Manchuria

“The Empire does not hurry. It has already outlived you.”

The Manchurian Empire is not merely old. It is continuous. While other nations shattered, reformed, or reinvented themselves in the centuries after The Meteor, Manchuria endured by folding change into ritual. Ancient dynasties fell, rose again, and were reborn as something greater: a monarchy that fused tradition, Shardisite magic, and absolute authority into a single, unbroken machine. The Empire calls itself eternal not as metaphor, but as policy.

Its beating heart is Tokyo, a city of brass and jade where emerald and bronze dragons coil atop clockwork towers and incense smoke mingles with steam exhaust. Calligraphers labor beside artificers. Monks pass scholar-engineers in the streets. Above it all sits the imperial court, radiant with ceremony and suffocating with intrigue. In Tokyo, adventurers become agents, duelists, negotiators, or disposable solutions, navigating court intrigue where a bow can conceal a knife and a compliment can be a death sentence.

In the Northern Marches, caravans, dragon cairns, and ruined forts offer battle and forgotten secrets. Dragons remember oaths. Veterans read the wind like scripture. Among the monasteries, pilgrims seek enlightenment, nobles seek techniques, and spies seek leverage. What is learned here can change destinies, or end them.

Across the eastern archipelago, shrine magic, guild politics, and whispered rebellion turn every stranger into a threat. Every twist of the weather could be an answer to ritual or it could be just the wind.

The Empire is ruled by the Son of Heaven, Emperor Zhu Long, whose reign has outlasted generations. To his subjects, he is divine mandate made flesh. To the court, he is an axis around which power turns. To the world beyond Manchuria, he is a reminder that some crowns did not break when the world did. Manchuria does not expand recklessly. It absorbs patiently.

Manchuria appears eternal. That is its greatest strength and its greatest risk. Empires that believe they cannot fall often forget how to move. And when Manchuria moves, the world notices.

The Son of Heaven is an absolute monarch, his authority both spiritual and temporal. Imperial law flows from his decrees, layered atop centuries of codices and precedents. In practice, governance is enacted by a vast bureaucracy of mandarins, generals, scholars, and ministers, each competing for influence while presenting perfect unity.

Justice is severe, but not blind. Patronage, lineage, and service shape outcomes as much as guilt. Corruption exists, but it is ritualized, regulated, and understood. Bribes are crimes only when they bypass the proper channels.

Publicly, the Empire projects harmony. Privately, factions grind against one another endlessly: noble houses guarding ancestral honor, scholar-engineers advancing shardcraft agendas, and secret martial orders whose loyalties predate the throne itself. Stability is maintained not through peace, but through balance.

Manchuria spans much of Southern Asia, a vast and varied realm bound together by infrastructure, doctrine, and force.

The river heartlands feed millions, where ritual calendars still govern planting even as shard-driven mills hum beside ancient canals. The Jade-Spine Mountains divide provinces and cultures, their passes guarded by monasteries and way-shrines older than the Empire itself. In the Northern Marches, wind-scoured steppes still bear the scars of dragonfire, cairns marking where entire regiments vanished beneath the shadow of wings.

Along the northern coast, abandoned shardisite mines and rusting derricks scar the shores of the Sea of Ghosts. Fortified ports rise amid the wreckage, launching convoys under imperial banners toward haunted waters and foreign markets.

Manchuria’s greatest contradiction is that it is both brutally modern and mythically ancient. Imperial automata patrol streets, tend fields, and guard vaults. Some bear calligraphed sutras etched into brass frames, said to bind spirits of duty and obedience within their shells. Scholar-engineers debate whether these spirits are symbolic or literal. The Empire does not encourage the question.

Dragons, once harbingers of catastrophe, now march beneath imperial banners. Survivors of the Dragon Rebellions were harnessed through bitter campaigns and forbidden rites. Some serve openly as living weapons. Others brood in mountain aeries, unleashed only when necessary. Each represents both victory and warning.

Faith in Manchuria is inseparable from authority. The Emperor’s right to rule is framed not as belief, but as cosmic order. To question it is not heresy, but disruption.

Monasteries guard ancient rites of body and breath, producing masters whose movements seem to ignore physical law. Scholars argue whether these techniques are spiritual, shard-induced, or something older. The monks do not answer.

Divine powers are acknowledged, respected, and subordinated. Angels and demons are studied as forces, not worshipped as masters. Any belief system that claims authority above the throne is quietly dismantled, absorbed, or erased.