days, each village or lineage guarded its own law, jealous of old rights and wary of foreign judgment. The Grand Recognition worked to draw folk out of their scattered homes and bring them face to face in the open, where words and deeds alike were measured by all. No longer would worth or blame rest on birth, favor, or the whispered word of kin. Here, each was bound to answer for their work before the whole.
The act of leaving behind private strength and household pride was itself the first step toward public order. Rules were not set by one man or a hidden few, but by the reckoning of many: the smith beside the scribe, the boat-master beside the grain-ward, each heard, each weighed. Rewards and punishments, once the coin of lords or elders, became public matters, set out in the sun for all to witness, not doled in shadow.
Since that time, the Grand Recognition has endured—sometimes through calm, sometimes through storm. Each season or year, or in moments of crisis, delegates from every recognized body—provinces, leagues, great guilds, sworn companies—assemble at a chosen site as the Imperial Grand Council in the Grand Convocation. In earlier centuries, these gatherings were held almost exclusively at the mythic heartland of Zhēnxún, whose assembly halls and riverside fields still echo with the oaths and debates of ages past. With the invention of telegraph and radio, and the Empire’s far reach, convocations now move between major cities and regional centers, or may even be convened in parallel through wires and coded dispatches, with the recognition ritual transmitted and witnessed in many towns at once.
The heart of the Grand Recognition lies in visible, public acknowledgment. Oaths are sworn in the open, disputes are argued and arbitrated before all, and every decision—the confirmation of a new league, the settlement of a border, or the declaration of a joint muster—must be recognized by those assembled. Secret decrees have no force; only what is witnessed, recorded, and affirmed by consensus can shape the order of the Empire.
A convocation can last days or weeks, depending on the issues at hand. Rituals of greeting, negotiation, and oath-renewal are as important as the substance of debate. Each recognized delegate—whether from a province, a city, a merchant league, or a sworn brotherhood—holds the right to speak and to challenge. The final ritual, the public Recognition, is performed as a series of mutual affirmations, witnessed by scribes, way-seers, and the gathered people. In times of harmony, the convocation is a festival; in times of danger, it is a council of survival, with decisions bearing the weight of the realm’s future.
Over centuries, the Grand Recognition has become a ceremony of memory, a living proof that no authority in the Empire is permanent except that which is sustained by the recognition of others. This tradition, at once ancient and adaptable, is the Empire’s safeguard against both anarchy and despotism. It endures by force of arms, by the shared will to be seen, measured, and remembered by all.
The Imperial Grand Council and the Grand Convocation
At each season’s midpoint, when the sun stands high or low, the Empire’s great and good gather. The Imperial Grand Council sees the realm’s voice find shape in open speech and binding oath. No king presides. No single seat commands the rest. No court that rules by edict. Instead, every house, league, sworn company, and guild that bears the mark of recognition sends its own to speak and be seen.
The Grand Convocation brings together the Empire’s leading folk, village elders, captains of trade, heads of sworn brotherhoods, high ritualists, and master scribes. Some ride from stone-walled cities, others come by river or rail, still others listen in by radio. Wherever the convocation is called, gathered crowds witness every word and deed. The council’s strength lies in the swords and banners of free folk serving as militia, in the open air of speech and the gaze of the folk.
Every matter of weight comes before the Council at Convocation. Borders and roads, feuds and markets, call for war or peace, all are set to the floor. No business is settled in darkness, every pledge is made aloud, every compact written where all may see. Delegates stand, speak, and challenge as peers. Each has the right to call for open reckoning, and none may silence another without the crowd’s consent.
Decisions pass through talk, barter, and sometimes, the old rites of public trial or discussion. The realm’s living memory lends more weight to the Council’s word than the letter of law. Every oath sworn at Convocation is carved into record and echoed in the squares and markets of the Empire. If a body leaves unsatisfied, it may carry its claim to the folk for wider judgment. There is no last word, only the work of renewal.
The Council meets in full only four times a year, unless storm or strife calls an urgent gathering. Yet its presence is felt always as the clearing-house of memory, the keeper of common standards, the place where every league or province must stand if it wishes to be seen as part of the whole.
With the coming of the telegraph, radio, and fast rail, the Grand Convocation is no longer fixed to one place or bound to the slow march of roads. News and pledges fly ahead. Witness and reply may echo from many towns at once. The heart of the thing keeps unchanged through it all. Folk must see and be seen, must risk their claim in the open, must make their peace or feud before the crowd. No compact holds unless the Empire’s memory takes it in.
The Imperial Council
If the Grand Council is the great meeting-ground of the realm, then the Imperial Council is the daily hearth and workshop where the Empire’s business is shaped. The Imperial Council does not rule from a throne. It is a lean, seasoned, and ever-watchful circle of senior scribes, Way-seers, engineers, inventors, and proven folk chosen from provinces and leagues.
They meet year-round in stone chambers or bright courtyards to weigh news from around the realm. They keep watch on harvests, the ebb and flow of roads and rivers, market growth, intelligence and analyses seen by the way-seers, and whispers of unrest or rumor. They must guide the Empire’s course in times of plenty and storm alike.
The Council’s hand decides local wardens, the calling of seasonal rites, and the first answer to any trouble, be it flood, famine, feud, or strife. When a province sends for help, or a league cries out for fair hearing, the Imperial Council sends envoys, gathers witnesses, and weighs first findings. All their deeds must be set in the light—no act is hidden from the eyes of the folk or the broader Grand Council.
Their strength lies in memory, skill, and the people’s trust. No decree of theirs stands unless it can win the assent of the assemblies and the councils of the provinces. When a matter rises that stirs the whole realm—war, great reform, the weighing of a league’s recognition—it is the Council’s charge to call for the Grand Convocation.
The Council’s chambers are never far from scribal archive or ritual halls. They are served by a standing circle of record-keepers, Way-seers, and keepers of precedent. Their word is quiet, but moves the gears of the Empire in setting festival dates, recognizing of new guilds, in balancing local rights and old custom.
Where others gather in storm or festival, the Imperial Council works in the long, slow rhythm of the realm, steady as the tides. In peace and in hardship, they weave the Empire’s many voices into a chorus that endures strong, but always ready to bend before breaking.
The Grand Secretariat
The Grand Secretariat holds no army, no palace guard, and issues no commands by force. His voice, however, carries from the old archive halls to the farthest steppe outpost. He is archivist, adjudicator, and wartime envoy all in one. By right and by expectation, he drafts writs that harmonize feuding provinces, sets the order of every Convocation, and guides words spoken in council or square. He bears seals, tends archives, and shapes the forms of recognition that hold the Empire together—all with neither an army nor a court of favorites. The broader assemblies thus witness, echo, and ratify every act he makes.
When the Empire’s fate hangs in the balance, he travels himself—alone or with advisors, Way-seers, and other capables—across wild roads, through trade towns, or into border strongholds. He is known to have appeared unannounced at militia musters, in the midst of disputed markets, or at the edge of a clan’s mourning. Many times he has appeared with neither guards nor banners—just a notebook and a patient gaze. Some say he walks the Empire’s roads as a watcher or as a shadow, always gathering what is needed, always a step ahead of rumor. Whether or not these tales hold truth, all know this: when the Grand Secretariat travels, it is never for show. His presence is warning and promise both, and every province, league, and guild remembers that the Empire’s memory, like its fate, may ride in the coat of a single man.
Whispers across the Empire recall one meeting above all: it is said that early in autumn before the snows of war broke, the Grand Secretariat crossed into Fragrant Harbor, the shining jade of the Lok-Laeng Merchant Republics to meet with the eldest son of the Zhī family. There he spoke of Company manipulation in Tsukiyumi and outlined a maritime strategy with chilling precision. Witnesses to the meeting told of his calm voice, measured, full of practiced gravity. Soldiers on the frontlines say they’ve heard it before the drums of war, carried by radio like a bell struck clear across the Empire. One rumor holds that the Secretariat personally arranged the death of a Company broker in Mu’an. No blade drawn, no message left, just an accountant found drowned with old script in his mouth. True or not, the fear is the same: when the Grand Secretariat speaks, the Empire listens and begins to move.
Lǔyáng Province (卤阳省; Lǔyáng-shěng)
Landscape and Geography
Lǔyáng stretches along the Empire’s storm-battered southwest coastline, its capes and bays jutting into the inland sea. The land rises from tidal flats and broad salt marshes through rolling fields of millet and wheat, broken by scattered low hills and the winding arms of ancient canals. In the north, great estuaries and reed-beds shelter flocks of waterfowl; in the south, clay and sand dunes, thick with wild barley, push up against the salt-washed foundations of old port cities.
The soil here is rich but easily exhausted, and centuries of rotation between salt pans, dry farming, and fishponds have shaped both land and custom. Windstorms, flood tides, and the ever-shifting shoreline keep both engineers and peasants busy. Local sayings insist that “the sea gives no promises, only tidings.”
Lǔyáng lies north of the Great River’s lower reaches and is shaped, more than any other province, by the delta’s vast salt marshes. Here, the Great River (大河) divides, its main branches pouring westward into the open arms of the Western Sea at the old city of Tsihwu, while lesser distributaries fan north, east, and south, their waters diffusing through broad marshes before meeting the shallow, tideless Inland Sea.
This delta is a living labyrinth: reed-choked lagoons, winding watercourses, and brackish pools where river meets sea. Salt pans glisten beside the old levees, and millet fields nestle on earthen ridges just above the tide line. Each season brings the risk of flood or drought, yet it is this changing world that makes Lǔyáng both vulnerable and resourceful.
Lǔyáng’s southern marches are a world of water, silt, and salt, where the Great River breaks into a thousand winding arms, fanning through reed marshes and fishponds before spilling into the broad, shallow inland sea. For the people of the delta, the land is never fixed; it is earned and reclaimed, year after year, from floods and the slow, encroaching brine. Villages stand on earthen levees and ancient stilt foundations, half afloat in every season.
Yet the southern horizon is always marked by something else: the invisible wall of Tsihwu’s power. The main current of the Great River escapes imperial reach entirely, veering away through silt-choked channels toward Tsihloujan wealth. Every barge of grain, jar of pickled fish, or cask of salt bound for the Western Sea must pass through Tsihwu’s customs. Here, imperial law gives way to the calculus of contracts, tariffs, and the cunning of Tsihloujan brokers. Lǔyáng merchants keep two sets of accounts: one for the assemblies of the Empire, one for the Southern Republic’s shifting tolls.
The people of the Lǔyáng delta have learned to adapt.
Salt harvesters, canal-pilots, dyke-keepers, and reed-boat leagues are the true social backbone. Every negotiation with the Tsihloujan is mirrored by bargains made in Lǔyáng’s own guild halls; every treaty with Tsihwu prompts new arguments over marsh boundaries and fishing rights.
Every year brings a new rumor of Tsihwu raising its tariffs, shifting a sandbar, or laying claim to some disputed islet at the mouth of a lucrative channel. Imperial assemblies discuss, but the marsh folk must act: building clandestine canals, staging barter upriver, and forging quiet understandings with certain Tsihloujan notaries. Smuggling and back-channel deals are a way of life along the border—sometimes tolerated, sometimes cracked down on, but always renewed.
For all their rivalry, Lǔyáng’s markets would wither without Tsihwu’s silver, and even the proudest Tsihloujan syndicate relies on Lǔyáng’s flood-tamed fields and salt-pans. Smugglers, pilots, and marriage ties—formal and clandestine—bind the two shores as tightly as any treaty. The phrase “as subtle as a Tsihloujan’s oath” is as common in Lǔyáng as “as stubborn as a Lǔyáng levee” is in Tsihwu.
Songs, dialects, and even family customs blend along the border. Delta festivals often feature guest musicians from Tsihwu, and Lǔyáng’s canal feasts are known to send secret invitations to prominent southern traders. Children of mixed ancestry grow up learning the ways of both marsh and tower, speaking the river’s twin dialects.
In times of crisis, whether a flood, a blockade, or a southern embargo, the people of the Lǔyáng delta close ranks. Delta guilds become militias, and every household is reminded of old sayings. “The river’s mouth is never closed, but neither is it ever safe.” It is said that in these times, the marsh folk trust each other more than they trust any assembly or council, imperial or southern.
For the broader Empire, Lǔyáng is a province on the frontier of negotiation. Its salt and grain underpin imperial wealth, but its fortunes rise and fall with the tides of the Tsihwu republic to the south. In Lǔyáng’s towns and reed villages, every day is shaped by both the river’s moods and the next message from the customs tower downstream.
Towns, Cities, and Social Rhythms
Lǔyáng is famous for its ancient port cities—layered, labyrinthine, their foundations older than Empire. Here, every wharf has its own stories of flood, famine, and miraculous recovery. Canals, sometimes ancient and overgrown, sometimes newly dredged, thread from the coast deep into the interior, binding market towns, grain silos, and salt villages together in a lattice of trade.
Towns are practical and close-knit, but proud. Each claims a distinct lineage of canal-builders, salt harvesters, or legendary storm-defiers. The region’s villages are famed for their communal halls and feast-days, as well as their ability to mobilize work-gangs overnight when embankments fail or storms threaten.
Economy: Salt, Grain, and Guilds
Salt remains the backbone of Lǔyáng’s economy. Marsh salt, sea salt, and even mineral salt drawn from brackish inland wells are each governed by their own guilds—some ancient, others barely a generation old. These salt leagues bear distinct banners: stylized waves, blazing sunbursts, or fishhook sigils, each with its own rites, boundaries, and feuding histories. The salt harvest is rhythmic and ritual-bound: crews walk the flats in silence at sunrise, then chant as they rake and grade the day’s yield. To interfere with another league’s channels or drainage dikes is a cause for arbitration—or open sabotage.
