The path of the Xiushi is a singular one. Every cultivator travels their own unique journey to ascension, this is so. The path of the Xiushi cannot be traveled alone. Every cultivator practices martial arts according to manuals and traditions, building on the accumulated wisdom of the past. This is also so. Those that believe these truths contradict will not travel far on the path. Most cultivators belong to a confraternity typically called a sect. Most sects can be categorized by two traditions, the Harmonious Path and the Unfettered Path.

The Harmonious path believes that ascension up the chains of heaven must involve reconciliation with heaven's will. They believe they defy fate to fulfill a deeper greater plan, for if Heaven did not truly wish for impossible challenges to be overcome by impossible deeds it would not allow it be so. The Harmonious Path puts great emphasis on anticipating and minimizing the reverberations caused by one's actions, be it in the mortal world or metaphysically. Followers of the Harmonious Path often call themselves righteous, and the Unfettered Path wicked.

The Unfettered Path embraces defiance of heaven. Some see preordained roles and fate as shackles that must be shattered, others merely deny their own chosen place but none will bow and scrape before heaven to apologize for seizing eternity. Contrary to the accusations of the Harmonious Path, the Unfettered Path is not evil, but it is self centered, beholden to the personal will for good or ill.

An Unfettered Xiushi is no less likely to thwart banditry and uphold justice as a Harmonious Xiushi, nor more likely. Righteousness and Honor do not stem from traditions but from personal conduct.

All things in this universe inherit affinities to elements from their composition. This includes the mortal soul. For most this affinity is of minor import, as governing as the influence of the star they were born under, but for those who walk the path to immortality discovering the alignment of their soul is a great matter indeed, for it will be a defining element in their cultivation. The typical soul has affinity for one Core Element. Rare individuals may have multiple affinities or an affinity with an Esoteric Element. Exceptionally rare figures have had more than two affinities, affinities with oppositional elements or affinity with a Primal Element.

Core Elements
Fire
Water
Air
Earth

Esoteric Elements
Lightning
Ice
Wood
Metal


Primal Elements
Quintessence
Void


Elemental Relations

Fire Counters Water, Ice, Metal
Water Counters Fire, Metal, Earth
Air Counters Earth, Fire, Wood
Earth Counters Air, Metal, Lightning
Lightning Counters Water, Air, Metal
Ice Counters Water, Earth, Wood
Wood Counters Earth, Water, Metal
Metal Counters Air, Wood, Ice

Quintessence Counters Void
Void Counters Quintessence


All cultivation involves martial arts, and every cultivator chooses an instrument through which they wield their power. These weapons are referred to as the Master's Tools. While an elemental affinity is based on an accident of birth, the choice of Master's Tool is a conscious and singular one. A Xiushi may wield Lighting and Fire, but only ever wields one weapon.
The Master's Tools are as follows:
Sword
Saber
Polearm
Bow
Axe
Fist
Hidden Weapon

Bow loses to Fist Sword Spear Axe Saber Hidden Weapon Bow

The number of Celestial beings in Heaven is as countless as grains of sand in the desert. Though cultivation as a whole is defiance of the will of Heaven, individual Celestials have been known to smile on individual cultivators- or mark them for particular opposition. Most just ignore the uppity mortals. Four Celestial beings particularly known for involvement with the martial world are the Beasts of Quality.

Har-Jo the Heat Phoenix
The master of blazing warmth. Har-Jo is a creature of deep passion and a connoisseur of beauty and art. Skilled musicians, tormented artists, attractive men and women all may receive her favorable gaze.

Glorb the Sodden Goldfish
The master of soaking damp. Glorb moves slowly, but with precision, striking only when success seems certain. Just as Glorb seeks to become a dragon he smiles upon the ambitious and the blue blooded.

Bassk the Desiccation Lizard
Bassk is master of the parched desert. Some may describe her as cruel but she would say practical, determined to survive to matter what. Those with grit, who overcome the impossible, who break taboos that have outlived their use, they recieve the approving gaze of Bassk.

Motari the Rime Penguin
Motari is the master of freezing cold. Fastidious and precise, Motari prizes order and method and despises impulsive action. Those who compart themselves always with dignity and propriety no matter the circumstance or their background win his favor.

There are many more. (Apps taking the Heaven Favored or Heavenly Disfavor traits may make up a relevant Celestial being if they wish)

Locations:

Moonisle Village
Moonisle is a quiet and serene location with a small population. The soil is grey and rocky and dominated by two great peaks. The lake between the two is said to collect the rays of the moon. The people of the only village on the island take long naps, have short work days, and live even longer.

