Bonus: haunts of the Primal Forest

Every province in the Empire has its perennial dangers. In the Celestial Peaks, nameless beasts and remnant constructs stalk the undermountain regions left behind by the Strife of the Twin Emperors. In the Thousand Lakes, the manifold children of the Face Stealer, slain by Yao the Fisher, haunt the fens throughout the province, and the foul creatures of the red jungle plague the west. The plague of the Ashwalkers scourges the Golden Fields, even millennia after the Cataclysm. Ebon Fields sees the Zheng war forever with the man eating spirits of mountain and river. Even the Alabaster Sands must content with nightmares left behind by the terrible engines of the strife.

However, the Emerald Seas has suffered more and longer than any province save for the Golden Fields. This is of course a contentious point. Yet it must be pointed out that even under the Weilu, these lands were not free of war. The Weilu were not the stalwarts of the Celestial Peaks, the unquestioned rulers of the Bai, nor even the bizarrely stable mob which are the Zheng. They were themselves a confederation of tribes, well prone to civil war.

This passed on to their descendants, the Xi and Hui, who have at best simply kept the violence of these lands to lower simmer. This fractiousness impedes the advancement of human authority, and so it is that the great province of Emerald Seas is filled with regions where man does not walk, and beings which haunt our roads and towns. In the wake of the horror that was the great Khan, this has only grown more true, who knows the true number of unconsecrated battlefields, ruined, overgrown villages and other sites of woe which dot the south even now.

Before discussing the dangers and challenges of the Emerald Seas in more detail, it must be said that the Ministry of Integrity has done much good. In the destruction of the Bandit Kingdoms and the death of the destruction of proscribed cults across the province, they have done much good. Never let it be thought that the purpose of this document is to denigrate their works. The Emperor’s burden is beyond the humble imaginings of a mere scholar, and this document purports only to catalogue those places and things which human ingenuity and drive has yet to conquer.

The dangers laid out in this book shall be divided into three categories. The Unquiet Dead, the Vile Spirit, and the Deep Places.

The unquiet dead are most common in the south, where the ravages of the Great Khan lie close to memory. In that chaos there was no time to give those slain their proper rights, nor in many cases access to the sites of those deaths. The least of these dangers are lost hamlets and watchtowers where a few hundred mortals or common soldiers met their end, tainting the land with their anger and despair. They are beyond a single exorcism and the solution to them is the construction of proper shrines to death gods and regular offerings to slowly put those suffering to rest. The Greater among these are whole towns or minor battlefields, which must be violently cleansed by noble and honest cultivators to allow the exorcists and priests to begin their labor. The greatest example of these lies far in the southeast, Hushao pass, Hushao pass was the site of single largest slaughter of imperial forces by the Great Khan, here the Patriarch Wu was overwhelmed and his clan near destroyed as they waited for promised reinforcement that would never come. The deaths of so many potent cultivators in the throes of hate and betrayal has transformed the once peaceful land into a terrible wasteland.