Farming in Lǔyáng is intense and restless. Millet, barley, and wheat grow in tight rotations on reclaimed silt fields, bordered by canals and floodbreak berms. Coastal dunes support wild barley and hardy reed cultivars, often woven directly into thatch and ropework. Every storm reshapes the soil, and so fields are not merely tended—they are rebuilt, season by season, by labor crews who trace their lineage to the first embankment-menders.
Flocks of long-legged sheep roam the higher marsh berms and dry margins of the tidal plains, tended by small kinship leagues who claim ancient grazing rights. Their wool is coarse but durable, prized for sailcloth and padded work vests. Mutton, smoked over brinewood fires, is a staple of the canal hinterlands, often served with pickled reeds or fermented barley mash. During flood years, sheep-herders band together to guide their flocks by barge to pastures on higher grassland, a journey treated in songs like a pilgrimage and remembered in fleece-draped festival effigies. These sheep, with their unusual gait and salt-resistant coats, are exported throughout the Empire and prized far beyond: considered exotic delicacies in the southern republics and Tsukiyumi, and a minor fashion curiosity among bushi who dye their wool, then wove it belts or bracers worn during certain ritual duels.
More curious still are sheep-fighting circles. In the spring and autumn fairs, rams bred for strength and stubbornness are pitted against each other in stylized bouts, watched by cheering crowds and presided over by hereditary referees. Bets are placed, oaths are wagered, and some guilds even forge alliances or resolve minor disputes based on the outcome of a well-matched ram duel. In Lǔyáng’s marshlands, it is said, “A good ram is worth a rowboat of salt.”
Fishing remains vital to the coastal towns. Painted skiffs set out in dawn mist, competing for shellfish beds and seasonal herring runs. Some fishers still observe the old taboos: tying red cord to their nets, refusing to speak until the first haul, offering the largest fish to the river’s mouth. Inland, fishponds supplement diets and millet fields double as hatcheries, creating a seamless rhythm of millet and fish that sustains whole villages.
Artisan guilds enjoy wide esteem, especially those of the canal-diggers, coopers, dyke-keepers, and salters. Some trace their founding to legendary “water-masters” who tamed the tides or bargained with spirits. Their seals appear on levees, tools, and canal stones alike. Apprentices train not only in their trade, but in dispute negotiation and emergency mobilization—skills as essential to marsh life as the work itself.
Culture and Daily Life
Lǔyáng folk are known for their practical piety—a spirituality that blends old river gods, ancestral shrines, and a healthy skepticism toward both far-off council decrees and sudden innovation. Rituals for storm appeasement, “opening the salt pan,” and canal-blessing are still practiced, often with a blend of humor and gravity. Festivals are noisy and communal: lantern regattas, fish-feasts, and the Day of the Last Tide, when debts are forgiven and old rivalries symbolically set aside (or at least, argued over in public).
Recently, Ternary Prior doctrines have found unexpected purchase in Lǔyáng’s pasture communes, canal towns, and marsh villages. Though the region remains rooted in river rituals and ancestral shrines, many have come to see the Prior’s Threefold Glory as harmonizing naturally with the rhythms of tide and labor. Local interpreters have woven its principles into the guild feasts and flood rites, portraying the Prior’s mysteries as living truths found in saltwork, flood defense, and mutual obligation. Sermons from traveling presbyyters, often former salters or boatwrights themselves, draw large audiences during market days, blending spiritual insight with practical wisdom on justice, craft, and endurance. Though some elders view the faith’s spread with suspicion, others see in it a new expression of the old Lǔyáng virtue: that no god or law is worth much unless it can hold water.
Music and poetry are earthy and direct, favoring drums, reed flutes, and songs about lost boats or the return of the spring salt-wind. Lǔyáng’s dialect is quick and clipped, laced with nautical metaphors and inside jokes about “outsmarting the sea.”
Militia service in Lǔyáng is a rotating duty shared by most adults as part of guild or village compacts. Most canal towns keep armories stocked with rifles, sabers, dagger-axe halberds, and water-resistant jerkins, issued when storms or strife threaten. Service is typically tied to the salt and canal leagues: to defend the marshes is to defend the livelihood of all. Every guild feast includes a toast to past defenders, and the appointment of new marsh-watch leaders is announced with drums and oaths before the whole town.
Training is practical and water-bound. Militia drills often involve boarding practice on reed-boats, securing flooded causeways, or learning to march waist-deep through saltwater with gear strapped to the back. Ship carbines, cutlasses, long-hafted hook spears, and rope entanglement are favored weapons—tools well-suited to the region’s tight waterways and soft terrain. Some marsh leagues even maintain flotillas of motor patrol boats, known for sudden raids against smugglers, pirates, or even Company agents judged to be skimming too deeply.
Militia service is seen as a mark of trustworthiness, especially for younger folk or new arrivals. Those who serve with distinction are remembered in flood-songs and given voice in village debates. Old veterans are treated with quiet reverence, their stories consulted not only in times of crisis but during canal planning, guild negotiation, and even marriage arbitration.
Reputation and Relationships
Lǔyáng is admired (and sometimes envied) throughout the Empire for its agricultural resilience, salt riches, and legendary ability to organize communal labor. Outsiders sometimes stereotype its people as stubborn, penny-wise, or superstitious. Jinyou merchants, especially, tease Lǔyáng folk for their “salt-thrift” and for settling arguments by “seeing who can repair the embankment faster.”
Yet, when crisis strikes elsewhere, Lǔyáng’s guilds and villages are often first to send grain, timber, and laborers—a mark of both regional pride and the deeply rooted culture of mutual aid.
In the Empire’s History
Lǔyáng’s port cities have long been crossroads of trade and invasion, suffering pirate raids and foreign landings, as well as being early centers for the Empire’s canal-building traditions. Its history is a chain of adaptation—recovering from every disaster by re-negotiating its own forms of order.
In times of central weakness, Lǔyáng’s salt and canal guilds have acted almost as independent powers, mediating disputes, funding embankment repairs, and even fielding their own armed companies when the threat of piracy or famine loomed. Yet, over generations, the province has remained loyal to the Empire’s tradition of consensus: its most storied families and societies are famed for producing not just clever traders, but wise mediators and master engineers.
Jìnyōu Province 晋幽省 (Jìnyōu-shěng)
(Loess Plateau, Stone Cities, and the Northern Backbone)
Geography and Landscape
Jìnyōu lies east of Lǔyáng, perched high above the inland sea and the tangled river deltas. The land is carved from the loess plateau—deep, wind-blown yellow earth, terraced hills, stark ravines, and broad tablelands that catch the sun like a hundred muted banners. Rivers here are rare and precious: they cut steep valleys through the loess, their courses guarded by ancient stone bridges and wind-bent poplars.
The province’s climate is dry and bracing, with biting winter winds, sharp spring frosts, and long, golden autumns. In summer, storms roll in from the west, carving new gullies and re-shaping field and road alike. The soil, though rich, is easily lost to erosion. Farming is a constant battle of terraces, walls, and ritual patience.
Towns, Villages, and Urban Character
Stone-walled towns crown every major bluff, their streets winding along the edges of cliff and gorge.
Each town is its own world, stoic but proud, built from pale stone and sturdy timber, with narrow alleys cut for windbreak and defense.
The city of Yànbì (雁壁, “Goose Wall”) stands as a provincial icon: ancient, battered, ever-defiant, its ramparts bearing scars from centuries of siege and civil strife.
Defensive towers, old campaign banners, and the black tortoise banner of the province mark important squares and assemblies halls.
Society and Daily Life
Across the windswept loess plateaus, large estates rise from the ochre earth, each built around a warren of family compounds. These compounds shelter generations beneath lacquered eaves, tile roofs patched with local slate, and gates carved with ancestral names. Every estate acts as a node of local power, a place of return and reckoning, where family rituals, disputes, and alliances shape the rhythm of village life.
The Zhī estate is legendary: a place not only of wealth, but of memory and negotiation. Here, refugees and relatives gather in times of crisis, and even political exiles or merchant rivals might be offered a bed in the old guest wing if etiquette demands. Feasts in the courtyard mark victories, funerals, or reconciliations; stories and grievances are aired as freely as the pine smoke on winter mornings.
The Zhī family’s seat commands respect and wariness throughout Jìnyōu. For generations, the Zhī have earned quiet deference through their mastery of contracts and the art of leverage—kinship oaths, trade routes, loyalty bought with steel and sealed with millet. Their hospitality is renowned: a guest at the Zhī hall will find safety, service, and scrutiny in equal measure. There, the loyalty of caravan guards is matched only by the warmth of a shared meal on a cold night. Yet in recent years, their compound has taken on a different shine: baskets of mangoes, southern lacquer, bronze phonographs, sweet tropical nectar served in crystal glass—all too bright for a mountain autumn. Such indulgence has raised murmurs: that the family grows too close to the Company, too soft on its terms. Some whisper of a rift in the household, that the eldest son has returned bearing scars, weapons, and silence. Rumors tell of him taking up arms against the Company, even as news of a Southern engagement—his rumored bride the daughter of a Southern merchant prince and Tsukiyumi matron—circulates through every tea house and barracks.
Still, the people of Jìnyōu admire resolve, not rumor. To outsiders, Jìnyōu’s people may seem blunt, but this is a land where belonging is proven by action, not speech. When a guest is truly accepted, they’re treated as kin: expected to pitch in, speak their mind, and face challenges with the same resolve as any family member. Hospitality here is unsentimental but warm: a bowl of millet porridge or a cup of coal-fired tea, a seat near the stove, or a scarf against the wind. Etiquette runs to the practical. Elaborate formality is viewed with suspicion, a relic of southern courts and deltas.
Communities are organized around strong compacts—agreements among households or lineages, sworn by shared work and mutual defense rather than by central decree. Village assemblies debate in open courtyards or smoke-filled taverns, settling land disputes, arranging marriages, and planning repairs to the ever-crumbling terraces and walls. Most villages keep a militia roster and an armory. Every child learns at least the basics of wall repair, bucket brigades, and formation drill. In times of crisis from banditry, drought, or border tension, the entire community can mobilize in hours, transforming estates and town squares into rallying points. Times of “emergency cohabitation” mean that, in crisis, strangers and neighbors alike are expected to share hearth and shelter without hesitation.
The plateau’s hard wind and hard soil have shaped a people wary of sentiment and rich in memory. In the Zhī estate, servants still whisper blessings before bringing tea, though no incense burns. Across Jìnyōu, the sound of boots in gravel still carries the quiet rhythm of those preparing, always, to endure.
Work, Wealth, and Craft
Jìnyōu is the mineral heart of the Empire. Beneath its rolling loess plateaus lie veins of copper and seams of iron, some worked since the age of hydraulic despots. Blacksmiths’ forges and small foundries cluster around nearly every settlement, their chimneys marking the skyline with plumes of black or red smoke.
Coal is the fuel of both comfort and industry here. Every family estate keeps its own seam or claims rights in a village shaft, and the supply of coal is as closely guarded as land or lineage. During the long, bitter winters, the glow from coal fires is said to “keep memory alive” as much as it keeps rooms warm.
Metalworker guilds have a fierce, even martial reputation, with generations of smiths, toolwrights, and ore-haulers organized into compact brotherhoods. These guilds, along with stonemasons and wheelwrights, are the backbone of the local economy and are known to take apprentices from distant provinces, hoping to learn the plateau’s famed metallurgical methods. Foundry disputes or accidents can spark feuds lasting decades. An old saying claims, “A Jìnyōu hammer settles what a council won’t.” During times of crisis, the smiths’ halls double as armories and rallying points for militia musters.
Jìnyōu is also a province of inventors. The legacy of legendary embankment-builders lives on not just in memory but in daily work: every terrace and windmill is both a practical solution and a point of pride. Terrace-building is a form of art and science, passed from master to apprentice through a mixture of rigorous calculation and inherited intuition. Windmills, water-lifts, and automaton tools are Jìnyōu signatures. They are designed for resilience and low maintenance, often patched with clever improvements over generations. Workshops across the province are small but dense with innovation: wooden gears, chain hoists, ingenious locks, and smoke-belching threshers built from repurposed wagon parts. Surveyors and Way-seers from Jìnyōu are prized in the Empire’s public works, able to map a hillside or rebalance a canal with almost ritual efficiency.
The larger estates operate as semi-autonomous industrial villages, with dozens of households contributing to smelting, tool-making, cart-building, and even the production of war gear in tense times.
Artisan prestige is real and fiercely contested. Mastery brings not just guild honors but real social standing. Young smiths and inventors can rise rapidly if they win the recognition of guild elders and secure patronage from a great family, especially the likes of the Zhī or other merchant dynasties.
For the people of Jìnyōu, craft is identity. Tools, weapons, and even domestic goods are often marked with personal or estate seals. A person’s worth is measured by the quality of their work and the memory of their apprenticeship as much as by bloodline or speech. Labor here is both tradition and experiment, a world where the old and the new blend by necessity, and where every problem is a challenge to be solved with one’s own hands.
Markets and Routes
Caravans run east-west along the plateau roads, with the province’s highways and narrow switchbacks acting as the critical arteries between the Empire’s heartland and its distant eastern provinces. Jìnyōu’s traders are masters of logistics and negotiation: millet, ironware, dried fruit, and wool leave the loess valleys in exchange for southern rice, silk, and salt, as well as horses and tools from the northern and border provinces.