Port Eagle
The great port city of Port Eagle has grown wealthy and powerful through trade with lands across the western Sea like The Empire of the Eagle Kings and the Kingdom of Arnhaund. Its merchant lords have built grand mansions but with Imperial decline and banditry and piracy on the rise trade is suffering. Western goods like great horses, smokebrew, flatbread and firepowder have grown very rare and deeply expensive.


Clawton
Inhabitants of Clawton say that anyone who moves to the city learns to go without sleep both because its businesses seemingly never close and became its main industry is blacksmithing and no one can sleep when the forges are running. In a related note Clawton is known for its many tea houses which serve very strong tea and little cakes

Tanu Village
In the reign of the 36th Gao Emperor, Gao Taki, a great flourishing of the arts occurred, sponsored by the Imperial Purse.With Imperial support the great landscape painter, Alkimi the Silken Brush, began a quest to paint every scenic vista in the Empire. 250 years later he returned and presented the 40th Gao Emperor his work and concluded that Tanu Village possessed the most beautiful scenery in the Empire. Ever since then the sleepy village of Tanu, lightly dusted with pure white snow has often served as an adoptive home of would-be artists, who stay in their inns, paint their scenery, help with the harvest and years later if successful have built grand buildings in thanks in the village. The villagers are invariably too polite to say that their settlement of 2,000 permanent residents do not need another golden pagoda.

Akoby City
Sited in the fertile floodplains between two rivers, much of the history of Akoby has been defined by the struggle between being fed by the rivers and struggling to not be drowned by them. Emperor Gao Rapo, the 24th Gao Emperor ultimately had the entire city rebuilt after a particularly devastating flood with a massive system of sewers, cisterns and drains beneath the revived city. In the present day the system still protects the city, even if full knowledge of its layout has long since been lost.

Mulberry Palace
The Mulberry Palace has nine thousand chambers, though in truth the Palace is much larger complex than its main building. An entire city, if not the entire world in its own right, Emperor Gao Sho, chosen of heaven, has never in his nine years of life and rule left its confines. Neither had his father. The Imperial system still functions but it is a shuddering beast run by directionless bureaus and countless eunuchs. Emperor Sho can hardly see for his milky eyes and has little effective control over his ministers and vassals. All the same he is still the chosen of heaven, and protected by mighty mystical defenses and the Palace Guards.

Starfall Bastion
The Starfall Bastion has been built in and into a giant crater left from a falling star. Metal mined from the site is in theory the exclusive property of the Emperor. Of course isolated in thick forest these laws may not be particularly enforced. Marquis Schwan Yibert commands the garrison and is also well known to be one of the best gamers in the Empire.

Jorbis
Though a big city, the people of Jorbis do not go in for the hustle and bustle that some other cities do. It would not be proper to be in a rush, and no one in Jorbis would ever do anything less than properly. It is generally believed that the best courtiers and servants come from Jorbis. The Count of Jorbis, Fetto Haung, is one of the richest men in the Empire and needs ten men to carry him when he leaves his palace.

Colton Town
Colton Town is well known for breeding the finest horses in the Empire. They have chestnut coats and firey manes and run faster and longer than any other horse. The best horses are reserved for the Emperor's Horse Guards who armor them in crimson lacquer.

Gressi City
Gressi City is a major agricultural market which every year holds a largest possible onion competition. Whoever wins gets custodianship of the heavenly Even Bigger Onion for an entire year.

Fragge Village
The people of Fragge Village are known for their fast speech and thick accents. The village is built on stilts over the marsh they inhabit and is perpetually filled with frogs whom the villagers pair with at youth and selectively breed for prodigious size. Villagers who leave home bring their frogs with them. Most people in the Empire think people from Fragge Are weird.

Castle Neg
Older than even the Gao dynasty, Castle Neg stands at the furthest point in the Empire the monsters of the north have ever penetrated. Now somewhat outmoded by Fort Jo, the castle is more of a secondary garrison and fallback position, its great scale and antiquarian construction well dwarfing the size of its garrison.

Warrior's Rest
Located between Castle Neg and Fort Jo, Warrior's Rest is a marginal land wounded by its past battles. Atop a hill with a natural spring Warrior's Rest has long been a site of settlement but during the founding of the Gao dynasty when Emperor Gao restored justice and order to the land and built what was then called Fort Gao, he ordered land in the depopulated settlement to be granted to soldiers upon retirement. Centuries later the Empire is not as fastidious in granting rewards to its troops but Warrior's Rest remains a settlement inhabited by retired soldiers and their descendants, many of whom go on to enlist in the Fort Jo garrison.

