The Yin World The Yin World lies within and below the realm of the physical. It is a dark place, hollow with the death-energies of Yin, and the final resting place of all things in the void of Oblivion. At the same time, it is quiet and peaceful. The young Wan Kuei should remember that Yin is not evil; it is merely an end to change. Scores of realms populate the tempestuous void of Yin, the greatest of which is the Yellow Springs, controlled by Yu Huang, Jade Emperor of the Dead. There are many other realms of interest, however.
Home of the Final Blossom In the dying days of the Third Age, a mortal woman named Tien Lu, who'd walked close to death her entire life, entered the spirit world on a quest to become immortal and escape death's predation for all time. Her travels took her into the Yang Realms and, eventually, to a high mountaintop, to the Everlasting Tree. Only one flower remained on the vast tree's branches. As Tien Lu reached for that blossom, the tree itself spoke to her, saying: "In this flower lives the last of my life, and as the Everlasting Tree dies, so does this kingdom. Are you truly heartless enough to take it from me?"
Tien Lu, old and suspicious, laughed. "You try to deceive me, old tree, for this kingdom lies in the heart of Yang, and you simply wish to keep your own power." With a smile, she plucked the last blossom from the Everlasting Tree and ate it. As she hiked down the mountain, air rushed past her; green grass turned to gray ash, which scuffed into clouds as she walked upon it. Tien Lu, last of the Wan Xian, left the Home of the Final Blossom as it swung from Yang to Yin.
Today, the Home of the Final Blossom is airless; any mortal entering it would certainly suffocate, and there is no wind to carry sound to living or dead ears. The realm is waterless, too; spaces that were once rivers and lakes are now inky and black voids; some of the largest "lakes" brim with Yin Chi. Trees, grass and fantastic creatures stand motionless; they are no more than beautiful sculptures of ash now, destroyed by the slightest contact. The Everlasting Tree still stands atop its mountain; it, too, is a pile of ash, but those that taste Chi in the air can sense tantalizing fragments of Yang energies wafting past - - perhaps this is the last touch of the active Celestial Emperor in the universe.
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «
From Commentaries of Dan Xiang:
The ashes and dust of the Home of the Final Blossom can be a treasure to some. Those skilled in such things can brew alchemical potions of great power from the ash, and others have told me that gold and jade can be found if one digs deeply enough into the ashen ground. For my part, I have visited the realm but one; it was the quietest place I have ever encountered, making it ideally suited for contemplation.
The Shards of the Imperial Libraries In the earliest days of the Fourth Age, the Yama King Dou Tingzhang, Mutilator of the Unfaithful, staged an attack on the August Personage's libraries; his intention was to sever the vast library compound from the rest of the Heavenly Palace, twist it into Hell and use it as a base of operations in his campaigns against the former servitors of Heaven and the other Yama Kings.
But the servants of Heaven - the
hsien, the Ferocious People and even a few still-loyal Wan Kuei - built ramparts and barricades to keep the forces of Yomi Wan at bay. The battle lasted for weeks; eventually, Dou Tingzhang himself stepped forward to face Zhao Fenzhan, an aged, powerful weretiger, in single combat. That battle, it is said, took the better part of a day, and it laid waste to much of the libraries' grounds and many of the libraries themselves. Finally, at the point of death, Zhao invoked the Heaven Thunder Hammer and drove Dou back to Hell, where he was later set upon by his peers and torn to shreds.
The Shards of the Imperial Libraries float in the Yin Realm. Each library building (there are 11) and its grounds are present, even though some buildings are not intact or even usable; the weeks of fighting combined with the maelstrom of Zhao's final combat with Dou destroyed most of the structures of the compound. Zhao's burial cairn occupies a position of honor near the center of the realm; it was the last thing constructed by the libraries defenders before they left in the aftermath of Dou's defeat. On the whole, the Shards are quiet places of contemplation and study. A handful of buildings remain intact enough that sufficiently driven Wan Kuei can enter and find ancient scrolls or simply sit and meditate in peace.
Chorales of former librarians parade through the ruins; they can no longer see or read, but the text of scrolls and books from their sections within the library are pressed onto their skin. The chorales have been together for thousands of years now; each of them knows all of the words inscribed on all of the members of their chorale, and as they slowly wander from half-burned building to collapsed husk, they sing or chant those words. Not all of their songs are derived from poetry, mind you; a particularly dreary chant is simply a calendar marking the proper times for a farmer to hoe, plant, weed and harvest. The chorales are not entirely monomaniacal; they will stop if confronted and speak (usually in a droning singsong) if addressed.
The Watery Kingdom of Fu Yi Fu Yi was once a thriving kingdom on the ocean's coast, in the mortal world. Its Wan Xian kings and lords built towering stone and wooden buildings, soaring bridges and gracefully spired temples; they were philosopher kings and warrior-poets. Fu Yi had numerous cities and a population in the hundreds of thousands. This, of course, was before chaos and madness struck the Wan Xian.
When the Wan Xian made war on each other, the very earth of Fu Yi trembled. As months of fighting passed, astute mortals noticed the sea's slow rise, the perpetual flooding of major rivers and great valleys blasted out where mountain ranges once stood. On the fifth day of the fifth month of the last year of the Third Age, the lands of Fu Yi gave a great shuddering heave and submerged beneath the ocean floor and into the Yin Realm. Today, no sign remains of the kingdom in the mortal world; the remains of its beautiful buildings entered the Yin Realm rather than remaining on the sea floor.
Thousands of mortals drowned, of course, and hundreds remained attached to Fu Yi as ghosts when it slid across the Wall. The kingdom itself remains quite flooded, even in the Yin Realm; seawater rises far above the grandest spire of Fu Yi. The ghosts of the land acclimatized to their new surroundings remarkably quickly and set about their moist afterlives with surprising vigor. Their first step was to restore their nation's former beauty, and they have long since completed that process.
The subjects of the Undying King of Fu Yi elected themselves a new king in the underworld, and although the king has been replaced more than once, the passage of power has largely been peaceful. The population of Fu Yi no longer increases - perhaps a shipwreck every generation or two contributes to the ranks of the drowned dead here, but no more than that. Yin spirits, malevolent and benign, pass through the realm on occasion and are met with a response appropriate to their nature.
The ghosts of Fu Yi have watched the rise of the Yellow Springs Realm since the death of Qin Shihuangdi, and they are no friends to the Jade Empire. Fu Yi is far smaller than Yu Huang's realm, of course, and would be crushed in an outright war. However, the ghosts of Fu Yi retain three large advantages over those of the self-styled Jade Emperor: They are truly ancient ghosts who do not, apparently, face the worst dangers of Oblivion and, so, are individually very powerful; their kingdom is a three-dimensional maze of water in which the forces of Yu Huang are at a great tactical disadvantage; and they refuse to take to the field, fighting only when it suits them, in ambush, assassination and harassment, spending the rest of the time submerged where most wraiths cannot follow.
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «
From Commentaries of Dan Xiang:
The ghosts of Fu Yi are quite willing to pass along what they know of the Yellow Springs, for those who wish to enter that realm without the knowledge of Yi Huang. They seemed unusually open and welcoming to me, without any of the bitterness or insularity one might expect from such a small and ancient society. Or perhaps they hid their internal feuding from me, their guest. I do know that when I returned a second time, a teacher with whom I spent a great deal of time was gone - to his final reward, the others told me, but they would not elaborate further.