Jìnyōu sits astride the key mountain passes and choke points. Merchants here transport goods, they set tariffs, broker corridors, and mediate disputes between clans, guilds, and even between rival provinces. The province’s councils have the authority to grant or restrict passage, and a well-placed family can make or ruin fortunes by their decisions at the toll houses.
The most storied of these are the Zhī family, whose estate commands respect across the plateau. For generations, the Zhī have been noted for their shrewd contracts, and deft handling of clan alliances. They are famed for the hospitality of their halls, the loyalty of their caravan guards, and a reputation for directness. They have a growing reputation, however, for an ostentatious interest in Southern wares and culture. Word of their growing entanglement with Company affairs has even made it to Yinhai.
Weekly markets in towns like Yànbì bustle with traders, scribes, and caravan leaders haggling in a dozen dialects. Bargains are often sealed with a nod and a handshake, but always confirmed by the council’s notary—disputes are settled publicly, and honor is on display as much as goods.
Memory, Honor, and Conflict
A Jìnyōu accent is said to be “clear as frost in a Jinyou autumn”—crisp, spare, instantly recognizable in any market square or council hall across the Empire. It carries with it the plateau’s own reputation: plain speech, unadorned meaning, a willingness to call things as they are. In Jìnyōu, identity is not a secret kept behind doors, but a public inheritance. A person’s worth is measured in how they act when watched and remembered. “Let others claim greatness; we’ll prove ours in daylight” is a local saying. Stories of ancestors—who mended walls through famine, who broke sieges, who made a bitter joke and stuck to it—are retold at every gathering. Family honor is a public ledger, as likely to be updated in the marketplace as in the home.
Disputes are unavoidable in a land where property lines shift with every flood and tempers flare as easily as dust. In Jìnyōu, these are expected and channeled constructively:
Most quarrels over water, boundaries, or bargains are first brought before the estate or village council. Elders and guild notaries weigh evidence, hear both sides, and issue a verdict. Their word, spoken before all, becomes binding; to ignore it is to risk shunning.
When councils cannot decide, parties are expected to negotiate directly, often in the open, sometimes with a third-party mediator, sometimes over a single shared meal. Agreements are written down, sealed, and witnessed by those present.
For matters of personal insult, contested honor, or claims too tangled for speech, the ring remains. Such bouts are rarely bloody, with boxing and sparring serving as tests of endurance, wit, or sometimes just the willingness to stand unflinching in combat under others’ gazes. The outcome, accepted with dignity by both sides, closes the matter.
To live honorably in Jìnyōu is to be seen carrying your share of hardship, making good on promises, and standing firm for kin and neighbor alike. Bragging is frowned upon; an honorable deed, like a mended wall, should speak for itself. Broken trust is not easily forgiven, but atonement—a public apology, a year’s labor, the hosting of a village feast—can restore reputation over time.
Weddings, oaths, and seasonal feasts are more than mere celebrations—they are how Jìnyōu binds the wounds of its history and renews its alliances.
Weddings are occasions both practical and sacred: alliances between houses are cemented not just with vows, but with contributions of labor, goods, and protective pledges from both families.
Oaths are sworn before ancestors’ tablets or the eyes of the village, sometimes sealed with a cup of strong millet wine or a symbolic token: a stone, knot of cord, or shared blade.
Feasts serve as the arena for reconciliation: old grudges may be ended with a public meal, debts forgiven with a round of toasts, and new compacts proclaimed in the presence of all.
When calamity comes—famine, flood, or the threat of war—estates and villages transform. Doors are thrown open; guests, kin, and even recent rivals are taken in without question. “Northern style” cohabitation means every hearth, barn, and hall becomes shared space. Resources are pooled, work divided, and the household becomes a living testament to endurance and adaptability. After the crisis passes, it is customary to honor those who gave shelter and aid with gifts or labor, and to commemorate the shared hardship with a stone or inscribed tablet placed on the estate wall—a record of survival and unity.
In the Empire’s History
Jìnyōu is the backbone of the Empire: its towers and passes a defense against outsiders, its iron and grain the sinews of imperial power. Yet it is also a land apart, less deferent to distant councils, prouder of its own way-seers, engineers, and elders.
It is a province where memory is kept not just in song and story, but in the scars of stone, the depth of the loess, and the weight of each returning footstep.
Zhēnxún Commandery (珍循郡; Zhēnxún-jùn)
At the very heart of the Empire of the Three Seas lies Zhēnxún, the ancient commandery and enduring cradle of imperial memory. Here, where three rivers wander out of the highlands and braid themselves across wide, fertile plains, every field and market road is thick with story. Zhēnxún is a country of thresholds: between upland and coastal marsh, plateau and river country, past and present, tradition and quiet innovation. Its people tend groves and gardens planted by ancestors who outlasted tyrants. They walk cobbled causeways once watched over by embankment despots, and still consult the rivers’ faces for signs of a changing world just before dawn with the same yarrow sticks that their ancestor had used. To cross the rivers of Zhēnxún is to pass beneath the weight of myth where every new agreement is judged against the memory of ages, where the balance of custom and adaptation has given rise to the Empire’s most enduring institutions.
Unlike other commanderies within the Empire, Zhēnxún stands apart from the provincial system. It answers directly to the Imperial Council, its affairs administered by an assembly of local elders, ritualists, and recognized guild delegates. This autonomy descends from ancient compacts and the memory of its resistance to hydraulic despotism as the cradle of consensus. The commandery’s own assemblies manage land, water, and ritual, and appeals from its judgments go to the heart of the Empire itself.
Geography and Landscape
Zhēnxún unfolds as rolling alluvial plains, thick with intersecting currents of countless small rivers and tributaries. These waterways flow westward toward the Western Sea or south into the Great River, dividing the land into irregular islets of orchards, fields, and marshes. The landscape is gentle but never static: spring floods redraw the map each year, while old riverbeds, now shaded with willows or lined with stones, mark the boundaries of ancestral villages.
Among the most distinctive features of the commandery are its sacred groves and ritual causeways. Rows of ancient mulberry and peach trees, planted in the time of the first way-seers, stand watch beside worn stone paths that connect towns, ferry crossings, and gathering grounds for the great seasonal fairs. These causeways thus serve as processional routes, walked in festival and in mourning, bearing the weight of generations.
Villages cluster on low ridges or artificial mounds, their walled compounds raised above the reach of floods. Each settlement is surrounded by gardens, ponds, and ritual fields, often with a small shrine or council pavilion at its heart. The surrounding fields are famed for their variety: wheat and millet, lotus and beans, all grown in careful succession on land made rich by centuries of silt and labor.
Zhēnxún’s climate is forgiving but capricious: gentle spring rains, bright and humid summers, long golden autumns punctuated by the haze of burning chaff, and winters often softened by mist and the lingering warmth of stone-walled hearths. The cycle of the rivers shapes every aspect of life here: not just the harvest, but the very fabric of custom and governance, reminding all who dwell here that endurance is earned only through adaptation and memory.
Towns, Compacts, and the Memory of Rule
Towns in Zhēnxún speak for more than collections of houses, being living compacts defined by layers of precedent, shared labor, and rituals of recognition that have held the region together since the old embankment tyrannies. The largest towns of Yíchéng, Gāoxí, and the riverside fairground of Sūnquán are each famous for their open market squares, tree-lined assembly halls, and processional streets where seasonal fairs and assemblies gather beneath banners older than empire.
Every settlement, whether walled town or riverside hamlet, maintains its own records of compacts etched into stone or lacquered onto wooden tablets, witnessed and revised at every generation. These compacts govern the allocation of land and water, the rotation of ritual offices, the timing of festivals, and the boundaries of mutual aid. To break a compact is to lose one’s place in the memory of the town.
Village and town assemblies are the true guardians of order. Each year, delegates from major families, artisan guilds, and sworn brotherhoods convene at the assembly pavilion or in the open air of the market. There, under the gaze of ancestors and the listening crowd, they review the year’s disputes, acknowledge new alliances, and debate reforms. The proceedings are less about decree than performance: everyone must see that recognition is mutual, that grievances are heard, and that the public face of harmony is maintained.
The old rituals of hospitality and mediation run deep. A stranger seeking shelter or a merchant asking for passage is judged by their willingness to honor local compacts more than by rank or wealth. The memory of the despots who once demanded tribute for imposing their own arithmetic on the land remains a cautionary tale, recalled in festival plays and stories that elders tell by riverside. In Zhēnxún, no assembly holds power unquestioned. Legitimacy is measured by those who remember, and the willingness to renegotiate when the world itself shifts beneath their feet.
Legends, Memory, and the Imperial Heart
In Zhēnxún, every stone and waterway carries the weight of legend. Ancient embankments still stand in places, mossy and half-broken, reminders of the age when hydraulic despots sought to rule nature through ritual and arithmetic alone. Songs tell of when the three engineers (三匠) upturned the epicycle kings, each finding in thought, then awareness, then experience a new way to bind the rivers and free the land. Their stories are echoed every year in festival plays, and their names live on in titles given to those who mediate between tradition and necessity.
Every village claims a tale of divine favor or ancestral cunning: a river shifted by a timely oath, a famine averted by a pact with marsh spirits, a tyrant outwitted by a band of local way-seers. Pilgrims travel to stone shrines on old embankments to leave tokens for luck in engineering, management, marriage, or bargaining. Memorial stones at crossroads bear the names of those who defended their towns in floods or brokered peace between rivals. Public memory is as durable as the carved stone, and just as often revised.
Zhēnxún’s place in imperial ritual has no equal. For centuries, every Great Convocation drew delegates to its riverside halls to reaffirm the bonds tying the Empire’s provinces together. The commandery’s compacts were taken as precedents in disputes far beyond its borders. Elders from Zhēnxún—engineers, Way-seers, mediators—were called upon to arbitrate in times of crisis across the Empire, a living symbol that true authority comes not from a throne or decree, but from the patient memory of negotiated harmony.
Nowadays, with radio, telegraph, and rail allowing fast telecommunications, the Imperial Grand Council no longer gathers only in Zhēnxún. Convocations can be summoned at prearranged sites throughout the Empire for circumstance, crisis, or the need to flatter far-away provinces. Even so, the memory of Zhēnxún endures. Its compacts and rituals remain the touchstone for legitimacy. Every remote convocation is, in some sense, a gesture toward the rivers and causeways of Zhēnxún, the wellspring of the Empire’s consensus.
Pōlù Province (坡麓省, “At the Foot of the Plateau”)
Landscape and Geography
Pōlù Province lies where the loess heights of Jìnyōu sink down into the Empire’s northern plains, a sweep of open country that stretches from the wooded ridges of the heartlands to the shadow of the distant steppe. Its very name—“At the Foot of the Plateau”—captures the province’s essential tension: a land poised between the ancestral memory of hills and the restless promise of the open fields.
The landscape is marked by broad, meandering river valleys, each season swelling and shrinking with the rains. These rivers, unlike the capricious torrents of the uplands, flow wide and slow across the province, nourishing a patchwork of fields that ripple in the wind like a sea of grass. Between the river-courses lie long, shallow rises, old dunes and glacial mounds where villages cluster along ancient roads or behind half-vanished earthwork walls. In spring, the ground blooms with rapeseed and wheat. In autumn, the air is heavy with the scent of barley, millet, and burning stubble.
The heart of Pōlù is its endless farmland. Shallow lakes and irrigation ditches break up the horizon, reflecting both sky and the ever-watchful eyes of migratory birds. Here, the soil is dark and fertile but easily eroded. Fields are rotated with care, and every generation leaves its mark on the old canal banks and levees that guard against both flood and drought.
Market towns and waystations, their walls built from packed earth and river stone, dot the province’s main highways. These routes have served for centuries as the Empire’s arteries of trade, migration, and defense. Some towns crown low bluffs, their watchtowers surveying the roads for miles. Others sprawl along river fords, their open-air bazaars famed for the raucous bargains of spring and the gatherings of peasant leagues.
To the north, the fields give way to wilder grassland and scrub, the wind growing colder, the settlements more sparse. The steppe’s shadow is never far, and the memory of past incursions lingers in every boundary stone and militia stockade. It is this land that is neither plateau nor steppe, neither city nor wild that stands as grain belt and sentry line of the Empire, forever adapting to the ebb and flow of change.
Towns, Leagues, and Social Rhythm
Pōlù’s towns are crossroads, places where the grain-laden carts of the heartlands meet the shaggy ponies of the steppe, where the world’s oldest bargains are still sealed with a handshake and a nod before the crowd. Each town claims a character as distinct as its history: Dòngguān, the “East Gate,” rises on a wide bluff above the central river, its walls streaked with the banners of ancient peasant leagues. Sìchǎng, “Four Fairs,” sprawls across a lowland basin, its market square ringed with grain warehouses and timbered hostelries built for caravan trains. Smaller villages cluster along the old earthwork roads in packed-mud houses set in defensive arcs around wells and threshing floors.
Market days are the lifeblood of Pōlù. Every week, towns erupt in a riot of bargaining: wheat and barley, millet and oilseed, horses, sheep, plows, and rough-woven cloth changing hands as elders and notaries look on. Towns compete fiercely for the biggest fairs and best prices, sometimes with jokes and song, sometimes with quiet sabotage, or, on rare occasions, a midnight raid by a rival league’s strongarm men.
Village life in Pōlù is built on leagues: cooperative compacts of peasant families, canal-keepers, and border watchers. These leagues organize labor for planting and harvest, maintain the embankments and irrigation ditches, and enforce the rituals of field-sharing and flood-watch. In times of trouble, a village’s peasant league becomes its militia: stockpiling grain, organizing night patrols, and mustering all able hands when raiders, bandits, or steppe fires threaten the land.