Fort Jo
Fort Jo has been renamed many times, always after its current commander. Its current master is Grand Duke Jo, The Hundred Badgers General. Beloved by his men and generally considered to be the only high official of the Gao dynasty to be utterly without corruption, Jo leads the defense of the Emperor's boundaries against the endless demon wastes. Perhaps the most fortified position in the continent with the cream of the Imperial army stationed, a lesser man may have considered moving for the throne, but Grand Duke Jo is a supreme gentleman and also under constant siege from monsters beyond.

Twulake City
Twulake City is famous for its many canals which link the two lakes that give the city its name. Many of the city's poor make their living from fishing the lakes and the rich spend fortunes on building, stocking and maintaining grand ornamental fish ponds.


Hundred Autumns Palace
24 years ago, during the Reign of Emperor Sho's father, a series of bizarre murders in the Mulberry Palace were solved by his Great Grandmother, The Maple Princess Agai Critin. In thanks she was gifted the Hundred Autumns Palace, formerly the site of the Imperial court in the cool season, for her lifetime. This was likely not intended to be as long term arrangement as it has proven as the Princess will soon celebrate her 120th birthday. Filled with courtiers and servants nearly as old as her, the Palace is a living museum of how court life once was. It receives few visitors.

Corfu Town
Sited where the drylands begin to give way to desert, Corfu Town is mostly forgettable but it is the southernmost settlement in the Empire. The main crop in Corfu Town are cactuses and most food there contains cactus fruit.



Lands Beyond the Empire

The Blighted North
As long as history records the north of the Empire has been a land utterly hostile to civilization and human life. The wastes beyond are the haunt of bestial demons and hungry ghosts. Natural boundaries protect the Empire, but where they fail fortifications and constant vigilance are needed. Even in the current state of the Empire the funds for northern defense are barely embezzled

The Mysterious West
The lands of the west lie far across the sea and little is known of them. The two main lands that come to trade are folk from the Empire of the Eagle Kings and the Kingdom of Arnhaund. The lands of the Eagle Kings are said to be a place of sun kissed mountains above vast verdant plains. The humans of this land hail as their rulers the Eagle Kings of the mountains, avian humanoids whose wisdom and refinement are unimpeachable. As each mountain has its own equally wise king but heavenly order demands one ruler, the insightful Eagles have a system where one of them is selected among themselves to be paramount leader for a period of years and thus prosperity is assured. Trade with the Eagle Kings brings alcoholic smokebrew, Amber, volatile but medicinal firepowder and the dish known as Flatbread.


Centuries ago King Votern of Logrea, heirless and beset by disloyal vassals, promised the crown to Armhaund the Strong chieftain of the mighty Joten tribes across the channel. Crossing the sea, Armhaund brought the men of Logrea to heel before returning to his own country to await his inheritance. But when Votern died the lords of Logrea proved no more loyal to Armhaund than Votern, and he was forced to cross the channel and take his crown by force. Much of the lands of the rebels were taken and given to those more loyal and Armhaund's Jotens. In time the mixing of the two peoples created the Great Kingdom of Armhaund. The Armhaunders like to claim that theirs is the greatest Kingdom and people in the world. This is of course patently absurd. Regardless, Armhaunders are great sailors and bring goods from countless places many of which they likely made up. Armhaund merchants rarely sell their famous Great Horses, but when they do nobles open their purses for nowhere else can such large and powerful horses be found.


The Sprawling East

To the east lies a vast expanse of grassland and dried lake beds, broken up by occasional plateaus and protected from the north by a canyon of incredible scale. The peoples of the east are generally considered beneath notice by the Imperial court, stereotyped as backwards and cowardly with little resources worth considering. Funds allocated for border defense in the region have instead been diverted to a 44 mile fish pond for the Emperor's tenth birthday.

The Parched South
To the south lies leagues of terribly dry sand dunes that few can navigate and survive. It is known that beyond the sands humans do live and civilization exists but what little is known compared to fantastic stories told by travelers. It is said in the south all animals are impossibly giant from horses with grand necks to lizards that tower over the land like tyrants. The land spews forth gold and copper and other metals valuable or useful and the natives dwell in houses of ivory. Little of this is likely true but metals are the main import from the south.