The rhythm of the year is marked by great communal tasks and public festivals. Spring brings the famous horse fairs: part auction, part courtship, part council, where alliances are forged, marriages arranged, and grievances aired before all. In summer, every hand joins in the harvest. In autumn, villages host feasts to honor the earth and share tales of good years and bad. Old rivalries are set aside when the anti-bandit drums are sounded: then leagues unite, roads are watched, and the banners of a dozen villages may fly together from the stockade walls.
Pōlù’s social life is shaped by an ethic of defense and mutual aid, a wariness born from centuries of standing guard on the Empire’s frontier. Outsiders often find the province blunt, even insular, but those who win a place through labor, loyalty, or the luck of marriage are bound by ties as strong as blood. Honor is kept in public, disputes are judged by league councils, and every wrong has its remedy whether through arbitration, or in the open field before all. Here, belonging is measured not by birth but by the work and memory a person leaves behind.
Grain, Trade, and Defense
Pōlù is the granary of the Empire, a province where the harvest is a badge of honor and a source of bargaining power. Wheat, millet, and barley fields ripple in every direction, interspersed with patches of rapeseed and hemp, and fringed by communal orchards or bean gardens. Grain storage is a communal responsibility: every town and village maintains earth-bermed silos and storied granaries, with keys held by elected elders or the rotating leadership of the peasant leagues. Famine is rare, but when it comes, Pōlù’s councils are expected to open the stores for their neighbors, and a village known for stinginess in hard times will never live down the shame.
Trade in Pōlù is robust and fiercely competitive. Grain moves by oxcart, barge, and caravan down the ancient highways to Zhēnxún, Lǐjiāng, and the Merchant Republics, while horses and salt flow in from the steppe and Lǔyáng’s marshes. Every major road is a corridor of negotiation, patrolled by guild-appointed caravan guards and watched by local notaries who arbitrate tariffs and mediate disputes. Spring and autumn fairs swell the towns with visiting traders, drovers, and smiths. It is said that a single good bargain at Sìchǎng can set a family up for years—or ruin them by winter if they fail to deliver.
The constant threat of steppe raids and banditry has made defense a core pillar of Pōlù’s life. Villages and towns maintain armories stocked with spears, bows, matchlocks, and, in wealthier places, repeating rifles and ceremonial armor. The peasant leagues—originally founded for irrigation and harvest labor—serve as rapid-response militias, trained to muster at the ringing of the grain bell or the beating of the night drum. Border villages form sworn brotherhoods with their neighbors, sharing patrols and intelligence. Some have since grown into formidable local powers, able to muster hundreds of fighters and dictate terms of peace or tribute with would-be invaders.
These leagues are not just defensive. When the balance of trade or power is threatened—a rival town blocking a road, a guild overreaching on tariffs, or a southern merchant undercutting the local market—Pōlù’s leagues can act with ruthless unity. Negotiation is preferred, but showdowns in the open square or the midnight burning of an abandoned granary are not unknown. Above all, Pōlù’s people pride themselves on resilience: no matter the storm or struggle, they rebuild, replant, and return to the work of feeding the Empire.
Culture and Daily Life
Daily life in Pōlù is shaped by cycles older than memory: the turning of the plow, the rhythm of the fairs, the watch kept on the northern horizon. The work of the land is both a necessity and a communal rite—sowing, weeding, and harvest bring every household into the fields at once, and even children know how to bind a sheaf or dig an emergency drainage ditch before the first spring flood. In every village, the year is marked by the feasts and rituals that gather the whole community under banners hung from barn eaves or the town’s old gate.
Practicality is a local virtue. Clothes are sturdy, meant for weather and work: wool, hemp, and coarse cotton, dyed in the browns and golds of the fields, or indigo for festival days. The province’s folk are known for their direct speech, dry wit, and a taste for earthy humor—mocking city luxury or steppe bravado with a sharp word and a sideways grin. Storytelling is communal, often delivered in the form of satirical verses at harvest feasts or biting songs at the spring horse fairs.
Festivals are times of open competition and shared renewal. The great horse fairs see young men and women test their skill in riding, wrestling, or singing, while elders arrange matches and alliances behind the scenes. During the Grain Festival, villages bring out the year’s best loaves, dumplings, and grain spirits, setting long tables in the square for all to share. Old quarrels are often aired and, if possible, settled before the whole assembly; intractable disputes may be set aside for another year, or decided in the ring by wrestling or archery contest.
Pōlù’s culture prizes contribution over inheritance. Newcomers who work the fields, stand guard, or marry into local lineages can rise quickly to respect—while those who hoard grain, shirk their share, or betray a compact find themselves quietly shunned. Local sayings sum up the province’s ethos: “A straight furrow, a fair bargain, a watchful neighbor—these are worth more than gold.” To live well in Pōlù is to be remembered for one’s deeds, honored for one’s service, and to stand with the league when the warning drum sounds.
Spiritual life in Pōlù finds its heart in the chapels and commons of the Ternary Prior. The faith in this grain-rich land has taken root less as dogma than as daily practice. Every market town boasts at least one prior’s house or open-air chapel, its triple-spiral banner fluttering above the square, where neighbors gather for blessing, memory, and mutual aid. Worship of the Threefold Glory—of the Hidden One, the Word, and the Flame—are interwoven with old field customs, giving form and voice to hopes both ancient and new.
Here, devotion is quiet and practical. The Blessing of the Tools at sowing, once a simple offering of grain to field spirits, now brings together entire leagues beneath the guidance of a Prior, who speaks the threefold prayer and calls down favor on both earth and laborer. After the autumn harvest, families bring lanterns to the chapel steps—each one inscribed with a wish or a name to be remembered in the light of the Flame. Elders and Priors together recite the old compacts, weaving stories of hardship, endurance, and reconciliation into a tapestry of shared memory.
In daily life, the Ternary Prior serves not as a distant authority but as a companion to the rhythms of field and village. Chapels are places for mediation as much as worship, venues where disputes are settled, bargains witnessed, and the sick or weary find counsel and rest. The Prior’s blessing is sought before each season’s first furrow is cut or each league musters for the watch. Yet private rites endure alongside the new: a charm for good weather may still hang from a granary, and ancestor shrines line the roads between villages.
Festivals in Pōlù blend the Prior’s threefold symbolism with local color. During the Feast of New Grain, a procession winds from chapel to granary, baskets heaped with the season’s first sheaves, and the Flame is carried to every home. In the Vigil of Lanterns, the triple-spiral is painted on river stones and floated downstream—a reminder that memory, word, and hope must all be carried forward together.
Faith here is a vessel for old wisdom and new purpose. The Prior is respected as a keeper of memory and a guardian of right action, for helping Pōlù’s folk remember who they are, and what they owe to each other, when the world’s tides shift once more.
Reputation and Relationships
Across the Empire of the Three Seas, Pōlù is known as the province of steady hands and deep roots. Its people are trusted for their practical judgment and quiet diligence, as farmers who sow with foresight, guards who do not waver, and merchants who mind the grain scales as if they were family tablets. Other provinces regard Pōlù folk as modest but shrewd, unshaken by fad or panic, and slow to trust but slower still to betray it.
To outsiders, Pōlù may seem insular. Its leagues and villages are tight-knit, its alliances cautious. Yet once earned, a bond here is rarely broken. “A Pōlù handshake holds through frost,” they say in Lǔyáng. “Their word weighs like stone,” is the Jìnyōu version. In truth, Pōlù’s loyalty is not easily given because it is never offered lightly. Within its towns and fields, relationships are maintained with a dense, invisible threadwork of obligations, festival ties, cooperative labors, and ancestral compact.
Neighboring provinces look to Pōlù for grain in lean seasons, militia aid in times of unrest, or brokers to mediate local feuds. The province’s leagues are particularly respected for their role in negotiating borderland disputes, whether between canal rights, caravan routes, or shifting claims among steppe clans. In moments of regional tension, Pōlù’s guilds and brotherhoods dispatch envoys to listen, to map every grievance, and to quietly steer things toward resolution.
Among more pious Imperial citizens, Pōlù’s growing devotion to the Ternary Prior has drawn both admiration and suspicion. In places where old customs still hold sway, some view Pōlù’s converts as too rigid, too given to doctrinal oaths. But even here, a Pōlù convert is rarely a zealot. They approach belief the same way they plant barley: patiently, deliberately, and with an eye toward what can be sustained.
For all its reserve, Pōlù remains indispensable. It provides not only grain and road-watches, but a cultural ballast, a way of being measured and remembered without flair. In an Empire of invention, trade, and ever-shifting recognition, Pōlù remains the place where one's name is less likely to be shouted, and more likely to be counted in the harvest books and remembered in the turning of seasons.
Yínhǎi: The Silver Crown of Pōlù
Overview
Name Meaning: “Silver Sea” (Yínhǎi, 银海)
Poetic Title: The Silver Crown of Pōlù
Real-world analog: Tianjin and any Hanseatic League city.
Location: At the western edge of Pōlù Province, where the Whitewater River (白水河) empties into the Inland Sea.
Character: Mercantile entrepôt, coastal fortress, site of foreign entanglement and internal reckoning. The Empire’s grainmouth and western gateway; a city of negotiation, vigilance, and cosmopolitan flux.
Geography and Setting
Yínhǎi sits at the Empire’s far western edge, where the long reach of the Whitewater River (白水河) fans out into tidal flats and the restless waters of the Inland Sea. From the northern high fields of Pōlù, the river descends through a thousand meanders, gathering tribute from grain villages, winter lakes, and hidden marshlands where migratory birds settle each spring. At Yínhǎi, this journey ends in a maze of levees, canals, and stone breakwaters, all engineered to keep silt at bay and the harbor clear for the unending traffic of grain barges and riverboats.
The city itself straddles both the last firm ground of the west and shifting, half-reclaimed saltlands where river meets the sea. Ancient walls of tamped earth and riverstone still mark the Old City’s ridgeline, their towers offering a view from the labyrinth of canal alleys out to the horizon’s bright silver gleam. South of the old ramparts, the New Wharves spread across ground won from the tides in rows of warehouses and arsenal slips, built up on pilings and armored against both storm and attack.
Behind Yínhǎi rise the rolling grainlands of Pōlù, cut by irrigation channels and old roads that snake eastward toward the province’s interior. The main canal arteries, built centuries ago and widened in times of plenty, feed directly into the city’s harbor pools, each lined with stone quays where the season’s grain is measured, taxed, and transshipped for the southern coasts or distant provinces. The long northwestern roads bend away toward Sangmuryeon, heavily patrolled whenever chaebols send trade convoys. Other caravan tracks to the north climb toward the cold forests and border hills of Sōnglǐng Province and beyond.
Tides by the sea here are erratic, the wind carrying both the scent of salt and the stories of distant lands. Sea-walls and beacon towers line the approaches, guiding vessels past sandbars and treacherous shoals. In storm season, pilots are said to pray as much to old gods and city saints as to modern charts, one reason Yínhǎi’s sailors are famous for both superstition and skill.
City Rhythms and Market Zones
Yínhǎi’s life begins at the shore, where the wide mouth of the Whitewater River fans into the open sea. Here, salt winds rattle the masts of deepwater ships and the cries of gulls carry across a waterfront crowded with ocean-going junks, battered coastal tramps, and grain barges from the eastern heartlands. Every tide brings in new cargo—rice, fish, coal, tin, and rumors from distant lands—while the city’s long breakwaters and stone-built piers shelter a restless fleet.
At the Old Seaward Quay, the first port of Yínhǎi’s founding, painted warehouses and wind-scarred wharf offices huddle beneath the ancient signal tower. Here, deepwater pilots, dockmasters, and merchant captains jostle for position. Saltfish and kelp are traded alongside crates of steel and barrels of pickled grain. Dockside leagues, some centuries old, govern loading rights, resolve disputes, and oversee the city’s great Blessing of the Nets, a springtime ritual where the Prior or a guild elder invokes fortune for all who brave the open water.
Inland from the docks, the Upland Hall Quarter rises on higher ground, a district of sturdy guildhouses and stone merchant halls built by syndics from Jìnyōu and Lǔyáng. Here, brokers set shipping rates and arrange convoys for the overland grain trade. Notaries arbitrate contracts for both sea and caravan. The public bathhouses and teahouses are famed for their endless negotiation, gossip, and the annual autumn wit-contests held by rival apprentice leagues. Brokerage firms, millwrights, and the famed bathhouses of the quarter serve as meeting-grounds for deals both public and discreet. Caravan masters haggle with warehouse chiefs here, while rival leagues compete in ritual games of skill and wit out in the public courtyards—sometimes echoing ancient disputes, sometimes forging the new alliances that will move a thousand wagonloads of grain.
To the south, the Silver Mile gleams a narrow street in the late sun lined with counting halls, notary towers, and the offices of the city’s great merchant houses. It is here that fortunes are made and lost in a single bargain, where contracts are recorded in both Empire-standard script and the quick cyphers of trade. The rivalries here are as much about ceremony and honor as they are about price: each merchant house funds its own festivals, endows its own scholars, and backs its own leagues of apprentices and advocates.
The New Wharves are the city’s most modern face. Built over the last two generations on reclaimed land atop a network of breakwaters and silted piers, it houses the city’s arsenal slips, navy detachments, and the great boat-yards. Arsenal slips and navy boathouses stand among warehouses armored for fire and flood, their garrisoned gates always under the eye of the city militia. Here, every barge is inspected, every cargo recorded, and the flags of the Empire fly alongside the banners of recognized guilds. Militia and merchant vessels alike are built, provisioned, and repaired. In times of tension, the New Wharves double as the city’s fortress, their walls and breakwaters forming a shield between the inland sea and the grain markets within, their walls and watchtowers patrolled by grain-league musters and recognized guild militias.
The boundaries between these quarters are fluid: fishers, dockworkers, upland traders, and Priorist mediators flow between quarters and classes. Seaward, every returning ship brings new faces, rumors, and inventions. Inland, grain and salt travel eastward by barge and caravan, connecting Yínhǎi’s fortunes to the entire Empire. In every teahouse and market stall, tongues mingle in a polyglot of Northern speak, local dialect, and the words of traders from Tsukiyumi, Sangmuryeon, Sōnglǐng, the steppe, the Merchant Republics, and even the Eastern World Island.
Trade, Economy, and Contraband
Yínhǎi’s very lifeblood is movement—of grain, salt, fish, coin, and rumor. It is the Empire’s great western port, where the harvests of Pōlù’s grainlands and the goods of far-off provinces converge, only to be measured, taxed, and sent out again on the tides. Its harbors are filled with the deep, resinous scent of sea-wet timber and tar; its warehouses with the shuffled echoes of old debts and new bargains. Every day, grain barges from the east queue beneath the breakwater cranes to offload their cargo into the cavernous stone granaries that line the city’s central docks.
Grain is Yínhǎi’s claim to both power and peril. Grain merchants, organized in tight, often rival syndicates, control the pulse of the port. In times of scarcity, their contracts determine who eats and who waits. In seasons of plenty, their auctions fill the air with a carnival hum as buyers from every province, and from as far as Sangmuryeon or Tsukiyumi or even the Republics, bid for the year’s bounty. The city’s dockmaster council mediates disputes, posts daily prices, and enforces strict rules against hoarding or fraud. But in a place as competitive as Yínhǎi, rules are as often tested as observed.
Salt and smoked fish are the second pillars of the city’s prosperity. Vast salt pans glitter along the coast to the north, and their produce is as fiercely protected as gold. Fishmongers’ guilds compete over the freshest catch, and each night, fleets of lantern-lit skiffs set out from the outer quays, braving the open sea for herring, squid, and the prized deep-sea eels. Salted, smoked, or pickled, these goods are shipped inland and to the far south, feeding distant cities and, sometimes, the rumor that Yínhǎi’s real power is the hidden riches in its cellars.
Trade does not end at the water’s edge. Yínhǎi’s markets are alive with upland wares—ironwork and leather from Jìnyōu, preserved fruit and teas from Lǔyáng, even pelts and fire-oil from the Xurhén. Steel from Sangmuryeon arrives in crates stenciled with merchant sigils, always passing through layers of city inspection and league arbitration. Overland roads and coastal ferries bind Yínhǎi to every neighboring province, but all know the city’s first loyalty is to itself and its own advantage.
Where there are borders, there is contraband. Yínhǎi’s old salt lanes and river channels have always been haunted by smugglers: some with the blessing of city notables, others hunted by night patrols and the silent “watchers” of the Silver Mile. Forbidden weapons, banned books, Company cipher-books, and exotic medicines all find their way through secret doors or bribed dockhands. Rumors swirl of entire warehouse blocks used for storing illicit cargo when imperial taxes or foreign embargoes bite too deep.
All this is held together by a network of visible and invisible ledgers. Every merchant house keeps two sets of accounts: one for the eyes of the dock council, one for private review. The Prior’s chapels are trusted mediators of contract disputes, their blessings sought before major transactions. At festival time, even rivals must break bread together for custom demands it. On the city’s backstreets, bargains are sealed with a nod, a token, or a secret code inscribed in chalk on a warehouse wall.
Yínhǎi’s economy is resilient, pragmatic, and never quite honest. The city’s strength is its refusal to rely on any single source of wealth, and its genius lies in always finding a new outlet, a new route, or a new bargain when the old ones fail. As the city proverb goes: “In Yínhǎi, the tides shift, but trade goes ever on.”
Politics and Ritual Power
No city in the Empire balances as many interests, nor so deftly transforms rivalry into ritual, as Yínhǎi. Its governance is famously complex, an ever-renewed contest and compact among dockmaster leagues, merchant councils, Priorist chapels, and the city’s ancient circle of civic notaries. Authority in Yínhǎi is earned and displayed, not inherited or commanded: every seat on the city’s tripartite council must be recognized by both popular acclaim and the formal assent of guild assemblies.
The Dockmaster League represents the city’s river and seafaring interests. Its elders are drawn from families with generations of canal work, shipbuilding, or fishery behind them. They control access to the quays, set tariffs, and oversee the hiring of day labor. During festival or crisis, it is their banners that call the city to muster or mediation, and their hall that hosts the annual Blessing of the Waters, where leaders pledge to uphold the city’s prosperity before both the Prior and the assembled guilds.
The Civic Assembly is the voice of the merchant houses, grain syndicates, artisan guilds, and market notaries. Their council halls, richly paneled with old contracts and hung with the crests of every recognized league, are the true engine of city politics. Here, policies on trade, tax, and public works are hammered out in debate and public negotiation. Election to the assembly is open, but hard-fought: every league musters its members and allies for a show of numbers, and no single interest holds sway for long.
The Seal-Bearers, or Ritual Council, are the spiritual and ceremonial core of Yínhǎi’s order. Way-seers, Priors, and recognized elders of ancestral societies keep the records, oversee the swearing of oaths, and arbitrate the city’s gravest disputes. No major contract, appointment, or muster is legitimate without the stamp or blessing of the Seal-Bearers. Their authority derives as much from memory and ritual performance as from doctrine; during times of uncertainty, it is often the Ritual Council that guides the city through crisis by recalling precedent or invoking the traditions of recognition.
Yínhǎi is also a regular host for the Imperial Grand Convocation, one of the few cities outside the heartlands where the assemblies of the Empire gather in full. For these occasions, the city’s squares are hung with the banners of every province, and the ritual of Silver Reckoning is enacted: a ceremony where disputes between regions, guilds, and even foreign parties are arbitrated, witnessed, and if resolution be reached, sealed by public oath before the entire city. The spectacle is at once theater and governance, blending formal address, debate, and carefully orchestrated symbolism. In Yínhǎi, such rites are the living foundation of authority, pageantry through which memory is refreshed and order renewed.
In daily life, the city’s politics are enacted through festivals, public readings, and the performance of both grievance and gratitude. Market openings, launching a new ship, the first cutting of a levee after storm season, all are marked by ritual. The Prior’s chapels, in particular, are sought out by rivals wishing to reconcile in public, or to have bargains blessed before risk is taken. The city’s great ledger is not only a record of accounts, but of agreements and betrayals. Each year, the Roll of Oaths is read aloud at the Harvest Festival, and the names of those who kept or broke their word are cheered or quietly noted by all.
External Entanglements
Though Yínhǎi guards its autonomy with iron resolve, the city stands at the Empire’s frontier—where fortunes, powers, and perils all arrive from beyond the horizon. Here, the affairs of Sangmuryeon, Sōnglǐng, Cǎoyuán, and even the distant Tsukiyumi are not distant rumors but daily realities, woven into the city’s rhythms and ambitions.
Sangmuryeon, with its steel foundries and deep coffers, is both rival and occasional partner. Trade across the bay is brisk but wary: Sangmuryeon’s merchants vie for contracts on the city’s western docks, investing in Yínhǎi’s granaries and, some whisper, its politics. Guild masters and dock syndicates argue over quotas and tariffs with Sangmuryeon’s trade envoys, while rumors of espionage—saboteurs in the forges, Company bribes in city elections—are as common as spring storms. Yet, in years of poor harvest, grain from Yínhǎi often flows north and west, and in return, Sangmuryeon’s steel and coal keep the city’s forges and rail lines running.
To the north-northwest lies Sōnglǐng Province, land of pine forests and the Xurhén. Each winter, caravans arrive trailing furs, pelts, and wild iron. Yínhǎi is home to the only major urban Xurhén shrine in the Empire’s west. It has sparked controversy among the Ternary Prior faithful, but remains under the protection of city pact and the quiet threat of northern reprisal. Many a Yínhǎi captain or warehouse chief claims Xurhén kin, and the city’s winter festivals are spiced with foreign stories, ice-wine, and music that carries the echo of the boreal north.
Beyond the fields and marshes to the north lies the Cǎoyuán steppe. Here, the city’s reach thins, but its interest does not. Grain and tools flow north by caravan and barge. In return, news of the steppe’s shifting alliances, border skirmishes, and rare but vital horses finds its way south. Border brotherhoods from Pōlù and northern leagues often recruit in Yínhǎi, and in troubled years, the city’s militia is quietly reinforced by seasoned riders from the edge of Empire.
Tsukiyumi’s shadow falls across the sea. Its ships and merchants are known in the port—sometimes as rivals, sometimes as honored guests. There is a legacy of old treaties, dockworker alliances, and the occasional naval standoff, always resolved through the city’s public courts and the ritual of the Silver Reckoning. Tsukiyumi’s envoys, when present, are watched closely. Alliances are brokered in tea-houses and markets, while city leagues and Priorist chapels compete for influence in negotiations that are as much about theater as policy. In docks and alleyways, one still hears tales of northern daimyo whose ancestors once wintered with the dockworker leagues or sent rice convoys down the Whitewater for emergency grain exchange. Among the city’s grain warehouses and militia musters, names like Akegata, Hyōzan, or Hoshikura still carry weight. These clans descend from the matagi, have roots in Hinterland fortresses, and maintain fierce autonomy. They brokered shelter in winter ports among other ritual pacts with Yínhǎi's peasant guilds long before steam and Company paper changed the coast. Even now, the harbor leagues of Yínhǎi stage formal greetings for visiting envoys from Tsukiyumi’s highland forts, reaffirming ancient tide compacts sworn in salt, ash, and millet. Some say that in recent years, as northern clans grow wary of southern entanglements, they’ve once again looked to Yínhǎi for a quieter, older kind of partnership based on memory, not finance.
Through it all, Yínhǎi’s first loyalty is to itself and to the Empire. Foreigners may visit, bargain, and even settle for a time, but no outside power holds a quarter, a council seat, or a recognized syndicate in the city’s halls. Every treaty, tariff, or pact must be debated before the Dockmasters, witnessed by the Ritual Council, and recorded in the city’s great ledger. When foreign ambitions run afoul of Yínhǎi’s interests—or its memory—they find themselves meeting not only the city’s bureaucracy, but the unspoken unity of its leagues and the vigilant gaze of its people.
Company Entanglements
Despite its public face of neutrality and lawfulness, Yínhǎi remains one of the Governor and Company of Chartered Economists’ most heavily watched ports. It was here, after all, that their first northern office beyond the southern republics quietly opened beneath the banner of a trade mediation bureau. From that small foothold, their influence has spread like mildew through the province’s grain logistics, sea-lane insurance, and even municipal records. Officially, the Company’s presence is merely consultative. In practice, many large-scale shipments pass through the grain silos or drydock leases with Company notarization secured through a dense web of subcontractors, price indices, and discreet arbitration offices in the harbor quarter.
Even so, Yínhǎi would never submit in full. The old dockworker leagues remain powerful, their collective voting rights protected under Pōlù’s recognition compacts. Attempts by Company-backed firms to restructure harbor labor or standardize toll rates have repeatedly failed. The grain cooperatives, while deeply embedded in Company-backed futures trading, have also refused full restructuring. Every year, negotiations over storage rights, inspection access, and bulk loading practices devolve into minor crises resolved only when Company agents retreat to more favorable southern ports or renegotiate terms under the watchful eyes of Yínhǎi’s assembly scribes.
Conflict simmers behind the scenes. Company envoys are often seen walking under escort, watched not only by city militias but by freelance “shore overseers” drawn from old peasant mutual-aid leagues. The disappearance of two Company accountants in 4E 443 remains unsolved. Their ledgers were later found washed ashore, missing several pages. Rumors of sabotage, false valuations, and ghost syndicates tied to rival imperial merchant guilds swirl through the teahouses of the Old Quay. Still, the Company endures, adapting as it always does by slow, insinuating entanglement.
What the Company fears most in Yínhǎi is loss of influence. Unlike in the republics, here there are no concessions, no privileged enforcement mechanisms, and no standing banks wholly under their control. Every account ledger they keep has a local shadow copy stored by a competing grain auditor or port notary. Every official contract is matched by an unofficial understanding—old, local, and fiercely guarded.
Yínhǎi’s assemblies maintain a delicate but firm posture toward the Company: open courtesy, procedural scrutiny, and relentless memory. Each proposal from a Company envoy, whether to streamline dock inspections, adjust grain-weight protocols, or trial a new warehousing metric, is publicly recorded, discussed, and archived. The Assembly Hall keeps a deep record of every contractual clause or pricing formula offered by Company offices, and any delegate may request a historical comparison before casting a vote. As one harbor scribe quipped, “They innovate nothing we haven’t already declined.”
When disputes arise, they do not escalate to ritual. The Company’s agents are expected to present themselves not merely as economic actors, but as parties seeking recognition. This means appearing before witness circles that include dockworker representatives, guild elders, coastal ritualists, and scribes from the Grand Secretariat’s northern liaison bureau. These liaisons, often Way-seers or dispute arbiters, carry little official enforcement power but great procedural authority. Their presence ensures that even the most technical disagreements over warehouse taxation or signal flag interpretation must be phrased in terms of fairness, precedent, and mutual obligation.
On rare occasions, the Grand Secretariat itself has intervened. The most famous case, in 4E 443, followed the exposure of a Company-backed effort to buy out several ancestral warehouse leases under shell names. The Secretariat, appearing unannounced during an assembly session, presented stamped cross-province telegrams showing the pattern of shell acquisitions. No laws had been broken, but the Assembly, guided by the Secretariat’s quiet presence, invalidated the purchases on the grounds of “nontransparent standing.” That ruling has since been cited in dozens of local compacts across the north.
More often, however, the Grand Secretariat lets the assemblies take the lead, preserving Yínhǎi’s role as both frontier and filter. The Company has learned, sometimes the hard way, that here, recognition cannot be bought with shares, but must be bargained for in the open, under the gaze of ancestors, auditors, and the ever-watchful harbor wind.
The chaebols of Sangmuryeon are both pillars and puppets in the Company’s long shadow. Officially, they operate as proud corporate dynasties in steel, banking, logistics, and synthetic fibers under the banners of storied family names. Their daily operations, however, depend on a tangle of Company-backed loans, offshore subsidiaries, and exclusive procurement rights. The Company does not openly own the chaebols, yet its fingerprints mark every major contract: interest rates set in Eastern World Island markets, insurance policies underwritten in southern republics, even raw material supply lines quietly brokered through Company satellite offices in Sangmuryeon’s own coastal cities.
These links grant the chaebols tremendous leverage. Sangmuryeon steel, processed in arc-lit foundries and branded with chaebol crests, is shipped by the tens of thousands of tons through Yínhǎi’s deepwater piers with every bill of lading and customs record is mirrored in Company accounts. Credit lines extended to Sangmuryeon shipping firms come with “preferred partners” clauses, such that Yínhǎi’s dock syndicates and grain leagues must choose between Company-licensed brokers and their own ancestral trading compacts. The chaebols, aware of their own dependency, push for favorable inspection regimes and lobbying agreements in Yínhǎi’s assembly, while Company auditors circulate as “advisors” in both Sangmuryeon and the Empire’s portside council halls.
Competition within Sangmuryeon itself can be brutal. Rival chaebols bid against one another not only for Company favor, but for exclusive transit rights, grain quotas, and the city’s lucrative dockyard contracts. In the process, they recruit Company-trained compliance officers and legal tacticians to circumvent local tariffs, outmaneuver city guilds, and, if necessary, force delays on shipments by invoking obscure points of Company code. It is not uncommon for disputes between chaebols to spill into the courts of Yínhǎi, with Company lawyers representing both sides, each hoping to curry favor by extracting some new concession or legal precedent.
These entanglements are more than financial. Company-sponsored cultural initiatives in art festivals, technical education, and youth exchange programs ensure that Sangmuryeon’s rising elite internalize Company logic as the price of advancement. Graduates fluent in both Company and chaebol dialects circulate between Sangmuryeon, the southern republics, and the Empire’s western ports, forming a cosmopolitan but self-interested cadre who serve as brokers, mediators, and, at times, informants.
For the ordinary citizens of Sangmuryeon, the chaebol-Company nexus is both invisible and inescapable. Prices on basic goods rise and fall with distant commodity indices. Company compliance officers audit family-run workshops, demanding upgrades or threatening blacklisting. Even the local news, sponsored by chaebol advertising budgets, is quietly reviewed by “friendly consultants” whose real allegiance is to the credit ledgers of Company finance.
Yínhǎi’s seasoned dockmasters and Priorist notaries watch all these with wary calculation. They know that behind every new partnership or export boom, a chain of Company interests and chaebol ambitions reach all the way across the strait. They know that the city’s own autonomy depends on never letting any one foreign power, or its proxies, buy out more than a share of the port’s memory.
Lǐjiāng Province (澧江省; Fount of Sweetness)
(Canal Syndics, Floodplain Rivalries, and the Southern Drift)
Landscape and Geography
Lǐjiāng Province is the great lowland of the middle Empire, a land where the river’s slow hand draws and redraws the map yearly. From the wooded ridges of the north and the last hummocks of Lǔyáng in the west, the province spills down in a wide green apron, its surface scored by the braids and distributaries of the Great River and its kin. Here, flatness is destiny: the land barely rises above water’s edge, and a dozen times a generation, the river reminds all who dwell here that the ground beneath their feet is only borrowed.
In spring, meltwater and rain rush down from the uplands, swelling every channel and flooding the old silt beds. Broad wetlands spread outward from the main course: fields vanish beneath sheets of brown water, and only the willow-crowned levees, the dike villages, and the patchwork roofs of canal towns show above the flood. These inundations are both curse and blessing. Their silt left behind makes the province one of the Empire’s richest for grain, lotus, and vegetables. After waters recede, the land is black and fertile—ready for two, sometimes three plantings a year.
Canals, both ancient and new, crisscross Lǐjiāng from every direction. Some are straight as an engineer’s rule, others meander like old cattle paths, their origins lost in the memory of vanished villages. The oldest canals are said to have been blessed by river spirits, their banks lined with stone tablets and reed-thatch shrines dating to the age of hydraulic despots. Newer ones are feats of stubborn labor: cut by syndics, raised by guilds, endlessly maintained, rerouted, and debated by boatfolk and farmers alike. Where two canals meet, market towns and floating villages bloom, tethered to piles driven deep into the silt. At the crossroads, one finds teahouses on stilts, songboats tied up for the night, and market rafts lit with colored lanterns.
In dry years, the province is a mosaic of fields, silt islands, and reedbeds. Farmers coax barley and millet from reclaimed mud, while marshes fill with egrets and wild ducks. Bunds and low dikes snake between plots, separating shallow paddies from deeper, permanent ponds stocked with fish and lotus. Orchards of wild pear, persimmon, and candied jujube crowd onto higher mounds, where sweet-sellers hang out their banners when the fruit ripens.
Floods are never far. Each generation remembers years when tributaries breached the levee, summers when dike and dam broke together and whole districts vanished into foam. Every village, guild, and town thus maintains its own slice of the province’s great waterworks: levees woven from willow and clay, floodgates manned in three shifts, and ritual causeways hung with prayer-strips and the banners of syndics who claimed the most recent repair. The largest of these dikes, the Sweetwall, runs for miles along the Great River—a raised, stone-capped barrier wide enough for a horse and cart, lined with shrines and tollbooths at every crossing.
Between these engineered arteries, the landscape remains mutable. New silt islands are born each flood season, claimed by squatters or enterprising canal clans. Old ones vanish, leaving only the memory of their names and a ghostly row of dead willows. In places where the river shifts course, fields are sometimes left stranded yielding wildflowers, sandbars, or secret patches of sweet grass grazed by half-wild sheep and goats.
The rivers are not the only boundaries. To the south, low hills and dry ridges rise before the land drops away toward the Great River and the open floodplain. Westward, dikes and canals grow wider, converging near the great floating markets where Lǐjiāng’s produce is loaded for the journey toward the Inland Sea or the Southern Republics. To the north, the wetland mists thicken, and whole villages seem to float, half-seen, among the reeds and the morning fog.
Everywhere, water means both danger and livelihood. The people of Lǐjiāng have built their homes on piles or raised ground, with flood-marks carved into their thresholds and boats always within reach. The river is the main road, the best defense, and the greatest threat. Its moods are read with the attention other provinces give to imperial decrees: a dark line on the levee, a swirl of fish at a crossing, the echo of a night heron’s call. All these may herald fortune, disaster, or simply the need to call the nearest syndic to renegotiate a water-sharing pact.
Towns, Compacts, and River Roads
In Lǐjiāng, towns are born from water, and every settlement is defined by its relationship to the river’s restless flow no matter how humble or grand. The province’s great canal towns sit at the junctions of distributaries and engineered spillways, their main streets doubling as levee-tops or barge landings, their markets spilling out onto floating rafts and stone-paved embankments. Smaller hamlets cluster along the inner dike roads, their houses perched on mounds of mud and brush, surrounded by patches of lotus and sweet flag.
The architecture is distinct: wooden houses built high on pilings, with broad eaves and screened walkways for moving between buildings in flood season. In older towns, one finds half-ruined watchtowers built to monitor dike integrity or sign for help during a breach, and bridges arched high enough for loaded grain barges to slip under, even when when rivers run high. Every town has its own boat-slip, and in busy months, harbor pools fill with painted festival barges, market rafts, and migratory houseboats from up- and downriver.
Compacts are the glue of Lǐjiāng’s social and political life. Each town, whether river or land-based, works by a patchwork of water-sharing agreements, toll treaties, and seasonal alliances. Some compacts are carved into wood or stone at the local shrine, others sung aloud at the annual boat festival, still others passed in secret between syndics and boatfolk elders over cups of honey wine. Reputation is built not only on wealth or harvest, but on the memory of how a town honored (or broke) its compacts during the last big flood, the most recent dike repair, or a contested canal rerouting.
At the heart of these agreements stand the canal syndics—part engineer, part magistrate, part merchant-broker. Each syndic is selected by a council of guild elders, boatfolk, and river priests, their authority both technical and ritual. Syndics are responsible for overseeing dike maintenance, negotiating water allocation during drought, and setting tolls for barge traffic. They must also mediate disputes between landfolk and boatfolk, and even arbitrate when a trade league accuses a rival of sabotage or “borrowing” floodgates. In years of crisis, a syndic may command the entire population of a town or district for emergency levee work, granting them power rivaling that of a provincial governor—but only as long as their skill and luck hold.
Each new flood season sees the reaffirmation of compacts in noisy riverside ceremonies: Ternary Prior presbyters bless main sluice-gates and wine and sweet cakes. Boatfolk hoist their banners atop signal pole. Engineers chant summarized chronicles of past repairs, and promise to “read the water true.” Toll rates for the coming season are disucussed in open assemblies. At the Sweetflow Festival, rival towns may settle old debts or renew alliances by staging joint barge pageants, complete with mock battles and competitions of speed, wit, and cunning.
Between towns runs a network of river roads, channels dredged, walled, and maintained by overlapping coalitions of syndics, guilds, and merchant leagues. These are the true arteries of the province. River militias in their feathered helmets bearing feathered banners patrol for smugglers and toll-dodgers. Secretive night pilots, familiar with every oxbow and hidden channel, ferry contraband and rumors past customs towers. Barges and ferries serve as both cargo vessels and traveling courtrooms, where disputes are resolved and bargains struck as the current dictates.
A town’s prestige is measured by the reach of its compacts and the renown of its syndic. The most famous count as much legendary negotiators as engineers in their ranks—skilled in both flood prediction and the subtle arts of keeping the peace when water, money, and memory collide. To command a sluice is to command fate, and to break a compact is to risk fortune where the rivers can swallow memory in a night.
Grain, Trade, and Contraband
Grain is the pulse of Lǐjiāng. It shapes the calendar, the fortunes of towns, and the very pace of daily life. The province’s lowland soils and silt islands yield two—sometimes three—harvests a year, depending on the floods. Rice dominates water-bound paddies, with millet, barley, and lotus root cultivated on higher ridges and silt mounds. Even the smallest hamlets keep granaries built high on stone piers, both as protection from the river’s whims and as a badge of local pride. In bountiful years, the fields seem an endless checkerboard of emerald and gold stretching to the horizon, mirrored in the water at dawn.
Trade is the river’s second gift. Every morning, market barges and cargo rafts set out from the canal towns, laden with sacks of polished rice, preserved eel, pickled mustard, and baskets of candied lotus and water chestnut, the sticky-sweet confections that give Lǐjiāng. Barges drift downriver toward the Western Sea and the great markets of Lǔyáng, or turn south through hidden distributaries into the Republics—sometimes with legal goods, often with unregistered cargo. Northward cargoes flow to tributaries in Zhēnxún and the heartlands, feeding the inland provinces and carrying news, contracts, and rumor with every shipment.
At major canal junctions, floating markets come to life: stalls bobbing on rafts, vendors peddling everything from jujube cakes and lacquer bowls to woven mats and river pearls. Syndicate scribes tally trade levies and arbitrate price disputes from houseboats moored to the quay, while fishers and boatfolk sell the day’s catch directly over the gunwale. Toll rights are fiercely guarded, and entire guilds sometimes rise or fall on a single season’s trade receipts.
In Lǐjiāng, as in all true riverlands, contraband flows as readily as water. Smugglers and rebel ferrymen have long made use of hidden oxbows, night channels, and the endless shifting of silt islands, honed over generations of shifting channels and elusive borders. Every pilot on the Sweetwall knows a half-dozen “ghost water” routes: hidden oxbows masked by reeds, submerged causeways, silt islands that rise after floods and vanish come autumn. Night shipments are a choreography of whispers: lanterns doused, poles wrapped in cloth, skiffs lashed together and poled through the shallow mist as lookouts on levees turn away or drift into song. On a busy festival week, a single barge may carry legal grain, untaxed honey, packets of forbidden books, southern indigo, or even contraband arms, all under a false registry and a river’s worth of bribed paperwork.
Rival merchant leagues treat smuggling as both enterprise and weapon. “Accidental” dike breaches might divert floodwater to sabotage a competitor’s warehouse or erase evidence of an illicit cargo. Toll-keepers and canal syndics choose their allegiances carefully. Some syndics are infamous for turning a blind eye in exchange for a cut; others run “clean lanes” with armed patrols and make public spectacle of burning seized contraband to signal their incorruptibility. When tempers flare, syndicate shadow wars erupt: canal locks sabotaged, signal flags changed at midnight, even hired riverfolk raids staged under festival cover.
Relations to the Republics and Company
The proximity to the Republics—and the endless border of water—means imperial customs are always on guard, but seldom in full control. The Company and its southern agents pay handsomely for favorable toll rates, information, or a night’s silence at a crucial lock. Boatfolk have their own loyalties and will, on occasion, spirit a refugee or rebel out of the province under the nose of the river police. The phrase “the river knows, but tells no tales” is both warning and boast.
Lǐjiāng becomes a natural way-station for goods and people that ought not cross imperial lines. Southern traders arrive with “gifts” of rare sugar, porcelain, Company gadgets, expecting silent passage in return for information, black-market seeds, or a share of the tolls. Not all trade is material: rumors, bandit poetry, and coded manifestos drift upriver as easily as goods. River militias may occasionally stage high-profile crackdowns, but most know that every captain, prior, or syndic has a friend or cousin with ties to the Republics.
The Governor and Company of Chartered Economists has learned to operate within these currents rather than against them. Its southern agents are adept at buying information, trading in silence, and, when necessary, bribing an entire market town for a night’s peace. Company cipher-wheels and encrypted ledgers pass along the “sweet lanes”—so-called for the candied fruit and honey cakes that mark a favored smuggler’s cargo. Company notaries have even been known to settle disputes between rival Lǐjiāng leagues, offering “mediation” (and hidden subsidies) in exchange for preferential access to festival markets or grain stores.
Lǐjiāng’s boatfolk have their own loyalties and traditions. For the right cause—or the right story—they will spirit a refugee, rebel, or even a fugitive Company whistleblower out of the province, hiding them in market barges, festival processions, or floating shrines. “The river knows, but tells no tales,” say the elders: meaning that true power flows with those who can keep secrets, settle debts, and read the shifting tides of trust as surely as the turning of a wheel.
Sweets Industry
Sugar, in its many forms, is as much a currency as a commodity. Syrup and honey guilds maintain their own codes, their contracts often sealed with sweet cakes or festival candies rather than ink. For many outsiders, Lǐjiāng’s confections are a delight prized in the southern republics and Tsukiyumi as festival gifts, wedding tokens, or bribes in delicate negotiations. More than one trade dispute has been solved (or started) with the right basket of candied lotus.
Nowhere in the Empire is sugar so intimately woven into daily life and political intrigue as in Lǐjiāng. The province’s lowland climate is ideal for crops that yield sweetness: reeds, honey-laden flowers, even water chestnut and candied lotus root. Beyond abundance, it is artistry, organization, and ceremonial importance of its sweets that make Lǐjiāng a confectioner’s capital.
Candy-making here is both cottage industry and guild affair. Villages claim signature recipes—glutinous rice balls stuffed with flower paste, maltose taffies pulled into ribbons, jujube stuffed with sugared seeds, or syrup-glazed peanuts pressed into crisp cakes. These specialties are passed down within families and jealously guarded, sometimes registered with local compact notaries to prevent imitation by rival towns. Some confections are associated with certain festivals or rites: candied kumquats at the Sweetflow Festival, honey cakes for river-blessing days, and intricately layered flower cakes exchanged at betrothal.
At a higher level, Syrup Guilds and Honey Syndicates wield both economic and political influence. These guilds control access to the best sugarcane, beehives, and drying houses, negotiating with canal syndics for transport rights or festival monopolies. Their contracts are famous for being sealed, literally, with a sweet: signatories eat a morsel from a single cake, and the last crumb is dropped into the river as both pledge and offering. Guilds maintain their own secret codes: recipes written in rebus, color, or pattern rather than script, all shared only with trusted initiates.
Floating confectionery markets are a seasonal highlight. At festival time, dozens of candy-barges, decorated with lanterns and streamers, tie up along the main quays of market towns. Here, children trade pennies for sweet skewers, while elders broker more serious deals—paying dowries or resolving disputes by the exchange of rare candies. Political gifts and festival tributes often include elaborate baskets: candied lotus, honeyed walnuts, brittle spun sugar “flowers,” and mirrorlike crystalized fruit. In the Republics and in Tsukiyumi, Lǐjiāng’s sweets are status objects, sought after as tokens of favor, wedding gifts, or even subtle bribes for river access.
For the people of Lǐjiāng, candy serves as language, ritual, and insurance. The phrase “a sweet debt paid” can mean a debt of coin, a favor repaid, or even a peace negotiated after years of rivalry. More than once, a bitter canal feud has been dissolved (or ignited anew) with the exchange of the right festival basket. Even river priests recognize the power of sweets: offerings at shrines almost always include a portion of the best confections, shared with spirits and ancestors alike.
Beekeeping is as old as the dikes in Lǐjiāng. Along every levee and orchard mound, one finds woven hives perched atop poles, protected from floods, shaded by willow and pear. Boatfolk and landfolk alike maintain hives of native river bees, prized for their gentle temperament and the subtle, floral honey gathered from rapeseed, lotus, and wild jujube blossom. Each spring, bee-keeping guilds parade their finest combs through the market on lacquered trays, auctioning off the first-cut honey for festival cakes, offerings, and sweet medicines. In years of good blossom, a single hive’s honey might pay a laborer’s rent through winter.
Fruits, roots, and seeds are the heart of Lǐjiāng’s candied arts. The region is famed for jujubes, crisp lotus root, water chestnut, and even wild pear, each boiled in honey or malt syrup, then dried or pressed into glossy morsels. These confections, cut into jewel-like slices and arranged in lacquer boxes, are central to gift-giving and ritual: used in wedding baskets, river festivals, and as tokens of apology or alliance. Some villages guard recipes for rose-petal preserves, candied bean flowers, or sticky-sweet “river pearls” made from glutinous rice and wild grape.
Maltose, not cane sugar, is the province’s everyday sweetener. Made by sprouting barley or wheat and cooking down the resulting syrup, maltose is stretched into ropes, pulled into golden threads, and used to bind nuts, jujube, and candied seed into brittle cakes. At the floating markets, you’ll see children and old-timers alike with maltose taffy on bamboo sticks, and every town boasts at least one master puller, renowned for their strength and the translucency of their candy. For many in Lǐjiāng, maltose is the taste of home: less sharp than southern sugar, but beloved for its subtlety and for the patience required to make it.
Sugar itself is a luxury. It arrives by barge from the Republics in tightly sealed chests, sometimes as payment for grain or as a tribute for festival alliances. In the eyes of Lǐjiāng’s folk, southern sugar is an exotic marvel: used to craft rare mirror-cakes for the Sweetflow Festival, or to sweeten the betrothal candies sent as diplomatic gifts to distant cities and foreign envoys. To present a guest with a dish made from pure southern sugar is a sign of respect, and the best confectioners in the province compete for even a small supply, saving it for the year’s most important rituals. Among rival guilds and market towns, the phrase “sweeter than the south” is both compliment and challenge, a reminder that Lǐjiāng’s sweetness is forged from scarcity, skill, and the endless resourcefulness of the riverlands.
Thus, the river brings both fortune and danger. To trade in Lǐjiāng is to court the shifting line between legitimacy and cunning, to weigh the law against necessity, and to know that every grain sack or candy box may carry both profit and secret peril.
Culture and Daily Life
To live in Lǐjiāng is to accept uncertainty as the world’s native rhythm. The river’s moods shape everything: sowing and harvest, courtship and debt, loyalty and humor. Locals are famed for their adaptability and sharp eye for opportunity. Every child learns to pole a boat before they can write, and most adults can recite at least a dozen proverbs about reading water, luck, and the art of a well-timed bargain.
Rituals and festivals spill across the year, as restless as the tides. The calendar’s grandest event is the Sweetflow Festival at spring’s start, when the rivers are at their broadest and every town launches painted barges festooned with silk, lanterns, and banners inscribed with old compacts. Rival flotillas race down the main canal, each crew singing, drumming, and boasting in hopes of drawing the best trade and the favor of river spirits. On these nights, the water glows with floating candles, and lovers whisper promises from opposite boats, tossing candied lotus and honeyed walnuts as pledges.
Boatfolk and landfolk share the province, but not always comfortably. Ancient customs hold that every river town must maintain dual councils ensuring equal say in festivals, water rights, and canal repairs. Marriage alliances bridge these divides, but so do rivalries: a failed dike or lost cargo may spark feuds lasting years, only to be resolved with a well-timed marriage, festival, or basket of sweets.
Religion in Lǐjiāng is a matter of practice more than doctrine. River shrines, levee altars, and floating temples dot the waterways, each tended by a prior, canal monk, or revered matriarch. Offerings of confections, fruit, and sweet wine are left for river spirits, ancestors, and the Three Engineers, whom Lǐjiāng legends claim to have charted the first canals with only a reed staff and a handful of barley. Rituals for flood appeasement, dike-blessing, and debt forgiveness are public, boisterous, and always accompanied by the distribution of candy or sweet cakes.
The Ternary Prior has found particular favor here. Unlike older river cults or ancestral shrines that guard every hamlet, Prior chapels are distinguished by their open colonnades, triple-spiral banners, and the gentle ringing of handbells at dawn and dusk. Here, prayers are offered for memory, endurance, and the binding of community in clear, patterned canal and market speech. Local presbyters and ritual choirs sing their litanies in antique verse: half in local Northern dialect, half in the court dialect in Zhēnxún.
Where old gods promise luck or vengeance, the Prior’s teaching dwells on solidarity and the unbroken chain of blessing. The Threefold Glory is invoked at every key turning: start of flood season, negotiation of trade compacts, funerals of elders lost to life and river, and binding of festival oaths. Boat-crews pause to mark themselves with three fingers before braving a night crossing. Canal syndics seek blessings on compact scrolls before ratifying new water treaties. Children are brought to chapel steps for their naming, their foreheads marked with a drop of oil and a thread of river water. Even the most skeptical merchant will nod gravely to the Threefold Glory’s blessing before the year’s first shipment. The presbyter leads prayers for “right witness,” that every vow be spoken before all, every debt repaid, and every memory preserved for those who come after. In times of crisis, chapel doors stand open day and night, and it is said the simple act of kneeling by the spiral seal is enough to summon witnesses or shelter, no questions asked. Over generations, the Prior has grown from curiosity to companion. In levee towns and grain ports, under bridge-shrines and barge canopies, the triune memory of the Ternary Prior now weaves through the very cadence of life. In this way, the Ternary Prior has become a hidden bone of Lǐjiāng’s moral order, reminding all who pass beneath its banners that what is remembered and witnessed endures, long after the floods have receded.
Music and performance are woven into all of this. Barge-theaters float from town to town with troupes of singers, drummers, and masked dancers performing tales of clever merchants, tragic floods, and wily smuggler-princes. Every market boasts at least one storyteller skilled in improvisation—ready to turn the latest scandal, river rescue, or market rivalry into a parable, joke, or cautionary verse.
To outsiders, Lǐjiāng folk may seem slippery, quick-talking, or even a little sly. Within the province, reputation is everything: to be known for fairness in trade, generosity in festival, or courage in a flood is to have one’s name remembered and sung long after the waters shift and the old channels are gone.
To-do List
Provinces of the Empire of the Three Seas
(Codex Outline, Expanded & Corrected)
卤阳省 (Lǔyáng Province)
Real-world analog: Shandong Peninsula
Location: Southwest coastline of the Empire, directly north of the Great River (大河), opening to the inner sea that divides Hin-Chuk and Tsihloujan lands reaching up to Lǔyáng.
Setting: The “old coast” of the Empire, cradle of salt harvests and port trade. Hosts the Northern shore of the great inland sea.
Geography: Fertile coastal plains, low salt marshes, canal-woven delta, scattered low hills, and a storm-prone, cliffed coastline. Old seawalls and embankments mark centuries of struggle with the tides.
Character: Renowned for practical, self-reliant folk, pragmatic guilds, ancient shrines, and a tradition of ritual piety. Agricultural bounty (especially grains and salt), bustling canal markets, and port cities with cosmopolitan influences.
Cultural Notes: Home to ancient leagues of salt harvesters and canal diggers. Known for a distinctive dialect and wry proverbs.
Conflicts & Hooks: Periodic flooding, salt guild feuds, smuggling through the reed marshes, memory of early despotism and canal dynasties.
晋幽省 (Jìnyōu Province)
Real-world analog: Shanxi
Location: Inland and east of Lǔyáng; plateau region just north of the Great River, forming a barrier between the heartlands and the Empire’s east.
Setting: High, wind-battered loess plateaus with deep-cut river valleys, ancient trade roads, and strong defensive positions.
Geography: Dramatic ridges, stone-built villages, frost-hardened farmlands, iron-rich hills, and river gorges. The climate is dry and cold, especially in winter.
Character: Stoic, enduring, with a reputation for technical ingenuity and skepticism toward outsiders. Famous for fortress towns, legendary debating societies, and epic tales of siege and survival.
Cultural Notes: Region of engineers and smiths; once seat of embankment despots and their ritual “arithmeters.” Strong traditions of local governance and sharp-witted negotiation.
Conflicts & Hooks: Resource disputes, engineer lineages, faded dynasties, contested mining rights, legendary lost fortresses.
珍循郡 (Zhēnxún Commandery/Prefecture)
Real-world analog: Henan heartland (without the Yellow River)
Location: Transitional zone, bordered west by Lǔyáng, east by Jìnyōu, north by Pōlù, south by Lǐjiāng. Serves as the Empire’s mythic core.
Setting: The Empire’s “cradle,” defined by interlacing small rivers flowing toward the Western Sea and numerous tributaries feeding the Great River. Network of walled towns, ancestral gardens, and ancient sites.
Geography: Rolling alluvial plains, orchard-dotted riverbanks, patchwork fields, and sacred groves. Known for ritual causeways and legendary market fairs.
Character: Conservative yet quietly innovative; proud keepers of ancient compacts, storytellers, and memory-keepers.
Cultural Notes: Origin place of the “Way-Seers” and the downfall of the hydraulic despots. Ritual centers, legendary debating halls, and the sites of the old embankment experiments.
Conflicts & Hooks: Competing town assemblies, ancestral cults, river rites, and the ever-present memory of cycles of tyranny and renewal.
澧江省 (Lǐjiāng Province)
Real-world analog: Lower riverlands of northern Anhui/Jiangsu
Location: East of Lǔyáng, south of Zhēnxún and Jìnyōu, north of the Great River; major crossroads for river trade.
Setting: Canals and distributaries crisscrossing flat, often flood-prone land; thriving with floating markets, riverside towns, and trade guilds.
Geography: Wetland lowlands, silt islands, shifting river courses, dike villages, and levee-built shrines. Boatfolk and watermen form a visible caste.
Character: Clever, shrewd, adaptive; quick to see opportunity, known for festival barges and an “open hand, closed ledger” ethos.
Cultural Notes: Famed for water festivals, river-barge theaters, and seasonal migrations. Rivalry between upland engineers and canal syndics, as well as shenanigans with the Republics and Company to the South.
Conflicts & Hooks: Dike failures, merchant league rivalries, flood refugees, shadow networks of smugglers and rebel ferrymen.
坡麓省 (Pōlù Province, “At the Foot of the Plateau”)
Real-world analog: Hebei
Location: To the west and north of Zhēnxún and Jìnyōu, forming the transition from heartland river valleys to the open northern plains.
Setting: Fertile, open countryside below the plateau rim; strategic highways connect east and north.
Geography: Broad river valleys, patchwork grain fields, low rolling hills, and market towns set amid old earthwork fortifications.
Character: Practical, steady, sometimes insular; grain belt of the Empire, “first to fight, last to fall” in times of incursion.
Cultural Notes: Noted for cooperative peasant leagues, spring horse fairs, and traditions of communal defense.
Conflicts & Hooks: Steppe raids, market rivalries, land reclamation disputes, borderland “brotherhoods” and anti-bandit compacts.
草原省 (Cǎoyuán Province, Steppe Province)
Real-world analog: Inner Mongolian steppe
Location: True northern frontier, bordering the steppe beyond Pōlù and Jìnyōu.
Setting: Vast grasslands, seasonal grazing lands, wind-swept horizons; few fixed towns, but networked seasonal encampments and sacred groves.
Geography: Endless steppe, rolling hills, ancient burial mounds, and shifting river-courses. Nomadic and semi-nomadic populations with deep traditions of horse-herding and shamanic rites.
Character: Proud, independent, fiercely loyal to kin and band; skilled in mounted warfare, poetry, and animal husbandry.
Cultural Notes: Semi-autonomous ranger companies; blending of Empire and steppe traditions; seasonal trade and tribute with the heartland.
Conflicts & Hooks: Frontier wars, inter-clan feuds, imperial attempts at settlement, rangers’ legendary midnight raids.
松岭省 (Sōnglǐng Province, Pine Ridge Province)
Real-world analog: Southern Manchuria (Liaoning)/remote north
Location: Far northwest, remote and sparsely settled; beyond the usual reach of imperial councils.
Setting: Rugged, pine-clad highlands, harsh winters, wild river valleys, scattered hamlets.
Geography: Mountain ridges, dense forests, deep snow in winter; home to hidden valleys and secretive shrines.
Character: Known for the Xurhen people—a culturally distinct population of hunters, trappers, and mystics, with unique oral traditions and shamanic ceremonies.
Cultural Notes: Xurhen rites, border outposts, legendary hermits; viewed as exotic and sometimes uncanny by southerners.
Conflicts & Hooks: Encroaching Empire, lost shrines, smuggler hideouts, mysterious disappearances in the snow, legendary “spirit roads.”
Visual/Map Placement Reference:
Lǔyáng: Southwest coastal, north of the Great River
Jìnyōu: Directly east of Lǔyáng, inland, plateau
Zhēnxún: In between Lǔyáng and Jìnyōu, heartland core
Lǐjiāng: East of Lǔyáng, south of Zhēnxún/Jìnyōu, along the Great River
Pōlù: North and west of Zhēnxún/Jìnyōu, foot of plateau, below the steppe
Cǎoyuán: Northernmost, pure steppe, bordering Empire’s reach
Sōnglǐng: Remote northwest pine forests, Xurhen territory
The Ternary Prior in the Empire of the Three Seas
Atmosphere and Social Role:
The Ternary Prior is not a monolithic, centralized “Church” but a widely respected ritual tradition, woven into the everyday life of the Empire’s cities and villages. Chapels and Priories stand open and inviting, rather than forbidding or fortress-like. Worship is marked by song, memory, and an understated but unbreakable dignity.
“The chapel of the Ternary Prior lay quiet as the rain began again. No drums of alarm here, no shouted orders... From the belfry of the chapel of the Ternary Prior, the choir began its evening practice. Voices drifted down, pale and haunting, threading between the clamor of hammers and the muted tramp of boots. Below, a line of townsfolk, led by Lady Gwenno herself, carried a banner of the Threefold Glory from ward to ward, pausing at each barricade to offer prayer and the promise of memory. As they passed beneath old arcades, folk pressed their hands to the lintels, some murmuring thanks, some simply weeping.”
Rituals and Personal Devotion:
Worship in the Ternary Prior is public, participatory, and focused on the Threefold Glory (the Hidden, the Word, and the Flame). Ritual language is both familiar and dignified—prayers for memory, steadfastness, and blessing in daily acts.
“She knelt at the threshold, fingertips pressed to the cold stone. For a moment, words failed her. Too many thoughts, too many losses pressing in at once. Quietly, she spoke the half-remembered prayer her father had once taught her, the old Gwyllion words a comfort in the hush.
‘Cuddiedig, Gair, a’r Fflam—cadw ni ar y ffordd, taniwch ein calonau. And if there’s peace for those who went before… let Damian find it, wherever the waters carried him.’
For a long moment, she simply knelt, letting the silence speak for her. When she rose, the stars were just beginning to show through the open roof, and the city below murmured with restless life. She pressed her palm to the spiral, then let her hand fall. The way forward was not certain, but the weight in her heart had shifted, gentled by memory, steadied by prayer.”
Social Function and Moral Imagination:
The Prior and the chapel serve as keepers of memory and community. They bless unions, comfort the grieving, and serve as a steadying presence in times of crisis or siege. The Ternary Prior’s teachings emphasize endurance, the blessing of covenant, and the witness of community, not world-shaking miracles or exclusive salvation.
Symbolism and Ritual Objects:
The triple-spiral mark—visible in chapels and on banners—represents the unity of the Hidden, the Word, and the Flame.
Banners and bells mark ritual time and civic memory.
Incense and prayer echo both household and communal devotion.
No Monopoly or Universal Doctrine:
The Prior’s faith is broad, adaptive, and welcoming, not an exclusive or totalizing force. It offers “memory and blessing,” not coercion or dogma. The Prior may be asked to bless, remember, or witness; but no one is compelled to believe, and many in the Empire mix Ternary devotion with other local or ancestral rites.
Ethos and Theological “Feel”:
No universal salvation, no terror of damnation—just an invitation to memory, covenant, and the blessing of living faithfully, even in a world where power is always shifting.
The faith stands in solidarity with the people, not above them. It blesses their resilience and holds space for their mourning, as in times of siege or loss:
“The city’s heart had no walls of its own... Not weakness, but invitation.”
The Prior’s presence is felt most strongly not in decrees or miracles, but in moments of memory, promise, and quiet endurance.
In the Empire’s Lore:
The Ternary Prior flourishes precisely because there is no monopoly—no singular “truth” or state-backed orthodoxy.
Its rituals anchor memory and moral feeling, helping the Empire’s patchwork of clans, councils, and leagues recognize each other in crisis and in hope.
Its chapels stand “open to the sky and soil”—just like the Empire’s own unwalled squares—serving as centers of remembrance, reconciliation, and blessing.
Music and Sound in the Empire of the Three Seas
Forms and Functions
Across the Empire of the Three Seas, music is neither a courtly ornament nor a divine prerogative—it is a social craft, a memory aid, and a tool of harmony. Most villages and towns maintain local ensembles, but unlike the elaborate ritual orchestras of old southern polities, imperial music favors simplicity, portability, and participation. The focus lies not in sonic grandeur, but in tonal clarity and expressive directness.
Core Instruments and Regional Styles
Four- and Six-String Fiddles (四胡 / 六胡): The most widespread instruments, used both in solo laments and village dances. The four-string variant is common in the plateau provinces like Jìnyōu, while the six-string version, richer in modulation, finds favor both in the more fertile and cosmopolitan regions like Lǐjiāng and the northern steppes.
Pípa (琵琶): Common in both the southern borderlands and heartland towns, the pípa is prized for its range of emotional expression—from percussive brightness in martial pieces to trembling subtlety in bridal or mourning airs.
Gǔqín (古琴): Though rarer and associated with scholars, the seven-stringed guqin maintains a quiet presence among itinerant poets, Way-Seers, and certain contemplative rituals. Its modal systems are older and not always compatible with the more rhythmic forms of folk music.
Hammered Zithers and Box Drums: Found especially in Lǔyáng and the delta provinces, often played in river festivals and harvest ceremonies. These accompany rhythmic work songs, canal dances, and ceremonies for embankment blessings.
Reed Flutes and Clappers: Used in ritual, especially among marsh folk and festival troupes. Their clear tones carry over water and wind, marking boundaries of sacred space or alerting villagers to incoming news or danger.
Melodic Structure and Harmony
Rather than classical Chinese court harmony or large ensemble writing, imperial music emphasizes:
Linear counterpoint: Melody lines interweave modestly, with individual instruments or voices entering in rounds, canons, or call-and-response.
Adaptive tuning: Modes vary regionally; delta provinces use sharper scales to cut through wind and water noise, while loess highlands prefer flatter tones to suit slow ballads and ancestral odes.
Duets and Triads: Songs often focus on intimate pairings—voice and fiddle, guqin and reed flute—evoking conversation more than spectacle.
Cultural Role
Memory Music: Songs encode genealogy, historical events, and watershed negotiations. A well-trained fiddler is often a village’s informal historian.
Honor Songs: Performed at weddings, oath-swearings, and returns from campaign. These carry specific melodic signatures based on one’s province and lineage.
Lament and Protest: In the face of Company intrusion or flood loss, it is not uncommon for canal folk or plateau herders to respond first in song before word or steel. This tradition is protected in many regions under “sorrow clemency” rites.
Leisure and Recognition: Delta guilds and plateau estates host seasonal contests—ballads of endurance, string challenges, and story-duels, where repute is won not by speed or wealth, but by memory and grace.
Musical Mood of the Empire of the Three Seas: A Creative Guide
Core Principles
Simplicity, Honesty, Atmosphere: Imperial music is clean, direct, and deeply rooted in place. It is not “folk” as naive, but as lived: lines are clear, harmonies spare, every ornament has weight.
Memory and Conversation: Songs and instrumental pieces feel like memories half-sung across a courtyard, or dialogues between kin at dusk—never grandiose, always personal.
Northern Tuning: Melodic modes are often pentatonic or hexatonic, but unlike southern styles, they avoid lush ensemble layering. Expect dry, breathy textures and a windblown clarity—“music for walls, terraces, and wind.”
Instrumentation
Fiddles: Four-stringed and six-stringed fiddles lead, sometimes doubled for harmony. Think expressive, sometimes raw, capable of both long mournful notes and nimble dances.
Plucked Strings: Pipa and guqin are key. Pipa for rhythmic vitality, guqin for introspection.
Winds and Percussion: Reed flutes (simple, almost hoarse) and understated percussion (small frame drums, wooden clappers) set ritual pace or evoke village life.
Vocal: When present, voices are unadorned, close-miked, nearly conversational. Polyphony is rare. Duets or call-and-response dominate.
Harmony and Structure
Adapt Modern Japanese Harmony:
Chords: Built on fourths or modal clusters, never “lush jazz” but closer to Sakamoto, Joe Hisaishi, or Hiroki Kikuta—think “poetic ambiguity,” not sentimentality.
Progression: Static harmony or slow, gentle shifts (e.g., I–IV–vi–V, or I–bVII–IV). No “symphonic drive”—just slow breathing.
Pedal Tones: Sustained drones or pedal notes root the melody, like wind humming along a plateau wall.
Counterpoint: Lines weave gently; melodic fragments may repeat, overlap, or “shadow” one another.
Mood, Rhythm, and Texture
Color: Think of earth, stone, and wood—sounds are never shiny. Use subtle detuning, harmonics, and bow noise for realism.
Rhythm: Most pieces are in moderate or slow time—dances (if any) feel like communal work or celebration, not court pageantry. Syncopation is rare, but rubato (expressive timing) is encouraged.
Dynamics: Swell and fade, like weather or memory. Sudden loudness is rare, reserved for moments of collective ritual or emergency.
Atmospheric Guidance for Creators
Imagine:
A solitary guqin at dawn, playing for the returning workers along the levee.
Fiddles in low harmony, echoing between loess walls after the first snow.
Reed flutes calling in a foggy delta village, guiding boats home.
A trio around a fire: pipa, fiddle, and soft voice recounting an ancestor’s stubbornness.
Emotional Palette:
Nostalgic but unsentimental. Resilient, autumnal, with hints of anticipation and restlessness. Even joy feels like hard-won relief.
What To Avoid
Over-orchestration and lavish harmony (no grand “court music” or lush Western strings).
Large choirs or massive percussion sections.
Overly slick production—keep some air, noise, and “imperfection” for authenticity.
In short
Music of the Empire is spare, atmospheric, and locally grounded, with harmony drawn from modern Japanese practice—modal, understated, emotionally complex.
It’s “music that remembers”—and expects its listeners to do the same.